How to Easily Learn Difficult Things

Описание: Consider yourself waking up tomorrow and suddenly deciding to pursue one of the most difficult academic challenges in the world. You will have to spend hours and hours of your days for the coming years studying, understanding, and learning advanced formulas and theories that are used in the highest levels of profession. You are going to stretch your brain to the furthest limits you can take it. That's what I decided to do with the CFA program.

And like much of the best learning that humans can do, the curriculum is not taught in a lecture hall. This great challenge of academic excellence has to be self taught. So with this, I spent a significant portion of my early adult life, just learning. And the SINGLE most valuable skill that self study will teach you, is how to teach yourself. Today, we are going to break down the step by step process that I used to teach myself the most difficult of topics, and how to do it well.

There are many different topics throughout the CFA program, but for this video we are going to hone in bond pricing through binomial interest rate trees as one example. The self study steps I used get applied the same way across just about every topic, so right now we just need to talk about the principles.

The first step is to place the information into context. This is something taught by many famous educators throughout history, and while it isn't really where the learning happens, it can be an important primer. Just make sure not to spend too much time doing this with every little topic. To place this topic into context, we need to zoom out to fixed income investing in general, and understand what binomial interest rate trees can help us do. For me personally, I never felt the CFA curriculum really helped put information into context, so I would simply Google it. What you will find is that knowing where a certain topic fits in the context of being a financial analyst in this case, it will be much easier for your brain to remember what it was that you learned about a certain topic. This has to do with building more neuron connections when learning the material... Placing material into context can also help you to become more emotionally invested in learning it, which depending on your personality may act as an additional motivator.

The next step is reading/comprehension, and this step really has 2 parts. The first part is really just exactly what this step says. But the second part of this step is really where you can start to set yourself apart from most self-study students out there, and that is by carefully identifying the areas that you don't FULLY comprehend after the first read through. Doin this well will take some practice, because when reading through a logical topic, it's easy to be a bit overconfident and assume that you fully digested and understood what you just read. But a more effective learner can feel the difference in their mind of how a topic sits in your brain after you read or hear it when you TRULY understand it, vs when it just makes sense. Okay pause and think about that for a moment. Because you really want to try to think of a time you have tried to learn something in the past and some of it stuck and some of it didn't. The difference of how the information feels when it sits in your head is what you need to learn to identify. Some could tell me something that makes sense to me like... As you get better at knowing what you fully comprehended vs what you didn't, it will allow you to do a 2nd pass over the things you need to, which will set yourself up far better for the next step.

0:00 - Intro
1:17 - Place Into Context
3:09 - Reading / Comprehension
5:48 - Practice
7:57 - Various Forms
9:17 - Review
10:30 - WHY ITS WORTH IT

If you have an idea of something you want me to cover in depth, please let me know because I take your requests seriously. Will be back with more CFA Exam tips in a couple of weeks so please submit more questions you would like to hear answered. Love you all!

AJ

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** The information in this video is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional financial advice. All content, including text, graphics, images, and information, contained in this video is for general information purposes only and does not replace a consultation with your financial or tax professional**