How To Stop Forgetting 95% of What You Learn (Retrieval Guide)
6 practises to choose from, for bulletproofing what you've learned for life.
If you’re always forgetting everything you learn, it means you have one problem.
Maybe two…
Your learning could have a stronger purpose
You don’t have a retrieval practise, or you do, but it doesn’t work well for anything outside a classroom
I have written about priming and encoding before, which I would recommend reading before understanding retrieval.
You need to understand those to fully grasp the big picture of how learning actually works.
Let’s look at what happens when you learn anything.
Consumption is your intake. You are taking in information before you’ve digested it. Digestion is what happens through encoding and retrieval. Encoding is how you integrate new information into memory (your body storing fuel). Retrieval is how you use that information for a specific purpose (your body using fuel to perform), whether that’s an exam, a piece of writing, a problem you’re trying to solve, or a skill you’re trying to build.
You cannot have encoding without retrieval, and vice versa. Two sides of the same coin.
This example hits close to home, but try read a book with no exam at the end, no project to apply it to, and no reason to use what you’ve learned... and most of it will be gone within a week of finishing the book.
If you don’t use it, you will lose it.
Retrieval is how we use it and not lose it.
Most retrieval practices are aimed at helping students, which makes sense.
But flashcards and exam questions aren’t much use when you don’t have an exam to prepare for.
A lot of us aren’t only preparing for an exam.
We’re trying to build something.
To learn some cool shit online.
To use what we read to change our habits and therefore our lives.
I have a number of retrieval practise recommendations to give you, that you can pick and choose from depending on your learning goals.
Exam, creative project, skill or problem solving. Whatever.
First, let’s look at why the model most people are working from is lackluster to say the least.
Why I hate second brains (kinda)
Here’s a hill I see most learners willing to die on.
This is their learning system, which they treat like God:
Consume information
Write down some linear notes...ugh
Store them somewhere (second brain or real life)
Hope what you’ve written actually sticks inside your brain
Repeat
If you’ve read any of my other newsletters, you’ll know my stance on this.
Here’s a profound idea:
Purpose is a leverage multiplier when it comes to learning something.
Think of this as the “why” behind your learning.
Nietzsche said that he who has a why, can bear almost any how.
Well, in our case, you can’t have a how without a why.
That’s why most people focus on consumption and encoding, and neglect retrieval, mostly because it feels hard (because it’s so effective, even with just 2-3 minutes of doing it).
Your brain encodes information into memory depending on how you plan to use it through retrieval.
It is not the other way around.
How you think about applying or retrieving the information you wish to learn is the reason why retrieval and encoding are two sides of the same coin.
This is why I personally believe most people would learn more from reading one single page every day, and thinking about it deeply with the methods we will go through, than reading 52 books a year.
The purpose of reading is not to consume, but to think.
You consume a little.
You think about it.
You change how you see the world, and how you act as a result.
And you consume a little more, having changed.
Reading is an iterative, creative process. There is this iteration loop. It applies to everything you want to learn, not just reading.
The question is what happens when you don’t run that loop.
Most people study, and don’t learn
Have you ever noticed that when all you do is consume, nothing accumulates?
I want you to really think about this for second.
No body of work.
No compounding skill.
No sense that this month you are meaningfully more capable than last month.
If all you do is consume, without ever considering the other side of the coin - digestion - you will spend hundreds of hours going somewhere, and it won’t be forward.
You’ll do a Post Malone and keeping running in Circles.
When I was in 6th year in secondary school, in college too, I always had this feeling that I wasn’t as capable as I should have been at that time.
Considering how much effort and how many hours I was putting in (4-10 each day), it always hurt knowing I should have been going further, faster.
Like I should have been miles ahead of where I was, and I wasn’t.
Like I was always learning and learning as to build the life I wanted... but I never spent any of my time actually building anything toward that life?
If all you do is consume information all day without ever thinking or creating with what you consume, you will productively procrastinate yourself into preparing for a life you will never achieve.
If you consume without ever expressing what you’ve consumed, not only will you fail to retain any of it, but you will become the person who studies all day but learns jack-shit.
Iteration is how we stop studying and start learning.
I didn’t really know what I was building when I started writing.
I wrote 2,000 words about a problem I wanted to solve in my own life (I’m pretty sure it was about learning, actually) and I created my own potential solution to that problem.
I didn’t know if it was perfect, or if it would even work, and I didn’t have a grand system or plan in place either.
But the research was my encoding, the writing by hand was my retrieval practise, and the act of writing itself was my thinking.
Clarity came from actually doing the work, not from sitting around thinking about doing it.
After 2-3 months of iterating every day I finally started seeing noticeable shifts.
I was connecting ideas faster.
I was seeing gaps in my knowledge as opportunities for development, and not as failures telling me how stupid I was, because the gaps became the new goal.
I started to retain what I was learning and my writing improved because my thinking improved.
These are the exact things we want to expose.
Gaps in your knowledge.
Two connecting ideas you never fully articulated before.
These take seconds to reveal and are practically zero cost, other than requiring your own brain and a willingness to learn.
Which, you can do right now, especially with the first method we will go through.
That is how we will expose our knowledge gaps and learn to rinse the process of filling them, then exposing more gaps, and repeating the process, to create real leverage.
Learning without fluff.
I think most learning systems cost more to maintain than they do to learn with them.
For your retrieval practises, you do not need to do any of the following:
Download bullshit apps that “increase your IQ,” which is a blatant lie designed to make you feel smart without true effort
Strict learning schedules that restrict your day
Hours dedicated purely to retrieval practise and not creative work
Any other skills whatsoever
Your first retrieval outputs should be terrible.
By outputs, I mean the knowledge you will retrieve from memory without looking at any notes.
Expression is what we’re looking for here, and that’s what will expose gaps in our knowledge that we can fill with encoding. That’s how encoding and retrieval work like a loop, almost.
Expose gaps with retrieval, fill them in with encoding.
The faster you can do this, the faster you can learn anything and achieve what you want to achieve.
Retrieval practices to choose from
If retrieval feels easy, you’re not doing it right.
This should feel effortful... because it should.
Retrieval is very hard.
That is why it works, and why most people don’t do it.
By using any of these practises, you will be retrieving or recalling what you have encoded into your memory under conditions that resemble how you’ll actually use the knowledge.
This list is like a menu.
There are multiple options to choose from, so don’t feel stuck to any one practise.
Experiment.
Iterate with trial and error.
Develop your own daily practise.
Pick what fits your goals most in the beginning, then take it from there. You have enough agency to develop your own system once you discover what works best for you.
Most importantly, pick a retrieval practise that you’ll actually do every single day.
It doesn’t have to be long either.
10 minutes is huge if you do it right, but daily.
Interest and fun always comes first.
I - Define the 1% project
The best learning system is having a project.
By a project, I mean one thing you could do, would do, and should do, that makes your life 1% better within the next 1-3 months.
It can be anything, and it doesn’t have to be any good (yet).
A bad essay about a problem you want to solve in your life.
A skill practised badly and then slightly less badly.
A concept explained with one less stutter than when you explained it aloud yesterday.
Most people try to change their whole entire life by rewriting every wrong they’ve ever made in a single week... and are back on Netflix within three days.
You can always do more when you are capable of doing more.
Start with a 1% improvement in a weeks time.
If you can’t read for anymore than one hour a week, why try reading for three? Same applies to going to the gym, or writing, or studying.
Aim low, but that doesn’t mean don’t aim at all. Start with what you know you can achieve for certain, and then build on it.
Once you have a project, once it exists, then you will have a mental filter for relevance.
The mind is cybernetic, meaning it steers towards goals (whether you choose them consciously or not) and it hunts for solutions by recognising patterns. Think about red cars while driving on the motorway and how many yellow cars do you think you’ll see?
Exactly. Tons of red cars.
You will notice your mind connecting ideas here and there, from all things you consume, that could help serve your project. This is why I like choosing a topic to write about early in the week, so my brain is primed to spot ideas from everything I consume.
It’s pretty cool feeling the good dopamine from connecting seemingly unrelated ideas (like how I connected cybernetics and project-based learning above to the topic of retrieval).
Writing is my daily project, but feel free to chose one that’s different.
