Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

For over two years now I have written to you every week.

In my intro emails I wrote about why I created this newsletter, and why I will likely never miss a week if I can absolutely avoid it.

Writing about wisdom, health, wealth and all of the areas in between helps me keep that information in my mind.

It is so important for all of us to constantly learn, make connections, and grow.

So when I encounter a new tool, system, or framework that helps me do this faster or more efficiently I have to try it and then share it.

This week I cover an article written by Sahil Bloom that talks about a framework he uses to improve his retention.

What stuck out to me is how closely his thoughts mirror my own in terms of cultivating wisdom.

So I am going to outline what he wrote about and provide my own thoughts and insights to his framework to help drive the value of it home.

Let's get into it.

You can find all past issues (including this one) here. 

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🦉 Wise Owl Thought(s) of The Week: A Framework to Improve Retention

I don't think it comes as a shock that most people are never really taught how to learn. I certainly never was.

In fact, I was so terrible at purposeful learning that it led to me getting diagnosed with adult ADHD. Fun times.

For me, I found that nothing stuck unless I smashed my head against the information over and over again. What I didn't realize at the time was that I had stumbled on an extremely crude version of the way our brains actually access information.

The framework outlined below does a much better job with streamlining this concept.

💡Inspired Consumption 💡

This one is pretty simple - You are going to learn fastest when you give a damn about what you are learning. Have you ever gone down a content rabbit hole and just can't stop learning more and more about a topic?

I certainly have, although it isn't always the topic or subject I was trying to learn about. My brand of adult ADHD was the kind where I would hyperfocus on things and exclude everything else. If I tried to focus on something my brain didn't care about I became the most distractible person alive.

To this day if I try to force myself to learn something that doesn't interest me, I will literally start yawning and get sleepy! Seriously. I have enough self-control to stop most distractions, but if deep down I don't have passion for what I am learning my body starts to get drowsy.

"Inspired consumption is when you feel genuinely pulled to consume -- when you enjoy the consumption process." - Sahil Bloom

One trick I use when I need to learn about an area I don't normally care about is to find an angle that I do care about.

The past year I have been studying poker. At first this process was awful because it was so much more fun to just play poker than it was to study. What was not fun was getting crushed by my friends and not knowing why.

So I made a mental connection between defeating my friends and studying. It became a lot more fun to learn about the nuances of poker when it meant I could turn the tables on my friends.

Forced learning will crush your soul while inspired learning will nourish it.

You just sometimes need to find your own inspiration.

📝Unstructured Note-Taking

This newsletter is going to be one about making connections.

When you start consuming information, that is one point of connection.

Note taking forces a second point of connection.

We forget information we don't think about. Rapidly.

Every extra second we spend thinking about a thing ingrains it more deeply into our minds.

Unstructured note-taking is a step in that direction.

While you are consuming new information, take note of the following:

• base principles or foundational thoughts you notice
• insights you've never thought of before
• Connections you identify with other topics (important)
• Anything that creates a strong emotional reaction
• Any questions or areas of confusion

We are doing this, again, to create a reference point between our notes and the best pieces of the information we learned.

These notes make it much easier to consolidate our learnings into meaning.

🌀Consolidation

This is the part where you start to pull all the information you've thrown down into something tangible.

Look back at your notes and ask yourself the following

• Why did certain things stick out to you?
• What ideas were most interesting?
• What areas were most confusing?

Then go back and re-learn those focus areas. Rehash the information.

As Sahil says in his article "if unstructured note-taking created a bunch of dots, consolidation is where you start connecting them."

This is your third connection point after initially learning and taking loose notes.

♻️Analogize

Analogies, metaphors, parables; These are tools humans use to make information easier to understand. By taking information that is new and relating it to something familiar.

When you do this, you are once again creating another connection in your mind, but this time you are connecting with ideas, concepts, or principles that are already deeply ingrained in your mind, further anchoring this new information.

I use a minor version of this to help create inspiration when I am consuming new knowledge by finding something within a subject matter that matters to me already.

I see a version of this all the time when I hear people try to describe their new favorite shows, books, or movies.

"It's like modern day game of thrones!"

"It's like a cross between Dragonball Z and Naruto!"

We use pre-understood concepts to describe new ones.

The human brain functions due to connections, so creating them purposefully helps establish permanence.

💪🏼Idea Exercise

The human brain is fascinating. It is always trying to optimize itself and become as efficient as possible. This is why it is so easy to forget things right after learning them. Our brain is constantly processing images, color, movement, sound, smell, etc to create our view of the world.

Idea Exercise is the act of bringing up the idea, concept, or general knowledge frequently to force your brain to get used to thinking about it. As as I wrote earlier, the more you think about something, the easier it will be to remember.

This is why teaching people about a topic helps the teacher deeper their own understanding of that topic.

The more you review a topic the slower you forget what you learned and the more it gets catalogued in long-term memory.

So purposefully review the material over time.

Talk to others about it.

The more you do, the more you will retain, and the more connections your mind will make between the new information and the rest of your knowledge.

It's how we become wiser.

Quote/Meme of the week:

This meme hits in a couple of different ways.

First off, it is a gorgeous graphically representation of what we talked about today. The more you connect with a topic the smoother the journey.

Secondly, a constant (and consistent 😜) reminder about the importance of consistency in achieving any kind of success.

Have a great week!

This concludes our issue this week, I hope it gave you some perspective or injected a little motivation into your life!

If it helped, let me know! I read every newsletter response I receive, and I absolutely love hearing from all of you. This newsletter is for you, so I need your help to make it as great as possible.

If you'd like to show me some love for writing all this free stuff, you can always buy me a coffee.

More Resources

I will be adding to this section over time as we find resources that will help you all.

• Check out the Wise Owl Store
• All Wise Healthy Wealthy Articles on Medium
• Start your own Sendfox Newsletter
• Free products to help you level up

Crypto Resources

The Bankless Podcast: This is a link to the bankless podcast on Spotify. Start from the very beginning and learn why I am so positive about the power of Crypto and Ethereum in particular. You can find the podcast easily on the internet, but I am linking to episode 1 on Spotify for your convenience.

Buy your first ETH or BTC:

• On Coinbase - this is the easiest starting place for the newest beginners
• On Gemini - Another great option founded by the Winklevoss brothers. They are based out of New York.
• On Kraken - Kraken has a bit of a harder user interface, but they already have ETH staking enabled with the push of a single button.

Earn interest on your crypto

• BlockFi - Currently, you can earn 4% interest on BTC, 5% interest on ETH, and a whopping 8.5% on stable coins like USDC. Use the referral code b09f24fd to support the newsletter. BlockFi is currently not accepting new customers for its Crypto Interest Savings accounts as they transition to a new product called BlockFi Yield.

Other tools:

• Argent Wallet - This is the best mobile wallet for Ethereum, Defi, and all things on the Ethereum network, including staking. They even have plans to implement Layer 2 to remove network fees.
• Ethhub - this is a weekly newsletter that lists out all the interesting news, articles, and tweets that have happened in Crypto that week. It's free and awesome.
• Ethdashboard - A simple dashboard to look at various metrics in the ethereum space. I mainly use this as a quick tool to check ETH gas fees.
• Cointracker - this is one of the better tools for tracking all of your various crypto across all of the various wallets, exchanges, etc. You can also use them to do your crypto taxes each year.
• Metamask - this is a crypto wallet that you can access from your browser and allows you to easily interact with blockchain apps online.