Justin Sung — How to Think So Clearly People Assume You’re A Genius
Source: YouTube Channel: Justin Sung (2130000 subs) Duration: 18:17 Views: 411304 · Likes: 12997 Video: Watch on YouTube
Join my Learning Drops newsletter (free): https://go.icanstudy.com/newsletter-thinkclearly3trapstop1 In this video, I reveal three thinking traps that stop intelligent people from solving complex problems and show you how to avoid them so you can think clearly when others get stuck.
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= About Dr Justin Sung = Dr. Justin Sung is a world-renowned expert in self-regulated learning, a certified teacher, a research author, and a former medical doctor. He has guest lectured on learning skills at Monash University for Master’s and PhD students in Education and Medicine. Over the past decade, he has empowered tens of thousands of learners worldwide to dramatically improve their academic performance, learning efficiency, and motivation.
Key Insights
Thinking [music] clearly is a skill that you can train. And when you have the skill, you go from being overwhelmed about what the right decision is or how to solve a difficult problem to being able to see the missing connections and gain clarity [music] while everyone else is still stuck in confused. The ability to think clearly is also an incredibly rare skill that almost universally puts you in the top 1% most valuable people that others want to work with and have on their team. And as a learning and cognitive performance coach for over 14 years now, I’ve realized that there are three common traps that intelligent, high-functioning people often fall into that makes [music] thinking clearly more overwhelming and confusing than it needs to be. So, in this video, I’ll share those three traps and how to avoid them so that [music] you can become the most valuable person in your team. Trap number one, when you’re feeling stuck, think harder. When you’re stuck with a really difficult problem, and [music] especially if you historically are pretty good at solving problems and wrapping your head around things, it can feel like the best way to [music] solve this especially difficult problem is to just spend more time and effort thinking through it. But in reality, when you feel stuck, it’s usually an indicator that your brain is entering into cognitive overload. So, continuing to think about it harder doesn’t actually resolve the issue, it can actually worsen it. So, for example, let’s say that there’s this important decision that you’re trying to make. But this is a complicated decision because there are lots of different factors that influence [music] it. And you have to balance all of these different factors to make sure that you get the result that you want at the end of this decision. But it’s complex because [music] if you optimize for A, then maybe B gets worse. If you optimize for B, maybe you’re sacrificing on C. All of these factors are tied together, and this makes the decision confusing. [music] And so, you sleep on it. You think about it a few more times. You run through these different factors [music] over and over again in the shower, while you’re eating, when you’re lying in bed. [music] You run these mental simulations of what the decision might look like and how the result might change. And really, no matter how much you think about it, the decision’s not really getting any easier. In fact, it’s actually getting harder to make the right decision because each time you go through it, you’re getting more and more fatigued with thinking [music] about it. The more you try, your clarity is actually going down. And so, in this situation, instead of thinking harder, we actually need to think less. The brain is an incredible organ, and it’s great at problem-solving. And within the brain, there is this concept called working [music] memory. And working memory is basically the workbench of your brain. So, when you are thinking about how all these different factors relate to each other, your brain is pulling all of the stuff into your working memory, trying to [music] see how it all fits. But here’s the thing, your working memory is also very limited in general, the human working memory, not your working memory specifically. And so, when you’re thinking about too many things at once, it actually [music] gets pretty easily overwhelmed. So, there are five factors over here. If you try to think about all five factors all at once >> [music] >> in your working memory, you would reach overload. And when this happens, this is when you feel stuck. This is when you feel confused. And so, what we have to do is we have to respect the fact that our working memory is limited and limit our thinking to just a couple of factors at a time. And by doing this, it allows your brain to actually focus in and resolve the question marks that it has around how everything connect. And once you know how this thing connects together, you bring i
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