Imagine, if you could get through all of your work in just a few hours, instead of being like everyone else spending all day studying and never making any progress. I'm Salim, I'm a med student, and I've had to learn thousands of topics across med school, 

my undergrad, and my postgraduate degree - and I never wanted to spend all day thinking and studying as most people did, because I had other things I wanted to spend time on too. So I'll go through the 6 levels of thinking from beginner to 

genius using a modified Bloom's Taxonomy with actionable steps at each stage - so that you can massively increase how fast you think and learn. And most people are stuck at level 3, so stick around until the end to see how you can get to level 6, which is how the top 0.1% think.

So at the bottom of the pyramid is something we've spent a lot of time on, so I think it's safe to keep it short. And that's knowing how to recall facts and basic concepts - so knowing how to remember things.

I've had to learn thousands of random facts at med school so this is something I've had to master - and the best way to remember is by using active recall and spaced repetition. Skip ahead if you already know what they are, but for those that don't know - active recall is when 

you take a topic, make questions on that topic, and test yourself on those questions - so you force your brain to actively retrieve information, instead of just passively reading things. And spaced repetition is just doing these questions at increasing intervals over time.

The best way I’ve found to do this is by
using flashcard software like Anki - I have a brief guide linked in the description
box below, so check it out after the video. But the problem is, just being able to memorize
or remember isn’t enough for exams or higher

levels of education, so to get a deeper
level of thinking, you need to know how to understand what you learn - and this is what
the second stage of Bloom’s Taxonomy is about. And there’s a few ways to improve
how well you can understand something

you’re learning so that you can think faster. The first is to create deeper descriptions. When you’re thinking about something
you’re trying to understand, write down exactly what you know about the
topic - for each part of what you wrote down,

create a deeper description of it to
assess your understanding by asking ‘why’. Doing this successfully about 2 or 3 times is
usually enough to show that you fully understand something, and as you do this, you’ll get faster
at thinking when it comes to learning new things.

The second way to understand better so that you
think faster is by creating explanations - there’s the saying that “if you can’t explain it to a
6-year old, you don’t understand it yourself”. So, if you can teach someone you know about
something you’ve learnt in simple terms,

then it means you have a good understanding. But I’m not going to tell you to find a 6-year-old, because instead, you should use a friend. Have your friend learn one topic, and you
learn another, and teach each other the

topics and see if you’ve both done a good job
at explaining by repeating it back. So after you practise understanding, you’ll grasp
new concepts quicker too, but the problem a lot of people have is that even though they understand
things, they find it difficult to answer questions

which have different scenarios - and thinking
to apply is what the third stage is about. This is being able to use the information
you’ve gathered and apply it to new situations, which is necessary for getting
a high grade at university

or even for improving general productivity, such
as thinking of ways to manage your time better. And there’s a few ways to improve
your ability to apply your knowledge, with the second way being the best thing to do. But the first thing everybody should do
to improve their thinking to effectively

apply what they learn is to have a diverse
practical component to what you’re learning. So if you’re learning a subject, that’s
doing practice questions that increase in difficulty so that you get used to applying
the concepts you learn into different scenarios.

People fall into the trap of staying comfortable,
and stick with doing the same simple questions because it makes them feel good - but
that won’t help you get the higher grade or help you think faster; you need to practice
applying knowledge into a range of scenarios.

But an even better thing to do to reach the top of
level 3, is to create a system to streamline how you apply knowledge, so that you can think fast,
faster - and this involves using a 1:2:1 ratio.

For every hour you spend learning something, spend two times as much time applying what you’ve learned. And after you apply what you learn, go over the specific parts where you struggled, and spend an equivalent amount of time going deeper into the topic - usually this involves working on

your level 1 and 2 more before going more into the practical application of the knowledge. So for example, if I spent an hour on neurology, I’d then spend 2 hours going through questions, and then for anything I found difficult, I’d go into that topic for another hour - then repeat

the 2 hours of going through questions again until I’m fully confident in them. This system makes you think faster because you go through gaps in your knowledge and cement your understanding through a systematic approach. And that cuts out the problem people have of being unsure of what to do next or how

to improve - helping you go from level 1 to 3 of thinking for any topic in a fraction of the time. So level 3 is where most people end up, but the next two levels pair up well together and is

where it begins to get more advanced - and these are known as the Analyze and Evaluate stages. These levels are harder because it’s not just about extracting what you know and applying it to a given scenario - it’s about making connections and critiquing different ideas, which you might

commonly see in essay-based questions where you compare and contrast topics or information. But on a wider scale, these levels of thinking can improve your general productivity too, because you can think about how to personalize certain methods or systems

for your own workflow - but first I’ll start
with the academic application of this stage. A very simple way to practice
developing these levels of thinking is to use AI software like ChatGPT
- using it to generate essay-style

questions for you on topics you want
to have higher levels of thinking for. For example, if you’re learning about
neurology and specifically strokes, you can put this into ChatGPT and ask
it to make an essay question based on

levels 4 and 5 of Bloom’s Taxonomy,
and have it mark your answer after. You can also be quite vague with
what you want by copying this prompt, and it’ll give you different topics that require
you to critically think and build connections.

This works well to deepen your knowledge of
a topic, and by repeating this over time, you’ll adapt and see yourself thinking
faster even for complex topics - and that’s because you become better
at connecting multiple concepts. And it’s the top learners that master
this to get the highest grades.

And I said these levels of thinking are
good for improving general productivity too - for example, if you’re trying
to improve your time management and saw my video on time management
but also other people’s videos, you can analyze and evaluate which methods
work best for your specific workflow.

And that could be by starting at level 3
and applying those methods, then thinking through level 4 and 5 where you reflect on
how each method improved your productivity based on how much you got done with each one - 
then picking the one that worked best for you.

And now, to have the highest level of
thinking, you need to do something that's not been done before, which is why this
is the Create stage of Bloom's Taxonomy. But there's also a wider stage
for this, which I'll get to later.

But first as an example, this
could be at university where you're aiming to work on a publication. This isn't easy to do and
needs you to think faster, because there's a lot more moving parts
involved, from carrying out primary

research, doing secondary research,
analyzing the results, and more. But there are ways to maximize
how fast you get to this stage, which also means how fast
you climb up all 6 stages. And the best way to do this, is
by having a mentor to guide you.

There's a reason why people who are highly
successful still have coaches - they effectively have a second brain that's a step ahead and has
more experience that they can learn from them, because they'll learn to avoid common mistakes and
know the most efficient methods to reach the top.

So for you, this could be having a teacher
or professor give you guidance on how to go about working on research so
you have a good starting point, and someone who you can go to
for direction when you feel lost.

And I said that there's a wider stage for this, and to me this is what people
including myself are for. Using me as a mentor based on what
I advise and show in my videos is a way for you to create a life
where you reach your potential, 

not just in your academic life, 
but also in your personal life. And if you can adopt the way of thinking that 
I've applied in my life to reach my goals, 
then that's going to help you reach 
this higher level of thinking too.

But even if you have what it takes to 
get through all six levels of thinking, 
you might find it difficult to take action. And it's not because you're lazy or that you're 
a procrastinator - a more common problem people 

have is that they don't even realize, is 
that they have a fear of taking action, 
which stops them from reaching their potential. So in this video here, I talk about how I overcame 
my fear of taking action which helped me get to 

where I am today - and you can overcome this fear, 
by watching the video to take the right steps.

How to Think 3x Faster in 7 Days (from a Top 1% Med Student)

How to Think 3x Faster in 7 Days (from a Top 1% Med Student)