10 Principles To “Lecture” Literacy

Ever wonder why advisors, parents, and professors say, college is a full time job? 😕 “For X units you take, be prepared to spend 3X hours per week to succeed?” – deluded proclaimed wisdom.😨 Well… what they didn’t tell us was where those hours are to be spent, and how to go about doing so – as we are far too familiar with, learning demands vary dramatically depending on the class and our responsibilities of the term. So if you’re a learner struggling to learn what you are working towards understanding, or you’re a student studying X amount of hours without being able to then generate worthwhile ideas from your classes, this post is for you. Namely, just how much we can uncover from a single “lecture”, or more commonly-thwarting, just how much we can miss.

If you’re reading this post, you live in an Information Age and are aspiring to be accepted into the Knowledge Economy. Our quality of life, happiness, income, wealth are largely tied to our cogency and literacy with information. As college students, namely STEM majors, our ability to create significant learning experiences is gravely limited to our ability to capture what our professors’ say, and make use of their words & writing, in achieving the course learning objectives they have set for us. 

Here are 10 principles, derived from the productivity coach Tiago Forte’s principles in Building a Second Brain, have helped me get the grades I “study” to get, all while developing agency and efficacy in my personal and professional life. These principles have been essential for me to generate meaningful & paid opportunities across 4 countries in these organizations below:

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Overview 

1. Loaned Innovation – Walk, Discover & Gather with Giants  
2. Sticky Dependency – Outsource Memory by Capturing Notes
3. Salvage Concept Images – Apply Preservatives to Ideas 
4. Employ and Deploy – Leverage Concepts for Projects
5. Kindling by Jeff Anderson – Every note can flourish if Nurtured 
6. Illustrator and Carpenter by Steve Silva- Don’t start with Google
7. Cumulative Concept Images by Jeff Anderson – Motivation is Scarce
8. Breakers & Builders – Create Content to See what you (don’t) know
9. Fortune or Doom – Positive Deltas for your near Future Self
10. Intentional Ideas – a focus on stream rolling your Learning

Loaned Innovation

1. There’s rarely a new idea in my world that’s so original that validates me to claim to be completely mine. Near all creative & innovative work is some fusion of other’s work. When we see great accomplishments such as our favorite teacher (our Giants) being able to uplift us and bring us joy while helping us learn, this is a result of a ton of processing, growth mindset, and channeled inspiration. Great classes aren’t built by happenstance. 
   1. Our output is limited to the virtues / crafts-women-ship / and conditions of our inputs. Therefore if you want to create innovative work through deliberate practice and earn satisfactory grades while deriving deep everlasting value from our classes, we must consume (then digest) higher quality ideas & intelligence. Note: this in its very nature takes time to come across, and gather.
   2. We’re living in an overtaxed, oversupplied, overburdened, overwhelmed encumbering amount of “innovation” – from our president’s tweets to the 100th smartphone that came out this year – we must discern how to filter out that noise. 
      1. Trump and Apple (I’m aware they give tuition reimbursements) could care less if we get the grade’s we need to get to complete our degree for transformational opportunity equality, so it’s up to us to find the rare and valuable Giants & information out there.
      2. While it may not seem like it at times, the information (loaned innovation) our professor’s deliver to us warrants closer attention. This is why we may consider creating a lecture note system 
   3. When we create well organized lecture notes in our own writing after lecture ends, we start at a much more favorable starting point than when we were only drawing from Google Youtube or our textbooks (do books still exist in our library? Do bookshelves exist?)
      1. Just like how Trump and Apple doesn’t care if you get a college degree, neither does Google, Youtube, or your textbook
   4. We need to be able to pull on accumulated wisdom and loaned innovation – because lectures and lesson plans take time & effort to generate – so that’s why we’ll find ways to revisit our lecture notes, and make sense of it.
      1. Tiago Forte, a productivity coach, thinks about this as borrowed creativity

Sticky Dependency

2. Sticky Dependency
   1. I’ve been transcribing as many of the words my professors say (many of my lectures are not recorded), but I am reflecting on how this is not the way to go. Instead I should be writing/typing down these points to engage in active thinking. 
      1. Insights
      2. Relevant Content <-> Relevant Context that students can bring
      3. Questions 
      4. Examples
      5. Definitions
   2. The idea of capturing comes not only from David Allen’s book Getting Things Done, but from when I wrote lists of groceries to pick up from Costco a decade ago. 
      1. The similarity is that our minds have limited working memory. This means we can not hold on to ideas and information for very long
         1. Especially when we’re having to continue to look out (capture) and process new information – like we painfully have to do in lecture  
   3. Let’s try to value our (even smallest) ideas 
      1. Instead of “I won’t be able to understand what’s being delivered in lecture” – give yourself a chance to be able to understand what’s being delivered by noting down what it is, you do not understand
         1. If we do not capture the confusion, definition, example, story, or algorithm, not being able to act on the idea presented, will turn into a self fulfilling nightmare of a prophecy. 
         2. To be able to “connect the dots” or mind map concepts together, you have to have dots (concept images & notes) laid out in the first place… 
            1. Much harder to connect nonexistent dots “forward” – however it is important to begin with an end in mind 
   4. Listen to your head & heart on what to your sticky dependencies are – so capture:
      1. What makes you frustrated when you do not understand?
      2. What information excites you to utilize in your own content creation?
      3. What brings you energy?
      4. What do you immediately know you’d like to go to office hours, tutoring, strong study partners for? 
      5. Which questions might I find an answer to when I get specific with the problem statement? 
   5. When you do a project, an assignment, a 2nd draft to your 1st draft of lecture notes, it’s much harder to sit down and pour out valuable insights without collecting, storing, and organizing them from the actual event.
   6. Convert raw materials from lecture, textbook, youtube, google from your note taking system, to be able to do deeper (making the translation of this material to your assignments, assessments, and learning portfolio) 

Salvage Concept Images

3. Salvage Concept Images
   1. Borrow from your past self: experiences, prerequisite knowledge, notes, tutoring lessons, genuine connection during office hours, study groups 
   2. There’s scientific research literature around cognitive dissonance that proves the ideas 
      1. You do not really remember what your past self knew
      2. You do not know what you do not know
         1. Looking at a math solution in the back of the book is drastically doing the math problem step by step
         2. Looking at someone else’s code and nodding is deceivingly different than coding yourself and understanding each line of code’s purpose
      3. You do not really know what your future self will desire
         1. You may want a bugatti now, but you may value citizenship, service, peace, social & racial justice, friendships, community in the future
      4. What we can do is pass ideas through time (think about a manual for an old school device. while technology has become more user friendly which leads the manual’s becoming slimmer, lets not forget the origins of passing ideas through time in this context)
   3. Many of our greatest ideas start: simple, blunt, premature, pure, candid, sheer
      1. Social media post
      2. Email
      3. Word of mouth
      4. Recommendation
      5. Observation
         1. Now recall how you have taken that concept image, applied “preservatives” to it, and recycled it through various contexts and moments in time, to nourish it into a fuller beauty
   4. Unlike most physical things, Concept Images have the ability to become better when you recycle, reuse, and repurpose them!
   5. Do not try to study for your assignment, projects, or exams from scratch 
      1. Begin capturing and applying preservatives to the concept images from your professor/classmates/tutors guidance and words right away
         1. Freeze dry your notes if you have to, smoke kipper salt pickle marinate jelly candy mummify, whatever you have to do – the idea is to treat EVEN YOUR SIMPLEST of creations with more care – protect guard and shelter them from the naysayers 
            1. “Number 1 person you have to steer and negotiate in your life is yourself” Alexandra Carter professor of Law at Columbia, because our psychology can truly be our greatest barrier. Unfortunately, oftentimes our hearts and our minds are the biggest naysayers. 
   6. Paraphrasing the words of Tiago Forte – build a compounding asset of intellectual capital – in our case, our lecture notes – so that they will last us a lifetime 
   7. Most lectures are composed of components – so understand them to reuse them. 

Employ & Deploy

4. Employ & Deploy
   1. Knowledge presented in lecture is like a high performing operating system or factory ran with people who had too many Redbull energy drinks, NOT a quiet peaceful library
      1. If we are lucky enough to have the insurance of a recorded lecture, it does not make the pain points of lecture that much more comfortable
   2. Like an overworked operating system – things are coming at us at rapid unprocessable speeds 
      1. unless you have strong prerequisite knowledge and deep values-based reasoning behind studying the material that’s presented – you will feel quite flustered
         1. Fortunately this can be cultivated and earned 
   3. Remember we’re not taking notes for the sake of taking notes, we’re taking notes to improve our own personal knowledge management and begin developing our concept images!
      1. So that we can better meet our professors’ expectations while moving along to building mastery
   4. Projects (learning portfolio) that displays our concept images is a great unit of measurement for our output as a college student and future knowledge worker. Projects can be creative, specific, concrete, and something to be really proud of when you look back on it – this is not the case for “grades” by themselves
      1. Ideas are not as concrete
      2. SMART Goals at times are overwhelming
   5. Categories vs. Projects
      1. Categories of information are consumption oriented 
      2. Projects are production oriented 
         1. Therefore let’s organize our components of our lecture notes according to projects:
            1. Homework 
            2. Assignments
            3. Assessments
               1. Midterm(s)
               2. Final 
            4. Learning Portfolio (wordpress)
               1. Especially valuable when your professor doesn’t assign homework or assignments

Kindling by Jeff Anderson

5. Kindling by Jeff Anderson
   1. Heavy lifting is when we cram past midnight to finish a project (please refer above for The Learning Code’s examples of projects)
      1. However, over time, heavy lifting has its toll – compounded when life gets in the way, which it inevitability does.
         1. The consequences are no longer the fact that you forgot to bring your homework to your 5th grade English teacher before recess 
            1. The consequences now are: 
               1. academic probation, losing financial aid, spending an entire academic year longer to get a degree, feeling stupid (don’t worry, you are NOT no matter what the haters say – point your haters to literature on learning science or media on Limitless Mind or The Little Book of Talent)
   2. Kindling by Jeff Anderson is quite the opposite of heavy lifting. We gather information, exercise problem sets with a focus on learning, read-think-write critically, and strategically plan to get the grades we work for, while setting ourselves up for success in the near & far future. 
   3. This is the impetus, shade, and distinction from physical labor to intellectual labor
      1. Intellectual work can be spread out over time with refined working systems – which are habits and skills 
      2. This allows our school work to be more enjoyable, creative, meaningful, significant, critical, and filled with less Redbulls
         1. Ps. Redbull corporation doesn’t care if you pass your classes either 
   4. Tiago Forte’s analogy is that predators need to eat now – they work fast and intensely w scarcity. Scavengers work in abundance – we live in a sea of creative inputs – we do not have to look super hard to find inspiration and gold
      1. Consider looking in office hours, tutoring centers, and success centers 

Illustrator and Carpenter by Steve Silva

6. Illustrator and Carpenter by Steve Silva
   1. Steve and I use to start my homework, assignments, assessment review with a blank canvas – we use to start my work with scarcity, insufficiency, and sparseness.
   2. Now, we assemble components from our lecture notes so that we can illustrate our concept images while working like a carpenter/plumber/electrician
   3. Store as many notes as you can from your professors words to give yourself the best shot to meet their expectations
      1. Big breaks of the light bulb moment do not wait for you to be ready
         1. They tend to happen when you start your work with abundance with your own swagger and mood
   4. Make the decision to become wealthier when you “read and notetake” lecture 
      1. Leverage intentionality to cultivate this wealth of knowledge your professor has accumulated over the span of their lives
         1. While the ideas they present may seem free, plentiful, and trivial
            1. The concept images they accrued took many years, so store them forever and teach it to somebody else!
            2. More likely than not, they had to take the very classes we’re having to take to get our degree!

Cumulative Concept Images by Jeff Anderson

7. Cumulative Concept Images by Jeff Anderson
   1. Transitioning from unconscious incompetence -> unconscious competence is not necessarily your professor’s job
      1. Unless we’ve taught and are responsible for 100+ students grade’s during 1 academic term, we will never fully understand why there’s a minimal focus on learning compared to assessment.
         1. Therefore it is up to us to develop our consciousness and learning habits, slow and steady 
            1. The straight A students have done so much earlier in their academic journey’s 
         2. If we rush this process, we will shoot ourselves in the foot
            1. Just imagine if I gave you a degree of comp.sci. today and placed you in an engineering role. How effective will you be in your job?
   2. Instead of doing your entire assignment in 1 evening, break apart the lecture, then understand the objectives and specifications your professor outlined for you
      1. If they didn’t outline any, go to office hours and ask what they are looking for exactly after reviewing your lecture notes. 
      2. Do you think the textbooks you’ve seen were written in a sprint? 
         1. No they were developed using cumulative concept images
   3. If we are cumulative with developing our own concept images, do you think you will learn more meaningfully?
   4. Invest effort in making each concept image consumable for your (very near) future self 
      1. Turn perishable lecture notes into longer lasting ones by taking the time to save them down in the right place, and adding metadata to them by expanding and further researching the ideas from the lecture. 
      2. “To develop mastery, students must acquire component skills, practice integrating them, and know when to apply what they learned” – Ambrose

Breakers and Builders 

8. Breakers and Builders 
   1. Learning is quite similar to working – and the best way to learn (build) something is by making something (breaking apart what we know)
   2. I was ecstatic to hear that many of you are conscious in the importance & value of learning how to learn
      1. My student-centered leaders at The Learning Code, Foothill, SJSU and TechCore believe the same 
   3. Creating significant learning experiences (Fink 2007) is no easy task 
      1. But it’s a task worth pursuing. I bet an apple that the people you idolize in your life have engaged in some form of these categories narrated by me, written by Jeff in the comment field 
   4. When you begin breaking things apart to build content – all the practical difficulties and holes in your concept images come to life 
      1. Note I do not think you are contributing to the achievement gap when you do not get 4.0 GPA, but rather the system owes you a fulfillment debt for not engaging and inspiring you to learn the material to the best of your ability
         1. 1 time management and 1 binder organization workshop is not enough to help us develop student skills and learning habits, therefore The Learning Code was birthed 
   5. An example of breakers and builders are Tiago Forte’s book summaries 
      1. Check out how deeply he goes… He’s saving notes, diving into ideas, applying the ideas in a book summary, immersing himself with the ideas of each book, adding interpretations and metaphors 
         1. We can do the exact same with our lecture observation & lecture notes 

Fortune or Doom

9. Fortune or Doom
   1. Many of us feel the imminent doom in our current day and age, from not being able to graduate college or even if we do graduate not being able to find a worthy job. 
      1. However some people work harder and harder, some others work less and less, while becoming more fulfilled!
      2. Make things easier for your future self by focusing on the learning starting today. 
   2. Accumulate leverage with your concept images you’re introduced to in your lecture – to be able to generate good grades, learning & work portfolio, scholarships, degrees, blogs, true fans, savings, larger return on investment 

• Intellectual leverage compounds over time – which makes it easier for future selves
  1. 1. An example of this is placing our keys in a spot where we don’t lose them, finding a nugget of information from lecture or office hours that would have taken 10x longer on google, 
        1. or drawing right angles to calculate the hypotenuse (from “Change is the only Constant” by Orlin)
           1. By the way the object on the left is an apple and the right is Earth, which is why Orlin does not want NASA to use his sketch, lol.
  2. Treat your fortune as if that fortune is as in your control as possible
     1. This treatment will impact the way you eat, sleep, believe, workout, learn, and get grades. 
        1. Making things easier for your future self will help us act with more direction in life
           1. Ps. netflix and instagram could care less if you earn 6 figures or 5. 

Intentional Ideas

10.  Intentional Ideas
    1. Spend less time being frustrated when you’re stuck – realize this is symptom of a systemic problem when society doesn’t treat teaching and learning as a legitimate science – move on and recall these principles
    2. Lectures are not designed for active learning or to make you feel smart – unless you really previewed and anticipated the lecture, and you’re hella hyped to learn – for which I applaud you but still advise you to humble yourself and revisit the 10 principles here when times get tough.
    3. You will get stuck so keep your ideas moving by being intentional with what it is you want to do with those ideas
       1. Want to work in criminal justice system, want to go into social work, want to go into tech? 
          1. Empower yourself first and break down those glass ceilings along the way with your education and focus on learning
    4. Limit multitasking – Cal Newport, PhD in comp sci from MIT and a tenured professor at Georgetown, has published a TON about this idea so just search his name and listen to him speak for a little. 
       1. You lose progress as you can not keep everything in your head

“The use of a distracting service does not by itself reduce your brain’s ability to focus – It’s instead the constant switching from low stimuli high value activities to high stimuli low value activities, at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge – that is what teaches our mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty… it’s like dumping Sand in the gears to the machinery, that is our brain.” – Newport

1. To stay in flow – enjoyment, creativity, immersion – requires movement, keep moving and develop those concept images 1 letter 1 word 1 phrase 1 sentence 1 function 1 equation 1 example 1 lemma 1 theorem 1 algorithm 1 program at a time

While google, netflix, redbull, poop-to-coffee startups do not genuinely care if you earn your education and live out your life to its fullest potential the people who make you feel good about yourself, support you, and love you DO CARE. While it may not seem like they do due to the assumptions, opinions, and assertions they (parents, educators, friends) make about your capabilities may have lasting damages on our self-worth and values, I promise they do care about you (even if they don’t know how to) more than most tech companies and Philz Coffee. 

This post was geared towards making the most out of lecture, but my hope is that you integrate these principles in your professional and personal lives. Whether that’s reading an article, watching a video, listening to a podcast, arguing with your parents, debating with your friends… making sense of what we’re “consuming” is an essential part to providing something of value in our lives.

“Mentally strong people don’t metaphorically dust themselves off and get right back on their horse. They pause to figure out why they fell off in the first place before getting back on.” – Amy Morin.

Don’t fall off the horse, aka discount lecture and resources provided to you by your instructor, and expect to meet their expectations. While their expectations and metrics are sometimes flawed, The Learning Code wants to see you earn your college education, reimagine & redefine & reinterpret learning, so you can empower yourself to solve the more demanding problems you hold most dear to your 🤎. Figure out how to get back on the horse, reduce the chances of falling off, and carry on. This post contains roman keystone principles on how you “read” what’s around you. For more on that check out Jeff Anderson, my finest math and learning doctor’s remarks on reading here.