After watching Ali Abdaal on YouTube, I downloaded the Anki flashcards app for Mac and copy/pasted Naval’s tweet into flashcards to test my recall. Anki flashcards allow for quick testing, spaced repetition and targeting of my weak areas of understanding.
I will continue to sketch out a mind map of the tweetstorm. This is to make sure I know how each tweet relates to each other and the bigger picture.
As I dive deeper into the book I realised there are many more tweets and statements not included in the initial tweetstorm. These will help colour and provide more context and I will update my meta map and flashcards as I go through the book.
So in effect I am meta-learning with the mind maps and drilling my weakest points with Anki as well as continuous recall (If only I studied for my exams in university like this…).
Another practice I want to employ in this process is Sheperdising. This is the process of going through all the citations mentioned. I heard of this practice from Tim Ferriss’ interview with Dr Martine Rothblatt, read her description below.
So I applied that Shepardizing process to these medical articles, and somewhat like doctors, whenever a researcher publishes an article, they make footnotes and citations to other people’s research who they relied upon. So I would get all of those articles and read those. And then I would follow up on all of the references in those. And ultimately, you get to a point of diminishing returns where three, four, five levels down, the references are all circling back around on themselves.
This process of going down the rabbit hole is one I haven’t really done before (except in my literature review maybe).
My aim in doing this is to make a conscious effort to practice depth over breadth.
Eoghan‘s Blog 