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Ass-Kicking Email – Know the Big Picture to “Get” the Details

Hey,

In this email:

1. I discuss the implementation guide for Notes Compression
2. Why “Big Picture” Thinking is Needed to Understand the Details

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Notes Compression

The guides this month have been about preparing for exams. Earlier I
told you about the Study Dissection method and today I’m sending you
another “studying” tool, Notes Compression.

Notes compression is fairly simple to understand, the idea is that
you want to have a resource where everything there is to know in
your course is condensed into just a page or two of notes.

Sounds impossible, right? Some courses have hundreds of pages of
complex theory to understand.

However, this extreme reduction technique forces you to simplify,
make broader connections throughout the subject AND catches errors
of missing memory, allowing you to brush up on forgotten ideas
before a test.

I wouldn’t say notes compression can be used exclusively to prepare
for all exams, however it is probably where I spend most of my
time in actual preparation.

You can download this guide by going to the CONTENT section under
MONTH 5:

https://scotthyoung.com/members/?page_id=42

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Why you can’t know the details if you miss the “big picture”

Related to the idea of Notes Compression is the importance of
knowing the big picture. This is the broader view of how the
material you’re learning in a course applies in life, why it matters
and what the overlying trends are.

I’m a big believer that if you don’t know the big picture, it is
difficult to remember all the small details.

Take a detail-intensive subject, such as law. Clearly the details
are important. You need to know cases, principles and often with
verbatim precision.

However, if you can’t articulate briefly what the main themes are,
what its application is, or why it is important, all the details
are arbitrary and random. There is no forest that all the trees
fit into, so you’re forced to memorize the position of each tree.

The opposite is also true. If you spend some time working on the
big picture–seeing how everything is related and what the major
principles are–then you can more easily grasp the details.

This doesn’t remove the burden of remembering what the ratio of
a particular case, or the Latin name for a particular principle.
You still need to learn the details. However that becomes much
easier when you know where they are supposed to fit.