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This week I’ve covered a lot of ideas you can use to learn better. If you’ve been doing the mini-exercises at the end of each email, you’ve also tested some of them out.

However, briefly testing an idea and having long-term changes in your behavior are two completely different things. Today, in the last lesson of the bootcamp, I want to talk about how you can change your learning habits, not just for an exam, but for your life.

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Behavior change is hard. That was one of the motivating factors behind originally creating Learning on Steroids.

Before then, I had only written ebooks. But I worried that most people would read ebooks the way I read ebooks–in an enthusiastic burst, generally less than a week or two. You know, from the science I presented in the fourth email, that this isn’t the ideal way to sustain long-term memory. It certainly isn’t the way to sustain long-term behavior.

Instead, I designed Learning on Steroids so that you would get reminders of the content over time, through emails, along with detailed instructions for implementing every idea as a permanent habit.

I really do feel Learning on Steroids is my best work in taking these ideas and making them easy to integrate as habits. But for now, I’ll talk about some of the ideas you can use to make the lessons of this bootcamp habits, just in case you’re one of the people who can’t join us in the full program.

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Start with the Foundation

The most important step when making habits is to set the right ones. I structured this bootcamp so that the most important lesson would be the first one: scheduling slightly limiting studying hours.

This is a lesson that is both incredibly powerful and general. You don’t even need to be learning something to use it. The idea works well for any kind of work that requires focus.

I also wanted you to try it out yourself, in scheduling just one day, so you could see its effects. I got emails personally from hundreds of you who tried it. If you haven’t done it already, go back to the instructions here and try it for tomorrow (it’s never too late to start):

https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2014/09/15/bootcamp-day-1/

But one day isn’t enough to make using this technique a permanent habit. It’s also not enough time to debug the little hiccups that will occur whenever you try a new method. It’s just a start.

The next step, is to make this the foundation of your further studying. You can do this by committing to a particular chunk of time, where this will be the sole habit you’re trying to install. I recommend thirty days, but particularly important habits might benefit from sixty or more, as research shows that it can take significantly longer to imprint some habits.

I always suggest starting with a productivity system as the first habit you make in Learning on Steroids, because it’s the most valuable and it serves as a scaffold for easily adding new habits on top. Once you’re using this method for scheduling, adding in more specific methods is much easier.

Practice the Tools

Some of the techniques I showed you: scheduling learning hours, practice testing and distributing practice are habits. They aren’t too complicated to use, so you can get them mostly right on the first attempt.

These are also the best habits to start with, from scratch, because the benefits will be quickly apparent.

Other methods I taught you are skills, not just habits. Connecting ideas, the Feynman technique and skill dissection, are skills that can be performed well or poorly. It takes training to do some of these well, although the speed that you’ll pick them up can vary.

These tools can be practiced alongside your foundational habits. You don’t have to wait until you have the ideal productivity system to start using them. Instead, use your productivity system to allocate time to practice the techniques on your studies.

The advantage of learning these tools is that, since they are practiced by learning other subjects, they don’t need extra time to learn. You just need to apply them to your studies and you’ll get better and better results as you fine tune the exact procedure. In the meantime, you’re still learning whatever subject you’re performing them on.

Distinguish between techniques that are habits: which need long chunks of time to fully implement, and techniques which are skills: which can be practiced in the context of foundational habits.

Habits Require Maintenance

Although it is possible to set a habit up correctly, have the behavior become entirely automatic and never think about it again for the rest of your life, such cases are the minority.

Almost all habits which are worthwhile experience some friction from the environment. Even those that are relatively smooth will be jostled occasionally by outside events. You may be completely comfortable with morning running, but if you sprain an ankle, you may have to sit out for weeks where the habit falls apart.

Maintenance of habits is a necessary fact of life. Good habit creation reduces friction and decreases maintenance, but it doesn’t eliminate it.

For foundational habits, like a productivity system, I suggest revisiting them every six months. That way you can incorporate small tweaks to make sure the system stays relevant and functions well. I go through my own system with this frequency, sometimes changing the software I use, or typical daily routine.

Maintenance of ideas is also important. Many ideas aren’t something that can ever truly be learned, but require continual reminders to upkeep. Monks who study deep texts, don’t just read them once and move on. They understand that ideas which are linked to habits of behavior and thought require repeated exposure to stick.

You may want to do that yourself with these emails, or any other things you read which you feel are important for the foundational behaviors of your life. Schedule a time on the calendar to re-read your notes on an important book or essay.

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How to make the ideas of this bootcamp part of your habits

I remember doing one of these bootcamps a couple years ago, and a reader was irritated with me that one of my last emails, again about habit change, wasn’t a “content” email like the other six. They felt it was a cop-out to write about habit change itself instead of another method or idea.

Behavior change is really hard. If these emails were written proportional to their difficulty, then I would have packed the first six ideas into one email and spent the remaining six writing just about habits. I can only imagine how upset that reader would have been, had I structured the bootcamp that way.

This will be your last homework of the bootcamp, so I’m not going to do the usual “mini-exercise”. Instead it’s going to be a hard exercise, which you can choose to do or not.

For the next month…

Take the idea I talked about in the first day, and commit to making it a daily habit for the next month. One month won’t make it permanent, you’ll need maintenance and some effort. But it will be much more automatic than it is today.

For those interested in continuing with Learning on Steroids…

I’ll be opening Learning on Steroids tomorrow. With it you’ll be getting dozens more ideas for improving how you learn that I didn’t have time to cover in this bootcamp. As well as examples, video walkthroughs and reminders.

More importantly, you won’t be doing it alone. Learning on Steroids is a community with a forum and a live workshop so you can stay accountable.

I’ll spare the lengthy pitch for those interested when I send the sign-up link tomorrow at 10am PST. I’ll be holding open registration for one week, after which, on September 29th, I’ll be closing it down for another year.