Day 1 of 5, 18 min

Pre-study: skim it all, first

Before you study a topic properly, you take one fast, shallow pass over the whole thing. It feels too quick to matter. It is the move that puts you ahead.

1 Start here

Most people open the book at page one and study straight through in order. It feels responsible. It is actually the slowest way in.

Before you study a topic properly, you take one fast, shallow pass over the whole thing first. It feels too quick to be worth anything. It is the opposite. It is the move that puts you ahead.

2 The idea

Pre-study funnel — A quick skim of the whole topic, turned into four or five groups. Not to learn it yet, just to build a frame.

Skim the whole thing, before you study any of it

Pre-study is a quick skim over the entire topic, not to understand it, but to build a rough frame so that when the real detail arrives, it has somewhere to land. You collect the keywords as you skim, then pull them into four or five main ideas. Keep the whole thing under an hour.

Wide and shallow before deep and narrow — You cannot pour a topic in deep and narrow. Spread it wide and shallow first, then go deeper on later passes.

It is easier to connect five dots than a hundred. One hour of pre-study can make every later session on that topic noticeably easier, which is why it pays for itself many times over. hear Justin on pre-study ls-lc46 27:51

3 Watch someone do it

Watch someone do it

Before starting a new unit, a student spends twenty minutes flipping through every lecture slide deck for the whole topic, not reading closely, just catching the headings and bold terms. She ends with a page of about twenty-five keywords and a rough sense of the four big areas. She has not studied anything properly yet, but now she knows the shape of what is coming, and nothing will feel like it appears from nowhere.

4 Now you

Fifteen minutes, whole topic

Take a topic you have coming up. Spend fifteen minutes skimming the whole thing, headings and bold words only, no deep reading. Write down the keywords as you go. Then try to spot the four or five big areas they fall into.

Resist the urge to actually study. The job here is only to build the frame. The depth comes later, and it comes much easier because of this.

5 Get feedback

Ask your own coach

Paste your work into ChatGPT with this. It plays the coach we designed, and pushes on your thinking instead of handing you the answer.

paste into ChatGPT

You are my learning coach, trained on the iCanStudy method by Justin Sung. I pre-studied [topic] and pulled out these keywords and rough groups: [paste]. Tell me whether I have found the real main areas of this topic or missed a big one, and whether I have gone too deep too early. Keep it under 120 words, specific, and encouraging.

6 Checkpoint

You have got it when you can sketch the four or five main areas of a topic before you have studied any of it in depth.

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