 Regardless of 2022 was a good or could have been a better year for you academically, here are a few ways to guarantee that 2023 will be your year. Let's break it down. By the way, number seven is my favorite. So number one is to have a simplified learning mindset, both through my own struggles as well as through the hundreds of students that we worked with through our various programs. I've learned that the students who struggle have either a lack of a plan or a plan that's just way too complicated for really what you need, which is new information comes to me. This is how I learn it. This is how I'm going to repeat it before the quiz and the test. And this will be the strategy that I'm going to be using for the next few weeks. Adjust it as needed. And so the best in the top students not only have a great simple way of how they're going to learn things. They're always asking themselves, what would this look like if it was simpler? And that's the mindset that you need to go into 2023 with is now when you have new material come to you, instead of saying, I have to read this lecture or go through this lecture. Think about how can I restructure this lecture to something that becomes easily reviewable on a daily weekly basis before that quiz and test. Now you're asking proper questions of how you can make a learning system. That's super simple. If you guys are interested in what a simple study strategy will look like, I'll link down below a video that I did on all the study strategies that I used in medical school to get a 3.9 GPA, pick and choose the ones you like the best, make sure you mess around with them and enjoy them in 2023. And if you combine those study strategies, we'll talk about in tip number seven, I promise you're going to crush it. But let's get into number two, which is to have a daily minimum. Now falling behind is going to happen. It happens to me as a medical student, even though I consider myself to be productive and on top of it, it's going to happen to you regardless of if it's procrastination or life just goes ahead and throws a rent into the schedule you made. But the thing that separates a grade from an average or a below average student is that the below average student tends to get discouraged when they fall behind. And that means the rest of the week is likely just going to be ruined because they have an avalanche of tasks that they're always falling behind on. And even with our one on one students, we run into this issue all the time. So the biggest thing that I have to remind students is that you have to have what is the minimum that I'm going to get done today. And so going into 2023, you want to ask yourself, what is my daily minimum? What is the minimum that I'm going to commit to every single day regardless of life procrastination, lack of motivation, and maybe a simple and effective of saying if I do fall behind, which is going to happen, I'm going to at least make sure that the minimum that I do is to cover the lectures for the upcoming day to avoid falling further behind. So about five lectures behind, I'm going to give myself five lectures or five days to catch up, but I'm going to add it on to my daily minimum, which is to do the lectures that I learned that day. Number three is to have prioritized wellness. Now wellness is either an afterthought or something your institution will try to promote, but actually doesn't teach you how to do. I remember going into medical school having a session as a first year medical student, teaching me how to study and how to be happier. And I was excited. I thought they're going to teach me some great tips. They're just superficial stuff of making sure you're getting enough sleep and eating, but now strategies on exactly how to do this. There's really no step by step. So here is exactly how I stayed happy despite studying hard in medical school and despite having long years of residency and still as a doctor today, being busy, making sure that I can do the things that make me happy. And that simple strategy is to pick two to three things that matter to you that make you healthier, more focused, just happier or well rested. This can be forms of exercise like yoga or weightlifting or running or things that are just relaxing to you, hanging out with family, reading, cooking, watching TV. I was a big NBA fan. So basketball is a priority for me even when I was in medical school. And now here's the best part. Add them to your schedule first. Usually a student will look at their schedule and saying, I have to study for this many hours for this class, study for this final, study here and actually have no time left for myself. But in reality, if we took a step back an extra hour for this class here and there, probably wasn't going to make a difference on whether you're going to ace it or not, but instead you could have used that time to make sure you get the workout that makes you happier, makes you more focused or spend timing with your families and loved ones. That's exactly what I did in medical school. I looked at my schedule and saying from seven to eight is going to be my workout time, non-negotiable. That time is not going to be used for studying regardless. I may sleep in because I don't want to get a workout in. Maybe it's going to be recovery day, but that time is set for my physical wellness. This time here on a Tuesday is going to be where my favorite team is likely going to play. These three hours are not going to be set for studying. I'm going to watch basketball because I love basketball. Having these parts of your life that actually matter to you into your schedule, make sure that you truly are prioritizing your wellness. This way, when you actually show up to your studying session saying, you know what? I got my yoga session in. I feel great. I feel relieved. I feel fresh and focused. Let's get to work. Number four, this one's super important is to have daily challenge sessions. Now, one of the biggest things that I learned when I was in medical school is that most study sessions and most study strategies suck because you're just trying to get through content. You're trying to read through slides, watch through videos, but there's no real challenge of, do I know this information or not? And that's really where you have the biggest slap in your face. And it's usually as you get closer to a co-azure test when you're saying, shoot, I can't answer these practice questions. Somebody asked me a question about something that I should know and I just don't know it. But if instead you understand that learning is about knowledge that comes from highlighting what you're weak at as often as possible, then you start creating a study strategy that focuses on doing that daily. So for example, I loved using flashcards. I made my school notes into flashcards, would come home and repeat those every day. It was very easy for me to say, you thought you understood this lecture, but you have spent an hour or more on this lecture than you thought you would because you actually didn't grasp the concepts. Coming back to those flashcards in a week saying, I love this lecture and then saying, shoot. And throughout the week, I was constantly being quizzed through this flashcard. So for a little microseconds, I was getting quiz questions that would possibly show up on the test. You can do this with whatever strategy you have. You can quiz yourself on the notes that you physically write, the notes that you type up, outlines that you make, but simply asking yourself what type of questions could possibly show up on the quiz or test. How can I do something on a daily basis? Even if it's for five or 10 minutes where I'm quizzing myself, do I know this or not? If you can do this on a daily basis and constantly challenge yourself, you'll be able to highlight where your weaknesses are and then you can appropriately adjust going into a quiz or test. Again, number seven, I promise you is going to be the tip that's going to show you how to nicely do this on a daily, weekly basis. Now, before we get back into today's episode, let's take a quick second to talk about today's sponsor, which is Picmonic. Now, if you're unfamiliar with Picmonic and you're on your medical journey, they have hundreds and hundreds of videos for literally any class or material that you may need. What makes Picmonic so unique is that in addition to having so many videos on literally any topic you need, so for example, here we're in microbiology, you can click on any video, so here's Staph Aureus. The videos themselves are very short, so this video is about one minute 54 seconds, but essentially will break down the most high yield components that you have to know in the setting about Staph Aureus in this very nice story format using images. So here's a very nice Oreo cookie that essentially will link an image to your brain on an important concept about that. In the future videos, you may find that the same memorable image is included in another related video, so then you can link together concepts. For example, here this venom jar with green represents food poisoning, so any bacteria that may cause food poisoning may have this image in their overall picture and video so you can say, okay, I know all different bacterias that have food poisoning. And then whenever you feel comfortable with their relatively short story, you can easily go into the review and quiz phase and actually quiz yourself on the various different high yield components. Now, in addition to having a very unique and easy way to remember information for your quizzes and tests, you can also add all of the videos you're watching into a relative playlist. So if you're studying for a microbiology class, you can go ahead and essentially click all of the videos you add and add it to those playlists. And then whenever it's time, you can come back to your individual playlist and either watch those individual videos again, or ask for specific quiz questions related to the videos that you've now said that you've mastered or at least learned the first time. And that's just scratching the surface in terms of features that pick monocas to help you on your medical journey. Other cool things include having a weakness guide so you can see which topics you're the weakest in as well as their study scheduler. So you can actually say these are the topics I need to know and here's my test day and then it will essentially will give you a study schedule based off of that. So if you're looking for an all-in-one resource, you're on your medical journey and you haven't quite found it, definitely recommend checking out Picmonic. If you're interested, there'll be a link down below and our friends at Picmonic have also been nice enough to include an extra 20% discount if you use the code the MD journey at checkout. And so if you're interested in learning more about Picmonic, that link will be down below. And as always, thanks to Picmonic for being today's sponsor. Number five is committing a structure. Most students that we work with, and I was one of these when I was a first year medical student, is they start to do planning when life gets crazy. But the best way to make life less crazy is to always have control of it despite the amount of craziness and hecticness that you have into your weekly and monthly basis. And so we recommend to a lot of students, what I did in medical school is on a weekly basis, usually on a Sunday, you just plan the rest of your week. What would be those times if you'd be going to the gym studying for upcoming quizzes and tests, where would you be playing and accounting for catch up if you're behind and then maybe middle of the week just doing a check in a second. How am I doing with my schedule? What do I need to adjust for the rest of the week? What kind of came up that I wasn't expecting and how I'm going to use that to make some audibles throughout the rest of the week. If you do this just for the first few months of 2023, I promise you're going to feel like you have so much more control. And honestly, your life is probably just as chaotic as it always was. Number six is to focus on weekly 1% changes. Now when we work with students, we do something called a weekly checkup, which is where myself and the study coaches will ask you what worked well and what didn't because we're trying to get students to think about, okay, if I had a great test score, what do I need to do next time to make sure that it's consistent or I get that result again? If I didn't get a result that I was very happy with, what type of adjustments do I need to make? We're not asking the student what study strategies do I do not want to transition to or completely jump shifara. That's what most students do is that they jump from resource to resource, study strategy to study strategy. They never feel like they have something that feels natural to them because they really just frankly haven't given any time to create something that grows with them. And so instead, you want to be in the mentality of what 1% small changes can I make to turn the dial in the right direction? And so for instance, if we're talking about grades, maybe you had a test that didn't go your way. You want to ask yourself, okay, how prepared did you feel going in? How sound were you with your scheduling and showing up for your minimum amount of lectures? What worked and what did? And then you make those adjustments. But now you create a study system that again grows with you over time throughout the rest of the year versus one that just always looks like a Frankenstein creation because you're just trying to hold on for the rest of that course, the rest of the block. As a pro tip, one of my favorite questions to ask was if I hadn't taken the same test or quiz that I did poorly on again tomorrow, what would I do differently today? Knowing what I know about what's going to show up on the test, I still have to make sure that I understand the concepts. Maybe you don't know the answers. Now you're going to start thinking about your learning differently. And if you're taking that same course for the next few weeks, the next few months, now you start preparing for the upcoming lectures much differently. And again, 1% changes beats jumping the ship and not really knowing where things went right and wrong. Now we're getting into number seven. And again, this is my favorite, which is to have a retention checklist. I'm going to paint you the picture that every student I know has, which is you go into a test of the quiz and you just have a growing amount of anxiety because you realize how little time you have left and how many more concepts you have to master. If you ever felt like that at any point, go ahead and let me know in the comment section, hit that like button just to know that I hit the mark. Now here is how you overcome this. Every time you go through a lecture, a PPL, a lab, you want to start thinking of what possible things would show up on the quiz or the test that I need to master by the time that quiz or test comes around. Not something that I have to master now, but what are those objectives? So for example, if I was taking an anatomy lab, I would need to roughly know all the structures that were fair game to identify during that lab session to possibly show up to my practical. Think of all of your lectures in the same manner. What concepts, principles, you know, interactions, relationships, tables, do I need to understand by the time that I am going to be tested on it? Not now, but over time and creating that in a list using this an award doc or Google doc, having this in notion doesn't matter what you do, but having something that says for these lectures here are the 10 things, 15, 20 things that I need to be able to master by the time the lecture comes around. Now you can come back to this on a daily basis. For example, if I was going to review lecture one, I would focus on creating that list as I'm going through the lecture. I would do whatever form of review I had to do. So maybe I wanted to go into my flashcards. I'm going to do my flashcards and I'm going to look at my list and saying, which of these still make me feel uncomfortable? This is the beauty of it. Now we can start color coding out of the 20 things that I wrote, maybe the 10 to 12 things that I still feel a little uneasy about if the quiz was tomorrow. Now I'm going to do this every time that I go through a lecture. Now on a daily or weekly basis, you can come back to this retention checklist and say, which concepts that I recently reviewed or a lecture that I just went over is going to trip me up that I don't feel comfortable about. And you can do multiple things. You can just create a 10 minute, 20 minute session where you can say, let's go back to the slides. Let's go back to an online video on somebody on YouTube teaching this concept. And ideally you want to be able to color code your entire retention checklist from yellow or red, meaning I'm concerned. This stresses me out to something that's completely green because you focused on it a little bit at a time. As a pro tip, if you're finding topics on your retention checklist that just never change colors because it just creates so much anxiety, there's just so much to understand, write those on a sticky note and put them on your desk, put them on the wall before that quiz or a test and be able to look at them on a daily basis. Maybe it's a formula that you just can't get right. Maybe it's a relationship that you just can't wipe quite master after a few days that you had a break from it. Having the topics that are the toughest for you that are going to create the most anxiety show up on a wall that you can just take off and say, I mastered this formula. Cool. Now I can take it off. You can visibly see the load of your anxiety be really high and every single day just be able to come off the wall when you go into test day. You can say, I understand this entire pile of sticky notes plus my entire checklist on my retention checklist. I'm good. I'm golden. Let's go crash this. Number eight is to focus on building camaraderie. The problem with this is that studying gets very lonely. You're still going to, despite having the best preparation, the best planning, have grades and classes that just don't go your way. The best way to do this is to have a support system who is going through the same thing that you are actively. And so instead of looking at your classmates as a competition, even if you're graded on a curve based off of how everyone else is doing, use them as a support. But your peers and your classmates are going to be your source of support. They're going to be your source of motivation and honestly you're also going to be their source of inspiration for helping you stay motivated to continue going. Number nine is to under promise and over deliver. Now this was a motto that I started to incorporate later into my medical school years and definitely increased my level of happiness while improving my overall success. And really the biggest concept is how quickly you get up and go to the most important thing that matters and just focusing on getting that done every single day will define how successful you are in 2023. It doesn't mean that you need a big to-do list of things to do to feel busy or productive. Simply doing two to three things consistently great over the span of weeks to months is really going to be better than having a to-do list that you never truly accomplished on a daily basis. And so ask yourself what those two to three things will be each and every single day. Maybe one of them will be I need to get through all my lectures for today. Number two is going to be I'm going to use an hour to go ahead and review my old content through my retention checklist. Number three maybe you know what I have a test coming up. I'm going to make sure that I do some practice questions even if it's for 10 minutes every single day just to feel like I got some practice. There you go. And these two to three things don't just have to be academic. They can include those prioritized wellness things that we talked about earlier. So for example it can be every single day in my two to three things is going to be get my daily workout for 60 minutes get my lectures done for the day and make sure that I review my lectures for the day using some kind of quizzing technique like my flash cards. If I get those three things done that day is going to be a win. Anything on top of it is just cherry on top of the Sunday. Number 10 is to focus on having a tunnel vision year. 2023 needs to be your time where you're saying here is my plan. I'm going to take my time to create a study plan, my planning plan, how I'm going to structure my day, how I'm going to make sure that my wellness is included, what goals that I want to accomplish. But once I have those nailed down I'm not going to focus on what everyone else is doing or recommending because I think based off of my experience this is going to work for me. Now when things don't go your way you have a grade or a test that doesn't actually perform to the where you wanted. This is where you say okay pause what is everyone else doing? Where can I get help on learning information a little bit quicker? Where can I make my notes faster? That's what I found through my one percent process that I need to make improvements on. Okay got it. This is what I'm going to try to do for the next quiz or test tunnel vision for the next month. This is going to help you not against your classmates as competition. It's going to avoid having the stress of what everyone else is doing. That seems like it's going to be the magical solution for you. Really the only solution that you need is to try something, dedicate consistency to it and ask yourself where improvements could have been made and repeat the process. At number 11 minimize your consumption. 2023 is going to be that year where you're going to have more people that are going to give you more tips about the best and greatest things that they ever did including me here on this YouTube channel but whatever social media, friends, vlogs that you go through, you need to ask yourself am I consuming this because it's going to be something that I act upon? Or am I consuming this just to consume it and have ideas in the back of my head? Don't fall in this black hole just consuming tips and never actually incorporating any of them and just feeling just as lost as you were when you were trying to look for help in the first place. And so even after this episode, this video, I encourage you to take something that inspired you, that motivated you, that maybe gave you some ideas whether it's to watch that 3.9 TPA video or just to take one of the concepts that you learned today and actually go put into action of how you'll be using this in 2023. But all of these things together guys I promise you will just make 2023 your year, go out and absolutely go crash it. Now if you found these tips and these breakdowns helpful, you want more step-by-step help for Absolutely Free, go ahead and check out the Med School Success Handbook. This is basically an entire database of tips just like these that I've written out over the past few years that I'm constantly adding to on a weekly basis and it's absolutely free if you guys click down down below and of course it includes more study tips, more productivity tips but also just how to manage your life, how to manage your mentality as you go through the medical journey or whatever journey you're on. Now if you want even more help, if you want to make 2023 a year, a year where you're getting the grades that you wanted but just want somebody's help to do it as quickly as possible, then if you click down below there will actually be a video that I explain in quick three minutes of what we do with our students of exactly how I walk you through three phases to help you do everything that we talked about in this video plus more getting the grades that you will always want with less work and actually having time for yourself. If you guys want to see what kind of wins and success our students are getting just click down below you'll get access to the video to be able to see how we help students like you as well as being able to see tons of testimonials of what kind of things our students have done in very little time and so those will be linked down below but as always my friends if you enjoyed this episode you'll enjoy this one right here on how to get a 3.9 GPA in medical school I'll link it down below description too as well as this one right here the most popular that we have here on the channel on how to use Anki like a pro it's what I use in medical school hopefully helps you guys out but as always my friends thank you so much for being a part of my journey hopefully I was just a little help to you guys on yours can't wait to see what you do next year go ahead and crush it and I'll see you guys in the next one peace