 Elon Musk is easily considered to be one of the most influential figures in our generation. With his role in creation in companies such as PayPal, Solar City, Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and so much more, he's a great example of how one person can become so knowledgeable in so many unrelated topics. Now as smart as he is, one question would be how would Elon study for something that requires so much vast amount of knowledge and connection, such as medicine? So in today's episode we'll talk about what techniques and strategies Elon Musk would use if he was ever trying to be Dr. Musk, and what strategies you can also use to try to create a similar approach. Now this is actually a concept that comes from Elon Musk himself when he was doing an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. Somebody asked him how he remembers and understands so much, and he admits openly that sometimes it's difficult for him. But as he says, he says, quote, one bit of advice, it's important to view knowledge as a sort of a semantic tree. Make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and the big branches before you get into the leaves and details, or there is nothing for them to hang onto. With a variety of goals and projects that Elon Musk is now a part of, you understand that it's so much more important to understand the fundamental principles of something aside from learning the individual details. And if you were studying for an exam in medical school, you would likely use a strategy like the Q&E method, which we made a video about here on YouTube, which I'll link down below. But in case you're not familiar, Q&E method is basically taking your notes and designing them into big ideas and little pieces of details. If you think about when you read your syllabus to go over your PowerPoints, there are big branches and big trunks that you first have to understand before you start to focus on the little bits of details. For example, let's imagine that you were studying for a lecture that was teaching you how to treat hypertension. A very common slide that may end up in that lecture, or a material that may end up in a syllabus, would be the relevant medications that you can use to treat high blood pressure. Now the smaller pieces of details in this lecture may include things like how a specific medication may work, or the side effects for that specific drug. But for you, the big branches is, do you understand how hypertension works? And then do you understand the overall classes of medications you can use before you understand one specific drug? And so essentially what the Q&E method is, is to take your notes in the format of designing your learning as a semantic tree. So if you were studying for this lecture in hypertension, instead of just writing notes, you would instead say, okay, what are the five to six medications that I could use for high blood pressure, because you may see those on your slide. The first piece of learning is, can you answer that question? Now a second order question is, okay, amlodipine, which is a very common calcium channel blocker that doctors use to lower blood pressure, is one of those drugs. What is a common side effect of amlodipine, which is lower extremity or ankle edema? But it doesn't matter if I know ankle edema and amlodipine, if I can't tell you that amlodipine is actually a blood pressure medication. So you have to understand your learning in that bit. So putting your notes in the form of, here is a big idea. Let me rephrase in the form of question, and here is my answer. And then you can ask individual questions related to that answer if there are more trees and smaller branches related to them. And again, if you want more details or examples of how to use the Q&E method, I'll link down below a video that we've made here on YouTube, as well as more examples that we included in the medical domination bundle, the link will also be down below. Now, concept number two is to be a motivated learner. Now, this principle comes from Musk's early days, and he was asked who his best teacher was and Musk responds, quote, the best teacher I ever had was my elementary school principal. Our math teacher quit for some reason, and he decided to sub in for himself for math and accelerate the syllabus by a year. We had to work like the house was on a fire for the first half of the lesson and do extra homework. But then we got to hear stories of when he was a soldier in World War Two. If you didn't do the work, you didn't get to hear the stories. Everybody did work. Now, no, Elon is not telling you to find your lectures and hear some old stories from their past time. But he is saying that you should use motivation to learn because you have so much more capacity than you likely give yourself credit for. And oftentimes, especially when an exam is coming around in medicine, we feel like all that we should be doing is studying and that all of that time will be used effectively. And as you probably know from personal experience, simply having more hours doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be as effective throughout the entire duration. Instead of what I found in my own personal experience is having less hours and making sure that they're guaranteed to be as effective as possible and being okay with studying less is going to be so much more valuable. And one simple way that I found to be effective and something that Elon Musk may be doing is to actually have a midday reward just as they enjoyed listening to the stories of their teachers after doing their work. Sometimes you do a really high level task like flashcards or practice questions that you know is going to build your overall retention and then having something immediately after that you can truly relish, whether it's going for a walk outside, watching a TV show that you've been missing, but something that just gives you a mental break instead of trying to fill that time with more studying that may not otherwise be as effective. Now, principle number three is to understand that connections are crucial. Now, it's no surprise that the richest man in the world who initially started with the payment processes and system in PayPal and then was able to venture out to creating an electric vehicle like Tesla as well as sending rockets to space and SpaceX knows a thing or two about connecting ideas. And Elon understands that it's not enough to simply know the facts, but it's more important to understand how to connect them with prior unrelated material. In particularly medicine is a great example of yes, while it's important to know individual pieces of facts and information, it's useless if you can't combine it with all the other data that a patient presents you when they come to you to the hospital or the clinic. It's one of my favorite techniques that I love sharing to make sure that I know the facts, the trees and the big details, the forest together is the brain dump. Now, the brain dump basically involves grabbing a blank piece of paper, I just have a sticky note here, but essentially trying to recreate a lecture or a piece of a lecture, whether it be a diagram or something that you heard that you consider to be important and you want to make sure you understand it from start to finish. Now, often when we're studying for exams, particularly in medical school and you're using a variety of techniques, we're really good at and I used to be good at this as well of convincing yourself, I know that. And then as soon as somebody says put it on piece of paper, like draw it on the whiteboard, say it out loud. That's when you have like this, maybe not. It says exactly what the brain dump helps overcome. You grab a piece of paper, you're trying to recreate that piece of the lecture or the entirety of the lecture and you're looking for those discomfort points. Like where can I not go from A to C because point B is either not there or is very vague. Another simple way of understanding this is imagine going to a movie and then somebody's saying, okay, tell me the plot of the movie and do it as detailed as possible. Ideally, you'll be able to do it because you just got out of the movie, but there are going to be parts where like magic happens. Like there's something that happened here, but I have no idea how they went from this scene or this scene and how that was connected. But to fill in that gap, you don't have to watch the entirety of the movie. Of course, you just have to now go back to those individual scenes and saying, this is the gap that I had, this is what I was missing. Now I understand it. If you asked me to do it again, I would definitely make sure that I included this connection. That is exactly what the brain dump is instead. You're just doing it on a piece of paper, a whiteboard. You can also do it verbally. I just find that writing it down really just highlights to me like, Lux, you don't really know that. And so put a star on it and do it for the rest of the lecture and then look at all of your stars and go back to your slides, back to your syllabus, back to your recordings, whatever it may be, and fill in those gaps. You know, essentially fill in those parts of the movies that you don't understand for this individual lecture. Now, technique number four is problem solving. Now, in his career, particularly with SpaceX, Elon Musk has definitely learned a thing or two about failure. Now, Musk has always been vocal that his setbacks and his failure is really an opportunity to increase his chances of success in the future, particularly for companies like SpaceX and Tesla. Now, thankfully for us in medicine, we don't have to lose a billion dollar rocket to really understand our mistakes. Instead, we can make our failures in the form of practice questions and by doing them as much as possible. Often when I work with students or students to ask me questions, such as like, how do I do practice questions? How do I make time for it? Sometimes the question is actually the opposite, which is I want to guarantee x amount of time to do practice questions on a weekly basis. What type of things should I start taking away from my schedule so I can do more of this? If you understand that somebody quizzing you and somebody asking you like, this is clearly an important concept that you need to be able to connect, you should do that as many times as possible because whoever is designing the question has clearly learned the information well enough that they're going to try to trick you to make sure that you actually understand the concept and try to ask you as many of those questions as possible. But often practice questions are kind of things that we do at the very end when our test gets really close. So instead, you want to ask yourself, how can I do a minimum of 10 minutes of practice questions or 30 minutes of practice questions every other day or doing an hour of practice questions on a Saturday and an hour on a Sunday? For only people like Elon Musk would definitely take advantage of practice questions. A lot of us have access to them on a medical journey, but not only that as a pro tip, the second thing you would likely do is keep a growing list of things that he's missing to make sure that he doesn't miss his questions again. Regardless of the study strategy, ask yourself, am I really doing enough practice questions? If not, where in my study schedule can I put guaranteed time to do so and possibly take away some time that is not as effective? Now principle number five, and this is probably gonna be my favorite because it doesn't correlate at all with how I studied in a medical school, but it has the opportunity of being super effective. And that is learning from the best. Now Elon, again, working in multiple companies understands that he can no longer always be the smartest person in the room. He gets smarter by being around the smartest people in the room. Best way we can do that in medical school is going to our peers and our colleagues as we're prepping for the exam and to truly use them to fill in our gaps and then vice versa using our knowledge to fill in their gaps. So I am usually not a big proponent of group studying because sometimes they're just not effective and they become a big social class, but if you do it strategically, group studying can be super helpful. Two ways that I'm gonna recommend for you guys in this episode. Number one is that before you come into your group studying, each and every student that is a part of that small session or a small group, ideally no more than four to five people comes with a list of questions that are fair game for an upcoming quiz, lecture, or exam. And that way you can essentially just take turns asking each other questions. If somebody doesn't know the answer to something, you can just give them the answer that you have. And the second benefit of this is that as your classmates are asking you questions, if you can verify that you know the answer perfect, that means you're studying because right on, but if they ask you something, they're like, don't really feel confident. That is a great indicator of saying, okay, perfect, teach me. Like fill in that gap, build my foundation. Instead of me having to go to syllabus, you teach me what you think I should know. And then you can always make and double check with your syllabus material just to make sure everything hits home. Now the second option of how you can use group studying is create a list of that oh crap kind of list of things that you just don't understand a lot. Like I never understood HIV like transmission when I was a medical student because all my lectures were super just heavy with the pathways. But then I would go to a classmate and I'm saying, can you like just verbally explain how HIV is transmitted? And then they would go through the different receptors and the different kind of mnemonics and things that they would use and things would start to make more sense. And then I would go to another person saying, can you explain to me how this part of HIV transmission works in your mind? And they would be able to explain it and give me another mnemonic. And then eventually I had a whole picture using my peer and classmates who have spent so much of their time trying to create these and then I was able to just kind of like rip off of them. And on the same end, my classmates would ask me questions like, can you teach me how blood pressure is treated or how heart failure is treated? And I would give them my own mnemonics or thought processes. Use the smart people around you and keep in mind you're one of them and collaborate with the time that spent creating these mnemonics and connections and try to understand pieces of information by the effort and time that somebody's already put in. But these guys are some of the principles inspired by Elon Musk on how he uses to really learn anything and prep himself for all these multiple companies that he runs and ideally of how we prepare for an exam and something strenuous such as medical school. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this video. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this different type of format. If you did, just let me know in the comment section down below because I could think of so many more ideas and people that could get inspiration from on how to prepare for medical school. So if you guys did enjoy this again, let me know in the comment section down below. Hit that like button and subscribe button as well as notification bell to be informed when new videos like this go live. And if you're listening to this on a podcast, definitely consider leaving an honest review on iTunes and also consider hitting that follow or subscribe based on your favorite podcast listening platform. And then finally, if you're struggling on your medical journey and you want some extra help, particularly with studying, a few free resources that we have for you down below. One is our study rehab course, which is a three step process that I use and also on our coaching students. And then finally is their eight step study process is the same technique that I use in medical school that cut my study time in half. Both of those are free courses that we link down below as well as some of our paid programs including the Med School Domination Bundle from Med Elite Academy. And then if you want one-on-one coaching, there's a medic night coaching program. All of those are down below in case you're interested. If you're not interested in any of those, no worries, no harm, no foul. But if any of these videos or episodes have helped you, then definitely consider hitting that like button which definitely helps the channel grow and gets in front of more people. Hit that subscribe button and notification bell. And as always my friends, thank you so much for joining me on my journey. Hopefully I was a little help to you guys on yours. Elon, if you're watching this, just let me know if how right or wrong I was. And hopefully one day I'll owe a Tesla one day. But as always friends, I'll see you guys in the next one. If you did enjoy this video, check out this video on how you can use Anki like a pro and this video on how to study a medical school step by step. These two are gonna help you guys out and I'll see you guys in the next one. Take care my friends, peace.