Dr. Cal Newport

Deconstruct experiment.

And active recall was the thing that turned me all around.

And so I went from a pretty good student to 4.0 every single quarter, sophomore year, junior year, senior year.

I got one A-minus between my sophomore year through my senior year.

It was like this miraculous transformation.

It was active recall.

I rebuilt all of my studying.

So if it was for a humanities class, I had a whole way of taking notes that was all built around doing active recall.

For math classes, my main study tool was a stack of white paper.

All right, do this proof, white piece of paper.

And just can I do it from scratch?

If I could, I know that technique.

If I don't, all right, I'm going to come back and try it again later.

Completely transformed.

You know, I did so well academically, that's why I ended up writing that book.

to basically spread that message to other people.

So I'm a huge advocate for active recall.

It's really hard, but it is the way to learn new things.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, it was a problem.