The “see you in 6 months” learning mindset

Problem: understanding > memorizing

The more we learn, the easier it gets to understand new things, but the longer it takes to stick. We start feeling that we’re not progressing anymore and lose the motivation to keep learning.

Why: survival of the fittest & feedback loop

As adults, we learn by association. The more things we know, the more associations we can create between new and already learned concepts, making understanding easier.

But our memory is selective, akin to the evolution process: survival of the fittest. The statistical relevance of a newly acquired word will be inversely proportional to the total number of words we know. Words not deemed relevant will have a hard time making their way to our long-term memory.

When we start learning a new language, we begin with the basics, i.e., its most commonly used words. Unsurprisingly, we will encounter these words daily because casual conversations rarely use more than a few hundred different words.

Once we reach an intermediary level, the new words we learn appear less frequently in daily conversations.

Eventually, the feedback loop between the acquisition of a new word and reencountering it in a conversation becomes too wide to produce dopamine;

• Learning new words feel less “immediately” rewarding
• We feel like we are wasting our time or worse, that we suck at learning

If you’re interested in this topic, I talk about it in more detail in this thread: https://twitter.com/ghansali/status/1477494844767547392

Solution: the “see you in 6 months” mindset

This is more a mind trick than an actual memorizing technique, but every time you learn a new word, tell yourself: “alright new word, nice making your acquaintance. See you again in 6 months.”

Why 6 months?

Feedback loop: 6 months from now, you should have encountered the word or concept a few times and given enough time for your brain to process it to long-term memory.

Survival of the fittest: If you haven’t encountered it again after 6 months, it probably wasn’t really relevant to your daily reality. Maybe it will someday, but in the meantime, give yourself some slack and move on. There’s so much to learn!

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