fbpx

Jonathan Levi is a serial entrepreneur, published author, and keynote speaker born and raised in Silicon Valley. Since 2014, Jonathan leads SuperHuman Enterprises, which produces the SuperHuman Academy Podcast; the bestselling “Become a SuperLearner®” book; and offers online courses through SuperHuman Academy® and Branding You™ Academy training portals. His latest book, The Only Skill That Matters details his own journey and the techniques that anyone can use to learn faster.

Better Decisions and Supercharged Learning

by Jonathan Levi

3 Big Ideas

  • Career criteria list
  • How to train like an Olympian
  • How to improve learning and memory

Jonathan Levi Resources:

Full Transcript Available Here

Daniel: 02:14 I’m joined today by Jonathan Levi, a serial entrepreneur, published author and keynote speaker, born and raised in Silicon Valley. Since 2014 Jonathan leads super human enterprises, which produces the Superhuman Academy Podcast, the bestselling Become a SuperLearner book and offers online courses through Superhuman Academy in branding you Academy training portals. His latest book, The Only Skill That Matters, details his own journey and the techniques that anyone can use to learn faster.

Daniel: 02:50 Jonathan, welcome to the show.

Jonathan: 02:52 Thank you so much, Daniel. I’m really excited to be here.

Daniel: 02:54 It’s all about prioritization. And you have a must have, must not have list that helps you focus. Let’s jump in right there.

Jonathan: 03:05 Yeah, I love that. So this originally started when I was searching for my next big opportunity. I had tried this startup idea in business school. It didn’t work. And I had a little bit of freedom. I had time, I was still young, didn’t have a family, I’d sold a business before and I worked at little things that had created some income for me. I wasn’t destitute is what I’m trying to say. And so I really had this opportunity, which I think many people have, whether or not they realize it to think at this pivot point, whether that’s after you get your master’s degree or after you sell a business or after whatever, what am I going to do next? And is that going to be the thing that I’m pulled into or is it going to be the thing that I deliberately choose?

Jonathan: 03:49 And so a tool that I kind of came up with to evaluate opportunities and ideas was this idea. We actually changed it to call it the career criteria list in one of the courses we teach with my mentee Brandon Fong, but essentially it’s a must have and must not have list. So it’s writing out very simply the thing that I’m looking for, whether that is a mate, whether that is a new job opportunity, whether that is a volunteering opportunity, whatever it is that you’re trying to find and filter down. I think a lot of times we just go on this gut feeling, which I’m all about gut feelings. I love gut feelings, but there’s also something to be said about thinking analytically. And so the must have and must not have list is just literally a list of criteria. For example, with mine, I had some trauma from my previous business, so it had this must not require me to come into the office every day.

Jonathan: 04:43 Musts have the opportunity for me to impact people’s lives in a positive way. My last business was selling luxury goods on the internet. It did not have that and I came up with this whole list must allow me to work from anywhere I want in the world. Must not require that I work set days, must have flexibility, must not require that I compromise my ethical standards and on and on and on and you come up with about 20 criteria and then lo and behold, as this online course and online education thing took off, I kept looking and kept looking and kept looking until a certain point where I realized with the help of a friend, I will say, I realized, wait a minute, this side project that I have that’s grown now that it has grown, it is now meeting all of these criteria. I’m having impact on a global scale.

Jonathan: 05:28 I love what I do every single morning. I can work from home, I can travel. I feel like I’m doing something meaningful in the world. So it was just like, Oh well there you go. And there was no decision to be made. I was an online educator because every single one of my requirements had been met.

Daniel: 05:44 I love that story. What an epiphany to have to go through the work and then realize, Oh wow, like what I’m doing meets it.

Jonathan: 05:51 It took a long time. It took me awhile.

Daniel: 05:54 And you’re putting in the hard work, right? To really clearly define that and what I love is that at the end of the day, you’re going to end up somewhere, right?

Jonathan: 06:02 Yes.

Daniel: 06:02 And so where you’re headed, is that where you want to be going and doing this hard work is really defining that. I’m curious, so I heard you say about like maybe 20 criteria for each column there must have, must not have

Jonathan: 06:16 Total, I would say.

Daniel: 06:17 Ok total. Do you rank order those at all? I don’t know that it matters. I’m just curious about your process

Jonathan: 06:24 For very, very important decisions like finding a mate, I actually did rank order them because there are some criteria that you’re willing to sacrifice. For example, is she my “type”? Well, it’s actually not that important to me. If I fall in love with a woman with blonde hair, blue eyes, it doesn’t really bother me that she’s not my type. We’re in love. For this, I think, and by the way, I will admit that I actually created a spreadsheet, like a ranking algorithm to take this emotional decision of finding a mate and make it. I wanted it to be an emotional decision informed by logical, rational decision. So what kind of things get a 10 weight, do I get along with her family because I live in Israel. I don’t have my family to support me. That’s a 10 out of 10. Does she want kids?

Jonathan: 07:08 That’s a 10 out of 10. Is she an entrepreneur? That’s like a 3 out of 10. I can survive dating someone who’s not an entrepreneur and on and on. For the career I think intrinsically I knew that there were a couple that were more important for me. Income is a really important thing. It’s important to me to be able to provide for my family very well. I like to travel a lot. I don’t so much like things, but I like the comfort and security and safety and then impact was really, really important for me. I realized that the vanity metric of am I running $1 billion business or is it a venture backed startup? All of these ranked really, really low. And so they were on the list, right of like I’m proud of what I do. It gets media coverage, things like that. But they were ranked really low on the list.

Daniel: 07:55 That’s helpful. So I appreciate you unpacking that. What I heard you say is like for the even bigger decisions you will rank order them.

Jonathan: 08:02 Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve been known to do this when we just accepted a bunch of people into a certified coaching program. That’s an important decision. These are people who are going to represent my brand to my customers. And so I came up with an algorithm and I read each one of their essays in their application and if they mentioned X where X is not a good thing, I dock them and I give them fewer points and then there were certain things that were much more important. Their time zone, not that important to me. I’m happy to have people in Hong Kong, but the reason why they’re doing the program, if the only reason that they put is to earn a passive income on the side, it’s kind of not, doesn’t fit so well.

Daniel: 08:43 So good. You know, with the mastermind that I lead for school leaders, there’s a similar thing, right? There’s an application process and it’s fascinating what people choose to put, right? They’re very open ended terms of the questions and leaders can be as succinct or as deep as they want. There’s not a right or wrong, but it’s really interesting what they decide to share. And then what a lot of people don’t realize is we have a one-on-one call to make sure you’re the right fit for the community, because that’s why it works. Everybody’s handpicked and then by the end, they’re like okay, so what are the next steps. Well, welcome to the mastermind, right? This was an interview.

Jonathan: 09:24 I had the same experience with network. I had heard they’re very selective, handpicked. And so I had a call where they let me ask all the questions and then at the end of that they said, well one, you were referred by someone who vouched for you, but two, the questions that you asked were the interview.

Daniel: 09:45 Well I just wanted to share that real quick, but more importantly, I want to talk about you and something that you expressed to me when we met. It’s sort of like you helping people see things for the first time and that they have a lot of power inherent within themselves and sometimes the only barrier is just more knowledge, right? Getting the experience. And you talked about something that you called a B, do you have mindset. Can you tell the ruckus maker listening what that’s all about?

Jonathan: 10:24 I love that. So this is actually something I got from my buddy Hal Elrod and he led, in my mastermind, a one month challenge, which was so cool because it gave us the opportunity to go deeper, not just on his miracle morning stuff but also on the stuff that he has in his new book, Miracle Equation and what it did is it gave me a term to phrase a trend that I had seen come up in 250 podcast episodes, which is, and also in my life I should say, which is no one ever tells you, well, I just started doing what everyone else did and now I have the same results.

Jonathan: 10:58 No one will tell you, if you speak to a billionaire or an Olympic athlete they’ll be like, Oh, I just copied exactly what other people were doing in terms of training and then I won the Olympics. What they will say is I had to go through a process to change my identity, change who I am so that I would train the way that the other people were training and then I would have the results and success that other people have. So he just gave me this really nice handle to put on it because time and time again we hear this message of knowledge alone or I guess I should say this way, information alone does not create transformation. It’s information plus application, create transformation and that that application is what actually makes you into a different person because doing different things makes you a different person.

Jonathan: 11:48 If you repeatedly eat healthier, you will become physically a healthier, happier, fitter person. If you repeatedly read books instead of watching TV, you will become a different person. Books are one of these crazy things, right? They’re like infectious. You can’t come into context, prolonged contact with them without changing, and this really jelled for me at the absolute right time because I was working on my book and we were looking for a title and my life story, Daniel is really around having a lot of struggles and struggling to fit in, struggling to learn, struggling to achieve what I wanted to achieve and realizing that I had to change my identity with regards to what my capacity was, specifically my capacity to learn, my capacity to grow. And once I realized that I could change that, then I could start learning the things that other people knew, doing the things that other people did and having the things that other people had results. Of course, when you say it like that, it sounds like I just wanted to be like other people, but really I had role models and I had goals and I had aspirations that I wasn’t able to achieve until I changed who I was. And ultimately when it comes down to changing who you are, what does that learning, right? You are learning new habits, behaviors, patterns, ideas, thoughts, skills. That changed fundamentally who you are.

Daniel: 13:09 Learning is at the epicenter of making change happen. Start with those actions, investing in them, doing them consistently. But I think what’s happening intangent with that is, are your identities changing? I’m the type of person who does and then you just start doing more and more of what that type of person does and then you have the results you want. I think your buddy Hal is who taught me and I don’t have the quote completely memorized, but the idea was that to become the leader that you want to become, right, you have to start being like that leader, just like you’re talking about. So it’s about leveling up who you are and getting into those habits, getting around awesome people like you, Johnathan, that’ll push you challenging better. So I appreciate the message you’re sharing today.

Jonathan: 14:01 Likewise. And I want to touch on something that you said that’s really interesting. This whole idea of consistency and consistently doing the things that you do. Another person who led a challenge that I really, really love and I love his work is Benjamin Hardy, the psychologist. And he taught me that it’s this idea called signaling. And if you get down into the research, psychological research, how do we form our idea of who we are? And I have a degree in sociology and yet I’d never encountered this idea of the individual person. What makes them think I’m X. And of course this is something I’m super interested in because people come to me and every day say I have a lousy memory or I’m a slow learner. So what causes that to happen? And it turns out it’s not past stories. It’s not anything.

Jonathan: 14:47 It’s what do we do? Repeatedly, what do we do? So for the challenge, we did a willpower challenge with him and he had us do something consistently for the whole month. And I, all my life have been a nighttime workout person. I know it’s not as healthy to work out at night. And the knowledge alone did not create the transformation. But when I did the implementation, it took about three to four weeks. And then one morning I was leaving the gym and it was 7:30 and I looked at my watch, or sorry, it was 8:30 at the end of the workout I looked at my watch and I was like, Oh, how nice is it that I have 30 minutes to shower? And then tonight I’ll get to sit at home and just be on the couch with my wife. I’m so glad I’m a morning workout person.

Jonathan: 15:25 I was like, what? In 30 years I have not been a morning workout person and just a few weeks of consistently doing this, I caught myself changing my perception of who I am, which is so cool.

Daniel: 15:38 So cool. Thank you for sharing that story. Welcome to the morning workout tribe.

Jonathan: 15:44 It’s good, right?

Daniel: 15:46 So let’s share. The ruckus maker listening, this is a show they want to get better with their leadership, their mindset decision making, and you talk about that stuff. So can you share a practical tip on improving learning or memory?

Jonathan: 16:02 Yes, I would love to share all the tips. Here’s why I’m so excited about sharing with your audiences because they are, each one of them is an opportunity for a huge ripple effect of these ideas, which are not my ideas. These are ideas that have been around since 2500 years ago, but they were lost.

Jonathan: 16:19 And I want to make sure that we rediscover them. So what we’re learning and what neuroscience has kind of proven to us is that our brains are very specific in the kinds of information they like to remember. And many people feel differently about this because they’ve been trained all their lives to learn a certain way, whether that’s sitting in the classroom or reading books and listening. But actually there’s kind of three fundamentals if we want something to be very memorable. The first one is visual stimuli. After taste and smell, visual information is the most memorable, the fastest to recall. And it is the most interesting to us. We cannot avoid a novel image and novel site. The second one is connection. The more that we connect information in our minds, even if those are kind of made up superfluous, silly connections that only make sense to us. The more we can create those connections, the more effectively we’re going to remember.

Jonathan: 17:13 And then the third one at more advanced levels is locations. We’re really, really good because of millions and millions of years of evolution we’re really good at remembering locations and if we anchor our memories to locations such as where we learned that piece of information or at the higher kind of skill levels, memory palaces, this technique for organizing our memories, we can do infinite things with our memory. I mean the record right now for memorizing a deck of cards is under 12 seconds. People who’ve memorized 36 decks of cards in an hour, they’ve memorized 1500 names and faces in an hour. Pi has now been memorized to over 30,000 digits to the point where the issue with breaking that record is not passing out from exhaustion, not actually the memory piece. So our minds can do incredible, incredible things if we follow these three fundamentals.

Jonathan: 18:06 And then of course do space repetition because no matter how well you memorize something or encode it in your mind, our brains are really going to try and maintain efficiency. They’re 2% of our body mass, 20% of our energy consumption and oxygen consumption. So they’re always looking for how can I maintain and remove memories that are not being used. So we need to be systematic about reviewing the things that we learn to ensure that we don’t forget them.

Daniel: 18:32 Can you tell us what you’ve used the memory palace to memorize or to make it very real for the ruckus maker listening, because here’s the thing. I know it’s impressive that you can memorize X amount of decks of cards, right? Or Pi or whatever, but how does that help me at school?

Jonathan: 18:57 So names and faces really valuable. First day of class. What if you could walk to every single class, not just your classes, walk to every single class, memorize every single student. And fortunately, unless you’re leading a university, they sit in the same chair every single day. Build a memory palace, memorize every single child’s name by creating a symbol and a marker for exactly where they sit. Mike becomes a microphone. Ray becomes a Manta Ray. Daniel becomes connected to a famous Daniel that you know, and on and on and on. Other things that I’ve used it for, this room that I’m in right now is the circle of fifths, memory palace. So a little concept in music theory for those who aren’t familiar is from every chord do you need to know what other chords are in that? In Hebrew we call it Sullam. In English you call it a scale or key.

Jonathan: 19:49 I learned that all of this stuff in Hebrew, the music keys, so sullam, ladder, in any case, this room actually helps me. And where I’m standing right now is the C sharp, no C sharp is behind me, and then I’ve got my C right here and this room is essentially a memory palace. The hardware store downstairs is the UN or the NATO phonetic alphabet because I spent a lot of time on the phone. So I need to know this. Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo Fox, very useful. If anyone wants something easy and fun and useful to remember and they can’t think of a creative thing to remember, go memorize the NATO phonetic alphabet because it’s easy. I mean, how easy is it for Delta, picture a Delta plane, for Foxtrot picture a Fox, for India picture the Taj Mahal, for hotel picture your favorite hotel on and on and on. So it’s really fun. It’s really easy to remember. I’ve got a memory palace for the Russian grammatical case system.

Jonathan: 20:48 I’ve got a memory palace for Russian vocabulary. I’ve got two template memory palaces that I use when I’m on stage and I want to memorize 50 digits backwards and forwards for giggles. You can create memory palaces for your shopping lists for your to do lists, for key ideas. I have a memory palace for my Ted talk, which allowed me to memorize the entire thing in about 10 minutes. So really anything, I actually haven’t found something yet that can’t be in some way converted into a memory palace.

Daniel: 21:21 I like the Ted talk example and that’s where I heard it used. I don’t know if it”s Socrates or Aristotle, or one of those guys but in terms of the speeches, right, that they were giving and how they were teaching, a lot of that was memorized using memory palaces and people wonder how do they retain all this information?

Daniel: 21:44 And for a school leader communication is directly tied to influence and being able to confidently stand up not have to read exactly what the information you want to share and to be able to rely on stories to connect with people on an emotional level. A memory palace could be a great way to do that. I haven’t tinkered with memory palaces yet. I understand the concept, but when I share what works for me is all my slides I build with images. There’s maybe three words or less on there, but I think it’s following a same type of system in that the images are breadcrumbs for me of what story to tell next so that I can really connect with them.

Jonathan: 22:29 I bet you that you could, if you just super impose those onto a memory palace because the memory palace is not for everything. It’s like bringing an ICBM to a water gun fight. If you just need to memorize the phone number, you probably don’t need a memory palace. But for things where you need to know forwards, backwards, exact order without missing, it’s a big deal if in your lecture you miss one point. Whereas if you want to memorize, a bunch of people’s names that you met last night at dinner, it’s not the end of the world if one of them, you have to say, sorry, I forgot your name. So if you were to superimpose those exact images from the slides onto a memory palace, you wouldn’t even need the slides. And people would say he has the clicker, but why doesn’t he ever look at the slides?

Daniel: 23:13 That’s great Jonathan. I’m enjoying this conversation and we’re going to take a quick pause here for a message from our sponsors. The Better Leaders Better Schools Podcast is brought to you by Organized Binder. Organized Binder is an evidence based RTI tier-one universal level solution and focuses on improving executive functioning and non-cognitive skills. You can learn more and improve your students’ success @organizedbinder.com

Daniel: 23:46 Today’s podcast is sponsored by SaneBox. I’m a current subscriber to SaneBox and it is absolutely a tool that all school leaders cannot live without. Why do I love it? It just works. There is nothing to learn, nothing to install and SaneBox works directly with every single email service out there. Imagine a world where only the important emails make it to your inbox. All the unimportant stuff is magically filtered out to folders that you can review later, that’s SaneBox’s artificial intelligence working behind the scenes. It has saved me countless hours of filtering emails each week and it will do the same for you. If I could give you three or more extra hours each week, what would you be able to accomplish with that time? That’s what SaneBox does for me and it will do it for you. Start your free two week trial and get a $25 credit by visiting sanebox.com/BLBS that’s sanebox.com/BLBS.

Daniel: 24:54 I’m back with Jonathan Levi. We were talking memory palaces last and now I’d like to talk a little bit about the latest book, The Only Skill That Matters and when we’re thinking of these things like a total operating system upgrade in terms of our mind and our thinking, how much work is this for a busy school leader that’s listening to this show? How much time is she going to put in?

Jonathan: 25:21 So what’s crazy is as I’ve gone through the years, I’ve made the memory pieces of the course bigger and earlier and the speed reading parts shorter and later because the memory pieces in just a couple of weeks of, actually research has been done, two weeks of 20 to 30 minutes a day four times a week was enough for people to remember six times more and that lasted for six months. Don’t quote me on the exact numbers there, but there is a study from Radboud University and Dr. Boris Nikolai Konrad, that actually proved this. Twenty minutes a day, just practicing. And the practice is actually using the techniques in your day-to-day life, not going on and playing memory games on the internet. Speed reading takes a whole lot longer on average, takes people about two months to really crack the skill. And that’s with practicing every day. It’s a lot more difficult to speed read. But the memory, as you said is really kind of this like operating system upgrade. It’s once we turn on, and it is a matter of turn on because we all have a visual memory, it’s a natural gift that we’ve been given the same way that we all, we’ll never forget our own mother’s face. We all know how to memorize pictures. And so once we activate that, it really is just like switching to a different operating system. One that runs faster, quicker, leaner, and more reliably.

Daniel: 26:40 That’s good. So what I heard was that it’s about 20 minutes per day, so we can all be intentional and make that sort of time. And I also heard you say something important, which is you don’t have to necessarily go out there and learn all these new techniques. You can embed it in stuff that you’re already doing.

Jonathan: 26:58 Exactly. And one thing, I like to do a little piece of homework because educators, right? How often are they assigned homework? So we’ll turn the tables around. I want you to first off because it’s just a nice thing in the world and I think the world would be a better place if we all do this. Ask people’s names. The person if they’re not wearing a name tag, you know, the person at the supermarket is wearing a name tag usually, but the next waiter that serves you, the next Uber driver that picks you up, ask them their name and then memorize that name. So going back to the three fundamentals we talked about creative visualization, right? So Edmundo how are we going to memorize Edmundo well, he kind of reminds me of this guy, Edmund, that I knew and what do they have in common? So create that picture, create a connection, and then if needed, create a location. Where did Edmundo actually pick me up?

Daniel: 27:50 And I was plus one that idea. Dale Carnegie in How to Win Friends and Influence People says the sweetest sounding word in the English language and probably every language is a person’s name.

Jonathan: 28:03 In any language.

Daniel: 28:04 Right? Because you love to hear, we’ll be in a busy place, somebody will say, Daniel, right? What are the odds that they’re really talking to me in a crowd. Probably not, but I look every single time and we’re just, of course, conditioned to respond to that.

Daniel: 28:21 And the other thing too this is an interview tip. So since we’re giving challenges to the listener, at an interview I used to make a seating chart of the interview panel with everybody’s name. So I guess now having some of these techniques that Jonathan is sharing, I can memorize it instead of having that seating chart. But the point is this, I did that so I could refer to everybody by their first name. Again, they like how it sounds, but it also creates instant rapport. It says that you’re important, you’re important enough that I memorize your name, that I know you and I use it. And so it’s just a small, like sort of leadership tip, but very profound of what doors it can open.

Jonathan: 29:00 It’s huge. And it has literally and figuratively opened doors for me. I once had a situation where I wanted to get into a special area of a hotel that was restricted.I wanted to take pictures in there. It was this beautiful architectural thing and I asked someone along the way and they said, well, if the tour guide lets you. Now, he didn’t tell me his name, but I looked at his name tag really quickly. I remember to this day, this was two years ago, his name was Kai. I remembered Kai. And then we get to the tour guide and the tour guide says, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. Who tells you you can be in here? I said, well, Kai said that as, as it’s okay with you. She goes, Oh, Kai said that. I’m like, yeah, Kai. Spiky hair, Kai blue eyes. She goes, okay, if you know Kai then go ahead and she just let us in.

Daniel: 29:51 Kai’s the name. Jonathan, just wrapping up this conversation, what message would you put on all school marquees across the globe if you could do so for a day?

Jonathan: 30:03 Well I guess it depends. Are the kids of reading age or is it mostly the educators of reading age?

Daniel: 30:11 You can choose your audience. Choose your own adventure.

Jonathan: 30:14 Okay. So I would put for the educators because I feel like this is something that I would like to be handled at the youngest age possible, but it’s learning is a skill. Are you teaching it?

Daniel: 30:28 Learning is a skill. Are you teaching it? And Jonathan you’re building a school from the ground up. You’re not limited by resources. Your only limitation is your imagination. How would you build your dream school and what would be your top three priorities?

Jonathan: 30:44 Love it. Okay. So I’ve waited for years for someone to ask me this. First things first, everything would be interactive experiential learning, whether that’s using VR to go back and teach history or it’s using hands-on experiences to teach science and biology.

Jonathan: 31:03 Every single thing that students learn would be taught in a visual way, including by the way, social skills. Get the teacher up in the class. Let’s demonstrate, let’s see body language. How is it when I speak this way versus this way? So that’s first priority is making every single piece of learning experiential. Priority number two would be teaching some of the skills that I really feel are missing. I think in a lot of school curriculums like people skills, communication skills, and I’m talking younger age, managing your personal finances, how to be an advocate for your own health, entrepreneurship skills, which I think are more important than ever before for everyone to learn whether or not they plan to be an entrepreneur and letting children have that bare minimum of things we all should know. We should all know history, we should all know basic mathematics.

Jonathan: 31:54 Did I need to learn trigonometry? I feel like my time would have been better spent learning how to balance my personal finances than trigonometry which I was kind of clearly never going to use based on my interests and where I was strong. And then the third thing, I’ve long felt that it’s really bizarre that we have this concept called physical education, which follows us really from first grade on, sometimes til college. And they teach us how to use every single part of our body and we can talk about how effective that education may or may not be. That’s kind of besides the point. Do you even have a couple awkward years where they teach you how to use certain parts of your body? And we all squirmed through that class because it’s so uncomfortable but the human brain is not only the most complex object on your body, it’s the most complex object in the known universe.

Jonathan: 32:42 And no one ever sits us down and goes, Hey, this is how your brain works. You have these two organs called the hippocampi. Here’s what they’re looking for, for memorization. And by the way, here’s also how you maintain that brain. You need this much sleep and you should be consuming this much water to make sure it’s optimally functioning. And by the way, did you know that your brain is also responsive to light? So you want to be studying near a window and making sure that you’re getting the full spectrum of light. And I really feel like just having a seminar even, which is once a week or maybe one week a semester where students learn how to use their brains, whether that’s at the low end, you know, Hey, here’s what happens when we’re eating sugary foods. It’s really wreaking havoc in our brains to the higher level of let’s talk about how we can build memory palaces.

Jonathan: 33:28 And right now we’re learning this in biology. How are people memorizing that? And also teaching in a way, because I think one of the issues is it doesn’t, I don’t want to say it doesn’t matter, but no matter how great of a job an educator does, if a student learns something once and then moves on, they will forget it. So what if in addition to final exam week we had this kind of review or what if final exams were cumulative because exams are a great thing for getting students to study and also improving comprehension. But what if you’re fifth grade? I don’t know if fifth graders have an exam. What if your 11th grade exam tested everything that you knew all the way up. So you were always reviewing your knowledge for retention rather than learn it and move on.

Daniel: 34:14 Thank you so much for being a part of the Better Leaders Better Schools Podcast.

Jonathan: 34:18 My pleasure, Daniel.

Daniel: 34:20 Of all the things we talked about today, Jonathan, what’s the one thing you want a ruckus maker to remember?

Jonathan: 34:27 I want them to remember that just by simply adapting and adjusting the way you learn, meaning techniques, skills, and habits, you can dramatically, exponentially improve how effectively you learn. And so I believe it’s kind of our right to know how to do that.

Daniel: 34:50 Thanks for listening to the Better Leaders Better Schools Podcast for ruckus maker. If you have a question or would like to connect my email, [email protected] or hit me up on Twitter @alienearbud. If the Better Leaders Better Schools Podcast is helping you grow as a school leader, then please help us serve more ruckus makers like you. You can subscribe, leave an honest rating and review or share on social media with your biggest takeaway from the episode. Extra credit for tagging me on Twitter @alienearbud and using the # BLBS. Level up your leadership @ betterleadersbetterschools.com and talk to you next time. Until then, class dismissed.

 

SHOW SPONSORS:

ORGANIZED BINDER

  • Organized Binder is an evidence-based RTI2 Tier 1 universal level solution
  • Focuses on improving executive functioning and noncognitive skills
  • Is in direct alignment with the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework
  • Is an integral component for ensuring Least Restrictive Environments (LRE)

You can learn more and improve your student’s success at https://organizedbinder.com/

SANEBOX

Suffer from email overload?

Bring Sane-ity back to your email inbox. 

Click here for a free 14-day trial to Sanebox and get a $25 credit, by visiting sanebox.com/blbs

 

Copyright © 2020 Better Leaders Better Schools

(Visited 134 times, 1 visits today)