A New Look at Study for Mastery

By Bill Tam

Much has been written about mindset mastery, motivation and success. However, you may still be confused about what you must DO to develop a great career and a prosperous life. Bill gives you specific step-by-step instructions to help you make your most important choices in life. You will discover your career goal and priorities in life, based on which you can design and implement your self-improvement program NOW, as you can
visualize all the invisible factors which bolster or hinder your productivity and prosperity
resolve all important and complex decisions as simple choices
gain perspectives on opportunities for self-improvement
improve self-control and relationships with people in positive ways
learn actively and productively with mindfulness practices and reflective thinking to acquire transformative knowledge in collaboration with a team

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Dec 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543741599

Bill Tam

Author Bill Tam : Inspired by the Bible and TED talks, Bill shares a new approach to visualize important and complex life decisions as simple choices you make. Bill shares a new look at study for mastery, and defines the knowledge you should be seeking as true and transformative knowledge. Bill and his partners co-created Flipmapp.com, an online course and study notes creation platform. This book contains specific instructions on how to become a true master of the subjects you are studying, and how to use the tools you need to accomplish that.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 by Bill Tam.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-5437-4160-5

                eBook         978-1-5437-4159-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

www.partridgepublishing.com/singapore

CONTENTS

Proceeds

Preface

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1   The Discovery of Flipmapp

Chapter 2   Visualizing Everything in Life as Choices You Make

Chapter 3   Visualizing Exams as Games

Chapter 4   Visualizing Your Thoughts and Immense Potential

Chapter 5   Visualizing Opportunities For Self-improvement

Chapter 6   Step 1: Set Goal and Priorities

Chapter 7   Step 2: Teamwork

Chapter 8   Step 3: Energize Your Passion

Chapter 9   Step 4: Productive and Active Learning

Chapter 10   Step 5: Study for Mastery A Top-Down Approach to Learning

Chapter 11   How to Use the System and Tools

Chapter 12   Summary of Benefits, Features and Processes

Chapter 13   Your Turn

Chapter 14   Conclusion

An Excerpt From the Book A New Look At Study for Mastery

References

Education Websites and Resources

Glossary

TED Talks

Author and Co-founders of Sky Hub Edu

Proceeds

Not less than fifty percent of the net proceeds from the sales of this book to be received by the author will go to the City Partners endorsed by Hanoi International Fellowship (www.hif.vn). If you want to support the ministry of HIF and the City Partners of HIF, please visit HIF website and see how you want to support them financially and through your prayers.

Preface

To succeed in life and have a great career, you have to make a few fundamental choices to establish your beliefs and lifelong career goal. The advance in science and technologies in the twenty-first century result in explosive growth of information and knowledge, which presents both a challenge and an opportunity for you. The challenge is you must invest significant amount of time and energy in continuous education, to keep up with the growth of new knowledge. The opportunity is that with the advance in neuroscience and internet technologies, there are many new and effective learning tools and methods available to this generation of learners hitherto unheard of.

You can now conveniently access vast amount of high quality education resources, and engage with collaborative learning communities to learn any subject easily. Brain research assisted by MRI technology let us see how our brain develops when we learn. Our brain changes chemically in developing short term memory, structurally in developing long term memory, and functionally in developing our skills and characters. Short term memory is temporarily stored in our brain, while our long term memory has vast capacity but need to be developed through repeated practice and review over a period of time. Spaced learning, visual learning ⁶ and a number of study techniques have been developed based on new findings on how our brain absorb new knowledge more effectively. We have integrated these findings in our research, and developed a system for learners, authors and course creators to develop well-structured learning programs along specific career tracks and projects.

You need to define the core subjects to master and organize your learning around your career goal, which gives you the direction to set objectives and priorities to guide your daily studies.

The main purpose of this book is to introduce a top-down approach to learning, and introduce an online system you can use to organize and implement your study programs. A great career in the knowledge economy of the twenty-first century demands the mastery of a broad range of subjects of a generalist, and in depth career specific skills of a specialist. A great career is important to you, as it will bring accomplishment and prosperity in life.

I intend this book to be useful to anyone who is serious in building a great career and prepared to master any complex subjects. I have quoted some Scriptures of the Holy Bible in this book, to share what I believe to be truthful and useful to develop our knowledge and wisdom in life. However, I do not expect that everyone share the same faith. We devoted a chapter on how you can make rational decisions based on decision theory and logical reasoning. We invite you to think about faith, as what you believe defines who you are and how you make decisions in life. After all, we are what we believe and think.

Bill Tam      March 2017.      Hanoi, Vietnam.

Acknowledgements

We give thanks to TED Talks at TED.com, where we gained perspectives of many great speakers and experts in a wide range of subjects. After we watched many of them talked, we can see there is a clear pattern on why they are successful – they are extremely knowledgeable and passionate about their subjects. We have listed a number of TED Talks at the end of this book, which cover a variety of topics relevant to the thesis of this book.

We thank the people behind Wikipedia, Biblegateway, Coursea, Khan Academy, and other educational websites, where we have adapted various information in this book. We quoted a number of Scriptures based on the New King James Version, where we draw words of wisdom from this timeless and authoritative book of life. There is power in the word of God, and you can feel it when you receive it with all your mind, heart and soul.

We also thank our partners at LP4Y, who give us the opportunity to teach and motivated us to pursue a career in education and training. Last but not least, we thank our brothers, sisters, and parents in supporting and loving us.

Bill, Hieu and Dung.

March 2017. Hanoi, Vietnam

Chapter 1

The Discovery of Flipmapp

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Chapter 1

The Discovery of Flipmapp

It is more blessed to give than to receive

Act 20:35 (NKJV) The Holy Bible ²

H ello, my name is Bill Tam. In late December 2015, after I watched the TEDx Youtube video How to Learn Any Language in Six Months, I was inspired to explore how this idea can be applied to help learners mastering English as a foreign language faster than conventional methods. It was a year since I retired from my position as a finance director of a public company. As our society believes that people should retire at a certain age, people who are retired need to find meaningful things to do instead of being idle. It is not good to be idle at any age. Since I had more time to read the Bible and reflect on my life, I discovered many hidden treasures and wisdom in the Scriptures, and renewed my faith and perspectives of life. In early 2016, I volunteered to teach English at a nongovernmental organization (NGO), Life Project 4 Youth (or LP4Y) in Hanoi, Vietnam, which trains marginalized youth essential skills and prepares them to integrate with the society. I met Dung at LP4Y, and later we worked with Hieu to develop Flipmapp .com.

As I developed English lessons for the students, I created flash cards, quizzes and mind maps to teach new words and phrases.

I purchased a database of five thousands most frequently used words to develop the curriculum. I believe students learning English as a foreign language should focus on learning most commonly used English words and phrases. According to the Macmillan dictionary, ninety percent of the time, native English speakers use seven thousands five hundred words in speech and writing. If you happen to be an English learner, you can freely access all the content and resources we created at Flipmapp.com. Our resources cover the most commonly used verbs, adjectives, nouns and phrases compiled from different sources. The mastery of these words and phrases which represent the core part of the English language is extremely helpful to English learners. They can increase their learning productivity by focusing on mastering the core English language instead of learning randomly.

I knew what a mind map was back then, and used it casually on several occasions. Like most people, I didn’t use them often, as I found no compelling reason to use them in my work or study. After I became an English teacher, I discovered that these tools are useful to both students and teachers. They help students visualize, review and memorize new words and phrases more methodically and effectively. One of the key challenges to learn a second language is that there are too many new words, phrases, grammar rules and pronunciations to remember.

It is not uncommon to find students to spend many years in learning English but still unable to write or speak properly. It is likely that you also have to learn many other things beside language studies.

If you have a system to help you organize and retain much of what you learn permanently, you can save tremendous amounts of time, effort and money spent on education. While we do not encourage rote memorization, you must retain many things in your long-term memory to build up your knowledge and skills. When you are studying for exams, you would take note of key points from the text books you read, so you can review and remember them. However, if you do not have a career goal, you might not make deliberate effort to retain them permanently. You will forget most of what you learn soon after the exams. A top-down approach to learning helps you establish your focus and awareness of what you need to retain in your long-term memory. You do not need to remember everything you read, but you need to organize your study notes systematically, so you can decide later what you need to memorize permanently.

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

Albert Einstein

The problem for most students is they treat passing exams and getting a certificate as an end but not the means to mastery of subjects they are learning. Inevitably, they forget most of what they learned in school.

Study for mastery should be the objective of learning and education. This aims for complete understanding and perfection of skills, so you can contribute positive values in your occupation. Your occupation will indeed occupy most of your time and affect many aspects of your life. It’s likely you have already forgotten many things learned in school. You would not remember things you do not use and practice regularly¹.

A clear vision of your career goal helps you develop a study for mastery mindset, and reduce time and energy spent on irrelevant subjects. If you plan to study for mastery, you would plan and organize your learning resources and activities systematically. It is wise to organize and keep your valuable intellectual resources in a safe place, just as you would with your valuable personal belongings. You must invest tremendous amount of time, effort and money to acquire knowledge, so the value of knowledge is immeasurable. We believe our system can help increase your learning productivity to a whole new level to acquire transformative knowledge.

The Discovery of Flipmapp

O ne day in the middle of 2016, I discovered a new way to make mind maps, flash cards and quizzes in one single step. Thus Flipmapp system was born.

It is difficult for our minds to comprehend and remember things we cannot see. We must take notes to review what we learn, and make deliberate effort to commit important points to memory. Mind maps help us visualize ideas and relationships in words and pictures. Flash cards and quizzes help us retain information through reviews and recall tests. These tools were designed to help you organize your study notes to improve understanding and memory retention.

Flipmapp is an online courses and study notes creation platform, designed to enable learners to make use of the course content to take notes and create learning tools. A flip map is a mind map which synchronizes it’s key words with corresponding flash cards and vice versa, so you can create both great visualization & memorization tools effortlessly at the press of the save button after you have highlight key words to remember. Users can make use of a mind map to see the relationships of words and ideas, which cannot be easily seen in a flash cards deck, while the latter is ideal for spaced repetition learning.

Flipmapp is an innovative solution for both course creators and learners to create customizable online courses, where course content can be used by a user to create their own study notes in the form of mind maps, flash cards, quizzes and multimedia learning resources.

If you are already a fan of these learning tools, you can use Flipmapp system to generate them more quickly and conveniently than other systems.

You can add web links, images, videos and audio learning resources to your flip maps to enrich your study notes. Most of us have powerful visual memories. Memory champions apply visual associations of words and numbers with picture stories to achieve feats of memorization. In your personal experience, you have likely come across people you can remember their faces but not their names. Our brain has powerful visual memory but has difficulty remembering large number of words and numbers. To a computer, visual images contain far more data points than words and numbers. But human brain works differently. We cannot compete with the computer in terms of speed and memory retention, but we can process abstract ideas and images better than machines. The most important value of our brain is our ability to learn and produce new ideas and products in creative ways. You should realize that human creativity is something which machines