"I'M HITTING ALL MY GOALS, AND FOR ONE OF MY COURSES I EVEN GOT THE HIGHEST MARK IN MY DEGREE" — STELIO, DOUBLE DEGREE STUDENT
For Stressed-Out Students Who Want to Study More Efficiently
Discover a step-by-step workflow to handle multiple subjects, finish a lot of materials on time, and remember what you study beyond exams
Dear Reader,
Have you ever wanted to become the highest scorer in your exams — consistently?
Becoming a top student?
Or even getting into a good university?
If so...
What do you think it would take for you to get there?
If I had to guess, you’re probably thinking that you need to be “smart enough” or “have great memory” or “have lots of motivation.”
After all, whenever you try to “study hard,” your efforts and intentions don’t seem to reflect on the results…
Tell me, do these seem familiar to you?
Every single day you tell yourself, “I’ll study tomorrow” but you rarely do.
The moment you realize it, there's only 3 days left until the exams and you haven't studied anything...AGAIN.
It's always like this:
You know you have to study, but you’re just sitting there in front of your books procrastinating or scrolling through your phone.
When you do study, you can’t seem to concentrate for more than 10 minutes.
You just can’t make yourself sit down and start studying!!
In class, you took extensive notes on literally EVERYTHING — word-for-word — afraid that you’ll miss important details.
Yet no matter how much you look at your notes, the professor’s notes, and the textbooks, the learning just isn’t there.
When taking notes from textbooks, it’s the same.
But this time, you’re now highlighting entire pages.
Everything just seems so important.
Overall…
It’s just taking you FOREVER to learn new things the first time around.
The amount of things you need to study would eventually pile up, and it’s giving you anxiety, stress, and sleepless nights.
NOW you don’t know where to start.
You get overwhelmed by all the content you need to know.
THANKS, PAST SELF! 🤦♂️
With all the time pressure and overwhelm, studying now feels “all over the place” and feels as though you’re not actually learning and retaining information.
And no matter how many times you read the material, make notes of it, recite it, after a few days it goes away like smoke in the wind.
The moment you do something else everything goes out the window.
(Or you retain like, 10% of it.)
It’s a vicious cycle.
Yet, literally EVERYONE tells us we “just need hard work and determination to get top scores”.
“Don’t have friends!”
“Study for 20 hours per day!”
“Stop wasting your time on video games!”
“Sacrifice your hobbies — who needs hobbies?!”
“JuSt rEvIse yOUr NOtes aND LiSteN iN cLaSs, yOu WiLL lEArn eveRYthIng”.
Are you dreaming about video games in your sleep? “NO, IDIOT! YOU CAN ONLY DREAM ABOUT YOUR SUBJECTS IN MY HOUSE.”
(searches Google for “kangaroo height requirements Australia” because I don’t wanna be Asian anymore)
But these same people just don’t understand what you’ve been through.
Because if their advice holds up, then…
With the kind of effort and sacrifice you’ve already put into studying, you SHOULD — AT THE VERY LEAST — be in the top 10%, NO LESS.
…INSTEAD OF THE TOTAL OPPOSITE.
You weren’t having fun, you’re already above all those party kids for becoming a young hermit, you’re not taking any breaks from studying…
…but you’re STILL getting the shit kicked out of you at school.
Your intentions are to be a good student but your efforts are just not matching up anymore.
Sucks, right?
Listen…
If you feel like I’ve just described your entire life right now, it’s HIGHLY likely that one of three things is true:
- You probably feel bad for being distracted and having a hard time focusing and not studying
- You probably feel like something is wrong with you because you have a difficult time understanding and remembering things
- You probably feel very sad at the fact that you are studying and pouring in the efforts yet you can’t see even a SINGLE result that reflects your intention or work
I’ve been there. I know how it feels.
And sometimes it just makes you feel like you shouldn’t even be accepted in your degree in the first place.
That, with such an “awful memory” you won’t go very far in your degree.
Why the hell study if we’re going to fail, anyway?
You just can’t help but think…
“How are they able to pull it off?”
Top Learners — You know ’em when you see ’em
You know who I’m talking about.
Those guys who you don’t even see studying, telling you that they “Oh, I didn’t study at all” yet they get like 2 mistakes out of a hundred.
OH, THE DISRESPECT!
Chances are, you’ve seen a lot of these Top Learners:
- They enter the class looking refreshed because they got 8 hours of sleep
- Whenever they listen to lectures, they seem to “get it” after hearing it the first time
- Whenever they get asked a question from another angle, they never go blank. They can always give a sure answer because they TRULY understand the topic
- They have unbreakable study habits — whenever they think they’re going to start studying, they can immediately do it without procrastinating
- They amount of materials they need to study doesn’t faze them — in fact, they’re confident that they will finish and remember all of them
Not only do they look completely different — their results are, too:
✅ They achieve top grades in class that they could be proud of, and make their parents happy with their grades.
✅ They could get into top universities with FULL scholarships.
✅ They could crush their career exams without a single doubt that they’ll fail.
✅ They become “dream job material” and would have all the career options in the world.
The best part?
They still have all this time for sleeping, gaming, going to the gym, and hanging out.
Must be fun being smart.
Must be fun having great memory.
And it’s magical how they just have TONS of motivation to study.
…but is that really the case?
What if I told you that you could become one of them yourself?
What if you could become a Top Learner?
Think about it.
C’mon, just a thought experiment:
What if you could become one of them? Has that thought ever crossed your mind?
If it did, let me tell you something…
As someone who was formerly a FAILURE Engineering student who:
- Can’t even start studying and HATES studying more than anything else
- Takes notes on the entire page without learning anything (really)
- Goes out of the lecture room remembering literally nothing — as though the lecture didn’t even happen
- Blanks out during exams especially when asked a question from another angle
- FAILED 4 subjects, and is barely passing the others
- Spent a little more than 6 years in Engineering, when it’s supposed to be only 5 years
…and has become someone who learned to LOVE studying again:
- Got passing grades before the finals even started
- Ranked at the top 1 in the mock board exams for my degree
- Ranked at the top 6 in the national board exams (with a 50%+ passing rate)
- Is now pursuing a Master’s Degree in one of the top Engineering Universities in the country
I discovered that it’s POSSIBLE to get out of the vicious cycle of procrastination, getting behind, forgetting, and overwhelm.
You CAN become a Top Learner.
I’d go as far as saying that it’s possible for ANYBODY.
It’s possible no matter how “lazy” you think you are, how behind you are right now in class, or how “awful” you think your memory is.
I certainly didn’t have lots of motivation. I was constantly called “lazy,” for Pete’s sake!
I couldn’t even remember my GF’s birthday back in our first few months together. I didn’t have great memory.
And there’s no way in hell I’m “smart enough” like those Straight-A kids who’ve been in the Dean’s List since the Crustacean period.
But there’s something you need to understand first…
The truth is that you don’t need to be “smart”/“have great memory”/“have lots of motivation”
I’ve discovered that most people have been thinking about Top Learners totally backwards.
Let me elaborate…
Reason #1: Our motivation levels naturally fluctuate.
According to Dr. BJ Fogg of Stanford University, motivation doesn’t stay at high levels for a very long time.
In fact, we spend the MAJORITY of our time at natural periods of motivation — where we cannot do hard things. [1]
Turns out, aside from Motivation there are two little-known factors influencing our behaviors: [2]
- Perceived Ability
- Prompts/Cues
Knowing that, let’s ask the important question again:
How do you build study habits?
Take a look:
Option 1: Increase Perceived Ability
- Improving your study process. (Right process → predictable results → high Perceived Ability → Lower motivation required to study)
- Leveling the workload into many days
- Gaining reading skills, note-taking skills, encoding skills (Or, “sharpening the saw”)
Option 2: Improved Prompts/Cues
- Doing “choice architecture” to make good behaviors easier [3]
- Using a Productivity System [4] to eliminate task ambiguity, Zeigarnik Effect, and poor energy management
See how there’s a TON of ways to build study habits that don’t even require willpower?
(Now you can stop watching those motivational videos with someone shouting at you for how hard you need to work.)
Reason #2: Learning new information quickly means peforming the right mental processes.
Other students try to “remember important facts,” and so they “capture important information” by taking an endless amount of notes that’s literally just a color-coded idea graveyard.
100% NOTES, ZERO LEARNING.
No wonder why it’s taking them a lot of time — it’s because they’re NOT EVEN MAKING SOMETHING OUT OF THE CONTENTS, that they’re setting themselves up for RESTUDYING. (Thus, taking more than 2X time)
Learning new information is all about working with the mental processes of encoding.
The physical processes (note-taking, reading, etc.) are simply the means to that end.
And you can make the process of encoding efficient by pre-filtering your materials, taking advantage of book structure, [6] treating concepts as “tables with legs”, and formulating questions to test your understanding [7] (instead of regurgitation).
When you do so, you’ll be able to eliminate the biggest time-waster of all:
Going back to what you’ve already learned.
(Basically: The biggest reason why it’s taking students FOREVER to study.)
No amount of speed reading will solve that.
Reason #3: Forgetting can be slowed down, permanently.
Contrary to what you may believe right now, the rate at which you forget information is NOT fixed. Memory athletes and SRS fans know this very well
And based on (probably the most-cited) research on long-term retention, [8] there are actually a bunch of ways you can “decelerate” your forgetting:
- Retrieval practice w/ feedback
- Improving the quality of encoding (increased levels of processing, associations, context)
- Increasing retrieval effort
Which means that you don’t need to have “great memory” — you just need to decelerate forgetting rate of ideas to the point that decay becomes SO slow…
…that you’ll remember what you learned for MONTHS and YEARS instead of days.
With the right process, you CAN become a Top Learner
From the hundreds of students I’ve taught how to learn, I’ve discovered the most important truth about becoming a Top Learner:
The key to becoming a Top Learner is the right process.
It’s NOT that there’s “something wrong with you” but rather with “what you’ve been doing.”
It’s not YOU, it’s your PROCESS.
And I'm NOT talking about a mere combination of random hacks, tools, and magic pills.
I'm talking about a coherent process.
Once you start using the right process, you WILL become convinced of your abilities and start to believe in yourself more, like I did.
And you get to that “right process” by working with the memory’s core processes. (A-ha, captain obvious!)
Take a look: [9]
And if you treat the memory like a “manufacturing plant” with a couple of stages, you’ll quickly realize:
The only way you can study effectively is when your study system works with the core processes of memory.
These core processes/stages are: [10]
- Encoding. The “initial learning” of information, which requires a clear working memory.
- Storage. How you maintain information over time — which is strengthened by better processing.
- Retrieval. Happens whenever you access information from memory. The great thing about retrieval is that the process itself makes ideas a bit stronger and easier to access.
And let’s get a few things out of the way, shall we?
Knowing this 3-step process, you’ll quickly realize that:
- Pomodoros ALONE are not enough to make you study better or “beat procrastination inStAntlY”
- Note taking ALONE is not enough to make you learn new things
- Anki/Active Recall/Spaced Repetition ALONE is not enough to make you remember what you learn_ _(especially for concepts!)
- Understanding ALONE is not enough especially when the intervals between topics are too far
They need to be PART OF the system, not BECOME it!
Don’t get me wrong here: These are GREAT. I’ve used them myself, and they’re effective for their intended context.
In ISOLATION, though — which other students do — they just plain suck.
We could be using Obsidian/Notion/Roam Research/Anki/Active Recall for all we care, but at the end of the day, it’s all about how you work with those 3 processes.
Just imagine what your life could look like when you can guarantee retention...
You could…
- Get recognized for becoming the highest scorer on your exams
- Make your parents happy with your grades (that you could be proud of!)
- Get accepted into your dream university with full scholarship
- Crush a career exam and know 100% that you’ll pass before you even see the result
- Be the one to choose your company when starting your dream job. How does that sound?
And be able to do these ALL while having more time to do the things you want.
Watch anime? Do a Starting Strength program? Play Skyrim (after 10k hours…)? Party with your friends? Finally hop on the digital art bandwagon? Start a YouTube channel? Start a business?
Your choice.
Enjoy your well-deserved free time or study more if you wish.
That’s because with the right process…
Top scores become repeatable.
Continuous improvement becomes possible.
And you’ll know exactly where things are going wrong in your studying.
So there’s everything to gain and nothing to lose.
The good news is that it’s never been easier to learn this exact process, too.
After YEARS of learning from memory experts, memory champions, productivity experts, social psychologists, behavioral economists, the Toyota Production System, my own experience, and the experience of hundreds of LeanAnki students since 2020…
…you can now learn about this process from an easy-to-follow course — which you can take in the middle of your semester.
Introducing...
Simple Study System
The Step-by-Step System for Handling Multiple Subjects, Learning New Topics Efficiently, and Remembering in the Long-term
Simple Study System is a step-by-step study workflow that gives you the skills, mental models, and systems for finishing a lot of materials, learning new topics quickly, and retaining them beyond your exams.
It’s experience-based. I’ve only included things that I’ve already proven to work. No ideas that “sound good in theory” but don’t really work in practice.
It’s coherent. You don’t need to guess “when to apply these tactics” because, instead of out-of-context grocery list of “hacks,” you get a step-by-step workflow.
It’s permanent. The course focuses on developing the right skills ALONG with the right process. And once you learn the them, you’ll be able to use them for DECADES to come.
I promise you…
Once you learn the entire system, you won’t go back to your old ways of studying again.
✅ Instead of telling yourself every day that you’ll “study tomorrow,” you’ll ALWAYS know what to do and where to start. Eventually, this means UNBREAKABLE study habits that don’t need any willpower.
✅ Instead of highlighting entire pages of a textbook, copying entire lectures…you’ll know exactly how to find what’s important to spend your limited time on.
✅ Instead of drawing a blank when you get asked a question from another angle, you’ll know what it means to truly understand a concept and how to get there — step-by-step.
✅ Instead of taking too long to learn new content the first time and giving up halfway through, you’ll be confident that you’ll be able to finish your materials — without getting overwhelmed or burnt out.
✅ Instead of forgetting everything you studied after a few days despite re-reading your notes more than 3 times, you’ll enter your exam room with total “passing confidence”.
I created the study system course to solve all the problems I see in mainstream study advice...
...which is knowing a LOT of hacks, but NOT having a STRUCTURED game plan for acing your exams while living a life.
It's for serious students who believe that using systems — rather than blindly "working harder" or using silly "top 10" hacks — is the key to studying smarter.
Never have to go back and re-read stuff again
At a very high level, your study system will have specific elements that work together to guarantee retention — to accumulate knowledge.
That's because if you can accumulate knowledge:
- You won't have to go back to what you've already learned anymore
- You won't be afraid of learning new, seemingly foreign topics anymore
- You start compounding your knowledge — you retain more, and you can learn a lot more quickly
And the only way to do that is NOT through a collection of hacks...
...but rather through a structured workflow that works with your memory's core processes: Encoding, Storage, Retrieval.
Here’s how the study workflow works from a 30k-ft perspective:
- Creating an "Autodidact Curriculum" to know exactly which is important to study
- Use information processing skills (the “Bracket Reading Strategy” for textbooks and the "Lean Cornell Note-Taking Method") to encode information & increase levels of processing
- Practice effective note-taking principles to consolidate ideas and build your knowledge base instead of building pretty but useless notes that you won't actually review later
- Formulating questions from your insights so you can avoid the illusion of knowing
- Doing the 7 steps of Active Recall to remember what you learn in the long-term and enjoy more free time
The study workflow integrates with a GTD-based productivity system so you can free your attention and working memory for encoding information:
- You’ll separate "active vs inactive" tasks so you become more in control of your planning, while knowing exactly what to do next
- By managing your energy instead of just your time, you’ll be able to stay concentrated for hours when studying
- And by capturing open loops and processing them at a certain interval, you can finally stop thinking about the other tasks you need to do when trying to focus on studying
The result?
You eliminate overwhelm.
You ALWAYS know where to start.
You learn new information much faster.
You retain LOTS of information for long periods.
You build unbreakable study habits.
You get top scores that your parents could brag about — while having more time for doing what you love.
Eventually, you become one of the Top Learners everyone would recognize.
After all...
You’ve followed all the steps that make you work with the 3 core processes of memory…
You’ve prevented forgetting because you are constantly pre-filtering your materials, increasing the levels of processing, and testing your understanding…
And because you’ve prevented forgetting, you don’t need to go back to what you’ve studied anymore.
So why in the world wouldn’t top grades be guaranteed?
You tell me.
It’s cause-and-effect, my friend.
Everything you get once you become a member
✅ The Written Core Modules for Simple Study System (valued conservatively at $199) — NOT for skimmers
SSS is 100% written, and it’s short. There’s no need for hundreds of hours of incoherent advice that leaves you more confused during implementation.
Here's what you'll discover in the course.
In Module 1:
- How to pick out crucial points to take notes on
- The best note-taking method that works for anyone (hint: analog vs digital doesn't matter much)
- What to write in your notes during note-taking
- How to design effective Active Recall material from your notes
- 7 steps for doing active recall properly
In Module 2:
- Know exactly what to do and how much studying to do each day
- Stick to your study plan every single day
- Enjoy doing non-school tasks and be 100% present
Module 3:
- The Goalpost Technique: Know exactly what's important before you start reading
- Bento Box Thinking: How to easily understand the key ideas from walls of text
- The Bloom Test: Feel confident that you'll remember what you learn
Module 4:
- How to put everything together in a coherent, STRUCTURED study workflow
That being said, I want to be clear that this course is NOT designed to be skimmed.
Think of it as training your attention for learning the real thing :)
✅ Access to the Tribe Community ($99/yr value)
Spend all of your “guesswork time” doing the things you love instead.
Instead of constantly searching for the next best hack or tool on YouTube, Reddit, Google, or Quora…you’ll get DETAILED answers tailored to your SPECIFIC NEEDS and SPECIFIC situation.
Let’s face it: The free (often conflicting) advice you often see online just makes you even more confused than before you even knew them.
Once you become a member, you’ll get detailed answers from our growing Private Community.
Plus, you get to influence the course roadmap.
✅ Priority Access to my Inbox ($125/mo value)
This is an “early adopter” package — I’ll give you extra hand-holding because we're still a young community. You get priority access to me and get detailed, personalized advice through e-mail whenever you:
- Get stuck during course implementation
- If anything in the course is unclear
- If you feel overwhelmed and need help with implementing the lessons; or
- All of the above
If taking advantage of someone’s experience isn’t the closest thing to a “shortcut,” I don’t know what is :)
The good news?
Because I want to get all of these out into the world, I've decided that you don’t have to pay anything near $199 to join.
What people say about the course
In the first release of the course — then called Lean Anki Study System — I’ve only had a few enrollees. Here’s what some of them has to say.
(NOTE: Everything in here are unsolicited testimonials.)
"I even got the highest mark in my degree, with a solid 81%" — Stelio
Stelio is a double degree student in Dentistry and Med School. I imagined he wouldn’t have enough time to study, let alone read my course, because of his clinic duties.
"I managed to get 4 A pluses, with the rest of my 13 courses being A's and 2 B's." (Stelio's Update)
Yup, he still got the highest marks in his degree. I’m very proud of that guy, really.
"A system that gives a good framework for efficient learning" — Charlie
This was back in the early versions of SSS — called Lean Anki Study System.
"I got an A on an exam using the leananki strategy! My retention for the material was strong" — Lilyn G
When I got this message from Lilyn in our (previous) Slack group, it really made my day! My thoughts were like, "it really works — and I'm not just some outlier."
"I am blown away with how much I can comprehend a subject after only a few hours of study..." — Naomi
Naomi here asked for card critiques and adjustments via email. I give detailed email support to all members — although I'm a bit slow... And this is what she said. Proud of her results!
"I wish I knew about LeanAnki when I started my degree. I wasted so much time, money, and energy for YouTube videos, courses, and tools..."
There's so much to highlight here from JP's email...and really, I'm happy that the "systemness" was able to resolve the confusion for many of the course members in the early release of the course.
About the author
Hey there, I'm Al Khan, the author of the course. Through LeanAnki.com, I help Anki learners study smarter.
I strongly believe that you should forget about hacks that work around the real problem, and instead use systems optimized for long-term goals.
By choosing to do the real, unattractive work (and with my awesome mentors), and using the same workflows in the course, I was able to land a top place in the Electronics Engineering board exams in the Philippines — even though I had poor Math and Mechanics grades back in College.
Now, I'm ready to share my experience with you. :)
Some people choose “more information”. Top Learners choose better implementation.
You’ve just been through the most “step-by-step” way to becoming a Top Learner ever created.
You’ve seen how what most people believe about getting to the top of their class, scoring high on entrance exams, or passing career exams — “Poor memory,” “Slow learning speed,” “Being smart enough” — are actually just self-limiting beliefs.
And you now know that it’s all about working with the processes of Encoding, Storage, and Retrieval.
YOU NOW KNOW BETTER.
But right now, you’re probably asking:
“Isn’t all of these available for free online?”
Yes, absolutely. In fact, because the internet is just SO huge you won’t know where to even begin, I can give you a reading list if you want to go that route.
But here’s the thing…
Information is just a TOOL for thinking, deciding, and acting better.
There’s a point where the only thing holding you back is better implementation.
This is the point where most students are today — the point where they don’t need more information to get better results.
Have you ever wondered why there’s SO MUCH free information out there yet only a few people seem to get real, permanent results?
If you’ve tried all the tactics you’ve seen online, if you’re watching all these productivity and study channels on YouTube, then you’re probably in this position, too.
And if you’ve taken the time to read this, it’s CLEAR to me that you want to make a change — a PERMANENT change.
So you have 3 choices today:
OPTION #1: You can ignore everything we talked about and continue believing that being a Top Learner is all about having great memory, “lots of motivation,” and “fast learning speed”
OPTION #2: You can continue searching for the next magic pill, the next best study hack, or the next best study tool on YouTube (and get instantly diagnosed with dyslexia, ADHD, brain fog, dopamine addiction, AND zero attention span)
OR...
OPTION #3: You can take action and follow a proven system that has already worked to help people like you and me become Top Learners — ALL while having time to do the things you love
Whichever decision you make, know this:
After a week, a month, or another school year — you could be looking back at this day thinking that it’s one of the best decisions you’ve made in your study career…
…or, it could just be another “ho-hum” day.
Time will pass by, anyway. Whatever you choose, time doesn’t wait.
Know exactly where to start, finish your materials on time, and remember them in the long-term
Join Simple Study System for only $67.
If you get stuck, I’ll personally be there to help you. If you don’t like it, then tell me you want your money back within 30 days.
P.S. If you have any questions or concerns about the course, just email me at [email protected]. I'll be happy to answer them.
P.P.S. Quick disclaimer about the testimonials: they are not a guarantee of results. They are merely comments that my readers give me about the course/contents of the course.
