44 · Use It or Lose It

Revision is key. Revise just before you pack your bags and go home. Revise just before you go to bed and meet God. Revise first thing in the morning. Revise as you sit down at your desk. Revise on your way to work. It takes five minutes — failing to do these simplest revisions is a systems error, not a lack of willpower.

You are doing something very futile without revision, because whatever lacks meaning or utilisation, the brain literally abandons. You could read ten thousand books and forget everything without revisiting, embodying and applying the data. Revise. Carry your iPad literally everywhere; make it second nature to revisit the notes.

One more habit you're not doing: whenever you see your past notes — revise. It fleets away otherwise, and it takes ten seconds. Whenever you see scribbled napkins and papers, the instant response should be: oh okay, let me revise, let me pick up where that was. Those are all — all — opportunities.

Knowledge that is passively consumed is consolidated through utilisation. Using it in practice engrains the fact that it is useful, and it becomes part of us.

How often you see something matters enormously. Take the quadratic formula — I've seen it almost every day for a decade; it's something I breathe. You can reach that level with the A-levels within a month. Systems of constant repetition — set reminders, repeat on schedule — give you so much exposure that it compounds. And learn how to use Reminders on Apple properly: build the system and the infrastructure to remember for you, because you can't consciously carry it all — and even if you could, that capacity should be channelled into execution, not storage.

For learning something, repetition is just far better and less stressful than reading the same thing deeply once. For the A-levels: skim through it several times. Don't quit when it gets boring. Not hard — boring. Because when the material bores you, your pride kicks in and you avoid the work that simply has to be done. The following eighteen months will be a mix of boring and hard. You need to overcome both.

Blurting: definitions via flashcards, spaced through the day. Grade boundaries for the physics unit are typically around 56 out of 80 for an A. You're tracking at C or D — not because you don't know physics, but because of time, expression bloat, and definition gaps. It's the smallest gap you can sense, and you will close it.

I think it's just sheer breadth for the A-levels, even for FP1 and FP2. There's no depth to it at all — which is why people with A* in maths and further maths still get terrible TMUA scores.

Try to stack a set of loosely defined truths as you go — a personal glossary of what each term means in the marking scheme's language. You have to be able to read an expression in A-level verbal terms, and also know the mathematical definitions behind the key words, if you want to revamp your maths. What is the mathematical expression equivalent of a verbal term like "randomness"? Randomness is the verbal equivalent of identical probability of selection across the members of a population. Quantify the qualitative, and vice versa. Both directions, on demand.