Not long ago, I’d leave social gatherings with a list of shows to watch on various streaming platforms.
These days, everyone’s recommending their favorite new AI tool.
I’m no Luddite, but I tend to be wary of tech bandwagons—especially when they come with grand promises of revolutionizing my life. It's taken me two years to start using ChatGPT consistently (I use it as my de facto editor for my blog posts).
While there’s broad agreement that AI is here to stay, there’s also consensus that some core human skills remain out of its reach—at least for now. One human skill that shows up on all lists is creativity.
At its core, creativity is simply the act of combining existing ideas in new ways. To be creative, you need two things: knowledge (lots of ideas and facts) and memory (the ability to recall and connect them).
So, how do we humans get better at learning and memory? It seems like there is a ton of research, some great protocols, and amazing tools built on these protocols.
Two of the most effective learning techniques are retrieval practice—trying to recall something from memory—and spaced repetition, which spaces out your reviews to help you retain what you’ve learned.
Flashcards (physical or digital) are a great way to implement retrieval practice. Spaced repetition is slightly more challenging because it requires one to build a system to return to said flashcards periodically. This is where Anki comes in. It's an open source tool built just for you to implement retrieval practice and spaced repetition.
I’d heard of spaced repetition and retrieval practice before, but I’d never built a consistent learning habit around them. That changed when I read about Anki on Derek Sivers’ blog—it inspired me to take my own learning more seriously. I’m still early in the process, starting with flashcards for the books I’m reading. My next step is to build the habit of opening Anki regularly and reviewing these flashcards.
My recommendation – while the world tries to use NotebookLM to synthesize lots of data, you learn to use Anki. If you stick with Anki, five years from now, you'll be not only more creative, but also far more focused than those who outsourced their thinking to AI.