The Art of Manliness - Beyond Lazy Learning — The Keys to Gaining and Retaining Knowledge

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.600 Ever wondered why, after hours of reading and highlighting, you still feel unprepared

00:00:15.740 for that big test? Or why, shortly after a work training, you can't remember much of

00:00:20.200 what was said and how to apply it? Or why you have trouble comprehending a difficult

00:00:23.640 book? Whether you're a student studying for exams, an employee trying to learn the ropes

00:00:27.940 at a new job, or someone who's into personal study, learning effectively is hugely important

00:00:32.720 in increasing your capacity and knowledge. Unfortunately, most of what people do to learn

00:00:37.380 simply doesn't work. Here to unlock the superior research-backed strategies that will help

00:00:42.360 harness the potential of your brain is Daniel Willingham, professor of psychology and the

00:00:46.760 author of Outsmart Your Brain. Today on the show, Daniel explains why the default way that

00:00:51.400 our brain wants to learn doesn't work and how to approach learning by both reading and listening

00:00:55.220 more effectively. We discuss how to get more out of your reading, including whether you

00:00:58.980 should highlight, whether speed reading is effective, the optimal method for taking notes

00:01:03.140 during a lecture, the best way to cement things into your memory, and much more. After the show

00:01:07.740 is over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash learn. All right, Daniel Willingham, welcome to the

00:01:24.660 show. Thank you so much for having me. So you are a professor of psychology who has published a book

00:01:29.920 on learning better, and it's called Outsmart Your Brain. And you start the book off by arguing that to

00:01:36.600 learn how to learn better, you first need to understand the default way our brain wants to

00:01:42.480 learn and why that's not effective. So how does our brain want to learn things and why doesn't that

00:01:47.900 work? You know, even before you start thinking about the default way your brain works, you have

00:01:53.860 to recognize that learning is actually a multiple stage process. This is something a lot of people

00:02:01.220 don't think about, but it's self-evident when it's explained. When you're learning something and you

00:02:06.280 fail to learn, the problem may not be in terms of getting things into memory. That's where people

00:02:12.480 usually lay the blame. But it could be you were trying to learn something by reading and your

00:02:17.760 reading wasn't very effective, or you were trying to learn someone was explaining something to you and

00:02:22.340 your listening wasn't very effective, and so on. There are a bunch of little sub-steps to learning.

00:02:28.360 So that's the first thing I always encourage people to do, especially people who say like,

00:02:32.080 oh, I'm terrible at learning. What I point out is there may be a lot of it that you're doing pretty

00:02:36.940 well, and then there's just one little piece that needs some tweaking. And so it may be easier to

00:02:42.400 address than you think. But in terms of that stage of trying to get things into memory, the big mistake

00:02:49.900 that people tend to make is they tend to do something that feels easy and that also feels in the moment

00:02:58.440 like it's working well. So students, when they're studying, do a lot of rereading of their notes and

00:03:05.560 a lot of rereading of the textbook. And as they're doing that, the content becomes more and more

00:03:11.020 familiar to them. It's the same feeling you get when you see a movie for the second time. You're like,

00:03:16.400 yep, yep, I know all this. I've seen all this. Very familiar. And so it feels like you know it,

00:03:22.900 but that's actually not the kind of knowing that the student is going to need for the test.

00:03:27.340 They need to not only say like, yes, I've seen this before. They need to actually be able to

00:03:32.580 explain it. So that's one example of a way that people approach learning tasks that feels easy and

00:03:40.080 also feels in the moment like it's doing you some good, but is not really optimal.

00:03:45.200 I like the analogy you give in the book. The way we often approach learning is sometimes how we

00:03:49.620 approach pushups. We know that if we want to get better at pushups, we need to do more pushups.

00:03:53.740 But what we typically do is like, well, I'll do pushups for my knees and it feels like I'm doing

00:03:59.440 pushups and I'm getting stuff done and it's easy, but you're actually not going to get stronger just

00:04:03.420 doing knee pushups. Exactly. It's just as you say, like we, a lot of times we recognize in physical

00:04:09.640 exercise, you need that challenge. And even at the time, like it feels hard, it's not going well,

00:04:15.100 but you know, in the long run, this is the right thing to do. Same thing applies when you're trying

00:04:20.480 to learn. You need to have the right kind of challenge in order for your brain to get exercised

00:04:26.120 and to benefit. Okay. So learning is hard if you want to actually learn and know the information

00:04:32.000 then be able to apply the information in a meaningful way. But our brain wants to do knee

00:04:36.620 pushup versions of learning. So let's dig into how we can learn better and overcome our brain's natural

00:04:43.520 tendency to want to do knee pushups versions of learning. And a way, a big way a lot of people learn

00:04:49.040 is through reading. So what's the lazy way our brain wants to approach reading to learn?

00:04:56.160 So if you think about how you learn to read, you learn to read, I mean, most people learn to read

00:05:01.060 in the very early grades of school and you learn to read with material that is intended to be very

00:05:08.420 easy to comprehend. And when you do leisure reading, it's also intended to be pretty easy

00:05:14.740 to comprehend. Leisure reading by definition is reading that you choose to do. If it's very

00:05:20.420 difficult, you're just going to drop the book. So it's usually in narrative form. The author is sort

00:05:27.060 of coming to you to lead you along. The reading we do to learn is usually not organized that way.

00:05:33.860 It's organized hierarchically rather than in story format. And you're, of course, reading for a

00:05:40.760 different purpose. You're not reading for the sake of sort of being entertained. You're reading new

00:05:45.580 content that's probably challenging and you're reading it for the purpose of learning. So the

00:05:51.300 thing that your brain does is it falls into the same reading mode that you were in when you're reading a

00:05:58.060 story. I'll sometimes ask my students who struggle with difficult reading, like, well, tell me what you

00:06:03.780 do to read. Like, how do you begin? And they just look at me like it's a very, like, I sit down and open

00:06:10.320 the book. Like, what are you talking about? And that's what you do when you're reading a story.

00:06:14.300 There's no need to prepare. But when you're reading something difficult, you should prepare a little

00:06:19.180 bit and deploy some strategies. Okay. So what are some reading strategies that you can do to get more

00:06:24.240 out of your reading to learn? Yeah. So the first thing you want to do in terms of preparation is

00:06:29.160 think about what your goal is. There's research showing people really do read differently when they

00:06:35.760 do this little preparation to think about what am I hoping to get out of this. Then the second

00:06:41.160 thing you can do is look at the headings and subheadings of whatever it is that you're going

00:06:46.360 to read. That'll give you some sense of what it's about. And then generate a few questions based on

00:06:52.720 that quick skim that you're doing. And then as you're reading, so that's the preparation. This

00:06:57.520 shouldn't take, you know, if you're reading a chapter, this should be less than five minutes. I mean,

00:07:00.960 probably less than three minutes really. It's not a big deal, but you're sort of setting yourself up

00:07:05.940 in this way. The second thing you want to do is as you're reading, we all know it's hard to focus

00:07:11.980 attention, especially when something is complicated. Just as your brain doesn't respond well to here,

00:07:17.700 you have to remember this. Your brain doesn't respond really to the command you give it. Now,

00:07:22.700 I want you to understand what you're reading and I want you to continue to pay attention.

00:07:26.920 Your mind drifts. And so, instead of giving it the command, now listen, pay attention,

00:07:33.080 give it a concrete task to do. You're much more likely to stay with it if you're trying to do

00:07:39.800 something like answer a question. So, in that quick skim that you did, looking at the headings

00:07:44.980 and subheadings, you're thinking about your goal. And then you're also thinking, here's some questions

00:07:49.840 I expect to be answered by the time I've finished this chapter. Then as you're actually reading the

00:07:55.960 chapter, you can think to yourself, okay, am I finding the answer to those questions?

00:08:01.280 Those may turn out to be bad questions. So, like, should I revise them? What's a better question?

00:08:06.300 And what's the answer to that one? That'll help you stay on task and especially it will help you

00:08:12.080 sort of think about the deeper meaning. A lot of times when people read, they're kind of reading

00:08:17.780 one sentence at a time and they're not really coordinating the meaning of the different sentences

00:08:23.140 and paragraphs to put it all together into a bigger picture. That's what answering those

00:08:28.960 questions is going to help you do. As you were talking, this reminded me of Mortimer Adler's

00:08:33.400 how to read a book approach. He has different types of reading. There's inspectional reading,

00:08:37.620 where it's that what you're talking about. You look at the chapter, look at the headings,

00:08:41.600 kind of get an overview of what it's like, and then you kind of get into the deeper analytical

00:08:45.880 reading where you have the framework. With that inspectional reading, you've developed questions

00:08:50.220 that you're going to have, and then you can dig into that analytical reading and then the synoptical

00:08:54.660 reading where you try to figure out the main thesis and try to compare and contrast.

00:09:00.900 There are lots of versions of this. So, for school children, SQ3R may have been something that

00:09:07.460 some of your listeners are familiar with. But whatever they are, most of the reading strategies

00:09:12.160 have these two main elements where you do some sort of a preview to get a big picture idea and then

00:09:19.660 as you're reading, you've got something to keep you engaged. And it's usually

00:09:24.120 bearing questions in mind and trying to find the answers to them.

00:09:27.660 Something you highlight in the book is that highlighting, that's a typical approach people

00:09:31.360 use when they're reading to learn. Highlighting doesn't work. What's going on there?

00:09:36.980 So, to be clear, highlighting is okay if you've got a lot of expertise in the topic. So, if you already,

00:09:43.820 you know, when I'm reading cognitive psychology, for example, I will often highlight. And it's fine

00:09:49.860 because the main problem with highlighting is if you're new to the subject, you're probably not

00:09:55.800 highlighting the right stuff. And one of the really clever experiments they did on this with college

00:10:01.080 students, the researchers went to the college bookstore and they bought multiple copies of some

00:10:07.620 textbooks in some big classes like Poli Sci 101 and Economics 101. And they bought multiple copies

00:10:14.080 of the textbook and then they were used copies and they just looked at what people had highlighted.

00:10:19.880 And what they found was students were highlighting completely different things. So, the original intent

00:10:25.940 of the study was we're going to look at what students highlight and then we're going to ask the

00:10:29.720 professor, are the students highlighting the right things? But they couldn't even do that because

00:10:34.500 there was no consistency in what students highlighted. Actually, I take that back. The

00:10:38.740 one consistency in that study was if a word was bold-faced, everybody highlighted it. So,

00:10:44.580 they sort of doubled down on the emphasis the author had put in there. So, yeah, you don't want to

00:10:50.760 highlight. And the alternative strategy is taking notes. Taking notes has a couple of advantages.

00:10:56.960 One is that you can edit them later and you can go back and as your understanding gets deeper,

00:11:03.820 you can revise what you've taken notes on. The other thing is that notes are much better suited

00:11:09.060 to answering those deep questions, thinking about those deep questions, because you can pull together

00:11:15.640 things that were, you know, a couple of pages away. And this often happens when there's something

00:11:21.240 complicated. You know, the author is bringing multiple points of view and different types of evidence to

00:11:27.160 something. And so, you may want to relate something that was on page 75 to something that's on 78.

00:11:34.500 And of course, that's easy to do when you're taking notes, but highlighting is very poorly suited to

00:11:39.880 drawing those sorts of connections.

00:11:42.340 So, yeah, I do a lot of reading for my work. I read all the books to prep for the podcast. And I

00:11:46.620 highlight. I do highlight. I have my own little system where something's really important. I'll put a

00:11:50.920 star by it. But I think the thing that helps a lot that I do that's beyond just highlighting is after I'm

00:11:56.360 done with the book, I've got to create the outline for the conversation. And so, I go through and I

00:12:00.960 have to synthesize those highlights. And that takes some time. And that's how I remember this stuff. I think

00:12:06.460 it's that trying to craft the conversation for the podcast allows me to digest the information.

00:12:12.360 And the other thing, Brett, that I would point out is that you have a lot of experience and have

00:12:17.640 developed, I'm imagining, a lot of expertise in figuring out from an unfamiliar text what is really

00:12:25.460 going to be important. What's the main message here? What's going to be interesting to my listeners?

00:12:30.680 It's a little bit like magazine fact checkers. Most of us are not very good at fact checking,

00:12:36.060 right? That's why fake news proliferates on the internet. Fact checkers are really good at this.

00:12:41.260 And they've developed strategies through experience that make them so good at it. So, I wouldn't

00:12:48.740 necessarily suggest that a novice try to do what you do. Because in general, experts do something

00:12:55.400 different than what beginners are capable of doing.

00:12:59.020 Another tactic people use when it comes to reading is speed reading, because they want to

00:13:02.660 get a lot of information in. Is speed reading effective?

00:13:05.860 Speed reading is skimming. There's been research on this for years and years and years. And virtually

00:13:12.520 any task, you can do it faster and not do it as accurately, or you can take a whole lot more time

00:13:19.480 and do it more accurately. And it doesn't matter whether you're talking about, you know, throwing

00:13:24.540 clay pots or reading or driving or anything else. This is pervasive in psychology. It's called speed

00:13:31.980 accuracy trade-off. And so, that's what people are doing when they're speed reading. They're skimming.

00:13:38.440 And I think you can use that as a strategy on and off, depending on the situation. So, in my experience,

00:13:42.860 if I get one of those like airport pop nonfiction books, right, the business books where everything's

00:13:48.960 formatted for skimming. So, you can read the headline and the bullet points, and then you

00:13:53.800 can decide whether or not you want to dig deep into the anecdotal stories that they put in there.

00:13:58.580 I think those books are great for that skimming approach. But then if it's like a really hard

00:14:03.460 philosophical treatise, you can't do that. I just got done reading Kierkegaard's

00:14:09.580 unscientific postscript. You could not speed read that thing because you'd miss it. So,

00:14:13.840 I think you can, you got to be strategic about when you do the skimming.

00:14:17.880 Yeah, absolutely. And another function of skimming, sometimes you're looking at a book,

00:14:22.320 like you don't want the whole message. There's, you're doing research on something and there's

00:14:26.500 a particular nugget that you want and that you think is you're going to find in this book. And

00:14:31.120 that's another time skimming would make a lot of sense.

00:14:33.880 Okay. So, let's do a recap here. The lazy way to approach reading for learning is to approach

00:14:39.380 reading like you're, you know, reading for pleasure on a Saturday afternoon, where you

00:14:43.960 just jump in and think you can just follow it like you're following a story. But when

00:14:48.360 you're reading for learning, you need to do a little bit more prep work. You want to figure

00:14:52.800 out like what you want to get out of the reading, maybe formulate some questions, look at the

00:14:56.780 headings and the subheadings of the chapter you're about to read. You just got to engage

00:15:00.840 with it more. But another way we learn is by listening. And here too, there's also a lazy

00:15:07.100 way that we typically approach learning by listening. What does that look like?

00:15:11.260 Yeah, it's very similar to what I was saying about reading that you figure I'm listening

00:15:16.840 like I can listen the way I always listen. But listening, usually when you're having a

00:15:22.040 conversation, listening is not that demanding because one of the conversational conventions,

00:15:28.540 it's sort of understood that if I'm talking with someone, first of all, there's usually not

00:15:33.200 very much planning on the part of the person I'm talking to. They're sort of thinking of

00:15:37.700 things as they come to mind. And if they do refer back to something that they mentioned

00:15:43.000 10 minutes ago, they'll usually remind me of it. So, the demand that's placed on my working

00:15:50.300 memory, how much stuff I have to keep in mind at once, how much I have to juggle that stuff

00:15:55.220 is pretty minimal. And again, most of the time when you're listening to conversation, it's

00:16:01.260 pretty light. You're not trying to learn anything new. The same is true even in a movie. Again,

00:16:06.480 like reading narrative, when you're watching a movie, it's designed to be entertaining and easy

00:16:12.960 to digest. When you go to a presentation, when someone is trying to teach you something,

00:16:18.960 it can feel like a movie. It feels like you may be in an audience. And so, it feels like a

00:16:24.600 performance. But it's very likely if you're there to learn something serious,

00:16:29.160 the person who's speaking is not an expert in communication. This hasn't been carefully crafted

00:16:35.940 the way a movie has been crafted. And it also doesn't have the characteristic of the person

00:16:42.120 just talking off the top of their head. It is planned and organized, but it's not planned and

00:16:47.360 organized in a way that's terribly effective for learning. And so, listening in these circumstances

00:16:52.840 really takes a lot of work. Once again, just as with a textbook chapter or with a chapter that's

00:16:59.620 to teach you something, there is an organization that organization carries meaning. But in a

00:17:05.700 presentation, the organization is frequently not very obvious. So, it's organized hierarchically.

00:17:12.500 There'll be maybe three to seven main points. And then under each of those main points, there's

00:17:17.400 several types of evidence. There's a couple of examples and so on. And it's up to you to sort of

00:17:23.920 figure out that organization. Why is the person talking about this now? Oh, this is supposed to

00:17:30.260 help me understand this key conclusion. So, listening is actually, when someone is trying to teach you

00:17:36.460 something, listening is actually quite challenging. But the brain goes to that place of, I'm just listening.

00:17:42.400 What's hard about that? Okay. So, what you need to do is, as you're listening, figure out the hierarchy

00:17:48.560 that the presenter has in his head. Maybe he's not presenting it very well in a hierarchy, but there

00:17:54.880 is a hierarchy going on. You got to figure that out. That's exactly the way I think of it. Yeah.

00:17:59.680 It's like, when you're this, and maybe your listeners have experienced this, when you're

00:18:03.280 trying to teach something to a group and you've prepared a presentation, it's obvious to you because

00:18:09.520 you know this stuff, right? And so, you've got this organization in your head, but it's very hard

00:18:15.420 to communicate that organization. One of the things that makes a good speaker a good speaker is that

00:18:20.260 they are sort of leading you along and doing things like saying, remember I said there were going to

00:18:25.020 be three reasons this is true? Okay, now we're done with reason number two. Now we're going to move on

00:18:30.180 to reason three. That kind of signposting when you're a speaker, lots of evidence indicating that

00:18:35.620 really helps your listeners understand. But if you're listening to somebody who's not doing that,

00:18:40.920 it's kind of up to you to make the inferences that are going to help you understand the organization.

00:18:46.780 And so, it sounds like when you're asking questions in a lecture setting, the most useful

00:18:49.940 questions are going to be clarifications about the hierarchy, right? So, maybe you're trying to

00:18:54.060 figure out the presenter's hierarchy that he's got in his head. Maybe something's not translating,

00:19:00.140 so you could ask a clarifying question.

00:19:01.800 Right, right. Yeah.

00:19:04.060 So, one thing that people do during lecture settings to learn is take notes. But again,

00:19:10.320 there's a lazy way our brain wants to take notes when we're listening to a lecture.

00:19:14.440 What is that typical approach?

00:19:16.840 Yeah, the lazy way is just writing down word for word snippets of what the speaker has said.

00:19:23.980 Because you sort of figure, you know, I'm getting their exact words and that's got to be good,

00:19:29.520 right? But what this does is it really saves you having to listen deeply and process what they're

00:19:35.680 saying. Because, I mean, we all know if you're an adept typist, you can essentially turn into someone

00:19:42.140 taking dictation and you're really not thinking deeply about what the meaning is of what you're

00:19:47.660 writing down. You're just writing down what appear to you to be key phrases. And it's tempting to go

00:19:53.940 into that mode because when you're listening and you're trying to take notes at the same time,

00:19:59.860 that's very difficult. You're really in, and we've all felt it, when you're taking notes,

00:20:04.220 you usually feel like you're in mental overload and you can't really keep up. And so, ideally,

00:20:10.040 what you would do is you would listen, think carefully, and then paraphrase what's being said.

00:20:17.720 Write it down in your own words. Write down your own understanding. That's going to lead to much

00:20:22.500 better notes. But that's much more demanding than just writing down what the speaker said.

00:20:27.900 Okay. And that's a hard skill to develop.

00:20:30.240 It is.

00:20:30.740 It is.

00:20:31.260 Yeah.

00:20:31.460 So, it's just with practice, you have to do it. And I think one of the bits of advice you give is when

00:20:35.460 you go into a lecture, you have to decide what's your strategy going to be for this lecture. Is it

00:20:41.720 going to be more, I'm just going to get facts down? Because maybe there's a class where it's very

00:20:45.100 fact-based. And that's important to get all as many facts as possible. But then the class might

00:20:50.760 be more you making connections. And that would require you to think more about what you write

00:20:57.260 instead of trying to get everything down.

00:20:59.640 Absolutely. Yeah. Think about what your goal is. If you're there, you know, you're at a training or

00:21:05.580 something, you know, like, I'm here to learn this specific skill. And that should really guide how

00:21:10.500 you're thinking about the content and the notes that you take. We've all also found ourselves at

00:21:16.640 meetings where you're asking yourself, why am I here? Why am I supposed to listen to this

00:21:20.440 presentation? Like, here's an accounting guy and I'm in operations. But it's worth thinking about

00:21:26.480 that. Like, what, you know, and it's actually worth asking in advance. Like, what am I bringing

00:21:31.280 to the table here? What do you want me to take back to my group? And then think about note-taking

00:21:36.440 through that lens. It could be like a lot of what this person is saying is not relevant,

00:21:40.960 but you really better be alert because at minute 22, he's going to talk about stuff that does bear

00:21:47.200 on your group. And you want to be there and be present for it and be ready to take good notes on

00:21:52.820 it. If someone's taken like a study skills class, one thing you've probably encountered with note-taking

00:21:58.160 is these different note-taking systems that are out there. And you say, actually, they're probably not

00:22:02.520 that useful. I mean, they're okay. So, what the research literature on this looks like is,

00:22:09.600 in the end, not that helpful because there are lots of these different systems and they typically

00:22:14.740 compare use of the system. Like, you know, you instruct students in how to take notes with the

00:22:20.440 Cornell system or whatever it is. And then the comparison group is students who have received

00:22:24.780 no instruction in note-taking at all. And what you consistently find is some instruction is better

00:22:30.580 than no instruction at all. And I think that what the comparison I'd like to see is just a few words

00:22:37.260 to students about how to help them be mindful about how to take good notes. My concern with systems

00:22:43.160 like the Cornell system and so on is they're very demanding of attention. It gives you one more

00:22:48.260 thing to think about. Okay, now, so this is a summary. Now, in the system, I'm supposed to write

00:22:53.700 those at the bottom of the page or whatever. So, you know, I think you, you know, there's a steep

00:22:58.800 learning curve. And I think you, of course, people can learn it, but I think you'll probably

00:23:03.220 get more bang from your buck just being thoughtful about what notes are for and having a few tricks

00:23:09.260 up your sleeves about how to take good ones. We're going to take a quick break for your

00:23:13.620 words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so the easy way or the lazy way to listen

00:23:24.520 when you're learning is to listen to a lecture, like you're listening to a conversation with a

00:23:30.480 friend. Instead, what you're saying is we got to do, you got to think about the organization of what

00:23:34.660 the person or the lecturer is trying to say and like, try to figure out how things fit together.

00:23:39.460 I mean, then also the lazy way to take notes is to just jot everything down verbatim. And a better way

00:23:46.320 is to actually think about what's being said and paraphrase what's being said in your own words.

00:23:51.160 And yeah, like you said, you don't recommend like a specific note-taking system, but there's a few

00:23:55.220 tactics you recommend to make note-taking more effective or more efficient. You recommend

00:23:59.180 developing a shorthand system for your notes or abbreviations you're going to use in all your

00:24:04.180 note-taking. So it can allow you to focus on what's being said and not so much on like what you're

00:24:08.740 writing. You just do that shorthand. Here's a common debate. What does the research say about

00:24:13.720 typing your notes on your computer versus handwriting them? Is one method better than the other?

00:24:19.080 Yeah, very complicated topic because it's a little, I mean, it's a little bit like trying

00:24:25.420 to figure out whether smoking causes cancer. It seems straightforward at first, but the, you know,

00:24:30.600 the straightforward thing to do is just look at students who handwrite their notes, look at

00:24:34.560 students who type their notes, and then see who's, you know, doing better on tests. But of course,

00:24:39.340 that's going to be correlational evidence. And so you don't know whether students who are just good

00:24:43.880 students prefer one method or another. So that's not wholly satisfactory. The other thing you can do

00:24:49.780 is you can make people type notes or handwrite notes, but then I maybe am doing something I don't

00:24:55.940 really want to do, and that's kind of messing things up. So the data are kind of squishy right now.

00:25:02.640 The dominating factor and what I end up recommending in the book is that I think the potential for

00:25:09.760 distraction, if you're typing notes, kind of overwhelms everything. If you're on a laptop,

00:25:15.620 you have access to the internet. Most students are not able to resist checking, you know, email,

00:25:23.140 checking social media, whatever, doing other things during moments that they perceive to be a little

00:25:28.080 bit boring or something. And that's why I went to a no devices policy in my classes about seven years

00:25:34.640 ago. And I'll say things have changed a little bit. When I first instituted this policy, my students

00:25:41.140 were initially kind of angry at me, wanted to hurt me. But then by the end of the semester, they were

00:25:46.940 saying, okay, actually, I kind of see, I kind of see why you did this. I get it. More recently, my students

00:25:52.580 have, they get it immediately. And in fact, a few have said to me, you know what, like I'm on my phone

00:25:59.020 all the time. And so having someone in a position of authority say to me, you may not be on your phone

00:26:05.460 for the next 75 minutes, I actually kind of welcome that. So we've taken our lecture notes,

00:26:11.400 we've taken notes while reading, but our note taking doesn't stop there. And you argue that

00:26:16.120 you have to organize those notes. So what does a good organizational process look like?

00:26:22.060 I think what you wanted, this goes back to what we were talking about before, the presentation that

00:26:26.920 you were, whether it was a college lecture or something else, the presentation that you

00:26:30.800 were present for was almost certainly organized hierarchically. And so you want to go back and

00:26:36.440 recover that organization. And the strategy I recommend is very simple. When you're in a lecture,

00:26:43.740 try to put a star, as I think you said you do when you read, put a star next to major points. And this,

00:26:51.220 usually the speaker is going to make this clear. You can tell from their body language, you can tell from

00:26:56.580 they're probably going to repeat it, it's the kind of thing that would be on a slide. So you put a star

00:27:01.300 next to it. And then later, when you're at home, look and see each point that's in your notes. Think

00:27:08.720 about which of the main points of the lecture it relates to, and consider how it relates. And that's

00:27:16.440 how you can recover this hierarchical organization. The other thing that this process, so one thing this is

00:27:22.120 really good for is to make sure that you're understanding. It's also very good for memory.

00:27:27.040 Thinking about meaning is very helpful for memory, and this is really going to get you thinking deeply

00:27:31.940 about meaning. And we'll also reveal to you if there are any holes in your notes. So you may realize,

00:27:38.520 like, oh, I'm pretty sure he said there were going to be three reasons that thus and so is true.

00:27:42.700 I've only got two of them. And that alerts you, I need to go back and talk to the speaker or whoever

00:27:48.000 and see if I can find out what that third missing piece is.

00:27:52.280 The strategy I used when I was in law school, law school, I really learned how to study,

00:27:56.420 learned how to read, I learned how to listen, I learned how to synthesize notes. So I go to my

00:28:01.700 lecture, you'd have to do your reading before the lecture, listen to the lecture, take notes. And

00:28:06.480 then immediately after the class, I would go to my study cubby in the library. And then I would put

00:28:12.220 those notes into my outline. I'd be creating an outline as the semester went on. And that

00:28:17.800 outline creation was really how I learned the material. And as you said, when you create that

00:28:23.700 outline, when I was creating that outline, it helped you synthesize information, see how things

00:28:27.980 connect, but then it also allowed you to see where you had holes in your knowledge. And so you'd be

00:28:32.900 like, well, I'm missing something in this point here, this element of this crime. I need to learn

00:28:38.200 more about that and go talk to the professor. Absolutely. And I'll say that when students

00:28:44.120 come to me saying like, I'm really frustrated, I'm putting a lot of work in, I can't figure out

00:28:48.000 what's going wrong. I would say, okay, like, let's look at your notes, let's talk about what you're

00:28:51.980 doing and so on. When they're studying for tests, going back to earlier in the conversation, almost

00:28:57.220 always their strategy, I was reading over my notes, we've gone over why that isn't effective.

00:29:02.360 And so one of the things I encourage them to do is do this note reorganization,

00:29:07.500 just as you've described, Brett, the strategy you use very similar to what I was describing.

00:29:13.180 And what my students say is they come back later in the semester and they say, you know,

00:29:16.640 I did that note reorganization thing. And I found like I almost didn't need to study for the tests

00:29:21.660 because this is, again, goes back to, you know, you don't need to be trying to learn something for

00:29:28.160 something to get into memory. The process of doing that deep thinking and organization is so good

00:29:34.060 for memory that when the test came around, they found like they were already 80% of the way there.

00:29:39.580 Yeah. So creating your own study guide, creating your own outline is the plyometric version of

00:29:44.620 pushups, right? It's where you explode off the ground.

00:29:47.320 Exactly.

00:29:47.920 It's going to pay off in the end.

00:29:49.700 Yeah, I love that.

00:29:50.480 So let's talk about studying again. So I think we talked about if you want to study for a test,

00:29:54.560 one thing to do is you're studying throughout the semester or throughout the whatever it is you're

00:29:59.420 doing, putting together your own outline. But then you also argue that you don't just want to

00:30:05.640 review your outline when you're actually studying for that exam or whatever it is. You need to test

00:30:10.240 yourself. So walk us through the research about testing yourself to prepare for a test.

00:30:16.280 Yeah. I mean, there are a couple of things that work here. One is probing memory is actually one of

00:30:23.760 the really best ways, if not the very best way, to cement information that's kind of in memory but is

00:30:30.920 fragile. So the way the research on this goes, this is called retrieval practice. It's also called the

00:30:36.860 testing effect if anybody wants to look it up for more information. So the way these experiments

00:30:42.360 typically work is you've got two groups of people. Everybody has some exposure to some new information.

00:30:47.920 They read something or they watch a video or something. Then one group has a second session,

00:30:53.280 a few days later, where they get the chapter again and reread it or they rewatch the video.

00:30:58.780 They know that a test is coming up, so they're trying to study. The second group, their second

00:31:04.280 session is not re-exposure to the content. They actually take a quiz on the content and they get

00:31:09.600 immediate feedback about what they got right and what they got wrong. And then a few days after that,

00:31:15.760 both groups take a test. So this is a new test. Nobody's seen the questions before. So it's

00:31:21.520 different questions than the group that took a test in session two. It's different questions for

00:31:26.280 them. And what you find is usually about a 10% or 15% advantage for the people who took a test or a

00:31:33.180 quiz in that second session compared to people who studied a second time. So there are different

00:31:38.940 theories about what's going on in memory, but the phenomenon is not debated at all. It's been

00:31:44.740 shown to work with people of all ages and all sorts of different content. There's something about

00:31:51.180 going into memory, rummaging around, looking for something that is really effective in cementing

00:31:58.800 that information in. I want to emphasize, you actually get the effect even if you don't get

00:32:03.540 immediate feedback, but it works much better if you do get that immediate feedback.

00:32:07.600 Okay. So flashcards could be a useful tool there.

00:32:10.880 Flashcards are by far the easiest way to organize it. Yeah. So, and the other aspect of this, I want

00:32:16.520 to sort of go back to what we were talking about earlier. The comparison is reading over your notes,

00:32:22.840 right? And one of the things we emphasize reading over your notes, you're not necessarily thinking

00:32:27.700 very deeply about it. You can sort of skim over, it's becoming more and more familiar. But again,

00:32:32.940 it's going to feel like things are going great. I'm really effective. And that's not what's going

00:32:38.060 to happen with flashcards. With flashcards, you're sort of confronting yourself with whether or not

00:32:43.040 you actually know the content. So you're really getting two things from flashcards. One, you're

00:32:48.300 getting this memory boost that I described, but you're also testing yourself and providing yourself

00:32:54.600 with a chance to evaluate, how's this going? Do I know this content yet or not? And that's the type

00:33:01.260 of self-testing to prove to yourself whether or not you know it. That's going to be much more

00:33:06.400 effective. The other thing I did when I was in law school is I would take practice exams,

00:33:10.800 you know, in the weeks leading up to the final exam. You have three hours to take an exam. I would

00:33:15.040 actually, like on a Saturday, would three hours to do a practice test. And I found that to be the

00:33:20.700 most useful because those tests, like oftentimes they were closed book. And so I had to like know,

00:33:25.780 if I didn't know the stuff, then I couldn't answer the essay question. And the process of,

00:33:29.880 as you said, confronting what you don't know and like working to try to retrieve it,

00:33:34.620 that's how that stuff got submitted in my head.

00:33:37.400 The only, and I agree with you, it has those advantages. The things that listeners should

00:33:43.620 think about with practice tests, the dangers of practice tests. One is that the practice test you

00:33:48.480 have may not be really representative of what the actual test is going to be. You want to be really

00:33:53.420 convinced it is. And when people look to things like Quizlet, I mean, I've looked at the Quizlet

00:33:59.540 stuff that's available for my courses. It's frequently out of date. Frequently, some of it

00:34:04.620 is just wrong. So you do want to be careful about sources that you're finding on the internet that

00:34:09.820 are supposed to help with a particular course. And the other thing to keep in mind is that when

00:34:14.040 you've got a practice test, you are just looking at a subset of the information that you're supposed

00:34:19.200 to know. So it might be, you know, 40 items or something. And, you know, you could generate 400

00:34:25.540 items. And so it could be that you kind of got lucky and that the 40 items that on the practice

00:34:31.740 test were ones that you happen to know, and you'll end up with a little bit of an overestimate.

00:34:36.660 So I think practice tests are great, especially for, as you said, sort of giving you a sense in

00:34:41.940 realistic testing conditions, how am I doing? And they're also useful if you get them from the

00:34:47.100 instructor to get a sense of what type of questions should I expect. But I think in terms

00:34:52.960 of evaluating, is my knowledge really complete? Test yourself on your entire study guide and let

00:34:59.960 that be your guide as to whether or not you're really ready.

00:35:02.900 I can see this being applicable into the working world. Let's say you have to give a presentation

00:35:06.360 to make a pitch and there's going to be questions and answers. You can work with your colleagues to

00:35:11.840 develop potential questions and answers. That's going to be your study guide. And you just

00:35:16.940 see if you can answer them without looking at your notes. That's how you can apply this to,

00:35:20.260 I'm trying to move away from just academics, but to the working world.

00:35:23.800 And I'll tell you, the way I think about this is knowing your subject matter, whatever your work

00:35:30.040 is, knowing about the content of day-to-day what happens in your office and the kinds of problems

00:35:36.360 that you concern you with, that is going to help you. And so having more of that committed to memory

00:35:41.780 is going to help. So you can apply this principle of testing yourself, not just to very formal

00:35:48.900 situations where I sit down and I'm doing nothing else. You can probe memory at any time. So like you

00:35:55.440 can hang up the phone with somebody and you've taken some notes over the course of this conversation

00:36:01.000 with information that you think you need to hold on to. You can quiz yourself on the spot and say,

00:36:06.700 okay, so what did this person just say? She just told me how to solve this problem. What is it that

00:36:11.600 she said? And you've got it written down, but you still feel like that would be a good thing for me to

00:36:15.780 just have committed to memory. You can quiz yourself at any time and it takes just seconds. Most people

00:36:21.520 have a very hard time at the office, like setting aside time to devote to learning. So just do little

00:36:28.320 bits and pieces and sort of work that into your daily workflow. Okay. And so do practice exams,

00:36:34.360 practice questions, but you also say, I think we've already talked about this. Don't just reread

00:36:38.520 your notes because that's just going to lead to overconfidence because you're like, oh,

00:36:42.000 this is familiar. I mean, you're going to confuse familiarity with actually knowing the material.

00:36:46.940 Absolutely. Really key takeaway. Well, a lot of learning requires learning from your mistakes,

00:36:52.460 but looking at your mistakes can be very unpleasant. No one likes to do that. So any advice in overcoming

00:36:59.180 the reluctance to focus on our mistakes? This is, I think everybody struggles with this and this is

00:37:06.100 something like you don't grow out of this. I mean, this is something that, you know, I'm in the

00:37:11.280 academic world. I mean, professors, you know, we submit articles to professional journals and you get

00:37:17.660 reviews from, you know, expert colleagues and people will get reviews and not read them. Like they can't,

00:37:24.540 they, you know, they just can't face it because, you know, it's something you've worked on all these

00:37:27.980 years and the reviews can be harsh. Most people do develop tricks and a lot of what they do is

00:37:35.660 sort of taking the bad news in snippets. So telling yourself, okay, you know what? The first thing I'm

00:37:42.720 going to do is I'm not going to do anything about this. I'm just going to look at it. And that's it.

00:37:50.060 That's all I have to do today is just look at it as a way of sort of creeping up on the bad feeling

00:37:56.220 that getting this negative feedback is going to entail. And then usually once you can get

00:38:01.000 yourself to kind of break the ice, you realize, okay, it's not as bad as I thought. So like the

00:38:05.880 next step is going to be, I'm going to record everything that was wrong. Then the next step is

00:38:11.220 I'm going to think about how to respond to it and so on. So that's, that's a very common strategy that

00:38:16.880 I think is effective for a lot of people is breaking it down into pieces. But I do want to emphasize

00:38:22.840 that you're right. I mean, the, the way we learn is through feedback and responding to feedback.

00:38:29.840 Yeah. You have in the book says going over exam mistakes or just mistakes in your learning

00:38:33.840 may make you feel dumb and you are going to feel dumb, but you're actually doing what smart people 0.84

00:38:39.300 do. It's true. I mean, the, yeah, the people who, people who make the fastest progress and it's so 0.99

00:38:45.800 obvious when you spell it out, the people who make the fastest progress, they're eager to get the

00:38:50.600 feedback, right? They don't want to hear so much about what they're doing, right? They've already

00:38:54.320 got that. They want to know what they're doing wrong. And you know, they want you to help them

00:38:58.880 brainstorm ways of fixing it, new things they can try. So learning also requires that you manage

00:39:05.060 your time. You have to make time for learning, but you argue instead of planning your learning by

00:39:09.220 task, like I got to learn X chapter or I need to write X essay, you recommend planning your learning

00:39:16.000 by time. So what does that look like? It really, yeah, it really is about making time for learning

00:39:21.680 because I mean, this is very common with students. They'll come home, you know, at the end of classes

00:39:26.860 and they'll say, okay, so what do I have to do, you know, in the next couple of days? Do I have

00:39:30.780 reading to do? Do I have whatever? And there are two problems with this. One is they may conclude,

00:39:35.520 well, nothing is that urgent. And so they just won't do anything that day. So they're not really

00:39:40.420 getting ahead of the game, which in calmer moments, they would probably recognize,

00:39:44.980 it's probably a good idea to do at least a little something every day. And then there's the

00:39:49.580 planning fallacy, which is familiar to most people. The planning fallacy is just that people

00:39:55.380 consistently underestimate how long it's going to take to get something done. And especially as the

00:40:01.680 project gets more complicated, that becomes more and more true. There seems to be several reasons for

00:40:07.260 it. One of the most important is that you don't anticipate that something is actually likely to go

00:40:13.340 wrong, even if it's a really weird thing. There are lots of weird things that could happen that

00:40:17.620 would interrupt your progress. So we all tend to underestimate how long things will take. And so if

00:40:23.520 you say, oh, I've got a test on Friday, but it's Tuesday, so I don't really need to start studying now,

00:40:29.220 you may be counting on, you know, being able to get it done in a certain number of hours, and that's

00:40:35.280 really a bad estimate. So instead, you want to plan by time and sort of say to yourself,

00:40:40.020 every day from, you know, six o'clock to eight o'clock or whatever it is, that's my work time.

00:40:46.160 And so the question is not whether or not to work. The question is, what am I working on during that

00:40:50.840 block of time? I think that's even more important if you're in the working world. If you feel like

00:40:56.640 there's, you know, something I want to learn how to code, or I've got, I want to acquire a new skill,

00:41:01.200 or I want to learn about a new subject, or I just want to familiarize myself with aspects of,

00:41:06.800 you know, I work at a big company, there are aspects of this organization that I don't know

00:41:10.720 as much about as probably would be good. That's going to get shoved aside. There's no time limit

00:41:15.800 on that of when you need to learn it. Everyone is sort of frantically, you know, bouncing from email

00:41:22.640 to phone call. And so the learning is just never going to happen. And so you need to set aside time

00:41:28.620 instead of telling yourself, you know, I'm going to learn about, you know, what's happening when people

00:41:34.300 fulfill orders or whatever it is that I think would be useful for me to know. You say, you know,

00:41:39.020 every day, Mondays from, even if it's 9.15 to 9.30, or whatever it is, I'm going to protect that time

00:41:44.960 on my schedule. And that's my learning time. And then you're figuring out what you want to learn

00:41:50.920 during that time. Right. So you guys block out your learning time, then create an agenda

00:41:54.820 for your learning schedule before you start. Exactly. Okay. Yeah.

00:41:58.340 Another thing that plays a role in our ability to learn is our self-confidence,

00:42:02.020 or how we think of ourselves as a learner. What role does that play? What does the research say?

00:42:07.740 The most important thing about that is it has an impact on your resilience. So if you see yourself

00:42:15.620 as someone who learns, I'm pretty good at this. I tend to have success at this. When you have a setback,

00:42:21.540 when you find something is really hard, or when you've tried really hard and thought you were

00:42:26.940 successful, and then the evidence come back, no, actually, that didn't go well at all. You thought

00:42:30.820 you learned that. You didn't. If you have this self-image of yourself as, I'm someone who usually

00:42:37.440 succeeds at learning tasks, you're not going to give up. If, on the other hand, because you'll think

00:42:42.760 like, oh, well, that's strange. That didn't work. I must not have worked hard enough, or I had the

00:42:47.660 wrong materials, or something. You'll come up with some attribution other than, I just suck at learning. 0.59

00:42:54.400 And so someone who has a bad self-image of themselves as a learner doesn't see themselves

00:42:59.520 as a learner. They're not very resilient as learners, because when they fail, they figure,

00:43:05.700 yep, this is more evidence of what I already thought was true, which is that I'm not very

00:43:10.480 good at this. And then likewise, they may not undertake learning tasks, because they think

00:43:15.400 this is not the kind of thing that I do very well. And so there's really no reason for me to try.

00:43:20.700 Well, any advice for those adults who have that negative self-image? Maybe they developed it during

00:43:26.800 high school or college, where they just kind of realized, well, I'm not a good learner. I'm not

00:43:29.920 a good reader. I've seen that a lot when I challenge people or encourage people, like, hey, you should

00:43:34.760 read this really cool book, philosophy treatise by Plato. And they're like, oh, I could never do that.

00:43:40.400 I just don't understand. How can you overcome that negative self-image?

00:43:44.420 The first thing I would point out is that a lot of times these self-images are developed

00:43:51.160 very young, surprisingly young. When I first got interested in education, I started just observing

00:43:57.460 classrooms. And I was really astonished when I was sitting in, like, first and second grade

00:44:03.420 classrooms. And I felt like I could already see the children who had already given up on school,

00:44:09.860 who had already concluded, this is a place where I don't succeed. This is a place where I just feel

00:44:15.940 shame. And teachers were telling me, like, you see it in first and second grade, like we see it in

00:44:21.360 kindergartners. And so the first thing I would invite people to consider is, like, you know,

00:44:26.220 you were really different. You know, at the time this self-image formed, you were a really different

00:44:30.680 person. And it's possible, too, that, you know, that you didn't have a very good teacher,

00:44:35.260 but you nevertheless blamed yourself for this problem. The second thing I would point out is

00:44:41.100 that everybody can learn. This is, you know, part of what it means to be human. And it could be that

00:44:47.380 when you were in school, you were making comparisons that weren't very helpful. Like, maybe your good

00:44:53.840 friend was, you know, really good at reading or whatever it was, and you were comparing yourself to

00:44:58.540 your friend. That kind of comparison is really not helpful. The only comparison that really matters

00:45:03.220 is comparing yourself to yourself, you know, and thinking about, am I making progress? Am I moving

00:45:10.360 forward? And the final thing I would point out is, as I mentioned earlier in our conversation,

00:45:15.860 it could be that you're actually already really good at a lot of the sub-steps of learning. And then

00:45:21.360 there's just one thing that's troubling you. And so a little analysis, a little self-analysis of how do I

00:45:27.660 go about learning? And what do I need to tweak? You may find, like, yeah, you've struggled in the

00:45:32.480 past, but it was for a relatively minor reason. And with a few adjustments, you're going to make

00:45:37.340 progress a lot faster than you have been. Yeah, it's good. And you also encourage people who have

00:45:41.620 that negative self-image about learning is reminding yourself that you have learned stuff outside of

00:45:46.400 school. Maybe there's something about the school setting that puts you off from learning, but you've

00:45:50.600 learned stuff. You learned how to navigate the world. So it's not out of the realm of possibility for

00:45:55.440 you. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, Daniel, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to

00:46:00.040 learn more about the book and your work? DanielWillingham.com is my website. It is

00:46:06.140 infrequently maintained, I admit, but everything I've written, actually, to which I own the copyright

00:46:13.160 is available free for download on there. So there are a number of articles about learning that people

00:46:18.300 can see there. I'm also on TikTok now, Daniel underscore Willingham, and I'm on Twitter at DT Willingham.

00:46:26.120 Fantastic. Well, Daniel Willingham, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure. It's been a real

00:46:29.900 pleasure. Thank you. My guest today was Daniel Willingham. He's the author of the book Outsmart

00:46:34.440 Your Brain. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information

00:46:38.320 about his work at his website, danielwillingham.com. Also check out our show notes at

00:46:42.220 aom.is slash learn. We can find links to resources. We can delve deeper into this topic.

00:46:54.100 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at

00:46:58.160 artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that

00:47:01.940 we've written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven't done

00:47:04.900 so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

00:47:08.440 Helps out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show at

00:47:12.160 a friend or family member who you think we get something out of it. As always, thank you for

00:47:15.740 the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay. Remind you to not listen to the AOM podcast,

00:47:19.500 but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - September 18, 2023

Beyond Lazy Learning — The Keys to Gaining and Retaining Knowledge

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