The Art of Manliness - How to Get Better at Anything

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

00:00:11.540 Life revolves around learning, in school, at our jobs, even in the things we do for fun.

00:00:16.880 But we frequently don't progress in any of these areas at the rate we'd like.

00:00:20.720 Consequently, and unfortunately, we often give up our pursuits prematurely

00:00:24.300 or resign ourselves to always being mediocre in our classes, career, and hobbies.

00:00:28.600 Scott Young has some tips on how you can avoid this fate, level up in whatever you do,

00:00:33.340 and enjoy the satisfaction of skill improvement.

00:00:36.120 Scott is a writer, programmer, and entrepreneur, and the author of Get Better at Anything,

00:00:41.320 12 Maximums for Mastering.

00:00:43.360 Today on the show, Scott shares the three key factors in helping us learn.

00:00:47.060 He explains how copying others is an underrated technique in becoming a genius,

00:00:50.700 why, contrary to the sentiments of motivational memes, we learn more from success than mistakes,

00:00:54.660 why experts often aren't good teachers, and tactics for drawing out their best advice,

00:00:59.440 why you may need to get worse before you get better, and more.

00:01:02.700 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash getbetter.

00:01:06.020 All right, Scott Young, welcome back to the show.

00:01:21.740 Oh, thank you so much for having me back.

00:01:23.360 So the last time we had you on, we discussed your book, Ultra Learning.

00:01:26.980 You got a new book out called Get Better at Anything.

00:01:29.960 Both books are about learning.

00:01:31.940 So how does Get Better at Anything pick up where ultra learning left off?

00:01:37.800 Yeah, you know, it's funny because when I wrote Ultra Learning, when I was like wrapping up that

00:01:41.100 book, I was like, well, this is my book on learning.

00:01:43.100 I'm not going to have to write another book on that.

00:01:44.960 And I ended up spending like five years digging into research, and it was like, yep, there's

00:01:48.580 like more than another book here that I wanted to write and things that I didn't get to say.

00:01:52.920 So I would say at a very high level, the main difference is that ultra learning was kind

00:01:56.940 of dealing with a very specific corner perspective on the issue of how do you get better at things,

00:02:02.560 which was looking at people who take on these intensive self-directed learning projects.

00:02:08.040 So, you know, I covered Benny Lewis, who speaks like 11 languages, and Eric Barone, who built

00:02:12.940 his own video game learning like every single possible subskill from scratch.

00:02:16.140 And it was really just to look at these kind of dramatic stories and try to infer principles

00:02:20.440 from this.

00:02:20.820 Whereas this book, the story that really kicked it off was actually something a little unusual,

00:02:26.600 which was Tetris proficiency.

00:02:28.540 Tetris is a game that's been out for, you know, a couple decades now.

00:02:32.020 And it really was interesting for me when I first heard about this story from the YouTuber

00:02:36.540 John Green.

00:02:37.540 And he was talking about how for the first like 20 years of Tetris, the people aren't very

00:02:42.900 good at it.

00:02:43.460 Like the scores of the best players are just nothing close to what like 12 and 13 year old

00:02:48.700 kids can do these days.

00:02:49.780 And the sort of key to resolving this mystery was that the players who are playing today

00:02:55.560 are so much more interconnected, it's possible to quickly learn the best techniques, the best

00:03:00.920 strategies, and implement them yourself.

00:03:03.520 And that's just had this real salutary effect on the entire field, in that they've gotten

00:03:08.220 so much better, so much more quickly.

00:03:10.560 And so I really liked this story because it didn't fit into the paradigm that I had with

00:03:13.920 the last book.

00:03:14.460 This wasn't a story about like some impressive individual that like beat the odds and did way

00:03:19.280 better than everyone else.

00:03:20.300 But it was, here's a fundamental ingredient to getting better at things that applies to

00:03:25.580 everyone, whether or not you're the top of the field or in the middle of the pack.

00:03:29.900 And so that kind of kickstarted this real deep dive into not only stories like this one,

00:03:34.560 but the research on learning to try to figure out what are those principles, what are those

00:03:38.700 fundamental ingredients that you have to get right if you want to improve, whether or not

00:03:43.360 it's an intensive project or whether it's just, you know, something that you're trying

00:03:46.580 to get a little bit better at.

00:03:47.540 Yeah.

00:03:48.020 So the learning process, you break it down to three parts.

00:03:50.780 It's see, do, and feedback.

00:03:53.560 So that see part, like we learn best when we see other people doing stuff.

00:03:58.920 And that's like, we're social animals.

00:04:00.920 And I think that's probably what separates us from the other primates.

00:04:04.540 We're very social and we can mimic other people very well.

00:04:08.320 And we've been able to incorporate that into our learning process.

00:04:11.780 Yeah, I'm a big fan of Joseph Heinrich, the Harvard anthropologist and economist.

00:04:16.660 His work, he wrote a book called The Secret of Our Success, where he makes this argument

00:04:19.960 that the reason that we've sort of succeeded as a species is that we have culture, not that

00:04:24.360 we are like intrinsically just such better problem solvers than our, you know, chimpanzee

00:04:29.920 or orangutan cousins.

00:04:30.720 Now, I don't want to say that like people are equally smart as chimpanzees, but the differences

00:04:36.720 are not as dramatic as our kind of like, you know, as it would look like when you just

00:04:41.000 see them.

00:04:41.800 And part of it is that humans are excellent social learners, chimpanzees are not.

00:04:45.900 And so one of these experiments that I talk about in the book is comparing toddlers, like

00:04:49.840 two-year-olds.

00:04:50.940 So presumably at a level where they haven't, you know, acquired a lot of our cultural tools

00:04:55.240 against, you know, similarly aged chimpanzees and orangutans.

00:04:58.980 And on questions of like problem solving, so you're getting them to solve some sort of problem

00:05:03.760 on their own.

00:05:04.620 They're actually pretty similar.

00:05:05.700 It's not the case that like humans are just so much smarter than the other great apes.

00:05:11.000 But the main difference is that even toddlers, you show them how to solve a problem and they'll

00:05:16.420 copy it like pretty, pretty successfully.

00:05:18.700 And the other apes just can't seem to do that. 1.00

00:05:20.780 And so the argument that it's like monkey see, monkey do, that expression has it exactly

00:05:25.860 backwards.

00:05:26.560 That is the thing that makes us different from the monkeys is that we can see something

00:05:30.220 and do it, whereas they have to figure it out on their own.

00:05:32.940 And in this section about scene in the learning process, you take a look at Renaissance artists

00:05:39.280 and how they learned their art.

00:05:41.700 And I think we typically have this idea of artists, the greats like Leonardo da Vinci,

00:05:46.200 Michelangelo, even musicians like Beethoven, Mozart.

00:05:49.620 They're like these romantic geniuses who are alone in their workshop or their studio, just

00:05:57.540 toiling away and perfecting their craft.

00:06:00.260 But if you look at the history of art in the Renaissance, they learn by just copying the

00:06:06.900 works of other masters before them.

00:06:08.800 Walk us through that process.

00:06:09.840 It's really interesting.

00:06:11.220 Yeah.

00:06:11.480 So, I mean, this is something that I think if you look at kind of the, it's not even just

00:06:16.200 exclusively to art.

00:06:17.760 This is true in education writ large, but there became this idea, and I think a lot of people

00:06:23.060 blame Rousseau for it, but this idea that you don't want to be teaching too much.

00:06:28.640 You want to be letting people develop their own creative talents, their own ideas, their

00:06:34.320 own original voice.

00:06:35.640 And I don't want to say that that's entirely wrong.

00:06:37.880 You do need to have creativity and originality eventually.

00:06:41.480 But what this misses is that, again, what we were talking about, this ability to learn

00:06:45.860 from other people to sort of not have to reinvent the wheel and solve the same problems.

00:06:50.500 And so artistic education often follows this model in classrooms today.

00:06:55.580 I mean, I remember taking art classes in high school where there was, you know, the teacher

00:07:00.160 wasn't really teaching anything.

00:07:01.340 We were doing these like craft projects and just like, okay, do what you want, kids.

00:07:04.620 And then, you know, every once in a while there'd be a helpful suggestion or the teacher would

00:07:08.380 do something to your drawing.

00:07:09.600 But it wasn't like, okay, let's sit down and learn how perspective works or let's learn

00:07:14.400 how, you know, these site sizing techniques for like drawing something accurately.

00:07:18.260 Like that wasn't part of my artistic education when I was doing it in school.

00:07:21.720 And so it was very interesting to reflect on this sort of trajectory of art education because

00:07:26.120 it really started out of this apprenticeship model.

00:07:28.900 And the apprenticeship model was that the artist doesn't matter at all.

00:07:32.040 This is just a worker.

00:07:33.060 This is just a laborer.

00:07:34.240 And so you bring some kid in here and you're like, okay, you're going to paint leaves and

00:07:38.000 then I'm going to get you to paint leaves for a while and then you're going to do this.

00:07:41.000 And it was this being able to observe the master at work, doing what the master is doing,

00:07:45.840 copying from masterworks was such a fundamental part of the education.

00:07:49.260 And now if you suggest this to like art teachers or people who are in this sort of field, they're

00:07:55.040 almost like aghast that like, that's not what art is.

00:07:57.560 That's just copying.

00:07:58.520 That's not creativity.

00:07:59.840 But the people who went through this process, which continued beyond the apprenticeship period,

00:08:04.560 it became the kind of academy system for a number of years that produced many excellent

00:08:09.100 painters and many excellent artists, was that you're building these fundamental skills

00:08:13.920 of drawing, of seeing, of perceiving, and treating art as a skill that once you've mastered

00:08:20.340 it, you have to have an original vision.

00:08:21.960 You have to like take all the things you've learned and apply it.

00:08:24.900 But without that foundation, you know, you just, you can see the difference.

00:08:28.600 You can see lots of people who, you know, like, I don't want to be critical of, you know,

00:08:33.980 contemporary art because there's a lot of conceptual work there.

00:08:36.520 But there's a lot of, you know, people who get into art that maybe don't have that technical

00:08:41.140 foundation and it's just harder for them to express what they want to express.

00:08:45.100 And you see this, this idea of copying others, not just in art, but in writing.

00:08:49.220 A lot of the famous writers, you think, oh, they just came up with this stuff on their

00:08:52.320 own.

00:08:53.240 They actually, they started just by copying the works of other, I know Jack London would

00:08:58.660 handwrite and copy Rudyard Kipling's poems.

00:09:01.660 Let me see.

00:09:02.060 Robert Louis Stevenson did the same thing, just copied the work of other famous writers.

00:09:07.080 What was another one?

00:09:07.960 Oh, the guy who wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

00:09:10.520 Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:09:11.560 Hunter S. Thompson.

00:09:12.760 Hunter S. Thompson.

00:09:13.760 He actually just copied The Great Gatsby on his typewriter.

00:09:17.420 And he's like, oh, I did that because I just want to see what it felt like to write a good

00:09:20.220 book.

00:09:20.860 I even talk about in a later section of the book, Octavia Butler, a science fiction writer.

00:09:25.160 And she had this advice to her sort of upcoming science fiction students was like, if you're

00:09:30.260 having trouble opening a book, for instance, get like a dozen books and copy out their

00:09:34.640 openings word for word.

00:09:35.800 And I think what is happening here, I mean, the actual physical act of writing it, I don't

00:09:41.080 think is what matters.

00:09:42.160 What matters is that you're forced to, when you're copying something word for word, really

00:09:46.440 pay attention to what you're writing.

00:09:47.820 And this way of just like, okay, well, what is the way that people solve the problem of

00:09:53.280 opening a book?

00:09:53.960 And if you see a dozen different ways people do it, you have these kind of tools of like,

00:09:59.240 oh, okay, should we start off just with dialogue?

00:10:01.420 Or should we start off with some kind of like scene setting or a moment of action?

00:10:05.600 And like, how does that make me feel?

00:10:07.180 How does that change the direction that the book follows?

00:10:09.600 I mean, when I was writing Ultra Learning, I did the exact same thing.

00:10:12.140 Like I'd never written a traditionally published book before, you know, something of that magnitude.

00:10:16.400 So it's like, I open up people's books that I liked.

00:10:19.200 And it was like, how did they structure this?

00:10:20.540 How did they work on this?

00:10:21.520 You know, I'm a big fan of Cal Newport.

00:10:23.520 We've been friends for a long time.

00:10:24.560 It was like, I opened up Deep Work and I was like, how did he structure Deep Work?

00:10:27.800 Because I liked that book.

00:10:28.760 And so, you know, the book I ended up writing is not like Deep Work.

00:10:32.920 It's not that I was just, you know, imitating him in a really superficial level.

00:10:36.220 But seeing how he solved the problem of like, okay, I've got an idea, you know,

00:10:39.900 what do I need to do rhetorically to make this work?

00:10:42.580 I mean, that's really big.

00:10:43.860 And so I think that element of seeing from other people, copying what other people are doing,

00:10:49.100 not at the superficial level, but at a deep understanding level is super important.

00:10:53.300 And it's often neglected in creative fields where we prize originality.

00:10:57.520 And we often punish people for going through that early phase.

00:11:00.620 Are there any broad principles that people can use from this idea of copying others

00:11:05.500 so they can apply to other skills, whether it's, you know, public speaking,

00:11:08.620 making a negotiation, computer programming, et cetera,

00:11:12.420 these other skills in their life they might be doing besides art and writing?

00:11:17.240 Yeah, I mean, I do think people do do this to a certain extent instinctively.

00:11:21.320 Like, as I said, we are social learners as a species.

00:11:23.880 So even if you don't realize you're doing this, often that's what you're doing.

00:11:26.560 You know, I know lots of entrepreneurs who like this, seeking best practices and seeking

00:11:31.740 what, like, that's just second nature to them.

00:11:34.120 I think the idea of surfacing this and making this, you know, explicit and important is

00:11:38.240 recognizing that often there's kind of an opposing cultural tendency, sort of like,

00:11:42.580 you know, that's what you're doing, but you shouldn't be doing it, right?

00:11:45.240 And I think it's good to say, no, no, no, this is healthy.

00:11:47.680 This is good to start off with.

00:11:49.100 So if you are working in, like, public speaking, watch great speakers, you know,

00:11:54.320 listen to, like, Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech.

00:11:57.640 Listen to people who gave moving speeches and try to pay attention to what they're doing.

00:12:03.000 What are they doing?

00:12:03.840 What do you like what they're doing?

00:12:04.860 What do you not like what they're doing?

00:12:06.100 What do you understand?

00:12:06.800 What do you not understand?

00:12:07.960 And again, it's the superficial, like, I'm going to say that exact speech.

00:12:12.520 That does play maybe a role at the very, very beginning stages, like you're learning

00:12:16.220 to program something, you can't understand it, so you just copy the code line by line.

00:12:21.940 But I think this act of working through and understanding why someone's doing what they're

00:12:26.880 doing, it really skips over a lot of the trial and error, because the alternative to

00:12:31.420 doing this, the alternative to sort of finding a working template and copying it is trying

00:12:36.080 to invent one yourself.

00:12:37.580 And there's just ample research from educational psychology that people are not that

00:12:41.880 good at it, like people are not that good at inventing their own solutions, even smart

00:12:46.380 people, it takes them an enormous amount of effort.

00:12:48.960 And often when they do invent the solution, they don't even recognize that it's the solution.

00:12:52.360 And so they may not actually learn anything.

00:12:54.360 So I think this seeing process is just something that you can be more deliberate about, about

00:12:58.880 incorporating into your practice.

00:13:01.100 One of your maxims of learning or getting better at something is that success is the best teacher

00:13:07.320 in learning.

00:13:08.020 But I think we've all heard that, well, no, you actually learn most from your mistakes.

00:13:13.200 So why is success better than failure when it comes to learning?

00:13:16.100 I don't know.

00:13:16.560 I almost felt funny writing this chapter because part of me was like, well, isn't this obvious?

00:13:20.980 But it is because the kind of contrary we learn best through our mistakes or failures has become

00:13:27.120 such a rallying cry for so many books that in some ways presenting what I think is the obvious

00:13:32.320 truth is actually mildly contrarian right now.

00:13:35.540 But I feel like I want to state off that there is a reason why people try to give that advice.

00:13:40.940 Some of it is just to cheer people up a little bit that you're going to face failures.

00:13:46.020 You're going to have mistakes.

00:13:47.060 Those are inevitable.

00:13:48.200 You want to pick yourself up.

00:13:49.300 You want to learn from them.

00:13:50.780 And I have a couple reasons for making this point.

00:13:53.360 But one of them is simply just from information theory.

00:13:56.740 For many skills, it's better to learn from success than failure.

00:13:59.640 And the reason why is that if you can think of the right way to do a skill like opening a combination lock,

00:14:06.080 there's many, many, many more ineffective ways to do things than effective ways to do it.

00:14:11.200 And so if you try an effective way to do something and you get it to work, you know how it works.

00:14:16.820 If you try an ineffective way, well, you don't know which way works.

00:14:20.760 You have to try a bunch of other attempts in order to get it.

00:14:23.860 And so what you can learn in one shot, if you are shown the right way to do it,

00:14:28.360 may take many, many trial and error attempts to sort of hone in on that correct answer if you are failing.

00:14:34.540 So there is a real sense that, you know, success is less common than failure.

00:14:38.640 That failure can happen in many ways.

00:14:40.480 Success tends to happen in a narrow set of circumstances.

00:14:43.320 And so if you can succeed or you can set yourself up to succeed earlier on,

00:14:47.100 then you're just going to cut down the amount of learning time.

00:14:49.800 Now, how do you actually set that up?

00:14:51.200 And I think there's two important ingredients here.

00:14:53.760 One is having the fundamental building blocks of the skill you're trying to learn.

00:14:57.880 So I spent a lot of time in this chapter talking about the very extensive research that's been done on learning to read

00:15:03.740 and how it all points to the idea that if you are very explicit in teaching the sound spelling combinations of words,

00:15:11.460 of like phonics and doing this kind of approach,

00:15:14.260 children will learn to read much faster than if you try to give them realistic reading materials and let them guess.

00:15:19.420 So that's one thing is just, do I have the fundamental building blocks for this skill?

00:15:23.660 And often if I don't, it's going to be a frustrating slog.

00:15:26.860 And then the second thing is that if you can build early successes, this helps with motivation too.

00:15:32.780 That if you can have those early wins in a skill where you're working on simpler problems and you can get a hang of it,

00:15:38.680 this is going to give you more confidence, more motivation to tackle the harder problems.

00:15:42.440 So I think, again, the misunderstanding is like, yeah, we all want grit, we all want perseverance.

00:15:47.840 But where do grit and perseverance come from?

00:15:50.300 Grit comes from the belief that even when things are difficult, I can succeed.

00:15:54.480 But if you don't even believe you can succeed when things are easy,

00:15:57.660 then you're not going to believe you're going to succeed when things are hard.

00:16:00.560 So grit and perseverance and these kinds of qualities we really admire are often, again,

00:16:05.620 this end product of you've built enough confidence,

00:16:08.260 you've built enough self-efficacy in a domain, however you want to think about that,

00:16:12.680 so that you can tackle harder challenges and persist through them.

00:16:16.060 So if I were trying to teach someone, I would want to make sure they have the right building blocks

00:16:20.600 and build them up from this base of success so that when they do get to that harder problem,

00:16:25.280 they're not like, oh, well, I can't do this.

00:16:26.900 And they just give up right away.

00:16:28.340 Video game designers understand this.

00:16:30.080 Whenever you play a video game, you no longer need instruction manuals to play video games

00:16:33.680 because you just play the game and it's really easy at the beginning

00:16:35.840 because you're learning those basic skills that will allow you to play the rest of the game,

00:16:40.680 then it gives you those easy wins, not only teach you the basic skills you need for the game,

00:16:45.560 but also it's motivating.

00:16:46.700 Oh, yeah, this is fun.

00:16:48.240 And then you're able to get to harder and harder levels.

00:16:52.240 Yeah.

00:16:52.540 I mean, this is such an obvious, I think, motivational principle

00:16:55.640 that it seems sort of strange to almost argue against it.

00:16:59.880 But there is, again, like we're talking about here,

00:17:02.740 there is this sort of idea that, well, you should be making things as hard as possible

00:17:07.000 in order to maximize your progress.

00:17:09.780 And there's a little bit of masochism baked into that philosophy that,

00:17:13.480 you know, oh, well, the reason that you're not making,

00:17:15.540 you're not succeeding in life is that you're just taking it too easy.

00:17:18.040 You're not making it harder.

00:17:18.740 I mean, there's some truth to the idea that, you know, 0.98

00:17:21.620 you often do need to make things more difficult, more challenging to get growth.

00:17:25.160 But it's very important to understand where that occurs in the sequence.

00:17:28.020 And very often in the beginning of a skill, the problem is that anything that we really

00:17:32.420 care about is too hard.

00:17:34.120 And that's pushing us away from actually doing it.

00:17:36.600 So, you know, the early part of skill development, the early part of getting better

00:17:40.400 is all about how do you make things easier, manageable, motivating.

00:17:44.100 And then when, you know, you've been doing something for 10 years

00:17:46.400 and you're no longer making progress, okay, yeah, you need to be seeking out challenges.

00:17:49.700 You need to be pushing yourself and you get into the opposite problem.

00:17:52.520 But the sequencing and timing of that advice is super important.

00:17:55.720 Okay. So if we learn best by watching others, it makes sense like, okay, I'm going to find

00:18:00.820 the very best person at a skill and ask them to coach me, right?

00:18:05.160 So if you want to be a better quarterback, you think, well, I'm just going to have Tom Brady

00:18:07.660 coach me. But the research suggests that experts can sometimes be the worst teachers.

00:18:13.840 Why is that?

00:18:15.360 What happens as we progress in a skill, and this has been well-documented, is that there is

00:18:20.300 a tendency for parts of the skill to become unconscious.

00:18:23.340 And there's lots of different like theories and mechanisms for how this tacit knowledge

00:18:27.420 develops. But the basic idea is that when parts of the skill become unconscious, either

00:18:32.680 because you just remember the right answer and you don't have to use the kind of deliberate

00:18:37.340 method to get to it, or because, you know, you've picked up sort of like little subtle patterns

00:18:42.800 from the environment. And so you're, you're kind of bypassing that whole explicit phase in

00:18:46.900 the first part. It becomes very hard to learn from these people because they're like, oh, well,

00:18:51.060 you just do this. And it's like, well, why do you do that? Or how do you do that? And

00:18:54.840 so teaching really is two skills. You have to first know the skill yourself, but then you

00:19:00.080 have to kind of learn the pedagogy, learn the way of breaking it down. So someone who doesn't

00:19:04.540 have that knowledge can actually like have a handle on it and learn it. So reading this

00:19:09.220 research gave me a lot of respect for people who are good teachers, because again, this idea

00:19:14.580 that teaching something is not simply just being good at it. There is an additional skill

00:19:19.680 on top of that. And so I think this often comes up when we are trying to learn skills that

00:19:25.140 are not taught in school, that are things that you have to learn in the field in practice.

00:19:29.840 You talk to people who are busy experts, they're busy, they're good at what they do, they don't

00:19:34.220 have a lot of time to explain things. And you ask them for advice, and you just get like

00:19:37.860 terrible advice from these people. You know, my friend Cal Newport and I, we ran for a number

00:19:43.200 of years where we still run it, this course called Top Performer. And one of the steps

00:19:46.520 we get people to work through is asking people who are a few steps ahead in their career for

00:19:50.980 advice to, you know, to plan out what you should be doing to make progress in your career.

00:19:56.040 And one of the early things we noticed is that when you ask people to talk to these experts,

00:20:01.460 they just get like really generic platitude ridden statements of advice. It's like, well,

00:20:06.720 it's all about working hard. And, you know, it's all, you know, the kids these days and

00:20:10.800 this kind of thing, like this is the kind of advice our students were getting. Whereas what

00:20:13.920 they really want to know is that like, oh, if I want to go into book publishing, they'll be like,

00:20:17.100 okay, well, you want to get an agent, you want to work on a proposal, or, you know, you need to

00:20:20.700 build an audience that's about this size before you can get a book deal. And like these, these are

00:20:24.860 the advice that to the expert are so obvious, they don't even say them. It's like, well, of course,

00:20:29.980 you know, but to the person who's entering the field, it's not obvious at all. It's not apparent that

00:20:34.460 that that's what you have to do. And so in this chapter that I kind of discussed this research,

00:20:38.600 I spent a lot of time talking about, there's this family of techniques called cognitive task

00:20:42.280 analysis, which is the tools psychologists have developed for dealing with this problem

00:20:46.420 of how do you get an expert to explain what they're doing in ways that, you know, you can

00:20:51.500 write down, you can understand, you can learn from, even when they themselves aren't entirely sure of

00:20:56.580 how they're performing a skill. This idea that sometimes the best coaches aren't the experts,

00:21:02.620 this reminded me, there was a, an NFL football kicking coach named Doug Blevins. You've heard about this guy?

00:21:09.300 No, but I'm, I'm very interested to hear about this.

00:21:11.340 So Doug Blevins, he's one of the greatest kicking coaches of all time. He coached in the NFL and in

00:21:16.240 the college. He was even considered for the hall of fame, I believe, but he had cerebral palsy and he

00:21:21.720 was in a wheelchair, like he was in a motorized wheelchair, but he analyzed the game and kickers like

00:21:27.480 so methodically. And he was able to see things that kickers themselves couldn't see. And he was like

00:21:33.440 this objective eye. I mean, and he had a knack for being able to give cues to kickers so they

00:21:39.500 could improve their kick. Yeah. That chapter reminded me of, of Doug Blevins. It was really

00:21:43.120 interesting. No, I mean, in sports, I think it's well-recognized that the best coaches are not

00:21:47.600 always the best players. And I think in athletic skills, there's an additional reason why you want

00:21:53.120 to coach, which is that, well, not only are motor skills almost completely tacit. So there's a real

00:21:58.080 sense in which, you know, Tiger Woods has a hard time explaining how he swings a golf club and why

00:22:02.760 he's so good at it. But then there's an additional reason, which is that when you're swinging the golf

00:22:06.600 club, you can't stand outside yourself and see what you're doing. And so, especially in like elite

00:22:11.700 levels of athletics. Now you have like high speed cameras and people doing like advanced kinematic

00:22:16.380 calculations and be like, okay, well you want to actually like swing it just like 0.5 degrees to the

00:22:22.040 left. Like you can give that kind of advice, which is just impossible to get that information when

00:22:27.080 you're playing the game. And so I think in elite sports, they really understand this, but in

00:22:31.700 regular professions, I think it's less utilized, you know, in our everyday skills, we make less use

00:22:38.040 of this, you know, very important wisdom. Okay. So if you're going to go to an expert,

00:22:41.800 some things you can do to extract information from them, just have them talk through the problem

00:22:46.320 or what they're doing. So they make explicit what they do implicitly. You also talk about, you know,

00:22:51.740 ask for stories, not advice. I thought that was a good one. And then what was the third one? Oh,

00:22:56.700 see where they seek answers. So I thought that was interesting. So if they've got a problem,

00:23:01.400 if this expert has a problem, where do they go to get help? And maybe that will help you.

00:23:07.060 Yeah. I mean, I think, well, definitely that is this sort of the diffuse nature of knowledge,

00:23:12.480 especially this kind of like, you know, writing this book, one of the things that became really

00:23:17.240 clear to me is just that book knowledge for how many books there are in the library, how many things

00:23:21.540 are written down. It's the tip of the iceberg for what people actually know, right? And I think,

00:23:27.020 you know, we're training these large language models now on like the entirety of human text

00:23:32.200 corpus. But the problem with a lot of that is just that a lot of the things that we know are not

00:23:36.740 really written down anywhere, especially in fields and stuff where you learn it through being on the

00:23:42.660 job through practice. So you kind of acquire the tacit knowledge that way. And so this real difficulty

00:23:47.520 is that for a lot of the fields we want to do, you can't really just Google it and be like, oh,

00:23:51.340 this is the answer. You know, there's a lot of things you can Google, but there's a lot of things

00:23:54.740 you can't. And so knowing who knows the answer is, oh, who do you talk to for advice on this? And

00:24:00.280 then you get a referral. I mean, that's huge. And the idea of seeing how they solve problems and

00:24:05.180 getting them to walk through it, this is a technique that's used in a lot of cognitive science

00:24:09.200 research. This Think Aloud protocol has been the basis of a lot of work. Anders Ericsson's work on

00:24:14.580 expertise was based on it. A lot of the early work on problem solving was built on it. But it

00:24:19.240 follows from this same idea that we talked about earlier with this sort of apprenticeship model

00:24:23.500 that being able to see someone solve a problem, especially if you can interject and be like,

00:24:29.220 why did you do that? Is so beneficial. And it's not just about seeing the end product. It's not

00:24:34.640 just about seeing, okay, well, this is the book that they wrote. But if they can try to write a little

00:24:40.140 bit and you can watch them write, you learn a lot about the problem solving process because you see

00:24:44.840 the iterations it goes through. You see the first stabs and why they made changes. And well, I'm

00:24:49.200 running into this problem, so I'm going to do this edit. Do they use an outline? These kinds of

00:24:53.400 things which are maybe invisible if you just see the end product are very important for understanding

00:24:58.120 the process. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:25:01.320 And now back to the show. So we mentioned earlier, when you're first learning something,

00:25:10.820 you want it to be easy. One, so you can learn the basic skills, but also that motivational factor.

00:25:15.540 But at a certain point to get better, you have to make things more difficult. So say you're learning

00:25:20.420 a new skill. When should you start introducing difficulty in your learning? And then how hard

00:25:24.820 do you want to make things for yourself?

00:25:26.220 Right. So I think there's two ways to think about this. One way is just the fact that

00:25:31.580 maybe the problems that you actually want to solve in the skill that you're working on

00:25:36.580 are too difficult. So you're building up to those problems. So if it's like, I want to write a novel,

00:25:43.040 let's say, but I don't have any writing experience, then maybe working on a short story or work

00:25:48.580 on some simpler forms or little writing exercises is going to build up those skills in a sort of

00:25:55.880 smaller environment to ready you for writing the novel. Now, why do you want to build up that way

00:26:01.080 is because the end goal is writing a novel. If the end goal was writing these small things,

00:26:05.260 then there's no reason you have to progress to writing a novel. That's just sort of your decision

00:26:10.180 about how you're using the skill. So similarly, with lots of skills, we have to really think about

00:26:14.960 what our end goals are. Like I'm driving a car, for instance, definitely me competing in a race

00:26:21.800 with my car would force me to learn skills that I don't have as a driver, but I don't really want

00:26:26.620 to be a race car driver. So that's not really what I have to do. So I'm okay keeping driving at kind

00:26:31.180 of the same difficulty level. So the difficulty really depends on where you're trying to get

00:26:35.180 with a skill. But then the second thing I think is important is that the fine tuning of the difficulty

00:26:40.100 for a skill also matters because there's certain things that you can do to change the skill,

00:26:45.540 change how you practice that make things more difficult, but make learning more efficient.

00:26:49.520 So I talk about three in the book. One is retrieval, which is this idea that if you have to apply a

00:26:55.880 pattern or something you've learned from memory, rather than seeing it again, this strengthens

00:26:59.840 memory more. There's spacing, which is the idea of spreading out when you're practicing over time,

00:27:05.300 and that's more efficient than cramming it together. And then also variable practice, which is when you

00:27:10.080 practice similar skills, kind of in alternation so that you, you know, if you're practicing tennis

00:27:14.960 serves, you practice your forehand with your backhand, you kind of mix it up randomly,

00:27:18.420 rather than just work on the backhand until you get it perfectly. And all of these things tend to

00:27:23.160 make it more difficult. So there might be something that at the very early stages, you want to avoid

00:27:27.580 doing if you're trying to build that confidence, you're trying to build that progress, but they make

00:27:31.820 your learning more efficient. So you're going to acquire those skills better and faster than you would

00:27:36.940 if you sort of take the easier approach.

00:27:39.080 Yeah, the retrieval aspect. That's why flashcards are such a great tool for learning. So it causes you to

00:27:44.040 try to get the answer back in your head and do that process kind of cements it in your head.

00:27:49.680 I mean, there's a really interesting kind of debate and like theoretical implications around

00:27:54.780 this retrieval, because when I wrote ultra learning, I had a whole chapter about retrieval. And it kind of

00:27:59.740 in some ways points in the opposite direction of what we were talking about earlier about like

00:28:03.160 seeing examples and studying examples and learning from other people. And so, you know, in this book,

00:28:08.240 I talk about the importance of doing it in a practice loop. Like you want to see examples and

00:28:12.600 do practice on your own, because if you just see the example, or you're only looking at it, it's

00:28:18.120 going to be harder to learn eventually because of this retrieval practice problem. But if you don't

00:28:22.680 see the example at all, then you're not retrieving anything. You're just doing this trial and error to

00:28:26.540 try to invent the example for yourself. So there is a little bit of a tension there between like

00:28:30.480 studying other people and doing your own practice.

00:28:33.040 I did this, implemented this when I was in law school, like getting ready for an exam.

00:28:36.920 So the teachers would have, they had like an exam bank. So you could see what the exams looked

00:28:41.860 like. And then they had like sample answers. And so when I first started studying for these exams,

00:28:47.460 because like taking a law school exam, it's like a skill, like you have to, it's your grade depends

00:28:52.240 on this one essay and they get basically give you a legal problem. Then you have to find all the

00:28:56.880 legal issues and resolve it. And there's a format you need to follow. So you can get all these points,

00:29:01.300 you can get as many points as possible and get a good grade. So when I first started getting ready

00:29:04.980 for these exams, I went to the exam bank and I looked at like a, the sample best answer that

00:29:09.140 the law school professor provided. And then after that, I would get the subsequent exams and every

00:29:15.140 Saturday leading up to the exam, like for a month to the exam, I would do a practice test and I would

00:29:21.680 do it from memory. I wouldn't use my notes at all. And then when I was done with the exam, I would take

00:29:26.000 a look at the answer key and see if I got everything right and incorporate that feedback. Well, I missed

00:29:31.200 this issue, made a note of that. So when I took the next one, I made sure I got it.

00:29:36.780 I mean, I'm pretty sure that that is the right way to study almost any exam. Like where you, you look at

00:29:43.200 the examples, you, you get some kind of instruction, some kind of explanation of how you should be solving

00:29:48.320 the problem. So I think unless you already have a lot of prior experience, you know, going straight to

00:29:53.160 the exam, maybe isn't that efficient because you're going to get, just going to be doing trial and error. You

00:29:57.200 have no idea how to solve these problems, but then you make some attempt and then you check what the,

00:30:03.260 the sort of official answer is and you learn from that process. And so those kinds of feedback loops

00:30:08.100 of, you know, and in this case, the, the feedback is very much also an example, right? So they're,

00:30:13.700 the seeing and feedback are kind of almost mirrored with each other. They're just happening at different

00:30:17.600 parts of the process. I mean, this is, this is definitely how you would want to study for any exam.

00:30:22.540 The issue I think is just that so many of the skills that we want to get better at are not like

00:30:26.580 exams. So it's like, how do you make them more exam? Like, like, how do you make writing a book

00:30:30.320 closer to that process where you're seeing some example, you're attempting something,

00:30:34.640 you're getting feedback. And I think, again, the reason why people often struggle to learn

00:30:39.300 non-academic skills and, and, you know, there's some people get really good and some people don't

00:30:43.720 is because of this idea that it's just, it's not automatic to practice that way.

00:30:48.760 Yeah. So how do you get feedback? How do you do that loop for like, say, writing a book?

00:30:53.440 What would that look like?

00:30:54.920 I mean, and I think every skill has its own sort of little idiosyncrasies here. So I don't want to

00:31:00.940 be just suggesting like, oh, there's one method you can use on every single skill. And it would

00:31:04.660 be nice if that exists. It would be good for me selling books because I could just make that method

00:31:08.160 the book. But, but I think it's good to show different examples because there's lots of different

00:31:12.300 ways this can happen. So in writing, one of the things that I really liked about this story with

00:31:16.360 Octavia Butler was how important going to these writing workshops was for her process. Now in a

00:31:22.220 writing workshop, basically you're in a classroom of other writers and you would be, you know, assigned,

00:31:27.780 okay, you're going to write a short story for tomorrow. So first of all, there's already this

00:31:31.380 like impressive volume of practice that maybe you wouldn't be doing if you're just on your own.

00:31:36.060 And then you bring it to the class and then the class dissects it. And then you write again,

00:31:39.620 and then the class dissects it and you write again and the class dissects it. And so this feedback was a,

00:31:44.420 you know, peer and also teacher led feedback process of, you know, it's not the same as,

00:31:49.280 okay, well, this is the right answer. This is exactly how you should have written it,

00:31:51.980 but you are getting these kinds of nudges, these directional things of how you can change your

00:31:56.320 writing. And at the same time, you're seeing how other people are writing. You're seeing what

00:31:59.980 high quality writing in this field looks like, and you're getting lots of practice attempts.

00:32:04.360 So this practice loop occurs in a workshop environment very successfully where it's very difficult to

00:32:09.880 replicate that just on your own, you know, at home, you know, writing your national novel right

00:32:15.480 month where you, you know, you're not necessarily getting feedback from anyone or you're getting it

00:32:19.080 at a considerable delay. Again, it looks different in different environments, but if you see that as

00:32:23.740 being the ingredient, well, I want something like a practice loop. I want something that looks the way

00:32:27.440 that, you know, Brett studied for law school. If you can do something like that in a skill where it's

00:32:32.720 not typical or it's not automatic, I mean, that can just make a huge difference in your growth

00:32:38.340 because, you know, not everyone's doing that. Not everyone is going to be practicing effectively.

00:32:43.340 Okay. So to make things harder, going back to that, just to recap, retrieval, do some spaced learning.

00:32:48.280 So kind of space things out and then variables. So you just want to mix things up and don't just

00:32:52.520 study in chunks.

00:32:53.840 Yeah. The variable one, I just want to point out, like, it's kind of the opposite of the way we do

00:32:58.320 things in school. And the way we do things in school is like, we break everything into units.

00:33:01.720 We only focus on one thing at a time. You know which unit your homework's coming from. So you know

00:33:06.220 which techniques apply to those problems. But I mean, the variable idea is like, well,

00:33:10.320 if you just like mix those up randomly, it would be harder to do the problems, but you'd learn it

00:33:14.540 better. And so I think it's an underused strategy because we're even talking about like, how do you

00:33:18.780 make things more exam? Like, well, this is a situation where, you know, even in the highly

00:33:23.100 controlled environment of a school, we're often not learning as efficiently as we could be.

00:33:27.220 Okay. So we've often been told that the mind is a muscle, but you argue that that analogy is

00:33:32.500 misleading. How so? So the idea here is that a lot of people have this metaphor where if I practice

00:33:41.540 something, I will get good at that thing, but I'll also kind of get broadly good at things that are

00:33:46.720 of the same flavor. So this is the idea behind doing Sudoku puzzles so that it'll like improve your

00:33:52.180 logical reasoning. Or, you know, I'm going to study programming because programming teaches

00:33:56.740 problem-solving ability.

00:33:58.000 Chess, play chess.

00:33:58.680 Yeah. Like, you know, so many people who are advocates of chess, and I mean, I like chess and

00:34:04.220 I think you should learn chess because it's a great game. It has a rich history and cultural

00:34:08.360 tradition, but it's just simply not true that learning chess will make you a more strategic

00:34:12.480 thinker. And I know right now, as I'm saying this, there's like, you know, that chess player

00:34:16.900 listener is like, well, actually, you know, chess made me a more strategic reasoner. And I would

00:34:21.260 say, okay, well, just show me the controlled experiments where you teach people chess and it makes

00:34:25.040 some more chic reasoner and I'll recant. But the basic idea is that this muscle metaphor is

00:34:30.440 pervasive. It has been around for hundreds of years. I mean, even Plato in the Republic is

00:34:35.800 advocating for this idea. So I think it's, it's some way baked into our psychology that this is how

00:34:40.480 the mind works. And there's lots of evidence that that's not how the mind works. That's not how

00:34:44.520 improvement in mental abilities works. What it is, is probably a closer metaphor is that the mind is

00:34:51.400 made of a lot of different tools that are made out of knowledge. So when you learn chess,

00:34:56.920 what you're learning is you're learning some tools that are a little bit abstract and apply broadly.

00:35:01.260 So you're learning some things like sizing up an opponent and managing your time. And maybe those

00:35:06.060 are going to transfer to other kinds of games or other kinds of competitive situations. But a lot of

00:35:10.780 what you're learning is specific patterns that are unique to chess. Like you're learning about,

00:35:15.480 you know, maintaining king safety and you're learning about forking and pins and all sorts of

00:35:21.080 very specific ideas that really only apply to chess. And they're unlikely to transfer to any other

00:35:25.460 domain, any other skill. And so the idea here is that, first of all, if we want to have broad

00:35:31.000 competencies, they really are made out of lots of smaller parts. So we have to kind of acquire the

00:35:36.260 vocabulary as it were to master the language. There's no sort of a generic language muscle that we just

00:35:41.360 improve. And then second of all, that if we are trying to improve on a skill, it's very important

00:35:46.660 to pay attention to what those pieces are and to not just be sort of flippant about saying, well,

00:35:50.700 I want to be a better programmer. So I'm just going to like improve my logical thinking in some way

00:35:55.260 by doing some kind of problem, rather than focusing on the problems, the situations,

00:35:59.840 the sort of sub skills that we genuinely care about.

00:36:02.720 That makes sense. Again, I experienced this in the field of law. So I remember when I was in undergrad,

00:36:07.540 I was thinking about preparing for the LSAT, which is the test you do to see if you can get

00:36:12.340 into law school. And a lot of it's like logic based. So these like these logic games you got

00:36:17.580 to do. And so I took a symbolic logic class and I mean, I enjoyed it. I don't know how helpful it was

00:36:24.140 in the LSAT exam. The thing that helped me the most was just doing a bunch of these dumb logic games 0.88

00:36:29.480 over and over again until I got good at it.

00:36:32.360 I mean, there probably is near transfer in those situations. So near that psychologists distinguish

00:36:36.340 between like near and far transfer, which are hopelessly vague terms in the literature,

00:36:40.980 but near basically being the kind of transfer you'd expect because the problems you're solving

00:36:45.940 are in some way the same. Like that when you are solving, you know, a logic problem in a logic class

00:36:52.420 versus the logic problem in the LSAT, that the problems are in some sense the same. And there is

00:36:58.620 actually interesting research showing that like, even in those circumstances, transfer is not

00:37:02.480 automatic. We don't automatically apply things that we, that are helpful that we do know to,

00:37:07.660 to new problems. But you know, that is a kind that I think most psychologists would admit like it

00:37:12.540 exists. It's something that we can definitely do as human beings. The more questionable category is

00:37:16.960 this far transfer where the skills don't seem to have anything in common. There's no sort of

00:37:22.040 isomorphism as it were. There's no kind of like relationship where these problems are actually

00:37:26.240 the same in some sort of deep way. And yet you're going to improve from one to the other.

00:37:30.460 So, I mean, it's a complicated issue. There's a really big literature on it. So I'm sure someone

00:37:35.100 will point out some exception or something and I can get into the theoretical nuances of it. But

00:37:39.860 I think just if you broadly accept that when we learn things, we're learning information and that

00:37:45.220 information helps us solve problems of that type. And it helps us solve problems that are kind of the

00:37:50.840 same in some abstract level. That helps you, I think, when you're thinking about how you're going to get

00:37:55.220 better at skills because you're not relying on this kind of, well, I'm going to learn something

00:37:58.820 completely different and it's just going to boost my intelligence or boost my memory power or reasoning

00:38:03.140 power, which I don't think is how it works.

00:38:05.400 Right. So if you want to get good at writing, you got to write, do the skills of writing.

00:38:08.680 Yeah. And you got to do the writing that you're trying to get good at too. Like, I mean,

00:38:12.220 I mean, there's definitely writing exercises that are going to be helpful for our sorts of writing,

00:38:16.260 but I mean, writing poetry and writing a business memo are not the same.

00:38:20.880 Right. Exactly. So one of my favorite chapters was the one on how jazz musicians

00:38:25.280 learn to improvise. And one of the reasons I really liked this chapter is because just a few

00:38:29.880 weeks ago, we had a podcast guest on talking about Miles Davis and his life. So a lot of things you're

00:38:36.260 talking about there, you talk about Miles Davis. So what can we learn about jazz musicians on how

00:38:41.560 they learn to improvise to improve our own learning?

00:38:44.280 Well, jazz improvisation is a very interesting skill because when you think of something like chess,

00:38:48.720 a lot of what it is, is just having this like extremely large library of, okay, well,

00:38:54.120 in this situation you do this kind of patterns. I mean, there's higher level reasoning than that,

00:38:58.320 but that is a big part of what makes chess players good. And jazz improvisation, it's very different

00:39:04.160 from classical music where you just, you know, you play Beethoven symphesy over and over and over

00:39:08.820 again until you can do it like flawlessly. It's how do you play something that has a lot of skill,

00:39:14.680 a lot of talent, but is different from anything you've ever played before. And so I thought this was a

00:39:19.200 very interesting skill to look at because it does highlight a lot of these problems of like,

00:39:23.880 well, you're not just trying to master some sort of static pattern, but you're trying to have some

00:39:29.740 kind of flexible, creative representation of the music so that while you're playing, you can just

00:39:34.860 churn stuff out. And there's a really interesting book which talks about jazz training. And I relied on

00:39:41.060 heavily when I was writing this chapter is Paul Berliner's Thinking in Jazz. And this is like,

00:39:46.140 you know, multiple hundreds of pages of him having these deep interviews with jazz musicians,

00:39:51.500 looking at their training, looking at how they practice. He's also a jazz musician, so he can

00:39:56.040 like appreciate it on a deeper level than someone who's not particularly musical like me. And what

00:40:01.060 I thought was very interesting when I was reading this book is how it parallels a lot of the cognitive

00:40:05.620 psychology research on this variable practice effect. So it goes by a few different names. We have like

00:40:11.080 contextual interference, we have interleaving variable practice. There's even research on

00:40:15.940 concept formation. And so I talk about how these ideas parallel that as you practice with variability,

00:40:22.420 meaning that you're not just practicing the same thing over and over again, but you're practicing

00:40:26.460 similar things, but different things in alternation, in a random sequence, you're seeing different

00:40:31.020 examples, you're trying things in one key and then another key. This variability causes you to

00:40:37.420 generate a more abstract, more flexible representation of the skill so that you can do things like

00:40:42.980 improvise. And that's particularly important when what you're trying to get at is not just like,

00:40:48.300 you know, I can repeat this verbatim, but that you deeply understand it, that you're able to do

00:40:52.520 interesting and flexible things with it. So one chapter I want to talk about too, is you talk about

00:40:57.460 how in order to get better at something, sometimes you have to get worse before you get better. And you

00:41:03.560 look at the career of Tiger Woods to explore that idea. Tell us about that.

00:41:08.260 Yeah. So this was an interesting choice because Tiger Woods is, you know, obviously one of the

00:41:13.280 most famous golfers of all time, undoubtedly talented, you know, I mean, like reading his

00:41:18.420 biography, you see the video clips of him at two years old, lobbing balls on the Mike Douglas show.

00:41:24.200 And you're just like, this is someone who's just a phenomenal talent. Just, this is like an excellent

00:41:28.780 golfer. And, and the thing that, you know, one of the things that he's been most scrutinized in his

00:41:33.780 career, uh, at least professionally has been his decision at various points of his career to

00:41:40.500 change how he swings. So there is a lot of golf lore that like, you should not do this, that

00:41:46.540 as you develop a swing, you would develop some sort of natural way of moving your body.

00:41:51.940 It has its strengths and limitations, but trying to override that well-ingrained habit

00:41:56.700 often results in worse progress. So there's a sports journal, Scott Eden, and he writes this long

00:42:01.960 article about how countless other golfers had tried to do what Tiger did and failed. They

00:42:06.700 tried to rebuild their golf swing and it just kind of dashed their career hopes.

00:42:11.640 Whereas Tiger has actually succeeded with this. He has gone through phases where he's changed his

00:42:16.500 golf swing and he has gone on to play competitively. And even in some cases, you know, after his, um,

00:42:22.060 first swing adjustment, he played even better. Like he, he racked up a lot of his, uh, career

00:42:26.240 highlights. And so this idea that improvement is just this kind of steady monotonic increase in

00:42:34.360 ability is not actually supported by a lot of the research that often what we're doing when we're

00:42:39.940 improving is this kind of tension between, well, I have learned a way of doing something. I've

00:42:46.620 overlearned it to the point where it's very automatic, but to get better, I need to kind of

00:42:51.000 make some of those things less automatic. I need to do some things in a different way.

00:42:55.780 And this idea of this tension between automaticity or, uh, effortlessness and, um, the need to

00:43:03.060 improve was a central part in Anders Ericsson work. One of the people that's influenced me the most in

00:43:07.540 thinking about skill development is that he made this case that like, well, deliberate practice,

00:43:11.660 this thing that really sets apart top performers in many fields is this process of kind of like,

00:43:17.000 well, the automatic thing would be to do this, but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to put a lot

00:43:20.300 of effort to try to do it a slightly different way. And that's necessary to continue skill growth

00:43:24.780 past a certain point. So how can we do that? What are some principles to make things harder

00:43:28.660 for yourself so you can get better? Yeah. So, I mean, in athletics, one of the big things that

00:43:32.980 they look at is how can you introduce new constraints so that you force the skill out of

00:43:39.360 its sort of habitual way of performing it. So the one that I really like, a friend of mine who played

00:43:45.220 squash competitively, he was saying that when they were learning that one of the skills that they try to

00:43:50.200 get you to do is to hit the ball in the center of the racket. And obviously, you know, this is hard

00:43:54.980 to do and not everyone does this. So one of the ways that they do it is they gave them a racket that

00:43:59.060 had a really small head. And so this forces you to do that because if you hit it where it would have

00:44:04.180 hit on the regular racket, but it would be at the top or it wouldn't be right in the center,

00:44:07.780 that just flies straight through now. So if you practice with the racket with a small head,

00:44:11.580 it's going to force your skill to be more accurate in hitting the shot. And so I think with a lot

00:44:16.760 of skills, introducing new constraints that definitely increase the difficulty and they

00:44:21.580 inhibit an old way of doing things can sort of adjust you into a new sort of performance groove.

00:44:27.440 Well, Scott, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book

00:44:30.360 and your work?

00:44:31.600 You can go check out my website at scotthyoung.com. I have many essays, free essays, free newsletter on

00:44:37.180 learning, productivity, self-improvement. You can also check out the book, Get Better at Anything,

00:44:42.040 available on Amazon. If you're not tired of listening to me today, you can download the Audible book,

00:44:46.740 and listen to the Audible version and dive deeper into some of these principles.

00:44:50.500 Well, fantastic. Scott Young, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:44:53.140 Oh man, thank you for having me back.

00:44:56.000 My guest here is Scott Young. He's the author of the book, Get Better at Anything. It's available

00:44:59.480 on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website,

00:45:03.580 scotthyoung.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash get better,

00:45:08.140 where you find links to resources when we delve deeper into this topic.

00:45:17.700 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at

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00:45:39.300 continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay, reminding you to not listen to the AOM podcast,

00:45:42.860 but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - May 08, 2024

How to Get Better at Anything

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