How to Get Better at Anything
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, Scott Young returns to the show to discuss his new book, "Get Better at Anything: 12 Maximums for Mastering Anything." He explains how copying others is an underrated technique in becoming a genius, why, contrary to the sentiments of motivational memes, we learn more from success than mistakes, and why experts often aren t good teachers.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Life revolves around learning, in school, at our jobs, even in the things we do for fun.
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But we frequently don't progress in any of these areas at the rate we'd like.
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Consequently, and unfortunately, we often give up our pursuits prematurely
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or resign ourselves to always being mediocre in our classes, career, and hobbies.
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Scott Young has some tips on how you can avoid this fate, level up in whatever you do,
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and enjoy the satisfaction of skill improvement.
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Scott is a writer, programmer, and entrepreneur, and the author of Get Better at Anything,
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Today on the show, Scott shares the three key factors in helping us learn.
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He explains how copying others is an underrated technique in becoming a genius,
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why, contrary to the sentiments of motivational memes, we learn more from success than mistakes,
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why experts often aren't good teachers, and tactics for drawing out their best advice,
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why you may need to get worse before you get better, and more.
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash getbetter.
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All right, Scott Young, welcome back to the show.
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So the last time we had you on, we discussed your book, Ultra Learning.
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You got a new book out called Get Better at Anything.
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So how does Get Better at Anything pick up where ultra learning left off?
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Yeah, you know, it's funny because when I wrote Ultra Learning, when I was like wrapping up that
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book, I was like, well, this is my book on learning.
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I'm not going to have to write another book on that.
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And I ended up spending like five years digging into research, and it was like, yep, there's
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like more than another book here that I wanted to write and things that I didn't get to say.
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So I would say at a very high level, the main difference is that ultra learning was kind
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of dealing with a very specific corner perspective on the issue of how do you get better at things,
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which was looking at people who take on these intensive self-directed learning projects.
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So, you know, I covered Benny Lewis, who speaks like 11 languages, and Eric Barone, who built
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his own video game learning like every single possible subskill from scratch.
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And it was really just to look at these kind of dramatic stories and try to infer principles
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Whereas this book, the story that really kicked it off was actually something a little unusual,
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Tetris is a game that's been out for, you know, a couple decades now.
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And it really was interesting for me when I first heard about this story from the YouTuber
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And he was talking about how for the first like 20 years of Tetris, the people aren't very
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Like the scores of the best players are just nothing close to what like 12 and 13 year old
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And the sort of key to resolving this mystery was that the players who are playing today
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are so much more interconnected, it's possible to quickly learn the best techniques, the best
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And that's just had this real salutary effect on the entire field, in that they've gotten
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And so I really liked this story because it didn't fit into the paradigm that I had with
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This wasn't a story about like some impressive individual that like beat the odds and did way
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But it was, here's a fundamental ingredient to getting better at things that applies to
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everyone, whether or not you're the top of the field or in the middle of the pack.
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And so that kind of kickstarted this real deep dive into not only stories like this one,
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but the research on learning to try to figure out what are those principles, what are those
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fundamental ingredients that you have to get right if you want to improve, whether or not
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it's an intensive project or whether it's just, you know, something that you're trying
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So the learning process, you break it down to three parts.
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So that see part, like we learn best when we see other people doing stuff.
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And I think that's probably what separates us from the other primates.
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We're very social and we can mimic other people very well.
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And we've been able to incorporate that into our learning process.
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Yeah, I'm a big fan of Joseph Heinrich, the Harvard anthropologist and economist.
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His work, he wrote a book called The Secret of Our Success, where he makes this argument
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that the reason that we've sort of succeeded as a species is that we have culture, not that
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we are like intrinsically just such better problem solvers than our, you know, chimpanzee
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Now, I don't want to say that like people are equally smart as chimpanzees, but the differences
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are not as dramatic as our kind of like, you know, as it would look like when you just
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And part of it is that humans are excellent social learners, chimpanzees are not.
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And so one of these experiments that I talk about in the book is comparing toddlers, like
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So presumably at a level where they haven't, you know, acquired a lot of our cultural tools
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against, you know, similarly aged chimpanzees and orangutans.
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And on questions of like problem solving, so you're getting them to solve some sort of problem
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It's not the case that like humans are just so much smarter than the other great apes.
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But the main difference is that even toddlers, you show them how to solve a problem and they'll
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And so the argument that it's like monkey see, monkey do, that expression has it exactly
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That is the thing that makes us different from the monkeys is that we can see something
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and do it, whereas they have to figure it out on their own.
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And in this section about scene in the learning process, you take a look at Renaissance artists
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And I think we typically have this idea of artists, the greats like Leonardo da Vinci,
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Michelangelo, even musicians like Beethoven, Mozart.
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They're like these romantic geniuses who are alone in their workshop or their studio, just
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But if you look at the history of art in the Renaissance, they learn by just copying the
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So, I mean, this is something that I think if you look at kind of the, it's not even just
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This is true in education writ large, but there became this idea, and I think a lot of people
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blame Rousseau for it, but this idea that you don't want to be teaching too much.
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You want to be letting people develop their own creative talents, their own ideas, their
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And I don't want to say that that's entirely wrong.
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You do need to have creativity and originality eventually.
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But what this misses is that, again, what we were talking about, this ability to learn
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from other people to sort of not have to reinvent the wheel and solve the same problems.
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And so artistic education often follows this model in classrooms today.
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I mean, I remember taking art classes in high school where there was, you know, the teacher
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We were doing these like craft projects and just like, okay, do what you want, kids.
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And then, you know, every once in a while there'd be a helpful suggestion or the teacher would
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But it wasn't like, okay, let's sit down and learn how perspective works or let's learn
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how, you know, these site sizing techniques for like drawing something accurately.
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Like that wasn't part of my artistic education when I was doing it in school.
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And so it was very interesting to reflect on this sort of trajectory of art education because
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it really started out of this apprenticeship model.
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And the apprenticeship model was that the artist doesn't matter at all.
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And so you bring some kid in here and you're like, okay, you're going to paint leaves and
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then I'm going to get you to paint leaves for a while and then you're going to do this.
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And it was this being able to observe the master at work, doing what the master is doing,
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copying from masterworks was such a fundamental part of the education.
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And now if you suggest this to like art teachers or people who are in this sort of field, they're
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almost like aghast that like, that's not what art is.
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But the people who went through this process, which continued beyond the apprenticeship period,
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it became the kind of academy system for a number of years that produced many excellent
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painters and many excellent artists, was that you're building these fundamental skills
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of drawing, of seeing, of perceiving, and treating art as a skill that once you've mastered
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You have to like take all the things you've learned and apply it.
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But without that foundation, you know, you just, you can see the difference.
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You can see lots of people who, you know, like, I don't want to be critical of, you know,
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contemporary art because there's a lot of conceptual work there.
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But there's a lot of, you know, people who get into art that maybe don't have that technical
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foundation and it's just harder for them to express what they want to express.
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And you see this, this idea of copying others, not just in art, but in writing.
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A lot of the famous writers, you think, oh, they just came up with this stuff on their
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They actually, they started just by copying the works of other, I know Jack London would
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Robert Louis Stevenson did the same thing, just copied the work of other famous writers.
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Oh, the guy who wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
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He actually just copied The Great Gatsby on his typewriter.
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And he's like, oh, I did that because I just want to see what it felt like to write a good
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I even talk about in a later section of the book, Octavia Butler, a science fiction writer.
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And she had this advice to her sort of upcoming science fiction students was like, if you're
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having trouble opening a book, for instance, get like a dozen books and copy out their
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And I think what is happening here, I mean, the actual physical act of writing it, I don't
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What matters is that you're forced to, when you're copying something word for word, really
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And this way of just like, okay, well, what is the way that people solve the problem of
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And if you see a dozen different ways people do it, you have these kind of tools of like,
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oh, okay, should we start off just with dialogue?
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Or should we start off with some kind of like scene setting or a moment of action?
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How does that change the direction that the book follows?
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I mean, when I was writing Ultra Learning, I did the exact same thing.
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Like I'd never written a traditionally published book before, you know, something of that magnitude.
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So it's like, I open up people's books that I liked.
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It was like, I opened up Deep Work and I was like, how did he structure Deep Work?
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And so, you know, the book I ended up writing is not like Deep Work.
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It's not that I was just, you know, imitating him in a really superficial level.
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But seeing how he solved the problem of like, okay, I've got an idea, you know,
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what do I need to do rhetorically to make this work?
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And so I think that element of seeing from other people, copying what other people are doing,
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not at the superficial level, but at a deep understanding level is super important.
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And it's often neglected in creative fields where we prize originality.
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And we often punish people for going through that early phase.
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Are there any broad principles that people can use from this idea of copying others
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so they can apply to other skills, whether it's, you know, public speaking,
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making a negotiation, computer programming, et cetera,
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these other skills in their life they might be doing besides art and writing?
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Yeah, I mean, I do think people do do this to a certain extent instinctively.
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Like, as I said, we are social learners as a species.
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So even if you don't realize you're doing this, often that's what you're doing.
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You know, I know lots of entrepreneurs who like this, seeking best practices and seeking
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I think the idea of surfacing this and making this, you know, explicit and important is
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recognizing that often there's kind of an opposing cultural tendency, sort of like,
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you know, that's what you're doing, but you shouldn't be doing it, right?
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And I think it's good to say, no, no, no, this is healthy.
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So if you are working in, like, public speaking, watch great speakers, you know,
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listen to, like, Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech.
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Listen to people who gave moving speeches and try to pay attention to what they're doing.
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And again, it's the superficial, like, I'm going to say that exact speech.
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That does play maybe a role at the very, very beginning stages, like you're learning
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to program something, you can't understand it, so you just copy the code line by line.
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But I think this act of working through and understanding why someone's doing what they're
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doing, it really skips over a lot of the trial and error, because the alternative to
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doing this, the alternative to sort of finding a working template and copying it is trying
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And there's just ample research from educational psychology that people are not that
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good at it, like people are not that good at inventing their own solutions, even smart
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people, it takes them an enormous amount of effort.
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And often when they do invent the solution, they don't even recognize that it's the solution.
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So I think this seeing process is just something that you can be more deliberate about, about
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One of your maxims of learning or getting better at something is that success is the best teacher
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But I think we've all heard that, well, no, you actually learn most from your mistakes.
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So why is success better than failure when it comes to learning?
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I almost felt funny writing this chapter because part of me was like, well, isn't this obvious?
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But it is because the kind of contrary we learn best through our mistakes or failures has become
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such a rallying cry for so many books that in some ways presenting what I think is the obvious
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But I feel like I want to state off that there is a reason why people try to give that advice.
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Some of it is just to cheer people up a little bit that you're going to face failures.
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And I have a couple reasons for making this point.
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But one of them is simply just from information theory.
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For many skills, it's better to learn from success than failure.
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And the reason why is that if you can think of the right way to do a skill like opening a combination lock,
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there's many, many, many more ineffective ways to do things than effective ways to do it.
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And so if you try an effective way to do something and you get it to work, you know how it works.
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If you try an ineffective way, well, you don't know which way works.
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You have to try a bunch of other attempts in order to get it.
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And so what you can learn in one shot, if you are shown the right way to do it,
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may take many, many trial and error attempts to sort of hone in on that correct answer if you are failing.
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So there is a real sense that, you know, success is less common than failure.
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Success tends to happen in a narrow set of circumstances.
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And so if you can succeed or you can set yourself up to succeed earlier on,
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then you're just going to cut down the amount of learning time.
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And I think there's two important ingredients here.
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One is having the fundamental building blocks of the skill you're trying to learn.
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So I spent a lot of time in this chapter talking about the very extensive research that's been done on learning to read
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and how it all points to the idea that if you are very explicit in teaching the sound spelling combinations of words,
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of like phonics and doing this kind of approach,
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children will learn to read much faster than if you try to give them realistic reading materials and let them guess.
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So that's one thing is just, do I have the fundamental building blocks for this skill?
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And often if I don't, it's going to be a frustrating slog.
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And then the second thing is that if you can build early successes, this helps with motivation too.
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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,
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this is going to give you more confidence, more motivation to tackle the harder problems.
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So I think, again, the misunderstanding is like, yeah, we all want grit, we all want perseverance.
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Grit comes from the belief that even when things are difficult, I can succeed.
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But if you don't even believe you can succeed when things are easy,
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then you're not going to believe you're going to succeed when things are hard.
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So grit and perseverance and these kinds of qualities we really admire are often, again,
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this end product of you've built enough confidence,
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you've built enough self-efficacy in a domain, however you want to think about that,
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so that you can tackle harder challenges and persist through them.
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So if I were trying to teach someone, I would want to make sure they have the right building blocks
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and build them up from this base of success so that when they do get to that harder problem,
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Whenever you play a video game, you no longer need instruction manuals to play video games
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because you just play the game and it's really easy at the beginning
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because you're learning those basic skills that will allow you to play the rest of the game,
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then it gives you those easy wins, not only teach you the basic skills you need for the game,
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And then you're able to get to harder and harder levels.
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I mean, this is such an obvious, I think, motivational principle
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that it seems sort of strange to almost argue against it.
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But there is, again, like we're talking about here,
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there is this sort of idea that, well, you should be making things as hard as possible
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And there's a little bit of masochism baked into that philosophy that,
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you know, oh, well, the reason that you're not making,
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you're not succeeding in life is that you're just taking it too easy.
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I mean, there's some truth to the idea that, you know,
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you often do need to make things more difficult, more challenging to get growth.
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But it's very important to understand where that occurs in the sequence.
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And very often in the beginning of a skill, the problem is that anything that we really
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And that's pushing us away from actually doing it.
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So, you know, the early part of skill development, the early part of getting better
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is all about how do you make things easier, manageable, motivating.
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And then when, you know, you've been doing something for 10 years
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and you're no longer making progress, okay, yeah, you need to be seeking out challenges.
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You need to be pushing yourself and you get into the opposite problem.
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But the sequencing and timing of that advice is super important.
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Okay. So if we learn best by watching others, it makes sense like, okay, I'm going to find
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the very best person at a skill and ask them to coach me, right?
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So if you want to be a better quarterback, you think, well, I'm just going to have Tom Brady
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coach me. But the research suggests that experts can sometimes be the worst teachers.
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What happens as we progress in a skill, and this has been well-documented, is that there is
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a tendency for parts of the skill to become unconscious.
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And there's lots of different like theories and mechanisms for how this tacit knowledge
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develops. But the basic idea is that when parts of the skill become unconscious, either
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because you just remember the right answer and you don't have to use the kind of deliberate
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method to get to it, or because, you know, you've picked up sort of like little subtle patterns
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from the environment. And so you're, you're kind of bypassing that whole explicit phase in
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the first part. It becomes very hard to learn from these people because they're like, oh, well,
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you just do this. And it's like, well, why do you do that? Or how do you do that? And
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so teaching really is two skills. You have to first know the skill yourself, but then you
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have to kind of learn the pedagogy, learn the way of breaking it down. So someone who doesn't
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have that knowledge can actually like have a handle on it and learn it. So reading this
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research gave me a lot of respect for people who are good teachers, because again, this idea
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that teaching something is not simply just being good at it. There is an additional skill
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on top of that. And so I think this often comes up when we are trying to learn skills that
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are not taught in school, that are things that you have to learn in the field in practice.
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You talk to people who are busy experts, they're busy, they're good at what they do, they don't
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have a lot of time to explain things. And you ask them for advice, and you just get like
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terrible advice from these people. You know, my friend Cal Newport and I, we ran for a number
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of years where we still run it, this course called Top Performer. And one of the steps
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we get people to work through is asking people who are a few steps ahead in their career for
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advice to, you know, to plan out what you should be doing to make progress in your career.
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And one of the early things we noticed is that when you ask people to talk to these experts,
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they just get like really generic platitude ridden statements of advice. It's like, well,
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it's all about working hard. And, you know, it's all, you know, the kids these days and
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this kind of thing, like this is the kind of advice our students were getting. Whereas what
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they really want to know is that like, oh, if I want to go into book publishing, they'll be like,
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okay, well, you want to get an agent, you want to work on a proposal, or, you know, you need to
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build an audience that's about this size before you can get a book deal. And like these, these are
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the advice that to the expert are so obvious, they don't even say them. It's like, well, of course,
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you know, but to the person who's entering the field, it's not obvious at all. It's not apparent that
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that that's what you have to do. And so in this chapter that I kind of discussed this research,
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I spent a lot of time talking about, there's this family of techniques called cognitive task
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analysis, which is the tools psychologists have developed for dealing with this problem
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of how do you get an expert to explain what they're doing in ways that, you know, you can
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write down, you can understand, you can learn from, even when they themselves aren't entirely sure of
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how they're performing a skill. This idea that sometimes the best coaches aren't the experts,
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this reminded me, there was a, an NFL football kicking coach named Doug Blevins. You've heard about this guy?
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No, but I'm, I'm very interested to hear about this.
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So Doug Blevins, he's one of the greatest kicking coaches of all time. He coached in the NFL and in
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the college. He was even considered for the hall of fame, I believe, but he had cerebral palsy and he
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was in a wheelchair, like he was in a motorized wheelchair, but he analyzed the game and kickers like
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so methodically. And he was able to see things that kickers themselves couldn't see. And he was like
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this objective eye. I mean, and he had a knack for being able to give cues to kickers so they
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could improve their kick. Yeah. That chapter reminded me of, of Doug Blevins. It was really
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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
00:25:26.220
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
00:27:39.080
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?
00:30:54.920
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
00:32:53.840
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
00:33:58.680
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
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
00:38:05.400
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
00:44:31.600
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.
00:44:56.000
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
00:45:21.640
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00:45:25.420
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00:45:28.600
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00:45:31.680
It helps out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show
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00:45:39.300
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