How to Get Better at Anything
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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 the other apes just can't seem to do that.
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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
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
00:25:26.220
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
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00:45:39.300
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