Everyone wants to get better at things.
In fact, our lives kind of depend on it.
Whether it's:
- Learning skills to get your dream job
- Directions in a new town
- An instrument you've always dreamed of playing
Learning is at the core of it.
But why is it that despite years of practicing some things, you never actually improve?
In this book, the author explains that you must master three factors to improve at anything:
- See: To learn something ourselves, we need to see exactly how someone else does it.
- Do: Then, we have to practice doing it ourselves.
- Feedback: Finally we need real-world feedback.
This book shows practical methods for improving learning that anyone can use, in any situation.
It's incredibly well-researched and the methods are based on extensive scientific research and the author's personal experiences.
In this email I'll explain:
- The three factors for improvement
- Two practical tips you can implement right now
The Three Factors
Factor 1: See
As humans, we're incredibly good at learning through imitation.
But how do we make sure we're learning from others effectively?
Concept 1: Cognitive Load Theory
This sounds complicated, but it just means we have a limited amount of working memory to solve problems.
(Like a computer with limited RAM.)
When we have too many things to process at once, our brains max out, and we stop being able to learn.
So it's important that we don't overload our brains too early in the learning process.
We have to start with the basics and build up from there.
Concept 2: Success Is The Best Teacher
The author also argues that success, not failure, is the best teacher.
We do learn from our mistakes, but successes build our motivation because they fuel our belief in our self-efficacy.
Self efficacy: How good you believe you are at a specific thing
So, to believe we can do something, it helps to keep getting little wins early on in the learning process.
Concept 3: Experts Aren't Always Good Teachers
When we get really good at something, we skip some steps on autopilot.
Unfortunately, this leads to experts also skipping steps when they explain things.
The processes have become so automatic for them that they forget every step, even if they do them all.
You can combat this by getting an expert to do the task themselves and talking through it as they go.
Factor 2: Do
On top of learning from others, we also need to practice ourselves.
There's a few benefits of practice:
Benefit 1: Less Mental Effort
Practice reduces the amount of mental effort required for a task.
Think about driving: when you first start, it requires all of your focus, but over time, it eventually becomes automatic.
Benefit 2: Improved Memory
Practicing forces you to remember things about the skill regularly.
And retrieving this information regularly is an incredibly powerful way to strengthen those long-term memories.
Benefit 3: Hands-on Practice
And finally, some skills you just can't learn by watching.
You could watch golf for your entire life but wouldn't get better until you try it for yourself.
So how do we practice effectively?
Concept 1: Difficulty Level
As we discussed in the last section, the first step is making sure we practice at the right difficulty level.
(We'll discuss how to get this level right in the practical tips later in this email.)
Concept 2: Quality Comes From Quantity
The fastest way to get good at something is to focus on your quantity of output rather than agonising over perfecting each attempt.
Interestingly, this is not only true for learning but also for achieving at the highest level.
Studies have shown that artists and scientists who produce lots of exceptional works, simply produce more overall.
They have the same success rate as their peers, but they make more papers and pieces, so they got more wins.
Concept 3: The Mind Isn't A Muscle
The old saying that "the mind is like a muscle" is a nice idea but isn't very accurate.
Lifting weights will strengthen a muscle and let you lift more of anything in the future.
But the mind doesn't work like that.
Our brains can't really transfer things we learnt in one context to another.
So, when we practice, we need to make it specific and as close as possible to what we want to achieve.
Factor 3: Feedback
Getting immediate and accurate feedback is vital to improve and reach peak performance levels - so how can you get it?
Concept 1: Tracking
Humans often misreport how effective a training method is or even how good we are at something.
To combat this, track your decisions, outcomes and your confidence in those decisions.
This will also protect you from making a bad decision because you're overconfident.
(Which I think I can safely say is something we've all done at some point.)
Concept 2: Unlearning
As you get more feedback, you'll eventually reach a point where you need to unlearn an old technique and replace it with a newer, better one.
One great way to do this is to add a constraint to your practice to make it impossible for you to do it.
Here's a great example from the book:
If you want to practice hitting a tennis ball in the middle of your racket, you should practice with a smaller racket.
That will make it impossible not to hit the ball in the middle, so you can't rely on your old, bad technique.
Concept 3: Emotions
We all try to avoid things we're scared of and this often includes getting bad feedback.
The problem is that the more you avoid a fear, the more your brain reinforces this behaviour as the solution.
The solution is through forcing exposure.
If you try something and get good feedback, your brain realises there's nothing to be worried about.
And even if you get negative feedback, you'll realise after a while that it doesn't actually affect your life and it'll have less of an impact.
So, really, you just need to start getting feedback as soon as possible.
Two Practical Tips
Tip 1: Managing Difficulty
Throughout this book, it becomes clear that the key to both learning and practice is achieving the right balance of structure and difficulty.
Take a look at this diagram:
The line shows your experience, starting at beginner and ending at expert.
At the start that you want to keep your task and process very structured.
This will help to avoid you becoming overwhelmed and keep you motivated.
Then as you become more experienced, you want to slowly move to unstructured learning and practice.
Tip 2: Two Actions To Improve Immediately
Finally, I want to talk about the two actions anyone can take to improve their learning straight away.
As I read the book, I realized that you could benefit from most of its practical tips by doing just two things.
Action 1: Join A Community
First, join a community of people working on things similar to yours.
Communities have loads of benefits:
- They help you to avoid your own biases when analysing progress
- They'll make trying new things less scary and support you through the ups and downs
- They can provide regular feedback and help you when you get stuck
Action 2: Get A Coach
And finally, get a coach:
- They also help with quick, corrective feedback
- They can help regulate the difficulty of your practice for you
- And you can learn directly from them
Be careful though: The book makes it clear that it's essential to find someone who can show you how to do things rather than just tell you.
Conclusion
Funnily enough, I read this book as part of my research into creating the perfect environment for helping people accomplish hard things.
When I say hard things, here are some examples:
- Launching a business
- Learning a high value skill
- Completing a career change
Luckily, it reinforced what I'd found from my own research: community and direct coaching are some of the most effective systems for success.
This new project will be announced in the next couple of weeks.
So, if you want to stay up to date about that project, just click here and I'll make sure you're the first to know when it's ready.
As always, thanks for taking the time to read this email and I hope you found it useful.
Have a great week!
Tim