What It's About

The author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Ultralearning explores why it’s so difficult for people to learn new skills, arguing that three factors must be met to make advancement possible, and offering 12 maxims to improve the way we learn.

Life revolves around learning—in school, at our jobs, even in the things we do for fun. Yet learning is often mysterious. Sometimes it comes fairly effortlessly: quickly finding our way around a new neighborhood or picking up the routine at a new job. In other cases, it’s a slog. We may spend hours in the library, yet still not do well on an exam. We may want to switch companies, industries, or even professions, but not feel qualified to make the leap. Decades spent driving a car, typing on a computer, or hitting a tennis ball don’t reliably make us much better at them. Improvement can be fickle, if it comes at all.

In Get Better At Anything, Scott Young argues that there are three key factors in helping us learn:

See—Most of what we know comes from other people. The ease of learning from others determines, to a large extent, how quickly we can improve.

Do—Mastery requires practice. But not just any practice will do. Our brains are fantastic effort-saving machines, which can be both a tremendous advantage and a curse.

Feedback—Progress requires constant adjustment. Not just the red stroke of a teacher’s pen, but the results of hands-on experience.

When we’re able to learn from the example of other people, practice extensively ourselves, and get reliable feedback, rapid progress results. Yet, when one, or all, of these factors is inhibited, improvement often becomes impossible. Using research and real-life examples, Young breaks down these elements into twelve simple maxims. Whether you’re a student studying for an exam, an employee facing a new skill at work, or just want to get better at something you’re interested in, his insights will help you do it better.

My Thoughts

Wholesome. I really like it. I learn ’t a lot. It opened my mind to a whole new perspective on subjects such as getting a coach and it’s purpose. I am enlightened to see the immense benefits of unlearning.

Coach ⇒ monitors performance and suggest adjustments.

I ⇒ focus solely on performance.

Notes

What’s in it for me? Three keys to unlocking peak performance.

There’s s no limit to what you can learn, from quantum physics to backgammon to Hungarian or silversmithing.

The important thing is not what you learn, but how you learn it. Whatever the skill is that you want to acquire, you’ll learn it quicker and better if you understand the learning process itself.

Three key learning steps that are crucial for acquiring and perfecting any new skill.

1. Seeking how the experts do it.
2. Doing it for yourself.
3. Seeking feedback to improve your performance.

Once you’ve grasped how these steps influence learning outcomes, you’ll be able to leverage them in your own learning journey.

Want to perform better? See, do, and seek feedback.

See, do, and seek feedback.

First, we learn better when we see what the experts do.

Next, we need to do the thing we want to get better at, over and over again, in order to improve,

And finally, we improve our performance through incorporating feedback.

See: Exploit the power of imitation

Humans have an amazing capacity to remember things, but our working memory has finite cognitive powers. Think of memory as filing cabinet, where all kinds of important information is stored.

Ordering random letters into easily recognizable acronyms makes them so much easier to remember. They’ve been filed into manageable folders. The brain can do this for us by identifying categories or patterns across a range of information.

It would seem that in the early stage of learning a new skill, copying could be even more effective than trying to do something yourself. Later on in your learning journey, however, pivoting to discovery-based learning will let you deepen your skills and understanding.

To come back to the desk filing cabinet simile, learning something new is like staring down at a desk covered in random bits of paper. Copying from an expert lets you see how all this new, overwhelming information can be sorted into folders.

Here are four ways in which you can integrate copying into your own learning journey.

1. Seek out worked examples : ⇒ Look for resources that show solutions, not just problems — these will help you assimilate fast.
2. Reorganize confusing materials: ⇒ Streamline learning materials so you're not wasting your cognitive load trying to comprehend them.
3. Use the power of pre-training: ⇒ Before tackline a new skill, try and break it down into components, ⇒ Then try and perfect each component separately.
4. Introduce complexity slowly: ⇒ The more expert you become, the more complexity your working memory will be able to hold at one time. ⇒ Start simple, then build in complexity gradually.

Do: leverage productivity to achieve breakthroughs

Quantity matters more than quality. Or, more accurately, quantity begets quality.

Why does productivity play such an important factor in creative success?

Well, though we like to think of creativity as spontaneous, it’s actually like any other form of expertise.

The more you practice it, the better you get.

3 strategies to maximize your creative output without giving up work-life balance.

1. Adopt an assembly line mentality : ⇒You can’t control the random ways in which an inspiration strikes. ⇒ But there are probably components of your creative work that can be soiled and automated.
2. Let ideas ripen: ⇒ Unripe ideas are often missing components. ⇒ Pursuing unripe ideas is time consuming. ⇒ Wait until ideas are fully fledged before you try and put them into action. You’ll save time and maximize productivity.
3. Spend less time on non-creative work. ⇒ Being creative often requires you to set boundaries around non-creative commitments. ⇒ Try blocking out calendar time that’s devoted solely to creative work. ⇒ Refuse obligations unconnected to your creative aims.

Feedback: learn how to unlearn

An elite performer doesn’t just continuously learn through feedback, but actually uses feedback to unlearn skills and strategies that have been successful in the past.

Why should you unlearn?

• Unlearning stops skills from becoming habits.
• Unpacking habitual skills is the best way to continue refining and improving.
• Unlearning helps you avoid falling into the trap of functional fixedness. The term is coined by the Psychologist Carl Drunker, and it describes how perceiving an object in one way can prevent you from imagining other potential uses for it.

Learning to see things one way can actually stop you f rom perceiving their full potential.

Unlearning requires you to confront flaws in your understanding and your skill set. It can feel uncomfortable and often entails a period of poor performance before any improvement becomes apparent. It is also the most effective way to ensure that, once you have reached an elite level of expertise, you stay at that elite level.

Three (3) ways to start unlearning.

1. Impose new constraints to combat old habits: ⇒ When you’ve habitually performed a skill one way for years, it becomes cognitively ingrained. ⇒ Your brain won’t let you try it a new way. ⇒ Placing constraints on how you do something helps you force your brain to approach things differently.
2. Find a coach: ⇒ Unlearning requires you to perform a skill and monitor your performance at the same time. That takes up a lot of mental bandwidth. ⇒ Finding a coach who can monitor your performance for you and suggest adjustments based on real-time feedback allows you to focus solely on your performance.

The most effective way to skill up is through seeing what the experts do, practicing in the right conditions and continuously seeking feedback that allows you to adjust and improve your skillset. By following these three essential steps, you’ll be able to master any new skill, regardless of what it is.

Don’t rebuild — renovate: ⇒ Unlearning skills doesn’t always require you to start from scratch. ⇒ If your skills are built on a solid foundation, aim to augment your performance rather than overhauling it completely.

Quotes

The most effective way to skill up is through seeing what the experts do, practicing in the right conditions and continuously seeking feedback that allows you to adjust and improve your skillset.