Today I’m going to teach you how to learn skills quickly. I’ve used this method to learn copywriting, new programming languages, hard mathematical techniques and even cooking.<\/p>\n
What matters more, the research shows that without this key method, many skill-building practices fail, with people remaining at the same level forever.<\/p>\n
First, a Quick Announcement<\/strong><\/p>\n This bootcamp is just a sample of a much larger course I’ve been developing for three years, Learning on Steroids. It combines the best ideas in learning and productivity, along with a system to make sure those techniques stick long-term.<\/p>\n On Wednesday, October 31st, at 10am PST, I’ll be reopening Learning on Steroids for the first time in over one year. I’ll hold registration for one week (and for a limited number of seats) and then I’ll close it again until next year.<\/p>\n The price is student-friendly, and I’ll give you more details as we get closer to reopening. Now back to today’s email…<\/p>\n Why it’s not 10,000 hours (and what learning means instead)<\/strong><\/p>\n In Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book, Outliers, he popularized the idea that it takes about 10,000 hours to achieve greatness in a field.<\/p>\n A common misconception of this was that, in order to be great in a field, you just had to put in 10,000 hours of practice. This isn’t what Gladwell meant and it isn’t what the research implies.<\/p>\n Instead, Gladwell found that, of the successful people, a common tendency was to have invested at least ten thousand hours of practice. Note the emphasis: greatness required 10,000 hours, of the people who ended up being successful. Nothing was said about the people who have put in far more than 10,000 hours, but remain mediocre.<\/p>\n The Surgeon Paradox<\/strong><\/p>\n The greatest disservice of this meme was that it encouraged people to think that, with enough time, you can become great at anything. What this misses is how you spend the time. Indeed the research shows the opposite–investing time in the wrong learning activities can have zero effect.<\/p>\n Dr. Anders Ericsson (from whom Gladwell’s research was based) notes that the opposite can often occur. Doctors generally perform worse the longer they are out of medical school. Far from hours spent being a boon to ability, in this case it actually detracts. [source]<\/p>\n What’s interesting is a prominent exception: surgeons. While most doctors’ abilities suffer with time, surgeons continue to improve.<\/p>\n This paradox, however, illustrates the keys necessary to learn skills better.<\/p>\n What Makes Surgeons Different<\/strong><\/p>\n Two distinctions allows surgeons to continue to improve their skills while most doctors did not: specific goals and immediate feedback.<\/p>\n First, surgeons need to learn new surgical techniques, which forces them to set highly specific goals with measurable outcomes. Second, surgeons will usually receive very quick feedback on whether their attempt was successful. General practitioners, in contrast, may wait years before learning whether a particular consult was successful.<\/p>\n Now at first this may sound obvious. Aren’t goals and feedback something everyone knows is important to practice?<\/p>\n While it sounds obvious in theory, I routinely see people make the same mistakes in practice which stifles their progress.<\/p>\n Consider the example of students who do practice questions without solutions, or they do large sets of questions only checking solutions after completing the entire batch. Both of these are inefficient from the perspective of immediate feedback.<\/p>\n What about the writer who sets a goal to “become a better writer”? What does that even mean? Vague goals like these aren’t at all the same breed as the specific, measurable ones that surgeons use to improve their skills.<\/p>\n How to Learn Skills Faster (and Avoid Getting Stuck)<\/strong><\/p>\n Another important distinction made by Ericsson’s work is the difference between work and practice. Many professionals confuse the two, and as a result their skills stagnate even though they’re investing considerable time.<\/p>\n Elite athletes don’t get better at their sport just by playing a lot of games. They do drills. Drills are highly focused activities designed to rapidly build proficiency in one minor detail of their sport.<\/p>\n Violinists don’t play every song start to finish to practice. Instead they identify the hardest sections and practice them endlessly until they’ve mastered them.<\/p>\n Yet, when we want to be a better programmer, writer or designer, what do we do? We just work. We don’t practice the highly specific, immediate-feedback oriented tasks necessary to cultivate mastery.<\/p>\n The fix is simple: if you want to get better you need to adopt the mentality of an elite athlete or musician and actually practice (as opposed to just work). Here’s a few examples of how this could be applied to different skills:<\/p>\n Programmer. Take on very small, and highly specific projects that force you to learn a new skill. If it’s a particular technique, the practice could be even shorter–build a tiny program that is constrained to force you to learn the new skill.<\/p>\n I’ve done this myself with my own programming. In learning Java development, I forced myself to use the visitor design pattern in a mini-project, even though it wasn’t the most obvious way to solve the problem for me.<\/p>\n Writer: Start a blog and write articles with particular constraints. Making the blog public gives you feedback. Writing the articles under specific constraints forces you to learn new micro-skills in your writing.<\/p>\n Music Composition: Compose something short, but force yourself to use an unfamiliar key. If it’s digital composition, try forcing yourself to use different audio processing techniques or instruments.<\/p>\n ACTION STEP: Day 4<\/strong><\/p>\n Deliberate practice is a huge topic and unfortunately one I can’t do justice in just one email. However, I want you to continue the momentum of the past days and do a small exercise in designing a practice project to improve your skill in an area.<\/p>\n Even if you don’t have time to execute the practice right now, I want you to get in the habit of thinking about how to structure such a project, so you’ll know what to do if you want to take your skills to the next level.<\/p>\n Here’s the steps for today:<\/p>\n That’s it for today. Tomorrow I’ll bring a new tactic and give you a few more details about Learning on Steroids, which will be reopening on Wednesday.<\/p>\n Best, Today I’m going to teach you how to learn skills quickly. I’ve used this method to learn copywriting, new programming languages, hard mathematical techniques and even cooking. What matters more, the research shows that without this key method, many skill-building practices fail, with people remaining at the same level forever. 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\n-Scott<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"