# How to Learn Anything Faster Using Modern Research

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEDCHgZKXSY

[00:00] The world has changed a lot over the last hundred years, but the way we learn hasn't changed much at all.
[00:06] Right now, there are learning rules that are so common and so widely accepted that almost every person believes them to be true.
[00:13] But decades of research has shown that following these rules can be a complete waste of time.
[00:18] These are the ancient learning rules that 90% of the population is following for absolutely no reason.
[00:22] And in this video, I'm going to share with you six of the worst, most outdated pieces of advice that you need to stop following.
[00:30] So, starting with rule number one, to get good at something, practice it more.
[00:34] You have probably heard this rule and follow it all the time.
[00:38] It seems like common sense, but as a learning coach who spent almost 15 years coaching thousands of people on how to learn new skills and knowledge faster, I've seen that following this rule can your learning potential.
[00:47] Now, this rule is true to an extent.
[00:50] There are some strong research behind it.
[00:52] You may have heard of the famous Berlin violinist study in 1993 which was published by the Swedish psychologist Ericson out at Florida.
[01:01] State University.
[01:03] He studied 30 elite violinists at Berlin Music Academy and found that those with the highest level of performance also had accumulated about 10,000 hours of practice by age 20.
[01:14] And this idea that the more you practice, the more skilled you become became incredibly popular in Malcolm Gladwell's best-selling book, Outliers.
[01:23] But here's the issue.
[01:26] If more practice means you become more skilled, then what we should see is that the people who have greater levels of practice are in fact the greatest level of performers.
[01:36] But in reality, this is not the case.
[01:38] This is not the case at all.
[01:40] A really great meta analysis done in 2014 looking at 88 different studies found that deliberate practice accounts for only a very small amount of the variation in actual performance and skill.
[01:53] In fields like music, games like chess and sport, it accounted for the greatest level of variation.
[01:59] So up to 20% of the performance could be accounted for based
[02:03] on the amount of practice they had done.
[02:04] But this number drops to only 1% when we look at professional tasks for example like computer programming.
[02:11] So in simple terms what this means is that if you are an everyday professional and not a competitive musician or an athlete or a professional chess player the amount you practice only changes how good your skill level is by about 1%.
[02:25] And in reality, how you practice is much more important than how much you practice after a certain threshold.
[02:34] And in fact, Erikson, the researcher who published that 10,000 hours study before, he himself has gone on to say that his work has been massively misinterpreted over the years.
[02:45] And so, if you're trying to get better at something and you think the reason you're not getting better at it is because you don't have enough time to practice more, that's probably not true.
[02:54] What helps you more is understanding how to practice to make use of the time that you do have.
[02:57] Which actually brings us to the second ancient rule which says to become an expert,
[03:05] focus on just one thing.
[03:09] This idea that narrowly focusing on one domain and then just obsessively practicing over it actually originates from that same study as before, the Berlin violinist one.
[03:17] If you have limited hours in a day and you need to accumulate your 10,000 hours of practice to become elite, then it naturally makes sense that you should concentrate all of those hours in just one thing.
[03:29] Now, in more recent years, people have started challenging this a lot more publicly, largely because of a very, very popular and frankly incredible book called Range written by David Epste.
[03:38] By the way, that's David Epstein, not related.
[03:43] If you haven't read range, one of the main points that he says is that uh for a lot of fields and domains that don't have fixed rules and boundaries like uh music and sports and chess, getting good at it actually requires you to be a lot more generalized in the way that you practice.
[03:59] Being hyper specialized in just one domain can actually make it harder for you to get good at it.
[04:05] And this is completely true. Modern research
[04:07] clearly shows that to get good at something, you want to have more generalized practice.
[04:12] In fact, there's a really interesting piece of research on learning curves which was published in 2015 which shows that you get diminishing returns with practice, but it's not about how many hours is good and then after a certain point you get diminishing returns.
[04:30] It's actually about how long you practice using the same strategy.
[04:35] So, if you continue to use the same practice strategy over and over and over again, you start getting diminishing returns from that.
[04:40] And once that happens, it's actually better for you to change the strategy or change the angle.
[04:44] And so what I see as a learning coach is that a lot of people will learn new skills and during the first maybe 100 hours of practice.
[04:50] It's an arbitrary number, but during that time they may get really really good results and good progress practicing a certain way and then they plateau.
[04:59] But the reason they're plateauing is because they're just practicing it the same way.
[05:03] They're not applying it in different context.
[05:07] they're not challenging themselves and they're not realizing that the thing that is holding them back now is not the same thing that was holding them back 100 hours ago.
[05:15] So the way we practice needs to accommodate for that.
[05:17] And so when you practice your skill in lots of different ways, not only do you improve that skill faster, but you also start building conditional knowledge, which is understanding when to use different types of skills in different contexts.
[05:33] And it's this conditional knowledge that really separates an expert from essentially just a really good technician.
[05:39] As a takeaway for you, a quick tip that you can use in your own practice is to just have a learning log and just track three things.
[05:45] What you are practicing, why you are practicing it in this way, and what you are learning from that practice.
[05:53] If you're not clear about what you're practicing, it means your practice is likely going to be too random.
[05:58] If you don't know why you are practicing it in that way, it means that your brain is not ready to receive the learnings from that.
[06:04] Taking the time to build a clear rationale for
[06:09] what type of practice you think is going to be effective for you is what allows you to refine your practice strategy over time.
[06:15] And if you're not learning anything from your practice, it suggests that you are hitting diminishing returns and you need to re-evaluate your practice strategy or your rationale.
[06:23] Now, so far these have been two learning rules around learning skills and developing competence.
[06:26] But what about when it comes to learning new information, gaining new knowledge?
[06:29] This is where ancient rule number three comes in, which is to learn something properly, seek to understand, not to memorize.
[06:40] Growing up, going through school, I heard this all the time.
[06:43] Memorizing is not real learning.
[06:45] Understanding is real learning.
[06:47] And I'm not saying that this is wrong, but the way that people interpret this is very wrong.
[06:52] So yes, memorization is bad.
[06:56] It's undesirable.
[06:59] For most of human history, up until pretty much the very early 1900s, learning in the entire education system was all about rope memorization.
[07:06] And it's the work of some really great uh researchers and academics like Dwey
[07:11] Bloom from Bloom's taxonomy.
[07:14] Uh they pushed back against this really hard and they got people to really focus on just trying to understand to create learning rather than just rope memorization.
[07:23] So what's the issue with that?
[07:25] Well, the issue is that most people still believe this to be true, but research from around the 1970s onwards and especially accelerating through the 80s and '90s found that seeking to understand something is actually not a very efficient way of understanding something.
[07:42] This was for me one of the most powerful realizations and frame shifts both as a learning coach, but also in my personal journey trying to become a more efficient learner.
[07:50] Let me draw this out for you.
[07:52] In order for your brain to create a strong and robust memory using the data and information it consumes, your brain has to do something which is called deep processing.
[08:05] Deep processing is basically your brain creating meaning out of this data.
[08:09] It's looking for patterns.
[08:11] It's connecting things.
[08:11] It's developing what in the
[08:13] research we call a schema for understanding.
[08:15] And so when your schema is well connected, it's an entire network.
[08:20] It's stronger.
[08:23] The memory is more durable, which means you forget it less easily.
[08:27] And you can use that knowledge and that memory for more complex problem solving.
[08:30] And the outcome, the symptom of when you do this deep processing and build durable highquality memory is that you develop understanding.
[08:43] This understanding is a symptom.
[08:46] It's a byproduct of the deep processing.
[08:48] Now the alternative to deep processing is called shallow processing.
[08:53] But this is basically when you're not really thinking about the information very deeply and the neural patterns of thinking that your brain is going through are not very effective for producing memory.
[09:03] So here the memory that creates is often very weak uh very fragile, very brittle.
[09:09] It means that you're going to forget it more quickly.
[09:13] you're needing to spend more and more time just constantly relearning things
[09:16] because you can feel that this knowledge is slipping away.
[09:18] And even when you can recall it, you're not really going to be able to use that uh in in many ways other than just sort of regurgitating the fact.
[09:27] Now, when we come to memorizing or just kind of repeating something over and over again until it sticks, this is an example of shallow processing.
[09:35] In fact, it it doesn't really get more shallow uh than this.
[09:37] And so what this means is that no matter how much you do this rope memorization, the memory that you build is never really going to be that good.
[09:45] It doesn't matter how many times you use a a broken bad machine, the product of that machine is always going to be faulty.
[09:53] And the counterintuitive part which I've been talking about for years with controversy even though it has been well established in the research for decades is that when you try to understand something that you're reading that's your focus.
[10:06] You're reading something and you are just trying to understand it.
[10:09] This does not invoke deep processing.
[10:13] So intent to
[10:19] understand
[10:20] even though it's slightly deeper than wrote memorization it is still shallow processing
[10:26] and in fact if you want to understand something that you are hearing or reading you don't even need to want to understand it.
[10:34] There's a great piece of research that was done in 1969 where the researchers got a list of words and they got the participants to try to understand and remember this list of words.
[10:48] They then got another group to just rate whether the word felt pleasant or unpleasant to them.
[10:55] And so this might seem like a very random experiment to do.
[10:57] What does rating the pleasantness of a word have to do with learning?
[11:02] Well, the thing is when you rate whether something is pleasant or not, you are actually having to compare that word with lots of other things.
[11:11] Your perception of that word, your prior experiences, what is important or pleasant or unpleasant for you.
[11:16] And so it forces you to think about that word
[11:21] in the context of lots of other ideas.
[11:23] This creates a mini network, a mini schema.
[11:26] And so this is a easy entrylevel way of accessing deep processing.
[11:30] And the thing is this second group that was rating based on pleasantness, they were not instructed to try and remember the list at all.
[11:33] The researchers then measured the recall on that list of words.
[11:36] And they found that the group that was simply just rating the words on pleasantness performed at the same level or better than the first one whose entire purpose was just to try and remember and understand the list.
[11:41] And so the takeaway for you is that it's not that memorization is not real learning and understanding is real learning.
[11:43] Memory and understanding are byproducts of real learning.
[11:46] Real learning is about making comparisons and evaluations and forming networks of connected knowledge.
[11:48] And any strategy that allows you to
[12:22] achieve that is going to be more effective than any strategy that does not achieve that.
[12:29] And what I'll do in the description below is that I'll leave a link to some of the strategies that I think are the best, the easiest to learn that you can kind of pick up in just a few minutes that I think are really impactful.
[12:39] I've been using them in my coaching for a long time, but they allow you to tap into that deep processing.
[12:43] So, the link is Oh, wait.
[12:46] The the link that you see is to my newsletter.
[12:48] Oh, that's because my newsletter is where I teach some of those strategies and it's completely free to join.
[12:52] I send these to you every week.
[12:54] They are completely written by me and they are the key most important insights and strategies that I think that if you are on this journey of learning to learn, this is what I wish I knew 15 years ago when I was first starting.
[13:10] If you found this video insightful so far, you're going to love the newsletter.
[13:11] So, if you want to join, the link is in the description below.
[13:14] Now, continuing on from this theme of things we learn in school that we really need to unlearn is rule number four.
[13:18] to remember what you learn.
[13:22] Write it down.
[13:26] Now again, for most of modern civilization, learning was about writing things down.
[13:33] Often just copying it down again and again until you just remember it.
[13:39] Strategies like write it out 10 times, 20 times, 100 times were literal strategies that were recommended and taught for hundreds of years.
[13:49] And the theory was that the motor action of writing will help to encode the memory.
[13:55] Just to give some contrast, this was the best learning strategy around about the same time that doctors thought the best strategy for keeping yourself awake was to shoot yourself up with cocaine.
[14:08] So our knowledge has progressed a fair bit from then.
[14:11] And we now know that simply the act of writing down information much like wrote memorization or the intent to memorize is something that creates shallow processing.
[14:20] So writing is also not an effective learning strategy.
[14:23] Now here's where things get confusing
[14:28] because in 2014 Mueller and Oppenheimer two researchers published this research which was famously called the pen is Mightier than the keyboard.
[14:37] And if you've been in the learning science space for more than a day, you've probably heard of this study because it was massively popular.
[14:44] And what they found was that long form handwriting with a pen and paper outperforms people who type their notes digitally.
[14:52] And so this idea that writing things out creates memory and learning had this renewed sort of uh energy to it and became even more widely spread.
[15:02] But the mechanism was completely wrong.
[15:06] The reason that writing long form out performed people that were typing their notes is not because of the act of writing it long form.
[15:13] It's because you can only write so fast.
[15:16] Most of the time someone is not teaching you things so slowly that you can write it down as they speak.
[15:26] When someone is speaking to
[15:28] you at a normal speed, you can't keep up.
[15:30] And so what do you do?
[15:33] you are forced to paraphrase, to summarize, to use keywords.
[15:37] You actually have to think more about what the person is saying so that you can condense your thoughts down into your notes.
[15:45] And that deeper thinking, which is actually a necessary byproduct of the fact that writing is slow, actually triggers more deep processing.
[15:58] And this is the reason that I have a huge problem with uh these AI uh like voice recording notetaking apps that are marketing themselves as like the perfect note takingaking app because there's zero friction.
[16:13] You're never going to miss another work.
[16:15] It's perfect for students.
[16:16] This is completely against the evidence.
[16:19] If it's about actually learning and and not just, you know, like documenting thoughts or whatever it is or like, you know, a productivity tool, if it's about learning, I would
[16:29] not use one of those apps if they paid me to.
[16:31] In fact, they've tried to pay me to.
[16:33] Like, I get emails from these companies every single week saying that they want to sponsor me for a video.
[16:38] So, the next time you are struggling to keep up and you're frantically writing things down, remember this key takeaway.
[16:42] Don't write to remember, write to think.
[16:44] Spend less time writing.
[16:49] Don't try to keep up and spend more time thinking about what you're going to write.
[16:54] Go from the person who is frantically trying to write everything to the person who is calmly thinking and then occasionally jotting down a few words.
[17:02] When you realize that writing itself doesn't create learning, but it can be a valuable thinking tool.
[17:09] It completely flips the way that you use writing as a strategy.
[17:14] And as soon as you do that, you're probably going to run into the next ancient rule, which is number five.
[17:19] If something feels difficult to learn, fix the material.
[17:26] If I'm teaching you something and you're struggling to
[17:30] understand what I'm saying, the issue is that I'm not very good at explaining it.
[17:34] And that may be true, and I'm not trying to dodge responsibility here, but it might not be true.
[17:38] In fact, if I'm explaining it badly, it might actually be good for you.
[17:42] So back in the 1800s and 1900s when the education system as we know it was building a lot of its foundations education system had a very sort of factory model to it.
[17:51] You can see this reflected in the research back then a lot of the research even in fact to this day like 90% of all the research around learning and learning science is looking at it from an instructor's perspective.
[18:05] The schools are a factory the students are the raw materials.
[18:08] So there's a lot of emphasis on how do you teach and design lessons that are so engaging and so to the point and teaching this content in the most manageable way possible.
[18:20] So if you ask a student, hey, how are you finding this lesson?
[18:22] And they say it's kind of hard to follow, that's an issue with the way that you're teaching it.
[18:29] And to an
[18:31] extent, this is true.
[18:33] Like a good teacher is able to make a topic more accessible for the learners.
[18:38] But this is something that I personally believe to this day is wildly misunderstood by most people including educators and teachers.
[18:47] When something is difficult to learn, it just means it's difficult to learn.
[18:54] And getting to the point where as a learner you can look at this difficult thing and you now know how to think about it in such a way that it's not so difficult.
[19:08] That is the process of learning.
[19:10] That's where the value comes from.
[19:10] If you go to a gym and see a heavy weight on the ground, the reason the weight is difficult to lift is because the weight is heavy.
[19:18] It's not the manufacturer's fault.
[19:20] It's not even your fault as the person trying to lift the weight.
[19:24] You can't blame yourself for being weak.
[19:26] I mean, you you can if you have a really toxic approach to to motivation, I guess, but the strength
[19:32] you gain from training to be able to lift that heavy weight is actually the whole point.
[19:39] And there's a lot of great research around Vigotssky's zone of proximal development or uh John Swella's cognitive load theory which explains that effective learning involves discomfort and a lot of thinking and mental effort and all of that is actually necessary for your brain to form these durable memories.
[19:57] the idea that you never learn how to do this deep processing well if you're always in the shallow end of the pool.
[20:08] Now, you might say, "But Justin, if a topic is difficult and a great teacher is able to make that more manageable for me, help me to enjoy it and navigate through that.
[20:18] I'm still learning how to think about the topic.
[20:21] It's just that it's easier for me to learn how to think about the topic because the teacher is teaching me how to think about it.
[20:26] And that's completely fair.
[20:29] And to that I would direct you to an incredible study from 2010 by Carolyn West called does
[20:36] professor quality matter. In this study
[20:38] they got a bunch of Air Force Academy
[20:41] students who are taking uh classes like
[20:43] introductory calculus and they measured
[20:45] two things. First of all, how well do
[20:48] they rate their professors? And number
[20:50] two, how well do these students perform?
[20:52] As you might expect, the professors who
[20:55] made things more manageable, who made it
[20:57] more interesting, got higher ratings.
[21:00] And these students of those professors
[21:04] did better in those courses. The
[21:06] students who were taking introductory
[21:07] calculus, but with professors that
[21:09] taught it in a really tedious uh
[21:12] difficult way, they didn't do very well
[21:14] in that course. But here's where it gets
[21:16] interesting. They then did a follow-up
[21:19] to see how those students perform in
[21:21] later more advanced calculus. And what
[21:24] they found was the opposite. Students
[21:26] who were in the higherrated professor's
[21:30] class
[21:32] actually underperformed in the more
[21:34] advanced stages. And so the idea is that
[21:37] when you're going down and learning
[21:39] something for long enough at a certain
[21:42] point, it's going to be difficult. It's
[21:45] going to be so difficult that it doesn't
[21:48] matter how hard someone else tries to
[21:50] make it easy for you to understand. If
[21:53] you haven't figured out the patterns of
[21:55] thinking and deep processing to allow
[21:58] you to make sense of that and form
[22:00] durable memories, you are going to
[22:03] struggle when it gets to that stage. If
[22:05] you're learning to swim in the shallow
[22:07] end of the pool and you never take your
[22:09] pool floaties off, you are going to
[22:12] drown in the ocean. It is only by
[22:14] learning the patterns when it is easier
[22:17] that we gain the skills and tools to
[22:20] succeed when it is harder. Now, FYI,
[22:22] there's a lot of nuance here. It's not
[22:23] like there's no such thing as a good or
[22:25] a bad teacher, but getting into all of
[22:27] that nuance is a little bit much for
[22:29] this video. So, what's the takeaway?
[22:31] What does this mean for you? It means
[22:32] the next time you're learning something
[22:33] and you feel that it's difficult to
[22:35] understand or it's hard to manage, don't
[22:37] blame the material. Don't blame the
[22:38] resource or the textbook or your teacher
[22:40] or your mentor, your supervisor or your
[22:42] job conditions. Instead, what you want
[22:43] to do is you want to try to deliberately
[22:46] unlock new patterns of thinking that
[22:49] might stick and be more compatible with
[22:52] this topic. And two great strategies
[22:53] that you can use to do that is creating
[22:56] analogies and trying to teach it in a
[22:58] simplified form. The reason these two
[23:00] strategies are number one so famous and
[23:02] well recommended and number two
[23:04] genuinely effective is because when you
[23:06] create analogies or you try to
[23:08] restructure something to teach it in a
[23:10] simpler way, it forces you to evaluate
[23:13] the material and look for these
[23:15] patterns. And of course, instead of
[23:18] trying to just force your pattern of
[23:20] thinking on topic, when you deliberately
[23:23] look for the patterns that are in a
[23:25] topic, you're more likely to see those
[23:28] patterns. If you've ever taught
[23:29] something to someone else and then that
[23:32] experience of teaching it gave you a
[23:33] light bulb moment, that's why. Now, this
[23:37] final ancient learning rule is the one
[23:39] that I think is actually the most
[23:40] important because it can actually be
[23:42] lifesaving. When we think about getting
[23:45] better at something, when we think about
[23:46] an expert, one of the hallmark features
[23:49] of an expert is that they have great
[23:52] intuition. The thing that for a novice
[23:54] they need to spend hours, days, even
[23:57] weeks trying to figure out, the expert
[23:59] is able to just intuitively understand
[24:02] and come to that same conclusion. And in
[24:04] order to get to a point where you are
[24:06] that expert with that level of
[24:08] intuition, you need to accumulate a huge
[24:11] amount of experience. And this is the
[24:15] final ancient learning rule. Number six,
[24:18] get more experience to build better
[24:21] intuition. I come from a medical
[24:23] background. I used to be a doctor and in
[24:25] medicine pattern recognition and
[24:27] intuition goes a very long way. When
[24:30] someone comes into the emergency
[24:31] department and they have a certain
[24:32] constellation of signs and symptoms and
[24:35] you intuitively connect the dots and
[24:37] understand this person may have this
[24:39] condition that could save their life. On
[24:41] the other hand, if you didn't connect
[24:42] those dots, you may miss this. And one
[24:44] of the things that I felt was incredible
[24:46] as a especially as a medical student uh
[24:50] learning from these senior doctors was
[24:52] how quickly they were able to just see
[24:54] those patterns. And so there is a
[24:55] question how much better objectively is
[24:59] their intuition from mine and how much
[25:03] experience exactly is required to get it
[25:06] to that level. And of course just more
[25:10] experience isn't going to lead to that.
[25:12] That's pretty obvious. So, what kind of
[25:15] experience would allow me to build that
[25:17] kind of intuition more quickly? And
[25:19] there's actually a landmark paper that
[25:21] was published in 2009 by two incredible
[25:24] researchers called the conditions for
[25:27] intuitive expertise. This was published
[25:29] by Carnean and Klein, which by the way,
[25:31] this is like the avengers of uh
[25:33] cognitive science uh coming together to
[25:36] co-author this paper. And the thing that
[25:38] makes this particular paper so
[25:39] interesting is that these two
[25:41] researchers are on sort of opposite ends
[25:45] of the spectrum. Carnean is famous for
[25:50] publishing and researching around
[25:51] cognitive biases. The idea that the
[25:54] human brain is riddled with so many of
[25:56] these biases that any judgments that a
[25:59] human forms is almost always going to be
[26:01] biased and it is incredibly difficult to
[26:04] escape those biases. He's basically
[26:06] saying intuition is frankly overrated.
[26:09] Klene, on the other hand, is famous for
[26:12] researching that intuition is real and
[26:15] experts do have true, valuable, accurate
[26:18] intuition that they've accumulated
[26:20] across the years. And what they found
[26:22] was that experience always produces
[26:26] confidence. Experience does not always
[26:30] produce competence. And there are some
[26:33] conditions that are necessary for
[26:35] experience to translate into accurate
[26:38] intuition. And there are two conditions.
[26:40] The first one is that you need to have a
[26:42] high validity environment. This means
[26:44] that there has to be very stable
[26:47] patterns and stable cues. The Q can
[26:50] always be interpreted in this way. And
[26:52] so domains like chess, accounting,
[26:56] firefighting, these are situations where
[26:59] there are very clear Q interpretation
[27:03] pairings. And so intuition builds with
[27:06] experience. You get better at
[27:07] recognizing the Q's. The interpretation
[27:09] is always pretty stable. You get faster
[27:12] at making those judgments. On the other
[27:14] hand, a low validity environment means
[27:16] that that Q interpretation pairing is
[27:18] much weaker or more variable. So a great
[27:20] example of this is stock trading or
[27:22] stock picking. In fact, uh research
[27:24] famously actually shows that experienced
[27:27] stock pickers are no better at
[27:28] predicting the outcomes of their trades
[27:30] than complete noviceses. But like I
[27:32] said, experience always produces
[27:34] confidence. So experienced traders are
[27:37] often more confident in their
[27:38] predictions even if they have the same
[27:40] chance of being wrong. So that was the
[27:42] first condition, the validity of the
[27:44] environment. Now the second condition is
[27:46] actually having the opportunity to
[27:47] learn. So if you are a firefighter for
[27:50] example and you assess that a situation
[27:52] is dangerous and then the floor
[27:54] collapses you are immediately getting
[27:56] feedback. If you're a chess player, you
[27:57] make a move, your piece gets captured,
[27:59] you immediately got feedback. Now let's
[28:01] say that you are a clinical psychologist
[28:04] and you are recognizing a certain cue
[28:07] from the way that they're speaking, the
[28:08] things that they're saying, uh certain
[28:10] behaviorisms that make you think this is
[28:13] the interpretation. You may not get
[28:15] feedback on whether that was accurate or
[28:16] not for weeks. And between now and then,
[28:20] there are so many other factors and
[28:21] variables at play. It becomes very slow
[28:24] and difficult to get accurate feedback,
[28:26] which means that the amount of
[28:28] experience you actually need to develop
[28:31] accurate intuition goes up
[28:33] exponentially. And so, what does this
[28:34] mean for you? How can you develop
[28:37] faster, more accurate intuition? Here's
[28:39] the takeaway. Do those two checks on
[28:42] yourself first. Ask yourself, am I in a
[28:44] high validity environment? And am I
[28:46] getting the opportunity to learn with
[28:49] timely, accurate feedback? If you're in
[28:51] an environment or type of work that
[28:53] doesn't have stable repeating patterns,
[28:57] where the Q almost always represents a
[29:00] certain type of interpretation, then the
[29:01] most important first realization is to
[29:03] understand that as you get more
[29:06] confident in your predictions, it does
[29:08] not necessarily mean you're more likely
[29:10] to be right. This at the very least can
[29:12] prevent errors from overconfidence by
[29:15] giving you the opportunity to have
[29:17] processes and double checks and be more
[29:19] attentive to your decision-making
[29:21] processes. If you work in a high stakes
[29:23] environment, this realization alone
[29:25] could be life-changing or life-saving.
[29:27] Next, if you feel like you do not have
[29:29] the adequate opportunity to learn, what
[29:31] can you do to get faster, more accurate
[29:34] feedback more often? And just remember,
[29:37] getting feedback from someone who's more
[29:39] senior than you doesn't necessarily mean
[29:42] that their intuition is more accurate
[29:44] than yours. So you do have to be careful
[29:46] in how you interpret that feedback. One
[29:49] of the frameworks that I use myself and
[29:51] also in my own team, we use this type of
[29:53] language is how confident are we in our
[29:57] conclusions? If I do well at something,
[29:59] how confident am I to say that it's
[30:02] because of this reason? Could it be any
[30:05] of these other factors as well? This
[30:08] again prevents us from making the
[30:10] overconfidence error of attributing our
[30:13] success or failure to a particular
[30:14] factor just because we intuitively think
[30:17] that that's the reason why we did good
[30:19] or bad. And even if the feedback is hard
[30:21] to interpret, going from no feedback to
[30:25] some feedback or going from delayed
[30:27] feedback to less delayed feedback is
[30:30] usually going to be better for your
[30:32] learning rate. And as a learning coach,
[30:33] I see this very clearly all the time. My
[30:36] students and clients who I'll teach them
[30:38] a learning technique, the ones who can
[30:39] master that in two or three weeks are
[30:43] practicing it and reflecting on it every
[30:44] single day. Whereas the ones that are
[30:47] struggling with it after months or even
[30:49] years are barely reflecting at all. And
[30:51] so if you can cut down that feedback
[30:53] cycle from once every fortnight to once
[30:56] a day, you can sort of 10x your rate of
[31:00] learning. So, those are six of some of
[31:01] the most damaging learning rules that
[31:03] you need to stop following. If you
[31:05] enjoyed it, remember you can join my
[31:07] newsletter for more stuff like this for
[31:09] free. Links in the description. And if
[31:10] you want to learn how to build an entire
[31:11] learning system that avoids these rules,
[31:14] then check out this video here where I
[31:17] break down how I think about learning
[31:18] and building learning systems as a
[31:20] learning coach. Hope you enjoyed this
[31:22] video. Thanks so much for watching and
[31:23] I'll see you in the next one.