Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery - By Scott Young
Date read: 2024-06-11How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
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Great advice and techniques on how to improve your abilities to learn anything.
Contents:
My Notes
Begin any new project by finding out how competent people think about the problem. What do they view as the problem space? The major moves you can make to solve it? While knowing how to think about a problem doesn’t guarantee a solution, it is an essential first step.
When we have no one we can learn from and must find our way in an unfamiliar problem space, it helps to first explore the space rather than solve problems.
Exploring the problem space can proceed by trying things out and observing what happens, without deliberately trying to reach particular goals.
Learn by studying examples: a worked example is a problem with a solution, and all the intervening steps that the solver went through to reach the answer.
The redundancy effect refers to the surprising interference from duplicated information. A diagram that presents the same information both visually and textually results in worse learning outcomes than one that only offers one. It appears that redundant information, such as saying aloud the exact same thing written on your slides, creates an additional working memory burden because the viewer gets distracted filtering out the irrelevant reproductions. “Most people assume providing learners with additional information is at worst harmless, and might be beneficial,” Sweller argues. “Redundancy is anything but harmless. Providing unnecessary information may be a major reason for instructional failure.”
Application #1: Seek Out Worked Examples
Whenever you’re facing a new subject of any complexity, look for resources that have a lot of problems with worked-out solutions. In the beginning, these can offer a way to rapidly assimilate the problem-solving patterns. As you progress, you can cover up the answers to use them as practice opportunities.
Application #2: Reorganize Confusing Materials
Avoid the split-attention effect by reorganizing materials so that minimal mental manipulation is required. If you encounter a diagram that requires looking back and forth, recopy it so that the labels are right next to their referents. Comprehend formulas better by rewriting them with the plain-English meaning of each variable placed in context.
Application #3: Use the Power of Pretraining
Before embarking on a complex skill, see if it has any component parts that you’re likely to find difficult. If you can practice these components, committing them to memory, you’ll free up capacity for performing the skill later. Memorizing words in a new language with flash cards won’t solve the problems of speaking, but it will ease one thing you need to think about while doing so.
Application #4: Introduce Complexity Slowly
Since the working memory demands of a skill decrease with experience, this provides a rationale for starting on simple problems and proceeding to more complicated ones. Video game designers use this brilliantly when they design tutorial levels that have a few of the game’s features, allowing players to use goal-free exploration to learn the mechanics without laborious instruction. As you progress, introduce new complexities in a steady fashion.
Application #5: Put Craft Before Creativity
It is easier to see further when you have first mastered the techniques. It is only possible to bend the rules when you know which ones can be broken.
Mastery learning breaks the curriculum down into cycles of teaching, practice, and feedback. Units are first taught, and then students are given a test. Unlike the typical tests given in classrooms, however, these ones are not for grades. Students are not penalized for failing to do well on these tests. Instead, the tests are used purely for assessing which students have mastered the material and which have not. Those students who have not mastered the material are then given new explanations and practice to ensure that they can pass the test before moving on. Those who pass the first time are given enrichment activities instead. While mastery learning can take more time initially, proponents argue that the total time spread over the entire semester is usually only slightly more than a typical classroom. That is because, having their difficulties corrected early, many more students are able to follow the classroom lectures and assignments in later units without difficulty.
Another major tenet of mastery learning is that the material shouldn’t be taught the same way twice. If a student struggled with some of the initial lessons, the same explanations shouldn’t simply be provided again. Instead, students who are working through a unit they struggled on should be provided with new material to try to present the information in a different way. Different examples, explanations, or practice activities ensure that if the previous route to learning was a dead end, those students will have an alternative path.
Success, not failure, is the best teacher. The outcome of repeated early failure experiences is more likely learned helplessness or avoidance, not grit. Failure, when it is helpful, tends to be built on top of a history of previous successes. It’s only when we believe we can eventually succeed within a pursuit that persisting through failure even makes sense. While it may be beneficial to have some humbling moments in a long process of mastery, both as a corrective to overconfidence and to make our motivation robust in the face of difficulties, repeated, sustained failures are hardly motivating.
By getting the right foundation, and following it up with extensive practice, we can free up mental resources for handling more complex tasks. Therefore, before declaring that you’re unfit to learn a particular subject, you should always ask yourself if you’ve actually mastered the prerequisite material that’s assumed before you start.
Hire Help - get a professional coach to provide you with feedback and course correction.
When we lack confidence, the key is to build a positive track record, starting with easier, simpler tasks, and getting plenty of help from other people who can do what we want to do.
Experts in medicine, programming, electronics, athletics, and music all show enhanced recall of naturally occurring patterns, but their advantage sharply declines when the same information is presented in formats atypical for the discipline.
Ask experts for stories, not advice. The Critical Decision Method focuses on asking experts to recount a particularly challenging incident.
A good protocol is to act like a journalist preparing for a story—focus on gathering facts, establishing a timeline, and walking through the decisions step-by-step. This provides the raw material for asking follow-up questions to investigate why the expert made certain choices. A focus on the facts tends to highlight details of a story that may be obscured when simply asking for the broader lessons from the experience.
Being able to watch an expert perform a task, along with the ability to ask why they made the choices they did, can often reveal much about the thinking behind it.
Despite Google searches, Amazon books, and free public libraries, often the best method to answer a question is simply to pick up the phone and ask around for who knows the answer.
Do Learning from Practice
Strategy #1: The Workshop Method
“A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you’re communicating what you think you’re communicating. It’s so easy as a young writer to think you’ve been very clear when in fact you haven’t.”
Strategy #2: Copy-Complete-Create
Instead of studying a fully worked-out example, you try to fill in the blank with one or more parts of the example omitted.
Strategy #3: Scaffolding
Instructional scaffolding is a technique for indirectly modifying the problem situation so as to reduce degrees of freedom.
Whether the activity is brain training, chess, or programming, the results appear to be the same: training improves the tasks directly practiced, but there’s little evidence of substantial improvement to other topics.
The problem of “inert knowledge” in education, of those ideas and methods that could potentially apply broadly, but which lie dormant instead. Even if knowledge is potentially available to solve a problem, we often don’t use it.
Takeaway #1: Focus on the Tasks You Intend to Improve
Break down large goals into more specific sets of tasks you want to improve at. Knowing how to ask directions to the supermarket in Spanish is a much more modest goal than conversational fluency.
Takeaway #2: Abstract Skills Require Concrete Examples
Providing lots of examples is more likely to ensure students generalize a principle, rather than get stuck on concrete particulars. Instead of a single demonstration, most students probably need to see multiple examples in order to appreciate the full range of a method or idea.
Takeaway #3: Learn Things for Their Own Sake
Skills genuinely worth learning shouldn’t need the false promise of generic mental enhancement. Chess is a fine game with a rich history. Mastering its intricacies doesn’t require the justification that it also assist with formulating business strategies.
Strategy #1: Shuffle Your Studying
The easiest way to apply variable practice is simply to randomize what you practice within a studying session.
The only thing that matters is that their performance is short enough that you would be able to work on more than one in a single practice session.
Strategy #2: Play with More Performers
For professional skills, look for job opportunities that put you in contact with a wider variety of cases typical of the discipline.
Strategy #3: Learn the Theories
Practical theories, professional rules of thumb, and industry standards are just as valid ways of thinking, even if they aren’t derived from a scholastic source. Talking to people in the field, and finding out what tools they’re using and theories they’re working with, gives a road map for acquiring more tools to work with.
Strategy #4: Get It Right, Then Vary Your Practice
Strategy #1: The Assembly-Line Method
Routines, checklists, and systematic phases for different aspects of your creative work are a few ways you can automate the regular part of making new work.
Adopting an assembly-line mindset can also help shake you of creative resistance, where anxiety or perfectionism hold you back from publishing regularly. When the working up and releasing of new creative works is on autopilot, there’s little time for paralytic self-censoring.
Strategy #2: Allow Ideas to Ripen
Many authors maintain extensive notes on potential stories, waiting until a sufficient number of pieces have assembled in the background before doggedly pursuing the work. While it may be impossible to anticipate creative solutions, it is often possible to see how large the gaps are that separate the current reservoir of knowledge and what would be needed for a solution.
Strategy #3: Moderate the Risks
We can increase our creative risk taking by ensuring we have more reliable sources of work and income we can fall back on in the case of failure.
Strategy #4: Spend Less Time in Noncreative Work
Only by maintaining a high ratio of hours worked on creative projects to hours worked in total can we possibly have a productive career without completely sacrificing our personal lives.
Feedback Learning from Experience
When there are stable, highly predictive features of the environment when making a decision, expert intuition tends to do fairly well. In contrast, when making sound decisions requires consistently adding up a lot of features that are only poorly correlated with outcomes, simple rules tend to do better.
Strategy #1: Use a Model
Counting the factors for or against a decision isn’t complicated, but it often outperforms subjective judgment. Put the information into a spreadsheet and you can easily get a weighted sum for the best fit to the data.
Strategy #2: Get More Than Just Outcome Feedback
To improve, we need to enhance the quality of our feedback. That starts by keeping track of our decisions, so our fallible memories can’t distort what actually happened. Next, we need to calibrate our confidence.
Strategy #3: Build a Brain Trust
Holding debates allows you to put together information you might not have initially considered when making a decision. You also get better averages from a larger group.
Strategy #4: Know When (and When Not) to Trust Your Gut
Intuition works best when discernible cues reliably predict events, and performers have the ability to learn from quick feedback.
As new entrants, we need to pay attention not only to the content of the skills we wish to master but also to the social environment that enables access to practice.
Lesson #1: Study How Entry into Practice Really Works
If you want to be one of the few who make it, you need to do your homework and figure out how the field actually works. You may not always like what you hear, but you can’t work around an obstacle you can’t even see.
Lesson #2: Separate Skills from Signals
The programmer who gets a certificate for a new technology may learn the same amount as the person who studies informally, but only the former can put it on her resume. Similarly, the manager who leads his team to success on a major project may have acquired some useful ideas about leadership, but the visibility of his success matters more for eventual promotion. The theory of signaling means that it’s not enough to get good: you need to find a way to show it.
Lesson #3: Learn the Lore of the Tribe
With written texts, one solution for dealing with novel jargon is simply to read slowly and look up every word or phrase you’re unsure of. This approach may be painstaking at first, but eventually you’ll acquire enough of the basic concepts that you can read new material fluently. In interpersonal settings, being the person who asks silly questions about what words mean might be embarrassing at first, but it is often a short-term cost that needs to be paid so you can understand the work.
Tactic #1: Introduce New Constraints
You can prevent that backsliding by changing the task constraints so performing the skill in the old way is impossible. Sometimes these constraints can take the form of prohibitions against certain kinds of actions—writing an essay without using any adverbs or trying to paint a picture without using color. In other cases, the constraints can be requirements for action. Hitting a tennis shot using an undersize racquet face forces you to hit balls in the center.
Tactic #2: Find a Coach
Coaching and tutoring can make a major difference, even if the person you’re hiring isn’t better than you are.
Tactic #3: Renovate Rather Than Rebuild
In most cases, we’re probably better off augmenting or modifying the foundation we’ve built upon, rather than tearing things down and starting from scratch.
Strategy #1: Construct Your Fear Hierarchy
Mirror the situational, cognitive, and physiological aspects of the fear as closely as possible. For example, interact with dogs if you're afraid of them.
Strategy #2: Don’t Say “Everything Will Be Okay”
Just as making a list of fears can be helpful, so can making a list of common avoidance behaviors. These can involve actual avoidance, such as the person who excuses himself from speaking at meetings because of social anxiety, or they can involve crutches that increase the feeling of safety.
Strategy #3: Face Fears Together
“Most people appear to be more susceptible to fear when they are alone.”
Strategy #4: Distinguish Courage from Fearlessness
People overpredict their fearful reactions to events, and underestimate their ability to maintain composure.
The economist and author Tyler Cowen likes to ask people, “What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?”
I believe both drills and realistic practice are important.* Drills can iron out tricky spots in a complex skill and reduce cognitive load for handling tough situations. Yet we also need a lot of practice with complete tasks so that those skills are well integrated and meaningfully understood. We can resolve the tension by working back and forth, a loop between drills and realistic practice on top of our basic practice loops that combine seeing, doing, and feedback.
A good feedback environment is one where feedback is used to assist learning, not reward or punish performance, focused on making corrections to the task rather than judging the individual, based on a relationship of mutual trust and respect.