learning

The Hardest Thing In The World For A Smart Person To Learn

smart people

by Vlad Dolezal on September 16, 2011

Smart people have it easy. They breeze through elementary and high school. They get constantly complimented and encouraged by teachers and parents. They get in the habit of being right and of getting results without much effort.

Then they get thrown into the real world. And suddenly, they find themselves missing one key skill that most people develop earlier.

And the smarter you are, the harder it might be to learn this particular skill, and realize how useful it is.

What am I talking about? The skill of being wrong. [click to continue…]

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Do You Read Personal Development Blogs? Then Read This.

by Vlad Dolezal on April 27, 2011

A commenter, Georgina, recently left the following on my post EVERYTHING Is A Belief:

(…) I read this entry when it was brand new and now, more than a year from that, I can finally understand it. I’ve read a lot of other articles that talk about the same subject, and I kinda got them, but like week ago I had this discovery moment when I said: oh my!! I finally got it!! (…)

The post is over a year old, and deals with the fact that everything you think of as a fact is just a belief – a model you have for organizing reality. But that’s not what I want to talk to you about today.

The comment got me thinking about the fact that certain personal development concepts take a long time to assimilate and really understand. But that’s not what I want to talk to you about either.

What I really want to talk to you about is a core fact I realized – what you do with the information in a personal development blog post makes far more difference to the quality of your life than how much you read.

What you’re about to read may well be the most important blog post for personal development you’ll read this year. And if you’re thinking of skimming this post, stop right here. This isn’t the sort of post you want to skim over. If you don’t have the time or energy right now to read this thoroughly, just bookmark it and come back later. [click to continue…]

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How to Absorb Information Like a Prodigy

by Vlad Dolezal on February 23, 2011

If you read any of the more popular personal development blogs, you might have noticed that most comments on there are variations on “Great post!”, “So true.” and “You’re absolutely right.”

I have guest posted for a couple of blogs that have several times the readership of Fun Life Development, and I’ve noticed the same pattern.

At first I was assuming these might just be people trying to “get their name out there”, as one of the most common pieces of advice for aspiring bloggers is to comment widely and frequently to build connections. (I’ve never been a fan of commenting unless I have something to add to the discussion, but hey, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. Which I probably won’t.)

But one of the fun things I like to play with is finding different explanations for the same phenomena. So I was considering this one – and I had a sudden Eureka moment!

(By that, I don’t mean I suddenly jumped out of a bath and ran around the town naked. I mean I had a startling realisation.)

So I ran to my computer to check some of the posts I’ve written for popular blogs, and sure enough, most of the comments weren’t just saying “great post!”. They were saying that, and then rephrasing the message of the post in their own words. [click to continue…]

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The “Keep Showing Up” Path to Mastery

wolf

by Vlad Dolezal on June 1, 2010

A friend told me an interesting story about his grandfather.

Back in his middle-aged days, the grandfather was was worried about his fitness. He noticed he didn’t do much exercise, but as we all know, getting one’s ass from being a non-exercising ass to being an exercising ass is a pain in the… neck.

But then he noticed there was something he did every day. He went down to the cellar to get one thing or another. So he thought about how he could use that to become fit, and eventually came up with a solution. [click to continue…]

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You Can Do It, You Just Don’t Know It

by Vlad Dolezal on September 26, 2009

Look at the kid, shouting he hates tomatoes! Even though he’s never tried them…

Kids have a reason to be picky about food. Unless they’ve been introduced to a food early on, they’ll avoid it until they get old enough to make their own decisions about food. It’s a survival trait.

But adults behaving the same way? Uh-oh. And I’m not talking about food, either. Too many adults claim they can’t do something, even if they’ve never tried it!

Learning takes practice

Think back to when you had your first child (if you haven’t yet, just imagine it). When they were first learning to walk, and fell over, what was your reaction? Did you have a good laugh about it, and tell them to keep trying?

Or did you say: “Oh well Johnny, I guess you’ll never be a walker. I don’t think you’ll ever get the hang of this.”

Well… duh!

And yet adults treat themselves the second way again and again! They try something once or twice, and then conclude they can’t do it, and will never be able to.

If you haven’t learned something yet, that can only mean one of two things:

  • you haven’t put in enough time
  • you’re using wrong learning methods

And don’t go around telling me about your “natural limitations” or “inherent lack of talent”. Unless you’re a professional athlete or a world-class chess player, you’re going to quit LONG before reaching any kind of natural talent barrier!

And if you don’t want to learn because you’re afraid you’ll look dumb… don’t worry. No one cares how bad you are the first time you start learning something.

No one cares how much you shake and stutter the first time you try public speaking.

No one cares how much you fall when you’re first learning to ski.

Most people are either too busy thinking of themselves… or very kind and supportive! When you start learning something, you warm other people’s hearts by reminding them of their own humble beginnings. They’ll be more than happy to give you tips and encouragement.

If you don’t WANT to learn something because you … well… don’t want to, that’s fine. Just make sure it’s really your wants that are guiding you, not your fears.

Ask yourself:


What is more important? Your fears, or your desires?

And then live your life unrestricted.

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5 Common Myths About Learning

by Vlad Dolezal on February 25, 2009

learning mythsLearning is just one of those subjects, like religion or politics – everybody has an opinion, even though most people know very little about it.

Do YOU believe some of these common myths about learning?

1. You need innate talent to be great at something

Lots of people claim you need to be BORN a genius. That Mozart was always destined to be a great musician, or that grandmaster chess players have some special brain wirings or genes that make them great at chess.

In the mid-to-late 1900′s, there was one man who thought this was utter crap. Laszlo Polgar. He decided to prove that geniuses were made, not born. And he was going to do that by teaching his children to be chess champion from very young age. He found a wife who was going to support this experiment, and together they had three daughters.

From very young age, he began training his daughters to be a chess champions. He quit his job and made training his daughters his only occupation. They were homeschooled so they could spend forty to fifty hours a week practicing chess instead of wasting their time doing more mundane schoolwork. He had several grandmasters tutoring them on a daily basis.

Two of the daughters, Susan and Judit became the world’s top 2 female chess players. Susan was actually winning chess tournaments for under-11′s when she was just 4 years old.

You don’t need any inborn talent to become great at something. You just need the motivation and practice.

2. When you’re not learning as fast as you want, it’s because you’re not putting in enough time

This myth is held especially dearly by people who have tried putting in a lot of time into learning something, without much success.

For example, someone might try learning French by spending half an hour a day reading textbooks and doing exercises. They don’t learn much, so they try putting in twice as much time – an hour every day. And yet they still don’t learn significantly faster! Their conclusion? They’re not putting in enough time! (you gotta love the logic behind that :) )

We humans love being right. In fact, the need to be right (at least inside our own minds) often makes us less successful and less happy! The people who tried putting in more time and didn’t succeed believe that more time is the answer to learning. So instead of considering they might be wrong, and try learning through a different method – they decide they’re still not putting in enough time! But they can’t be bothered to put in even MORE time… and so they miss out on the wonderful experience of learning a foreign language!

3. To become great at something, you need to put in 10 hours a day

This is related to the point above. Lots of people think that to become really good at something, you need to spend every waking hour thinking about it and doing it.

Now, don’t get me wrong – obsession sure helps. If you spend ten hours a day practicing a single skill (like the Polgar sisters did), you WILL likely become really good!

But, as many top pianists will confirm, you don’t need 10 hours a day of piano practice to become a master pianist. In fact, 1 hour a day is quite enough, if you use the right learning methods! (Source: Fundamentals of Piano Practice)

Before you starts firing off angry e-mails saying “But of COURSE you need 10 hours a day of practice to become great! I heard it from so-and-so…”, pause to think for a moment. Guess who will tell you that you need 10 hours of practice a day to become a master pianist?

That’s right – the people who never made it past being mediocre! Now, call me skeptical if you want… but I think that if you want to learn what it takes to become GREAT at something, it makes sense to ask people who are themselves GREAT at that skill, not people who are mediocre!

4. You’re not smart enough to learn quickly

This is a belief that a lot of people hold. It might seem like it comes directly from a low self-esteem or a bad self-image. Interestingly enough, it usually doesn’t. Instead, it comes from another psychological phenomenon.

We humans like to attribute our successes to things we control (“Oh yeah, of course I succeeded. I’m really smart!”). And we tend to attribute our failures to things we DON’T control (“The sun was in my eyes.” or “I just had a bad day.” or “I’m just naturally bad at x.”)

So when we’re struggling with learning something, the immediate reflex is to say “Ah, I’m just not smart enough” or “I’m just not a public speaker. I was born without the public speaking gene!” (which are things we DON’T control), rather than saying “I’m not using the right approach to learning this.” (which is something we DO control).

5. You can’t significantly alter how fast you learn something

I used to believe this one. Big time.

I used to think that we are all born with a certain IQ, and that this is all that determines your learning rate. Boy, was I ever wrong!

In fact, using the right learning methods is EVERYTHING! You can literally speed up your learning tenfold by using the right methods. I experienced this myself when learning to play the piano. I was struggling, learning really slowly, and ready to give up… and then I came across the free e-book Fundamentals of Piano Practice. Let’s just say I was BLOWN away by the results! :)

Since that day, I have researched just about everything there is to know about human learning. And it only confirmed my initial experiences. Most people are using such sub-optimal learning methods it’s almost ridiculous. Thankfully, you can easily change your learning methods, once you know what the right ones are!

I’ll share all my knowledge about learning with you on another day. But for now, you can at least check out my article about The one secret behind learning ANY skill quickly.

—

Have you ever believed any of the above myths? Do you know any other common learning myths that others should know about?

Or maybe you think I’m completely full of horse crap and I should be hung up by the G’khazar*?

In any case, feel free to leave a comment! :)

(image courtesy of Cayusa)

*Town Hall

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The Jiu Jitsu Theory of Education

by Vlad Dolezal on November 30, 2008

jitsu
Image courtesy of ADD Photography

Woohoo! I found it!

An education system that works! As you might know, I’m a big fan of rebuilding the education system. What we have now does a dozen things reasonably well… but helping students learn isn’t one of them. Thankfully, I recently came across a model of teaching that REALLY works!

My Jiu Jitsu club.

I joined up at the beginning of October. And now, after two months, I figured out what they do so well. And a lot of the things could be transferred to traditional education!

Peer-to-peer teaching

The sessions are formally taught by our sensei, a brown belt (grade 7). But sometimes we split into groups and several are taught by lower grades, like purple belts (grade 4). Also, when we split into pairs to practice new techniques, the grades might go around and help us white belts (grade 0) understand the technique. And when we practice the techniques, sometimes I understand it better than the white belt I’m training with, and sometimes my partner understands it better. So we correct each other, or explain things to each other.

From the moment you start, you will be taught by many different people. Also, as you progress through your grades, you will teach others increasingly often. There’s constantly lots of back-and-forth teaching going on between people. You get to see what kinds of explanations help you learn, and what kinds don’t. You also explain stuff to others, which helps you practice explaining better. And you understand the techniques better through teaching.

Which brings me to the next point.

You are REQUIRED to teach to progress through your grades

Ever since orange belt (grade 2), you are required to teach bits and pieces in the sessions to progress towards your next belt. This has two absolutely awesome effects:

1. Teachings others helps you understand things much better

Whenever I learn a new cool thing, I just HAVE TO teach it to others. Just ask my friend Rich. I will literally call him up in the middle of the night saying “Check this out! I just learned this really cool new thing…”. Whenever I learn something new, I just pick up my phone and start dialing whoever might be interested.
- David DeAngelo


I got to around 1900 rating, and then just leveled off. I didn’t make much progress for months. Then I decided to start teaching others. I taught dozens and dozens of people of different skill levels. And my own success went through the roof!
- Ben Seeley

The first guy above runs a twenty-million-dollars-a-year business (it’s probably more now. That statistic is a bit outdated.). The second guy became a world champion at the game he was talking about within only two years of starting to teach lots of other people.

If we could only make teaching others an integral part of the education system. Maybe we could stop splitting people into classrooms by years. Instead, we would have different skill levels (instead of different years), and we would always mix them together in a classroom. The more skilled ones would help teach the less skilled ones. That would help the higher year students so much more than just sitting quietly listening to some rambling professor.

2. Teaching others since your early years makes you a much better teacher

By the time you get to a blue belt (grade 6), you will have been taught by dozens of people, and you will have taught others hundreds of times. Your average Jiu Jitsu blue belt is much better at teaching Jitsu than most school teachers are at teaching their subject!

In fact, in Jiu Jitsu, a brown belt needs to run his own club for at least two years before even potentially being invited to grade for his black belt. By the time a Jitsuka gets to black belt, he’s guaranteed to be a fantastic teacher.

Sure, some martial arts masters believe a belt should only represent your skill at the martial art, not at teaching others. Let’s not get into a discussion of whether that’s right or wrong. The fact is, Jiu Jitsu masters believe teaching is inseparable from being a martial art master. And I agree. It runs both ways. Teaching helps you become much better. And to be a true master, you need to know how to teach your skills to others.

Some days, we all practice the basics

Sometimes we split into groups by skill level, and each group practices different techniques. But other times, we all train together. Because mastery of the basics is what separates a competent person from a grandmaster.

I was at a major go [a board game of skill] tournament. After the day’s games, I was walking around, and saw one of the grandmasters reading a simple book about go that I’ve read years ago. We strike up a conversation and I tell him I’ve already solved all the problems in that book. He looks at me, and says “So have I. Hundreds of times. And yet I solve them again, and each time, I try to solve them faster and better.”
- Some random go player [sorry, I can't remember where I read this story]

Similarly, in Jitsu, the black belts still practice some of the same techniques they teach to white belts. They just do them so much better!

Jiu Jitsu students WANT to learn

Learning is an active process. You can not make someone learn. Sure, you can convince students to want to learn by threatening them with bad grades and extra work. That’s pretty much like threatening a slave with beatings if he doesn’t do your work. You won’t get exceptional results and a positive environment that way.

Until you convince students to actually WANT to learn, you’re fighting a losing battle. And the quickest way to make someone NOT want to learn is to force them.

Yeah, I know. It’s hard to reconcile the idea of “education for everyone” with “not forcing anyone to learn”. But I just had to bring this point up anyway. If we managed to create schools where students would WANT to learn (I’ve got some ideas about that), that would be the single biggest step towards a great education system.

Possible objections

Here are a few objections you might have thought of by this point. I’ll try to explain why some of these objections aren’t really a problem.

1. Jitsu is a skill. Schools are about learning information.

This is a good point. Learning skills and learning information are two completely different things. You learn skills by doing. You can’t do information. You learn information by connecting it to other bits of information you already know.

But in this article, I focused on the universal things that are great about my Jitsu club. The things that can be applied to any learning/teaching environment. I skimmed over how the club makes great use of post-practice improvement. Or how the sensei quickly explains a new technique, gives us 30 seconds to try it, and THEN proceeds to explain it in detail. Or how they masterfully break down techniques into simple steps to help us learn faster. Those are all great for learning skills. But I focused mainly on the universal stuff – most of which I haven’t seen myself until two months ago.

Also, schools aren’t just about acquiring information. In fact, the better the school, the more it focuses on skills rather than information. Real maths is about solving problems you never encountered before, not about memorizing algorithms. Real english is about analysing great writers and using that to improve your own writing, not about learning dozens of names and buzzwords. It’s more important to know how to find information than to memorize it. And all of these are SKILLS.

2. You expect 7-year olds to teach 6-year olds?

I have no idea. I’d give it a try. In the current education system, you usually need to get to be a postgraduate student before teaching others. That’s way too late. And even though in some schools a few select students get teaching responsibilities around 15 or 16 years old, that’s still pretty late. There might be a lower limit to how young a child can be before teaching others. But I would try pushing it as low as possible.

3. With all the different people teaching, won’t the students get really confused?

I don’t think so. You have the sensei (the classroom teacher) who walks around and makes sure everybody is doing it right. Sure, a yellow belt’s explanations might not be as helpful as those of a black belt. But they’re still damn good stuff.

How to use all this in our education system

I have a few broad ideas on how to use this in an education system. I won’t go into much detail, because I haven’t figured that out yet.

1. Replace years with grades

Instead of being “second years”, “fifth years” and such, students would get coloured belts, like in Jitsu. That way, smarter students could progress faster, and slower ones could take more time. You would always be learning mostly with students of the same skill level. Everybody wins.

2. Peer-to-peer teaching

Instead of separating classes by skill level (i.e. all orange belts in the same class), each class would contain people from all skill levels. That way, we could get full back-and-forth teaching going on.

Sure, some classes would be specifically for certain grades. But that would be an exception rather than the rule.

3. Required teaching to progress through grades

In Jitsu, you need to be a brown belt (grade 7), before you can run your own club. By the time you get to that level, you have been teaching others for years, and have been taught by dozens of other people. You pretty much know what works for students and what doesn’t. Contrast that with the current education system, where many teachers have no clue on how to make learning fun and interesting for the students.

If we required school teachers to be brown belts at education, we would have a guarantee of awesome teaching.

4. Mandatory grade instead of mandatory time

Instead of forcing students to stay in school for 12 years, I would let them out after achieving a certain grade. Say, a purple belt (grade 4). Sure, they could stay, and for example continue chemistry until they become a black belt. That would be analogous to a student continuing to postgraduate studies instead of dropping out after high school.

Some final thoughts

Sure, there are some things left to figure out. Maybe different belts for different subjects? (I could be a blue belt at mathematics, yet a yellow belt at history). What skills are needed for different belts? What to do about hard-to-measure skills like creativity and critical thinking? (Maybe have the students publish in established periodicals? Like have them get their short story published in a magazine?). And dozens more.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment. I’m always open to being told I’m a complete moron and this would never work. As long as your comment is specific :)

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Understanding Abstract Stuff Made Easy!

by Vlad Dolezal on September 24, 2008

Your brain is terribly outdated. No, really. It has evolved tens of thousands of years ago. And let’s face it – cavemen probably didn’t need to understand electric circuits or mathematical functions :)

But today, you sometimes need to understand abstract stuff your brain isn’t used to dealing with. And you can do that by translating the abstract information for your brain.

Pictures, stories and emotions

If you want to talk to your brain, you’d better use a language it understands!

So if you go like “Hey, brain, can you remember this 20-digit phone number for me?” The brain will go “Uh huh, sure.” and forget it in five seconds. Which is why top memorizers, who can memorize thousands of digits, instead translate every two digits into a picture, and then construct a story out of the pictures. Because the brain LIKES dealing with stories!

And if you try explaining to your brain how electric circuits work? That would be like trying to explain directions to a Japanese tourist who doesn’t speak a word of English. You might get lucky and communicate some stuff to the tourist by using your arms and body… but wouldn’t it be so much easier if you could just translate it into a language he understands?

Well, here are a couple of languages your brain understands!

  • analogies
  • stories
  • pictures
  • emotions

So if you tell someone “An atom is 10-11 meters small”, you’ll just get a blank stare. Try an analogy instead! Like “If you took an apple and shrunk it down to the size of an atom, that would be like taking the whole Earth and shrinking it down to the size of an apple.” Granted, you might still get a blank stare, but this will help most people understand it a LOT better than any amount of numbers or statistics.

On a related note, I was walking on the subway the other day, and I saw an ad for a mobile phone. The ad was making a big deal of how thin the phone was, showing a side shot and saying “only 11,7 mm” or something like that.

I was thinking – “Here’s an advertiser who HASN’T GOT A CLUE.” The information on the ad meant nothing to my brain.

Compare that to an iPhone ad (I meant to include a picture, but couldn’t find it). The ad shows a side view of the iPhone, next to an ordinary pencil.

That gets the point across loud and clear! Because everybody has experienced a pencil – your brain UNDERSTANDS how thick a pencil is. That’s the heart of an analogy. Translating a new experience into to something your brain already understands.

Examples of successful analogies

Elecric circuits

Loads of people misunderstand how electric circuits work. For example they think that electrons travel through the battery, where they pick up the charge, then go to the light bulb and deposit it there. That’s great… except electrons move at a rate of centimeters a minute. Oh, and how do you explain alternating current? In there, the electrons just wiggle back and forth.

I never really had an intuitive, “gut-level” understanding of electric circuits. Until I read Bill Beaty’s explanation. In there, among other things, he uses a great bicycle wheel analogy.

Take a bicycle. Then turn it upside down. The front wheel will be your electric circuit. It’s pretty accurate, since a normal electric circuit also consists of electric charges in place, just waiting to be pushed along by a battery.

Now put one hand on top of the wheel. This will be your light bulb. Next put your other hand at the bottom of the wheel, and use it to rotate the wheel. This is your battery. And the friction you feel on your top “light bulb” hand is what makes a bulb light up.

This shows you how the bulb can light up immediately when you put the battery into operation, even though it takes the individual electrons (the bit of your wheel at the bottom) quite a while to reach the bulb.

Learning

Scott H. Young has a great article where he explains how learning happens through connecting information. And he compares your brain’s way of storing information to a road network, with cities representing bits of knowledge, and roads representing connections between bits of knowledge. Again, this makes the concept much easier to understand.

Creating analogies

A couple of years back, I had real trouble understanding mathematical functions. I mean, I could work with them, and do all the school exercises. But I didn’t have a gut-level understanding of what they ARE.

So I thought about it long and hard, until I came up with a whole story that explained them to me. By comparing the mathematical functions to huge swamp creatures that eat and excrete numbers. I won’t type the whole story here, since it’s pretty lengthy, but ever since that day, I really understand what mathematical functions are, and how they work. Oh, and every time I think of explaining them, I crack myself up. That’s a bonus point :)

So whenever you face some tough-to-digest abstract information, see if you can come up with an analogy. Or create a picture in your mind, or a story, maybe add some soundtrack… whatever helps YOU understand. It makes the information more memorable, and also more fun :D

Your brain doesn’t enjoy dealing with abstract stuff. It likes stories, pictures and emotions. And if you can connect the new information to something your brain already understands (like the size of a pencil), you will understand it much deeper! Analogies ftw!

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The Secret Behind Learning ANY New Skill Quickly

by Vlad Dolezal on August 20, 2008

Hi! This is the first of a series of posts on learning new skills quickly and effectively. You might also want to check out:

Enjoy!

It was a warm summer day. A dozen strangers have met in a small conference room. They all came because they wanted one thing: To learn public speaking.

The instructor came in. He introduced himself. Then he called in two past participants from his course, who spoke easily and confidently, without written notes. The new learners really wanted to learn to speak like that.

Then the instructor introduced his method.

Positive feedback. (Keep reading. There’s more to it than you think.)

Whatever the learners would do, he would point out what they did right, and sincerely compliment them. No negativity, but also no faking and bulls***. Just the positive truth.

For example, when one woman’s turn came up to speak, she was so afraid she just stood there and shook, and couldn’t say a word. After a few moments she sat back down. The instructor just looked at her, and said: “That was very brave of you to get up there.” And everyone realized it was true.

And the progress the participants made was amazing. Within a few weeks, they were able to speak clearly and confidently.

No, I’m not trying to sell you a public speaking course. :)

Instead of taking your money, I will give you something for free. The key to learning, in fact. So be ready. Because the skill of learning isn’t just any odd skill… it’s the skill that lets you acquire all other skills faster.

Feedback is the Key

“Feedback uber alles!”
- Me, speaking in a horribly fake German accent

“You don’t get feedback. In soviet Russia, feedback gets YOU!!”
- A random unrelated quote

Yeah, yeah I know. Water is wet, the sky is blue, feedback is the key to learning. What else is old?

Well, I’m going to help you see feedback like you never saw it before!

I’ll show you exactly which bits help you learn, which bits are useless, and which bits are actively stopping you from learning well. Surprisingly, a lot of people do exactly the right things to not learn.

The Anatomy of GOOD Feeback

Okay, so what’s the secret?

Here you go: Good feedback is…

  • positive
  • specific
  • plentiful

Yes, in that order. (I’m not done yet, don’t stop reading :) )

(Sure, positive non-specific feedback (“good boy”) won’t do you much good. But it’s still a lot better than specific negative feedback!)

Positive feedback

“You screwed up. That was really bad. You’ll never learn this.”

Feeling motivated yet?

More shouting won’t help your motivation. And it won’t help your learning either.

When you learn a new skill, you’re building habits and ways of thinking. Whether it’s learning to swing a tennis rocket, or to signal direction when turning your car around a corner, emotions play a huge part in learning.

Ever put your hand on a hot stove? I have. Ouch! (Don’t try this at home… or anywhere, really.) It’s damn painful, and I’m not that likely to forget the experience anytime soon. The emotion of pain acts like a glue that sticks the message to your mind.

Ok, now let’s say you were learning something, like getting your driver’s license. And let’s say that you did something really bad, like forgetting to give way and almost driving full-speed into an intersection and causing an accident. The instructor would (quite rightly, in his opinion) harshly point out your mistake and tell you to never do it again.

Then, in the evening, you lie down in bed and think about the day behind you. And when you think of your driving lessons, the part with the strongest emotional charge comes first. In other words, you think of the time you almost drove full-speed into an intersection and caused an accident. And every time you think of it, that behavior gets reinforced in your mind.

An American basketball club (I forgot which one. If anyone knows this story, can you let me know?) was going through a dry spell. They kept making mistakes and losing against their biggest opponents.

Then a new coach came in, and he completely reorganized their practice routine. Instead of looking at recordings of what they did wrong and trying to improve it, he made them watch only their most successful games, and from those, only the most successful runs. He replaced most of their long-distance shooting practice with short-distance practice, where they hit the basket almost every time. He had them visualise shooting flawlessly for an hour each day.

Their results completely turned around, and they went on to become one of the most successful teams in history.

Simplicio: So we should just always go “good boy” when teaching someone, huh? Whatever the person does, just say they’re doing great and keep it positive? I prefer telling the truth rather than a bunch of positive mish-mash nonsense.
Salviati: Ah yes, I see what you mean. I’m not saying you should claim all is well. But it’s about bringing out the positive, and letting the negativity fade into the background. Then every time the person thinks of doing the thing they’re learning, they’ll remember the positive experiences.
Simplicio: Yes, but what if the learner makes a mistake? Should I just ignore it and let them keep doing it wrong?
Salviati: Nooo… the best solution to that is what Toastmasters public speaking classes do. It works roughly like this:

You give a speech. Then someone gets up to evaluate your speech in two minutes. The evaluation contains two main ingredients:

1. Positive feedback
(“You did a great job using those diagrams to emphasize your point.”)

2. Points for improvement
(“Next time try varying your voice tone a bit more.”)

And here’s the vitally important bit – The positive feedback takes up about two thirds of the evaluation.

Sure, the first time you’re learning something you’ll be doing hundreds of things wrong. Don’t obsess about them. Run through all the positive experiences in your mind, then pick two or three points you want to focus on next. Like “next time I’ll try hitting the ball with the center of my tennis rocket.”

You won’t believe the difference in your learning speed.

Want to learn even better?

So that’s about it. The great big secret. Now you know it.

Of course, after the great big secret, there are a bunch of only slightly smaller secrets, just waiting in line for you to learn them!

Like why 10-hours-a-day practice is only a myth, and how some top pianists got to be the best at only 1 hour of practice daily. And an exact step-by-step guide to duplicating their success, simply by timing your learning properly!

Or how to further accelerate your learning… by failing MORE.

Or the one simple technique that transformed Ben Seeley from your average “good” Othello player to a world champion, after he though he had hit his limit.

To learn all that, all you need to is take out your credit card… no, just kidding :p.

All you need to do is read my next article! To make sure you don’t miss it, you can grab my RSS feed (What is RSS?). Or you can bookmark this page and check back later. I’ll update this article when the next one comes out.

Happy learning!

Next: Learning Mastery 2 – Post Practice Improvement

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Learning Mastery 5 – Back to the Basics

by Vlad Dolezal on July 30, 2008

Hi! This is part of a series of posts on learning new skills quickly and effectively. You might also want to check out:

Enjoy!

“The only difference between an intermediate player and an expert in chess is in how well they apply the basics.”
- Alekhine

When the world’s best martial artists practice, they don’t practice flashy moves. They practice basic kicks and punches and holds. Over and over. They practice simple balance and good posture, and they practice moving faster and more precisely.

In the movie “Karate Kid”, the master teaches the kid only four basic moves (“Sand the floor. Paint the fence…”). The kid spends days practicing these simple moves, and then goes on to win a major karate tournament. (Yeah, I know it’s a movie. But it makes a good point.)

It’s not the flashy good-looking moves that win tournaments. It’s better mastery of the basics. (though I have to admit, a double-leg flying kick looks just awesome :) )

Back to the Basics

The slogan “back to the basics” has been cheapened over the years. In schools, some educators use it to push reforms that bring us back to times when kids had to memorize long passages of text without any idea of what they mean.

It’s not that “back to basics” is bad. But most people in education can’t even agree what the basics are, let alone how to teach them. What are the basics for reading? Phonics? (learning to pronounce different groups of letters). Or is it reading simple stories, and learning to pronounce words while reading them? In mathematics, should students memorize the multiplication table? Or is it more important (more “basic”) that they understand the mathematician’s mindset – curiosity, stretching principles to breaking point, basic proofs?

Before you can focus on the basics, you need to know what they are. If you want to get better at something you’re already good at, sit down and figure out what the basics are. If you’re learning a new skill, ask some experts. They will be glad you asked, because even experts sometimes get lost in the complicated stuff and forget the basics.

I’ll show you a few examples. These are skills where I’m reasonably good, and I think I know what the basics are.

Chess:

  • checkmates (if you’ve seen thousands of basic “chekmate in 2″ and “checkmate in 3″ problems, you will start to see them in the game. And you will start to see them several moves ahead – before your opponent is even aware of the threat. You can then use the threat to win some pieces.)
  • endgame (If you practice all the basic endgames, you can start to see them ahead. As in “Well, if I take this piece, it will lead to this forced exchange, and then I’ll end up with a rook and pawn against a rook. In this case it will be a draw, so I might be better off keeping things complicated.”)
  • mobility (letting your pieces have plenty of move options. At the beginning, this usually means fighting for the center of the board.)

Notice I don’t consider learning openings to be the basics. Mobility is the true basic principle behind most openings. Practicing mobility inside out will get you a much deeper understanding of openings – and it will let you play confidently in openings you don’t know.

Blogging:

  • use simple, direct sentences (“The boy kicked the ball.” instead of “The ball was kicked by the boy.”)
  • write as you speak
  • write about your passions

If you’re good at some skill, you can let the rest of us know what the basics are. Just leave a comment. I would especially like to know what the basics are in rock-climbing, dancing and programming.

Practicing the basics

Ben Seeley, a past world champion in Othello (the board game), was once telling me a story of a man he taught online. The man was a professional bridge and backgammon player, and was learning to play Othello for fun. He was getting angry because he kept losing, and couldn’t understand why.

Seeley talked to him and explained the basics. The man then practiced those, and started winning some games. Seeley had to leave for work.

When Seeley came back some 24 hours later, the man was still there, playing. Seeley says it was incredible how much his game has improved. The man had truly practiced the basics like no one else. He achieved a rating (a measure of skill online) in a single day that most people achieve in a few months.

Then he quit because he decided Othello was too easy for him.

Now, this man was a master learner. He really understood the value of the basics, and how to practice them. Most people (including me, and probably you) wouldn’t practice that diligently.

I’ll choose an example you will hopefully understand. Let’s say you were learning to play chess. A grandmaster would explain to you the basics of mobility (having plenty of options for your pieces), and that a simple way to achieve that is to take over the center of the board.

You would most likely practice the principle at the beginning of the game, fight for the center, and after the middle, you would switch to your usual ways of attacking the enemy king. That’s what a good learner would do, practice the basics.

But it’s not what a master learner would do. He would take the one principle, and practice it to its death. He would fight for the center with all his might, leaving everything else behind. He might leave his king almost unguarded. In some games, he would try sacrificing some pawns and even pieces to gain a hold of the middle of the board. He would reject simple easy ways to take pieces at the edges, and strengthen his hold of the middle instead.

In short, a master learner takes the principles to the absolute extreme.

Because you really need to push and overstep the boundaries to see how far the principle applies. If you just sort of apply the principle, and then switch to something else when it looks more convenient, you won’t find the boundaries. The goal isn’t to win the first couple of dozen games. The goal is to truly understand the basic principles inside out.

How to practice the basics

When you first learned to drive a car, you had to think about every detail. You had to focus on signalling correctly, looking in the mirror and so on. But after a while, you just started doing all those things automatically.

It’s the same with learning anything. At first you need to consciously focus on every detail, but soon bits get delegated to your subconscious and you do them automatically.

When you practice the basics, you improve the way you do them. More precisely. Faster.

Practicing the basics comes down to trying little tweaks. Let’s say you’re practicing your balance by walking on a narrow ledge. Try looking forward instead of at your feet. Try bending your knees a bit more. Try hunching over forward more, or leaning back. Try closing your eyes and keeping balance.

Notice what happens, then do your best at the end of the practice session.

Make sure you read my Learning Mastery 2 – Post Practice Improvement. There I describe exactly how to practice to make sure you grow your skills the fastest. It’s especially important when practicing the basics, because that’s a lot about committing new habits to your subconscious.

Right now, you can try to figure out what the basics are for a skill you’re learning. Then, next time you practice, focus on that skill.

If you know what the basics are for rock-climbing, dancing or programming, please let me know in the comments. And if you’d like to know what the basics are for some other skill you’re learning, ask also in the comments. Another reader or I might know.

Happy learning!

Previous: Learning Mastery 4 – Teach it And Hypothesise

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