How to help people get better at anything - a conversation with Scott H. Young - The Talent Equation Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Welcome to the Talent Equation Podcast.If you are passionate about helping young people
to unleash their potential and want tofind ways to do that better, then
you've come to the right place.The Talent Equation Podcast seeks to answer the
important questions facing parents, coaches,and talent developers as they try to help

(00:23):
young people become the best they canbe. This is a series of unscripted,
unpolished conversations between people at the razor'sedge of the talent community who are
prepared to share their knowledge, experiences, and challenges in an effort to help
others get better faster. Listen,reflect, and don't forget to join the

(00:44):
discussion at the Talent Equation dot codot UK. Enjoy the show. Well,

(01:06):
I'm really excited I always say this, but I am actually really excited
because I'm joined by Scott Young becausehe's been busy. He's got another book
out and I absolutely love the firstone and the second one I've had a
sneak preview of and I'm loving itas well. So Scott, welcome to
the show. Oh thank you forhaving me back. So, yeah,

(01:30):
the new book out. Get betterat Anything, I mean, we'll get
him through it in a minute.But just generally, like, you know,
kind of what's been going on,tell me a little bit about the
kind of you probably need to givea little bit of backstory to people who
may not have heard you before orcome across the stuff in the previous times
we've spoken. But yeah, I'dbe really keen to just get a bit
of who you are and what you'reabout and then get buck into it.

(01:51):
So in twenty nineteen, I publisheda book, Ultra Learning. It went
on to be a Wall Street Journalbest selling book, and that book sort
of documented some of mine interesting people'sintensive self directed learning projects. So you
know, there are people in thebook who speak a dozen languages, who
you know, self started video gamecompanies where they did the art and the
music and everything all by themselves.People who were you know, really good

(02:16):
at lots of things that you know, they taught themselves how to do.
And that book was probably the basisof the last conversation that we had.
And yeah, this book that Iwrote, I've been working on it for
the last basically since Ultra Learning finished. I started working on this book.
And this book dives deep into someof the fundamental science and ideas of how

(02:38):
learning works. So I sort ofdivided into these see do feedback kind of
principle, and we have these twelvemaxims to split it up. But yeah,
but basically this has been my lifefor the last four or five years,
just doing tons of research and diggingdeep into some of these principles.
Oh. I also had two kids, by the way, in the intermediate
times, so I've been keeping busy. Definitely a so just the genesis of

(03:01):
ultra learning because you may as wellgo right back to that. Sure,
I'd love to know more about,you know, kind of like what the
sort of whole how you even gotinto the space of deciding to write a
book about learning, because it's anendlessly fascinating area for me. So I
can just consume anything he put out. So so if I rewind back the
clock about it would be like maybetwelve years ago. Now, wow,

(03:25):
it sounds weird to say this,but you know, a little over a
decade ago, I was graduating fromfrom university and I had noticed that MIT
puts a lot of their classes onlinefor free. So this is still true.
You can go on MIT's website andthere's like, you know, some
class that they have, they havetheir lectures recorded. They're like, these
are the assignments, this is theassignment key, this is the final exam,

(03:47):
this is the solution key. AndI got this idea of like,
has anyone ever tried to learn whatMIT teaches in a four year computer science
curriculum? Has anyone ever just triedto like download the materials and teach themselves
out. So this became a projectI called the MIT Challenge, where the
goal was to try to learn MIT'scomputer science curriculum. And the sort of
twist of this is that I wantedto try to do it in twelve months,

(04:10):
and I talk about that a lotmore detail in my first book,
Ultra Learning. But that became thefirst kind of project that sort of put
me on this path of being aneccentric guy who talks about learning I did.
After that, I followed with aproject called The Year Without English,
where I went with a friend.We went to Spain, Brazil, China,
and Korea to learn the languages ofeach of those countries. And the

(04:30):
sort of twist of that project isthat whenever we would land in the country,
we'd only speak the language we weretrying to learn. So when we
landed in Spain, for instance,we tried to the greatest extent possible to
only speak in Spanish to each otheras well as the people we would meet.
And so I documented some of thoseprojects that started with Ultra Learning.
And when I started writing the bookUltra Learning, I started doing research into
not just sort of my own personalexperiences and what works for me, but

(04:54):
really getting into a lot of thecognitive science, because there's just this vast
amount of research on how learned works, what works, what doesn't work,
and it's kind of a complicated messif you're trying to get a total picture
of all of it. And soI started doing that in Ultra Learning.
I talk about some of those principlesin the book, but then that really
morphed into, you know, areal multi year long quest to really get

(05:16):
a good understanding of that and tryto consolidate that for a learner. So
if someone was interested in a lotof these details, yeah, the new
book Get Better than Anything goes intoa lot of that basic research. Wow,
Now you see, I think Imust have missed a bit where you
went and did the language stuff,so you went down the full full immersion
routes like you immersed yourself in thelanguage. And it's interesting. I've spoken

(05:40):
about this on the podcast with anumber of people before, about like the
constraint almost of not having English asa fallback. Yeah, did you find
that that meant that you essentially gotlike a rapid adoption of the language.
Yeah. So I think it's importantto kind of clarify what the immersion does
because I think when I talk aboutthe outside people who haven't been in this

(06:00):
exact situation before, there's often somemagic ascribe to immersion, like it's just
like you're just in this environment andthere's just like through usmosis the language is
coming into your being. And Imean there is an advantage to that.
But where we found the immersion reallyreally valuable, and this is particularly valuable
if you're doing a kind of travelbased project. So this is my advice,

(06:23):
my standard advice to anyone who islike, you know, I'm going
to go live in you know,Paris for a year. I'm going to
go travel to Colombia? What shouldI do? The advice I give is
to start with trying to speak thelanguage as much as you can, and
to the exclusion of English as muchas you can. From a very early

(06:44):
period. And why I give thatadvice is because when you land in a
new country, one of the firstthings you do is you sort of set
up your network. You meet people, you make friends, you set up
your routines, and if those happento be in English, you end up
making a little bubble of English aroundyourself. So even though you're living in
say France or South Korea or wherever, you're in this little pocket of English
within that broader country, and itcan take a long time to learn because

(07:09):
if you're only spending let's say,less than ten percent of your time speaking
French or Korean or what have youin this environment, then you know,
it's just simple math says that itshould take probably about ten times as long
to get the same amount of exposureof the language. And so this whole
you know, from the very firstmoment you land you only speak in like
really bad Spanish, has this advantagethat, yes, your Spanish isn't very

(07:30):
good, but you're meeting lots ofpeople who will learn to interact with you
in Spanish, and that it turnsout, means that you're getting probably about
not just like ten percent more exposureto the language, but probably about ten
times more, and it means thatyou're going to be acquiring at least the
basics of conversational fluency much faster.So there's lots of nuances in language learning,

(07:51):
and I'm not sure that I wouldhave the exact same advice for someone
who is Let's say, you know, I'm going to be sitting in my
house in Alabama and I want tolearn Japanese. What's the best way to
do it. It's probably going tobe a bit of a different strategy,
but definitely, if you're traveling,if you have that opportunity to go somewhere
for at least a couple months,I think that's probably the best way to
do it. And it's certainly workedfor me and for other people that I

(08:13):
documented in that book. It's fascinatingfor me because I was fortunate enough to
grow up in different parts of theworld, and one of the periods of
time, when I was around aboutfour or five, we lived in a
place called Guinea in West Africa,which is a French speaking country. So
I was completely bilingual at the ageof six. And I now find whenever

(08:37):
I go to France and I startconversing with people because a lot of it
you lose, right, And soI go start conversing with people and like
words come out of me that Idon't even know. I know, yeah,
and do you have a nice likeWest African accent too when you're speaking
French? That like as I'd lovethat, you know, No, I
mean, I think, I thinkfor language learning, I think, and

(09:00):
I document this in ultra learning.It's one of those It's one of those
examples where a lot of us havean experience learning it in a school context
where we are not often that successful. Where you know, I have you
know, if you survey people who'vebeen through a French class, the majority
of them would not feel comfortable speakingin French. And that maybe is even

(09:22):
true after multiple years of taking Frenchclasses. The same is true of you
know, how many people have likeI've got, you know, two years
on my duel and Goo streak,but like, you know, god forbid
you have a conversation with me thatwould be terrifying, right, And so
there that's one of my strongest examplesof where like an alternative approach to doing
things can can be so much moreeffective that really the method is just kind

(09:46):
of determines your your performance. Sothere's there's I don't want to say that
that is true of every single fieldthat there's like some way of doing ten
x what what you're doing if youuse the right method. But for language
learning, it definitely seems to bethe case that you know, the way
most people approach it is just notgoing to get them to a place where
they feel comfortable. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. So having immersed yourself

(10:11):
in the world of learning, andthen obviously the you know, this is
the next book, And what Ikind of like about this one is you've
gone in a slightly different direction becauseI think you've got a bit more practical
now. So it's not just necessarilyabout the kind of the knowledge acquisition piece,
it's the application of and essentially you'regetting into my world, which is
skill. So of course this islike this is like the new Bible.

(10:33):
So telp me about the genesis ofthat and then maybe we'll dive into some
of the specifics. But I've gotsome interesting things I want to talk about.
Yeah, I mean it's interesting.I think like one of the questions
that I get a lot is like, didn't you write a book about learning,
like Ultra Learning was also about learning, and it's sort of like,
isn't this book also about that?But I think the way you design a
book, you end up highlighting somethings in a minting other things. So

(10:54):
the bare truth is that I could, like, I love this topic,
and I could probably write like twentybooks on it if they'd let if the
readers would like to read them all. But when I started writing this book,
the real genesis was hearing the storythat I opened the book with,
which is about Tetris players. Andso to just give a little bit of
background, Tetris comes out in theearly nineteen nineties. It's this phenomenon.

(11:15):
It's, you know, people areobsessed with it. People are playing the
game so much that there's like peoplewriting off eds about how people are hallucinating
falling blocks when they're doing daily activities. They call it the Tetris effect.
So this is like a major landmarkgame. But if you look at the
performance of the best people, sothe most obsessed people, the people who

(11:37):
are playing all the time, whoare the best at this game, and
you look at like what scores they'regetting, how good they are at the
game, they are like nothing closeto what twelve and thirteen year old kids
can do now. So to justuse some like simple examples. One of
them was in the old game,it had six digits for the score,
so the best score you could getwas nine nine nine nine, And this
was sort of long thought to belike a pseudo impossible target because the way

(12:00):
the game works is it just getsharder and harder to play, so eventually
you lose, and usually you losebefore you hit this amount, And it
took about twenty years before someone coulddocument themselves actually doing this, whereas in
a recent Tetris tournament that was held, I think it was something like this
score was hit about forty times andlike fourteen different people all did it.
So this is over the span ofabout a weekend. So what changed?
Why are people so much better atTetris now than they were before? And

(12:24):
the YouTuber John green Is he wasthe one who brought me to this story,
gave a really good explanation which Iagree with, which is that the
environment that people played and changed soback in the nineties, the way you
learned to play Tetris is that youknow, you fiddled around with it yourself.
You figured out a few things maybelike your friend's older brother was like,
oh yeah, do this thing,or you got to do this first

(12:46):
to play well, and you'd pickup a few tricks, but essentially all
the players were isolated from each other. There wasn't that much ability to learn
from other people. In contrast,you know, the twelve thirteen year old
kids who are these Tetris prodigies todaylive online. They can see video footage
of not just like what a person'sdoing, but how they're holding their controller
with their hand. That turns outto be really important that there's like certain

(13:09):
button pressing techniques that are essentially necessaryto play at really high levels and they're
not obvious. And so these kidsare really good because they're better able to
learn from other people. And thisis just a story that it didn't fit
into the ultra learning framework that Ihad kind of made up, but I
thought it was important because we're nottalking about like one player or you know,
one prodigy was really good. We'retalking about the entire ability for a

(13:33):
domain to improve and for people tolearn in general based on these factors.
So in the book Get Better atAnything, I try to uncover some of
these factors. So one of themwas what we're talking about is seeing learning
from other people is so important,but there's also lots of other factors,
and I wanted to try to highlightsome of these systematic differences that if you

(13:54):
change some variable in how people practiceor what kinds of feedback they're getting,
or how they're able to learn fromexamples of other people, you can get
dramatically different levels of progress and howimportant that is when we're trying to make
progress ourselves. Well, what Ifind interesting I love that Tetra story is
obviously a movie about that as well, isn't there now about the whole Genesis

(14:15):
creation story is also like it's alsoa wild story, you know that,
Like I kind of allude to itin one paragraph, but it's also a
wild story. How that game cameabout too, Yeah exactly, Yeah,
but yeah, so I mean,and what I love about that and what
that really spoke to me about wassomething that I guess is a big part
of the thesis of this particular show, which is environment and changes of environment

(14:39):
and its ability to influence an individual'sresponse. Like you say, so before
those ability to connect were there andshare and learn from each other and all
those sorts of things. Like yousay, everybody was just sort of doing
the experimental process, which you knowthey you do. Obviously people can get
really good just on their own,just takes them an awful lot longer,

(15:01):
and less of them can do it. Yeah, I mean, I think
this sort of phenomenon where the connectivityof the domain, the ability to learn
from other people and those changing andchanging progress, that's pretty universal. So
there's a story that I was goingto make a bigger feature of it in
the book, but then it wasjust already like, you know, you

(15:22):
have to just cut things down,so it's only a paragraph in the actual
book. But I did all thisresearch on alchemy, and so alchemy seems
like kind of a funny subject.But the sort of popular impression people have
of alchemy is that it's magic,it's mysticism, it's something vaguely supernatural.
But really it was just sort ofearly chemistry. This was just like people
who didn't have the right theory ofchemistry trying to figure out how when you

(15:45):
mix stuff together you get other stuff, how does that work? Right?
And there's lots of examples. Icover the research of the chemist and history
and learned Prince HiPE quite heavily inthat book, and he talks about how,
you know, a lot of alchemistran experiments they did. You know,
they were doing things where they weretrying to figure out stuff, figure

(16:06):
out what the real theory of matterwas, and they were doing this work.
But one of the key differences,and this is sort of I think
what created the schism between you know, the continuation of alchemy and then suddenly
you have chemistry and you have youknow, actual laws, actual signs being
created, was that the alchemists believedin secrecy. They believed that they didn't

(16:26):
want this knowledge spreading too widely.They only wanted people who had the right
kind of clever gifts to be ableto understand. Part of this was just
this link to this idea of liketurning base metals into gold. There was
a sort of like this fear that, okay, we can't let that knowledge
go too widely, and so therewas a lot of secrecy around that or
you know, elixirs of life orwhatever there was. There was this element

(16:48):
of secrecy, and so you haveideas that like alchemical textbooks where they put
the recipe for how to do somechemical reaction in this just fantastical picture like
griffins and like two headed snakes andthis kind of thing. And so the
chemists or the alchemists in this case, was supposed to look at this image
and through their extensive lore, beable to be like, Okay, well

(17:08):
this two headed snake is this chemicaland because it's over here, you must
be doing this with it. Butthis is like a really bad way to
communicate information on following an experiment.In contrast, like Robert Boyle who kind
of kicked off scientific chemistry, youknow, when he does his experiments to
the airpunt, he has like thesedetailed drawings of like exactly what APPARATUSY used

(17:30):
in like this is the experiment Idid, and these are the exact measurements
I got. And so the differencein communicating the knowledge, not the idea
of experiment, not the idea oflike having a theory of matter, that
is what allowed that field to progress. And so it makes you think about
how many of the fields that weoperate in often have this kind of like
tacit unspoken knowledge, this sort ofopaque I don't understand how this works process,

(17:52):
and how that makes it often verydifficult for people to acquire real skill.
When I read that passage, youmade me really reflect on the world
of sports coaching, because obviously,the world of sports coaching is basically,
in my mind like all about howto help others get better at things,

(18:12):
and in order to do that,we have to get better ourselves looking for
new methods and approaches. But itstrikes me that a lot of coaching and
coach education, or particularly co education, is a bit like alchemy, because
many practitioners, once they get likequite good and they build a reputation,
they can be quite secretive because theydon't necessarily want their methods to be shared

(18:33):
with us because it gives them acompetitive advantage. So it's like they're finding
finding gold, but equally. Andit also then struck me as well that
this the way knowledge is shared andpassed from from one generation to the next
has some similarities as well, becauseI think you often I often found within
the world, within the world ofcoaching, is like that things aren't always

(18:56):
very clearly documented. People don't generallyit's got a lot better recently, but
up to fairly recently, people didn'tgenuinely document their approaches and their methods with
almost this what you call quote pedagogy. People sort of past me. They
do it secretly, sort of youknow, person to person when they've got
some trust with somebody, as opposedto put their work out there and allow
us to see it, like thankfully. Like I said, it's changed now,

(19:18):
but for a long time, itwas very much like that. Oh
no, I completely agree. Imean that that was sort of my takeaway
from looking at this is that thedefault for most skills and domains is that
it's really confusing and opaque and peopledon't explain and document things like in some
ways our experience with school, wherewe learn these like extremely you know,

(19:41):
well codified, well specified sort ofskills, like if you're learning to read,
you know, there's a million booksabout not only what you know how
reading works, but you know theright way to teach reading and this kind
of thing. And so these extremelytransparent skills are are not the norm.
The norm is, you know,okay, guy knows this is just one
guy and he knows the right answer, and you have to know that person

(20:03):
to learn from him. And that'sjust sort of how it's been, I
think, for most of human history. So it's just interesting to document the
tetris example, because it's not thecase that like well, Tetris was was
a sort of an outlier and nowit's like most of the world. No,
no, no, most things arestill like Tetris in the early days.
And it makes you really wonder howmuch performance improvement could be unlocked if

(20:23):
you were able to take some ofthese sort of murky, ill defined skills
and put them under the light ofyou know, the kind of practice that
we expect of more well defined domains, like you know, like athletics or
things like that. Yeah. Imean, so there's there's a lot in
here. I kind of almost don'tknow where to start, and I'm like,
I'm really terrible when I read thingsbecause I'm a bit like a hit

(20:45):
in a candy store. I sortof split about are the things that are
kind of interesting? You know,I'm not very good at You've probably spent
a lot of time crafting a narrativearc, and I'm ruining it by jumping
around. But anyway, lots ofstuff took my interest interest. Let me
just jump into one. You talka bit about variability over repetition, Yeah,
and I'd love you to expand onthat, because that's obviously a big

(21:07):
theme of this show. Yeah,yeah, so this is a this is
sort of an interesting set of research. But the idea is that when you
practice something repeatedly, you get youget better at doing the thing that you're
doing. Right, So, ifyou're practicing some sort of movement or some
sort of skill or some sort ofprotocol, you get better at doing it.
And if you practice a lot ofdifferent things in the same session,

(21:29):
your improvement is slower. And sothat sort of suggests, Okay, well
we should be you know, doingmore repetition, more practice. But there's
a lot of interesting experiences to showthat when you do the kind of varied
practice, so you practice your backhandwith your forehand kind of interleaved, or
you're you know, practice one kindof shot with another shots I'm using athletic
examples, or you do one kindof math problem interleave with another problem,

(21:52):
it slows how quickly you acquire theunderlying skills, but it makes it faster
to acquire new skill. And sothis is I think a kind of surprising
result because so much of our knowledgeabout like what we should be doing when
we're practicing comes from this direct experienceof like how fast am I getting things
how quickly do I seem to belearning? And this is one example where

(22:15):
doing things that seem to make itslower for learning, that make it harder
for you to acquire the skill nonethelessmake it easier for you to learn new
skills or for you to develop greaterabilities later. So I think it's one
of those areas where, you know, a lot of our design of curricula
is based on Okay, we dounit one, and then we do unit
two, and then we do unitthree, because superficially, our observation in

(22:37):
that situation is that, well,they're learning a lot faster than if I
mix it all together. But themixing it all together is sometimes better for
acquiring that you know, unit sevenwhen you've gone one through six, right,
And I love the fact that youknow. You reminded me again when
I was reading that, there wasa gentleman who's been on the podcasts like
very very immersed in the world ofsort of environment environments is learning modalities who

(23:03):
said to me that people think thevariability is noise. It's kind of gets
in the way while you're learning theparticular thing that you're learning. A boy
saying, is no variability isn't noise, it's signal. You kind of need
it in order to help you thenwith the other things. Well, yeah,
So one of the theories of whyvariability helps is that I'm going to

(23:25):
oversimplify a little bit here the idea, but that there's kind of two parts
when you're performing a skill. Oneis performing the action, the procedure,
the routine you've learned. So youknow, if you're doing an algebra problem,
it's how do you solve this kindof algebra problem. If you're doing
a you know, tennis backhand serve, it's you know, the movement of
the tennis backhand serve. But thenthere's a different part of the skill which

(23:45):
is very important, which is choosingto apply that pattern, choosing to use
that technique. And when you practicein a repetitive, highly consistent environment,
you do get better at that particulartechnique. But what is impoverished is because
the environment is highly predictable, youdon't train much ability for how do you

(24:07):
know when do you use it?And in real life, most of the
difficulty of what we learn is whendo you use knowledge that you learn.
I mean, if you break itdown simply enough, almost every skill like
the little component parts. You couldteach almost anyone, right, Like,
I mean, there are some skillsthat maybe it takes a bit of practice
to get, but you know,doing one action, one repetition is not

(24:30):
usually the crux of the difficulty.The crux of the difficulty is that you
know dozens of things you can doand you have to pick the right one.
And so this sort of suggests thatfor skills of even modest complexity and
things like this, this variable practiceis very important, and we kind of
do ourselves a disservice because we're nottraining that ability to pluck out the right
thing that we need to do inthe right time. This is one of
the reasons why I originally one ofmy I Think is a second podcast I

(24:53):
ever released was called The War onDrills, because it was designed to challenge
the notion that if we learn awhole series of kind of isolated movements in
very very discrete ways, and thenwe there's the sort of I think the
idea was that you know that thatyou aggregate up all these discrete movements and
then you become like a world classperformer and actually turns out kind of works

(25:15):
out that works the other way somy suggestion was, maybe we don't actually
need to have loads and loads ofchildren in queues waiting to have a go
at a very very isolated movement.We could do things more playfully, and
therefore we could have more fun whilewe're learning. Yeah, and I mean,
I think that's there's there's a lotof evidence that, like for movement
skills and stuff too, it's notsimply it's not simply that we are just

(25:41):
like, like you know, applyingan algebra formula. There's sort of a
rule that you're following that you justsort of apply the rule and it will
work every time. Whereas a lotof movement skills, a lot of motor
programs, we actually kind of storethe knowledge of how to perform that skill
at a fairly abstract level, becauseyou know, we have to adjust it
to so many different variables that aregoing to change from time to time.

(26:02):
So it hasn't come out on mywebsite yet, but I have a review
of like one of these longer textbookscovering sort of motor learning theory, and
that has been a sort of areaof scientist of like what is stored in
the brain when we learn movements,And it seems to be quite abstract.
That like a lot of the specificdetails of how you move, so like
which muscles are involved, the speedof the movement, the power, all

(26:23):
these things are sort of dynamic,can be said in the fly. And
so it means that if you arepracticing in a very kind of constrained setting,
you're not really testing enough variation,not enough of the range of the
movement to really get that kind ofabstract picture, which is what you need.
So I think that is a problemwith a lot of athletic training is

(26:44):
that you you know, if you'redoing things with the orange pylons on the
orange cones. I mean, maybeit's helpful if a student's really struggling,
like you know, to kind ofokay, this is the basics to understand
it, But beyond a certain point, it's going to be hard because you're
essentially learning it in such a narrowrange of circumstance. Says you're not going
to get a good generalization of themovement. And I like the word that
I would abstract, because there's areal danger, isn't there. Actually,

(27:07):
You particularly with a growing body,you know, and cognitive ability is growing
and maturation and all those sorts ofthings that actually the movements you learn as
a child, particularly if you dothem in such a sort of very discreet
and very it almost becomes like youkind of get a movement that you can't
like get out all, you know, and you're going to need to adapt

(27:29):
as your body changes. So inmany ways you're much better off sort of
keeping the movement repertoire much shallower earlierand allowing them to deepen later. Yeah.
Yeah, no, there is someresearch I know David Epstein highlighted in
his book Range that for sports inparticular, children seem to do better when
they have more diverse athletic involvement atyounger ages. They do better at elite

(27:52):
levels, which is, you know, it's an interesting idea, especially since
in a lot of intellectual pursuits weknow that, you know, not suggesting
that everyone should do this with theirkids, but you know a lot of
world class performers and let's say chessor music or some of these things which
are a little bit more intellectual,start from a very very young age.
So it's very interesting that athletics oftenshows this sort of pattern where you know,

(28:15):
doing a bunch of different sports whenyou're younger is maybe more beneficial even
if you're only going to be atennis player or golfer or what have you.
Yeah, they like contribute to youroverall appolticism and they give you other
dimensions. Yeah yeah, Now youled me onto something else which I wanted
to talk to you about because Isort of like linked to this notion of
variability. So some of I thinka lot of that people. And this

(28:37):
is one of the phrases. Ifif I had at a pound for every
time I hear this phrase said tome, is this idea of muscle memory?
So you know you've got a wholesection on the idea that the mind
is not a muscle. Yeah.Yeah, so this is this is one
chapter that I mean every every likeI feel like in a book like this,
sometimes there's the chapters where you arelike, people are going to really

(28:59):
like this chapter because it's telling themsomething they want to hear, and then
there's the other chapters where are like, people need to hear this, but
I don't know whether they're going tolike it. And I think the thing
that I got from learning the researchis this is a real underdiscussed area because
you read a lot of the academicresearch and there's been for basically one hundred
years. I would say a pseudoconsensus on the idea of transfer, which

(29:19):
is that the ability to learn oneskill and how it applies to the other.
So, if you learn chess,how does it apply to doing you
know, business reasoning? If youlearn music, how does it apply to
like being creative? If you learnprogramming, how does it apply to problem
solving? When you carefully study thesethings, transfer tends to be low outside
of domain. So I'm talking notabout you know, you learn JavaScript and

(29:41):
then you better Python programmer, youlearn to play tennis, or you good
at racketball. Pretty much everyone agreesthat that kind of transfer happens is pretty
common. But the sort of fartransfer where you learn one skill and then
how does that affect you for learninga completely different skill, It's kind of
hard to find. It's difficult tofind. It doesn't show up that much.
And so part of the reason Ithink people get seduced by this idea

(30:02):
that you know, this is areliable way to get good at skills broadly,
is that we have this metaphor thatthe mind is like a muscle.
So to use the example, ifyou lift a weight with your arm and
your bicep gets bigger and stronger.I would expect it to be stronger also
for carrying groceries and for doing allsorts of other things. Now, maybe

(30:22):
not one hundred percent, you know, lifting a weight is a little different
than lifting groceries. But broadly speaking, that's how muscles work. You have
bigger muscle, stronger muscles, youcan lift more. The mind doesn't seem
to be built like that. Itdoesn't seem to be the case that doing
some intense mental activity that involves onesort of domain just makes you mentally smarter,
clever, have better memory, betterreasoning in another domain. And so

(30:45):
the best sort of like counter theorythis is people talk about brain training,
and brain training is like super popular. Maybe you see those little ads that
are like for brain training games onthe side, and they really appeal to
the fact that people have this ideathat this is how the mind works,
that the mind is like a muscle, and if you do some kind of
Sudoku puzzles, for instance, you'rejust going to be clever when you're reasoning
about things that don't have to dowith numbers or grids or what have you.

(31:08):
And again there's a lot of evidenceI cite in the book that this
just seems to be not the case. It's not how the brain seems to
work. And I think a bettermetaphor for how the brain works is that
the brain is sort of a collectionof tools. And so those tools,
I don't want to say that they'rejust you know, knowing facts or knowing
procedures. They're a little bit morecomplicated than that. But these collection of

(31:29):
tools are quite specific. So eachthing that you learn is for dealing with
something fairly specific. But the kindof our intelligence or intellectual abilities is from
having a broad collection of tools,is from having a diverse and well honed
toolkit. And so I think thetoolkit metaphor is a better way of thinking
about it. That when we aretrying to be you know, good in
a language, for instance, it'sknowing a lot of words and knowing when

(31:52):
to use those words and knowing thegrammar. That's a big part of learning
the language. It's not some sortof you know, language in our brain
that just strengthens with practice. SoI think this idea is very important because
it tells us sort of where weshould expect abilities, Like if we're trying
to get good at something, weneed to do practice in the domain that
we're trying to practice. And thenalso if we're trying to build broader abilities,

(32:15):
if we want to be you know, like you said, generally athletic,
we want to be generally good problemsolvers, then we need to have
a broad and diversary of tools.Yeah, And the interesting thing for me,
and what I was thinking about whenI was reading this bit as well,
was like, how do the tool? How do the tool? How
are the tools generated? So sortof the traditional linear We will talk about

(32:36):
nonlinear learning in a minute, butthe traditional notion is that you know,
you almost like insert a tool intosomebody, you know, almost like a
piece of software, and then atsome stage they're going to know how to
like, you know, they're goingto have some sort of In my world,
you know, it's usually a movementto technique or something along those lines.
So we practice it, we insertit. It's a software program,

(32:58):
and then you just like play theprogram where it's needed. But increasingly,
you know, the literature is nowmoving towards the idea that actually the tools
are kind of they they're given toyou, but they're more sort of dynamic
in the sense of like your responseto the environment is essentially a tool,

(33:20):
but the tool is kind of moreflexible than that. It's not like it's
a rigid tool. It's actually somethingvery flexible that you can use in lots
of different ways with different levels ofcreativity. And so it's kind of that
that whole dynamic sort of environments humaninteraction is constantly at play, which is
why some researchers don't use the phraseskill acquisition anymore because it's sort of evokes

(33:42):
the notion that you know, youacquiere a skill and then you have it
forever, and they now talk aboutthis notion of skill attunement. It's a
variable, dynamic process of constantly adaptingto different environments stimulus. Yeah, I
mean the motor skills that it's justreally interesting too, because it's pretty clear
that being able to perceive the environmentand respond with our musculature to you know,

(34:08):
be effective in that environment is oneof the most complicated things we do
that in some ways, doing mathproblems is like it's relatively trivial, like
it's pretty easy to program a computerprogram that can like, you know,
do arithmetic, but it's even attoday's level with our you know AI and
everything like that, we still can'tmake good robots, like our robots still

(34:28):
kind of suck like, So it'spretty clear when you look at from a
computation or perspective, that's something wetake for granted. Being able to walk
around and move in the world,which we don't do with much thought at
all, is one of the mostcomplicated things we do. Like it just
at a very basic level, itis. And I think you're probably right
that there is whatever is being storedin the head. And even the word

(34:51):
stored is maybe misleading here, butwhatever is in your head that represents your
ability to do something, it hasto be pretty abstract. It has to
be something that can't just be like, you know, move your bicep this
much with this many newtons and forcelike it's definitely not that right, because
otherwise you would just be hopeless ininteracting with a changing environment, which is

(35:12):
what we do rather effortlessly. SoI think I think you're probably right.
I think that there is a veryimportant in motor skills, a very important
role for both practice and the feedbackfrom the natural environment in tuning those skills.
I will say that you know,one of the things that I kind
of came to in this is thatthe sort of more traditional, more old
school approach to skill learning I dothink has merits in the sense that if

(35:36):
you're not in the ballpart for theright skill, like if you're not acquiring
the skill in broadly the right way, the old sort of idea that like
doing a lot of practice doing thewrong thing gets bad habits and they're very
hard to get out of. Ithink that's probably still true. So the
example I've been using to kind ofmake clear with people from a motor skill
point of view is if you're learningto type on a keyboard, a very

(35:57):
natural way to start is hunting andpecking using two fingers and looking at the
keyboard and doing that. And ifyou do that enough, you can be
a proficient under and pecker I guess, and do it with enough speed that
you can get by doing emails.But that's never going to spontaneously turn to
touch typing, like they just relyon like a different kind of way of
processing. You know, you're okay, I'm using the A key as always
with my pinky finger. That's justnot something you do when you're hunting and

(36:21):
pecking. And so I think obviously, with like a coach, a lot
of times what you're doing is guidingpeople so that whatever kind of dynamic movement
pattern their body generates to deal withthe fact that they are a different size,
they have different strength, different mucilature, all that kind of stuff.
You want them to be in thekind of basin of attraction of like a
good movement pattern so that they're doingit sort of right. And you know,

(36:43):
without that ability to learn observationally,to learn kind of didactically from a
coach or a teacher, it's verydifficult to do that. I mean,
uh, there's I'm sure if Ijust started learning some sport and I didn't
have any guidance, I didn't haveany YouTube videos to show me the right
way to do it, very easyfor you to just like have bad habits
and then you get to a coachfive years later and they're like, oh,

(37:05):
you're doing it wrong, and it'svery difficult you don't do that.
So I think that's sort of whereit happens, is that often you're getting
in the zone and in the rightkind of starting place for those skills.
I mean, actually your your phrasethere, which I might have to steal
actually the base basin of attraction.I really like that motion. No,

(37:25):
no, no, I love it. I mean in many ways it's it
speaks to your your ability to puttogether words as a writer. Well,
the basin Oh sorry, yeah,yeah, I just wanted to elaborate because
it comes from system series. Solike basin attractions, that you have this
idea that like there's some some sortof landscape of moon skills and there's a

(37:47):
there's a quality to them, andso you can you can sort of move
toward a kind of central point,like you get practice gets you close,
so is the hunting in packing.You're getting more and more fast and smoother
and more efficient, but it stillremains and pecking. That's the that's the
sort of the the like what you'reasymptotically approaching when you're doing that. So
it's not just an invention of mine, but it is a little bit jargon

(38:08):
hereah no, no no. ButI actually really like the metaphor as well,
because it's almost this idea that youcan actually be quite skillful with environments
and you can kind of guide peopletowards sort of more optimal movement solutions.
I think the metaphor of people oftenuse it. It's a bit like a
marble on a stretched piece of fabric, and like it can, it'll it'll

(38:31):
move towards the area that you knowyou get into and you can actually be
quite you can manipulate the fabric andthen the marble will move into different areas.
And what you're doing is you're andthis is something you also talk about,
which is this notion of problem solvingbeing search. So actually what you're
doing is you're modifying the search spaceand then people find different solutions, as
opposed to saying this is the solutionthat you're always going to need forever and

(38:53):
I'm going to give it you nowand then op you go sort of thing.
Yeah, yeah, I mean Ithink that's that's often what you're doing.
Like in learning to move, there'sa lot of variables, right,
there's lots of ways you could potentiallysolve some kind of movement problem. And
one of the ways that our bodykind of solves is you just try things

(39:14):
and then there's a little bit oferror correction feedback. So that's that idea
of like moving down to this basinof attraction, there's some landscape of solutions
and as you keep doing something youmake it more efficient because you're getting this
like feedback from the environment of youknow, I'm going down the hill with
my skis and like, oh,that was a bit bumpier. I need
to make my legs a little bitmore tense. And you're doing this not
even always consciously. Your body isjust at a procedural level learning that this

(39:38):
is how you need to make theseadjustments. But at the same time,
because this space is so vast,there's many, often, many different ways
that you could solve something, andso it's possible that if you start off
far away from the solution is eithergoing to take you a lot of practice,
or you might pick up a badhabit which like it works under the
current constraints, but it's not tobe good in all situations. So I

(40:01):
know, I have a whole chapterdedicated to this sort of unlearning problem,
which can be a very big onein athletics, where if you if you
really train a movement solution very well, it can be very difficult to learn
an alternate one, even if thefirst one is certain deficient. So anyone
who's been a lifelong hunter and backaround the keyboard may be kind of daunted
because they know that learning to touchtype is going to be a drop of

(40:23):
performance for a while until you becomefluent with the new mode movement, and
even then you're probably gonna, ina moment of stress, kind of go
back to pecking again. Yes,as someone who's been trying to teach myself
to touch type, it is verydifficult when you're under pressure not to go
back to hunting and pecking when youjust need that key that you're looking for

(40:43):
exactly. So this this talks aboutI mentioned earlier on we talked about nonlinear
learning, and you title it improvementis not a straight line. So I
think we've touched on that a littlebit, but I'm interested a little bit
more on that on that topic.Yes, so this is interesting. I
found this, this idea that,like a lot of mastery involves unlearning,

(41:07):
to be a kind of a themethat comes out in a lot of different
domains. So that's why I wantedto write this chapter, was that there's
sort of parallels, Like, youknow, I talk about Tiger Woods and
his sort of somewhat infamous decision tolike rebuild his golf stroke when he was
at the peak of his career,which has been like endlessly debated by you
know, sports fans, but itkind of comes from this idea that you

(41:30):
know, in a lot of movementskills, again, like with the ones
that we were talking about, youcan get really fluent with a kind of
a bad habit, and then itcan be hard to get better. To
get better, you have to essentiallystop doing what feels comfortable, do something
else and sort of start from scratchand build a new movement pattern that will
sort of eventually override the old one. But this doesn't just apply to learning

(41:52):
physical skills. I mean there's awhole literature on misconceptions where people essentially have
these sort of naive folk theories ofphysics, of economics, of all sorts
of disciplines which we have scientific information, and this can present a real difficulty
for the teacher of science to explain, you know, how physicists think about

(42:13):
things, because people go in andthey have all these ideas that are just
wrong about how stuff moves, andthen that leads them to make incorrect predictions
and it makes it harder to learnthe deeper theories. And this is true
of many domains. It's even trueof a lot of like fairly simple what
we often think of as fairly simpleskills. I talk about Robert Siegeler.
He has a lot of research onhow kids learn to do arithmetic, So

(42:36):
how do you add two numbers?And he shows that instead of the way
we normally think about it as like, well, there's one way to learn
how to do it, we actuallyuse like several different methods. So there
we start by counting from zero onboth hands, and then you count from
the bigger want number, and thenyou count from the bigger number, and
then you just learn to add thosetwo together. You just do directly remember

(42:58):
that what the answer was. Andthese various methods kind of compete with each
other for a while, and soit's not the case that you just learn
one's skill and you just get steadilybetter at it. That for complicated skills,
of which he uses this as anexample, probably we have several different
ways of doing it, and thoseways shift over time as we get you
know, as we get more experience, we get more practice, we stop

(43:19):
doing it one way, we startdoing it another way. And so this
idea of non moneticity, that's sortof the academic word for not being a
straight line, But this idea thatwhen we're learning. We're not just you
know, learn the right technique andjust get steadily better at it over time,
but rather we're learning multiple ways ofdoing things that a new way maybe
is going to take over an oldway once we have more experience. These

(43:44):
things are very interesting because it suggeststhat often in our path to improvement,
we're not just again do it andthen keep repeating it. We're getting better.
We're having to constantly make things up, learn new techniques, suppress all
bad techniques, this kind of thing. And it struck me. I mean,
I it's quite early on in thechapter. You actually, you know,
I'm really into my golf at themoment, and you talk about,

(44:07):
like, you know it quite thedangers actually of some of this stuff,
particularly the assumption being that you know, if you continuously, you know,
look for different solutions, all you'redoing is basically adding to your repertoire.
But actually, if you take somebodywho particularly you talk about sev Biastereos,
you know, who was an individualwho learned to play the game. You

(44:29):
know, famously, as story goes, you had a three iron on the
beach, you know, so helearned a very very natural way of playing
the game that was not an instructedway, and developed a series of movement
capabilities and an ability to play thegame from anywhere. You know, his
escapes were always famous. And thenthe minute he went into a different mode

(44:52):
thinking he was going to try andsort of rebuild his swing, which is
the classical thing, and all ofa sudden it became about something much more,
a much more delivered to him inan alien way than his natural learning
approach, and as you say,never to be seen again, never played
competitively or never or at least nevercompeted at the same level ever again.

(45:13):
And it's sometimes to me thinks thatthere's a great deal of danger sometimes,
isn't there in these kinds of thissort of thinking of that the linear learning
approach is the way that we're alwaysgoing to find improvement. Well, I
mean, I think every time youdo research on these kinds of things,
like often you encounter a body ofresearch. So in my cases, talking
about these various examples of non monotonicallearning, some of these theoretical ideas,

(45:37):
and then you go shopping around lookingfor what's a good story that I could
use to highlight it. And Ihad heard about this Tiger Woods changing his
golfstrop kind of thing. And soit was very interesting digging into that story
about this. I really think itkind of captured this this risk because you
know, obviously, at least forthe first time he changed his swing,
it worked out for Tiger, likehe did quite well after he started working

(45:59):
with his first swing coach, alittle bit less well after the second swing
coach, and then you know,there's debates about whether the further improvements were
at all advisable. But just thisidea that like, you know, Scott
Eaden, the sports journalist that Icite in that chapter, just talks about
how like basically people just thought hewas insane for doing this, because there

(46:20):
was a lot of idea that youknow, you're you've spent a lot of
time golfing. Even when he wasmaking his first swing change, he'd spent
a lot of time golfing. Thisis a very well trained habit. If
it were or a movement pattern,if we want to be a little less
mechanistic about it, like that basinof attraction, he's way at the bottom
of that well. And so tolearn a different technique is very difficult.

(46:43):
It's very likely to encounter difficulties becausethat movement pattern is so automatic, so
reflexive to him, that if helearns a new way of doing it,
he's going to have to have anenormous amount of practice for that new pattern
to compete with the old pattern.And you know, it's probably the case
that even though I use the wordunlearning colloquially, we probably don't unlearn anything.

(47:04):
So once you learn something, it'sprobably somewhere in your brain. And
if you, you know, arein situations of stress or pressure, which
obviously a major golf tournament is fullof those moments, it's very natural to
fall back on old patterns, andso you can get in these sort of
choking situations where you're doing something notthe way you want to do it,
an old way of doing it becauseof stress, because of these things.

(47:27):
So in some cases, to Tiger'scredit that he was able to push through
that, but it also shows,you know, there was a definite risk
involved in taking those kinds of majorrecalibration. And as you put up with
the example of say, I mean, it doesn't always turn out in your
favor, I mean, it's sothat the Tiger is an endlessly fascinating sort
of story, not least of which, because what isn't often written about with

(47:51):
Tiger is he had a really quiteunique upbringing within the game. In a
very unique upbringing anyway. I mean, a lot of the strengths of him
comes from his mental strength, whichis derived from, you know, the
sort of the Eastern philosophy that werepracticed by his mother. And he often
talks about the fact that he playedoften in a sort of semi meditative state.

(48:12):
But anyway, I digress. Theinteresting thing is is that I was
very fortunate at one time to meethis junior coach, a guy called Rudy
Durant, and he had a heowned an eighteen hole path three course that
wasn't far from where there was andevery Saturday morning he would play around with
Tiger. This is when Tiger waslike five or something, right, And

(48:32):
he'd play a round of golf withTiger's father and him, And he said
all he would do is they wouldplay together and he would wait for the
coachable moment. So the unique experienceof Tiger was that he learned the plague.
And I actually asked, I askedRudy this question, and I said,
how much time did you spend kindof on the driving range, working
on kind of swing and things,and how much time you won the course.

(48:53):
At eighty five percent of the timewas on the golf course, and
then the only time he went tothe range was when we discovered something on
the golf course that we needed towork a little bit more on. So
Tiger's whole kind of upbringing from avery very early age was learning to play
the game of golf and the challengesthat it threw at him, and then
he would then refine those skills lateron when he discovered something that he couldn't

(49:15):
quite solve in the environment. Andapparently when he was in his middle teens,
one of his biggest challenges was becausehe had such a wide movement repertoire.
His biggest challenges was he'd see aboutten different solutions to the shot problem
and he couldn't focus down to one. So he had to learn how to
sort of focus down to one.And then when he did his his swing
changes later on, I actually believeat that stage that wasn't him. It

(49:39):
was written about as being he's rebuildinghis swing. No, what he discovered
was because he has this constant sortof developing you know, he's still that
child playing the game. It's oneof the reasons he'd hardly ever miss a
cut as well, because he couldalways get the ball in the hole from
wherever he was. But what hewould do was he would basically when he
discovered something, he didn't have themovement repertoire for the challenges that the game

(50:01):
was presenting to him now. Sowhat he then went about was setting about
finding the new movement repertois that heknew he needed, so he didn't necessarily
change his swing. He added toit. And I think that's a kind
of an interesting, sort of likeway of looking at how that all took
place. Well, yeah, Ithink it is interesting when you think about

(50:21):
performers in many domains how they addto their repertoire. And I think you're
right. I think sometimes there's asort of unthinking quality ascribed to this,
so that it's sort of like,oh, you're just a machine and you're
applying pattern A and then you applypattern B. But if you think about
you know, good writers or somethinglike this, it's not even so much
about okay, well i'm writing badlyand I'm writing better now, but often

(50:45):
about having more ways you can tacklethe same problem. So I use the
example of Octavia Butler earlier in thebook, but she's she's a good example.
She had this advice for students whenthey were getting stuck with things is
go and find like ten example.So if you're start struggling with openings,
go find like a dozen people whoseopenings for stories you like and copy them

(51:06):
downward for word. And the ideahere wasn't to copy them, but to
see, these are the ways youcan start a story, and like,
so if you're stuck, here's twelvedifferent ways you can do it. And
I think that's an important part ofwhat you're doing when you are getting into
those sort of more nuanced ages ofyour craft, is that you are like
in getting increasing distinctions, you're gettingincreasing levels of detail from the environment where

(51:29):
you can be like, this iswhy this is the right move in this
right situation. So it's not evenjust about Okay, I've got this library
of patterns, but you've very muchtuned in so that Okay, there's these
twelve ways I can do it,and I'm going to pick this one,
and this is why it's best.And that's why I think why it's often
very difficult to learn something to thatlevel is because the complexity just keeps going
up and you have so many moredifferent situations that you have to respond to.

(51:52):
I mean chess players, that's clearlywhat they're doing is that you know,
you don't just learn Okay, well, I'm going to try to make
the kidding right now, I know, you learn all these like increasingly fine
discriminations you need to make about thechess game in order to figure out what
move is the best one to play. It's interesting because chess is fascinating it
because there's so many almost like aninfinite number of possibilities. But the interesting

(52:15):
thing about chess players is they've donean experiment, haven't they. I'll probably
get this wrong, but where theylook. But they're basically pattern recognizers,
aren't they. So if you givethem like an end game or something,
they'll kind of work out the solutionreally quite quickly. But if you put
the pieces in random places that theywouldn't ordinarily be, they're no better than

(52:35):
a beginner. Yeah. Yeah,So this is a really important research result.
So chess is like that's a reallylong history within cognitive psychology. It's
like one of the favorite games thatpeople like to study for this, and
so William Chasin Herbert Simon. Theyreplicated this work of an earlier Dutch psychologist,
Adrianda Groat, and one of thethings they found was that better players

(52:59):
do not seem to search deeper intothe chess problem than not so good players.
Now, the range restriction there wasbetween players who are kind of like
asual weekend club players and like grandmasters or master shares players, so between
like pretty good players and like reallygood players. It turns out if you
expand the range to include like rankbeginners, like better players do actually look

(53:20):
further ahead, but not that muchfurther ahead, not enough to explain the
difference in their ability. So thedifference in the ability seems to be that
high level players have a much largerlibrary of chess patterns. They recognize certain
plays that they're able to almost perceivethe board in terms of it's imbued with
meaning of like this is what's goingon in this situation that beginners are not

(53:42):
able to do. So one ofthe ways you can test that is you
arrange the board, you let themlook at it, you clear the board,
and then you ask them to likerecreate it. And if the board
positions are natural. They come upfrom organic plays, so there are something
that maybe would have occurred during agame. Grand Masters and higher level players
are much better at reproducing the boardthan beginners, and this is one of

(54:05):
the reasons why grandmasters can play likenine consecutive blindfolded games, which would just
be impossible for a beginner because theyonly have to remember like a few little
data points, so like it's astory that they're hearing, and it's like
if you pick up a book youare reading and you're just like, oh,
yeah, I remember, this iswhat was going on in this book,
and you can just pick up fromwhere you left off, or is
it for a beginner it's just amess. However, it does seem that
grandmasters, even if you just likemake these weird permutations of the game where

(54:30):
they don't actually have any experience withit, they do play better. So
it's not the case that, like, you know, it's just pure pattern
recognition that drives a competitive play.But the experiments do show that this chunking
ability, this ability to take complexpatterns of information, store them in memory,
and use that to essentially be smarterwithin the game than beginners, is

(54:52):
a major component of how not onlychess players, but all sorts of expert
performance. So I kind of alludeto some say teachings of the book.
But this finding about chess players appliesto like dozens of other fields. So
this is not just about chess players. This seems to be how expertise works
in many domains. It's it's almostlike there's a it's almost like there's a

(55:15):
I don't know, like it's ashortcutting mechanism. And so going back to
the sort of movement movement domains,there's a lot of sort of research around
like amazing soccer players and their experiences, and a lot of them have So
if you take, for example,It's famous, that's sort of you know,
a lot of the Brazilian, thevery very highly skilled Brazilian players,
you know, their movement development wasin what they call futsal. It's very

(55:38):
small spaces. Football does allow footballin the room a lot of I don't
know if to teach you Brazilian youlived there for a year, but you
know, but very much in smallspaces. But of course playing a game
in a small space, but withboth proximity opponent post proximity teammates. So
what they're doing is they're seeing,like you know, a turbo charge,

(56:00):
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundredsof hours of essentially kind of football video.
That then, of course, whenthey then go into a different environment,
the sort of more formal environment,you know, the recognition of the
movements, so they're able to sortof process really quickly, they're able to
deal with small space, they're ableto deal in different environments, and that
again is a sort of a verysimilar thing. I think, Well,

(56:22):
it's interesting that you're talking about aboutlike the Brazilian footballers. I had heard
that before that you know, thesort of casual pickup games in Brazil are
maybe more formative than like the Americanyou know, little league soccer, soccer
coacha drills. But I think there'ssomething also an interesting question that this kind

(56:43):
of brings up, which is isthe real environment that you typically practice in
always the best for skill growth?And I think one of the things that
came up from my reading the researchis the actually the answer is often know
that sometimes the typical environment that youpractice in and doesn't have enough difficulty,

(57:04):
enough constraints to really like force youto learn the correct pattern. So you
know, an example that came upwhen when looking at the research was talking
about pilot training that typically when you'reflying a plane, like nothing bad happens.
You're just flying and you know,everything's good, and you can rack
up a lot of hours with thatand you know, and it'll be okay.

(57:25):
Whereas the way that they do alot of pilot training now, which
is sort of like a kind ofhard one lesson is well, you want
to like put all these various mechanicalfailures of the plane and like put it
in you know, I talk aboutone of the early Air Force pilot trainers,
you know, would just like putthe plane into like spins and dives
and like, okay, recover fromthis. And none of those things don't

(57:46):
happen very often, but those arethe experiences that force you to like develop
the ability to learn. So I'mthinking about the Brazilian soccer players playing in
these like kind of cramped spaces.Then in some ways that environment is more
challenging. It has, you know, more constraints, so you have to
develop solutions for dealing with problems youjust maybe don't come up very often in

(58:06):
the the on the soccer field,the big wide open green field, and
because of that you're maybe learning sometools in a much more rapid fashion that
when you are in the actual environmentit might have taken you a long time
to learn them. And so Ithink of that in a lot of spaces
that you know, people who workin kind of constrained, rigorous, highly
variable environments very often progress faster thansomeone who just simply does the thing that

(58:30):
they're trying to get good at becauseof this effect. So if you think
about writing, for instance, alot of the best writers, you know,
they have a background as journalists innewsrooms, and what that forces you
to do. If you're doing nonfiction, you have to write for an editor,
you have rigorous standards for reporting,and you get like tons of repetitions
of like, Okay, go coverthis story and come back to me with

(58:51):
like some thing, Whereas someone likemyself, who doesn't have that experience,
it's a lot harder for me tosimulate that because it's very easy for me
to just like I'll just write ablog article and publish it. And I
could do that for ten fifteen yearsand still not learn some of the things
that you'd need to learn to do, like high quality reportage. And so
I think That's something that when weare choosing environments and choosing how we want
to improve, sometimes choosing that thatsort of more extreme version of the environment

(59:15):
can be beneficial because it introduces newconstraints, new variability that you wouldn't get
just doing your day to day job. You just made me reminded me of
a There's a story I think.I'm pretty sure that Dan Coyle writes about
it in The Tuner Code, Ithink, but he and it's about the
Beatles and they're kind of how theysort of hot house their musical ability because

(59:39):
they happened to get I think itwas a weekly gig playing in a club
in somewhere in Germany, was it? I think Hamberg that's it. Yeah,
yeah, yeah, And of courselike they're basically playing live. You
know, when you said constrained,rigorous, highly variable environments, I think
that was exactly that, because apparentlythey sucked for quite a while. Yeah,

(01:00:00):
I mean no, I think Ithink that's from Malcolm Gladwell's book unless
Dan Cooyne also talks about From Outliers. He talks about the Beatles, But
the idea I think is also relevantto you know, like a lot of
standard comics that do a lot ofyou know, you're doing open mic nets
and this kind of thing. Thesethese there's these sort of environments that they're

(01:00:20):
going to accelerate your growth, particularlyonce you're sort of at a level where
you can survive in them, becauseI don't want to say, like,
another thing that comes up with theresearch is that a lot of the things
that work well for people at acertain level of skill don't work well at
another level of skill. There's sortof a continuum. But the basic idea
is that once you're sort of ata mediocre to like okay, you have

(01:00:42):
you sort of learned the basics,you have that repertoire, then the right
kind of environment I think really doesmake a difference because you know, it
could be the constraints we're talking about, the cramped corridors forces you to learn
movement solutions you wouldn't have learned ifyou're in a big open field riggers feedback.
Like you know, if you're ina newsroom and you, you know,

(01:01:02):
sloppy with citing your sources, you'regoing to get slapped down pretty hard.
You do that on a blog post, maybe nobody even notices. There's
also differences even just in the incentivesthe peer networks you're in. I talk
about the workshop method, where,like, you know, a really good
way that people get good at writingnovels is to be in these sort of
intensive workshop environments where you have topublish, you have to write something every

(01:01:23):
single night so that you can getdissected in the next day's class in front
of your peers. I mean,this just creates this really rigorous feedback cycle
which forces improvement over a short periodof time, which I mean you could
just be like typing up novels foryears and not get that experience that you
could get over a couple of weeksin a workshop. Imagine you've had a
similar experience in Spain, because theminute you like mispronounce a word in Spain,

(01:01:45):
they'll quite often give you quite abit of visual feedback with their face.
Yeah. I mean, I thinkthe language learning experience too. You
know another factor, and there's somuch stuff we barely touched upon, but
that the emotional factor is important too, because you know, my experience is
that there's certain skills and languages beingone of them, where we often have

(01:02:09):
a lot of awkwardness or uncomfortableness usingthe skill when we don't use it a
lot. And I can even saythis right now, this is a This
is a very hardwired thing. Thisisn't something that like, oh, you
know, some people are just boldand confident. Some people aren't. When
we were doing this language learning project, which now was over a decade ago.
When we were doing that project,it was totally natural to speak terrible

(01:02:31):
Spanish, you know, in thefirst like you were in three weeks.
We're you know, we're not speakingfluently, we're not being you know,
super proficient in this language. Butit felt totally comfortable, didn't feel like
weird to go up to people andspeak in bad Spanish. But now my
Spanish is much better now than itwas then. I don't speak it regularly,

(01:02:51):
I don't speak it like you know, every day I'm speaking Spanish.
If you just said, okay,have this Spanish conversation right now, it
would be a little bit of awkwardness, a little bit of like, oh
I forget this word, and Ifeel a little bad, and this kind
of thing. And so part ofit is just that when we're trying to
build new skills, choosing an environmentthat can also help us quickly adapt emotionally
to the needs of practice is importanttoo. So a lot of these environments

(01:03:13):
where you kind of go through thisrapid exposure where you get exposed to some
what is initially a stressful situation,but then you accommodate and then you're like,
oh, it's no problem doing it. You can often get into a
situation where you're able to get alot more practice than if you have this
sort of you tried every once ina while kind of kind of approach.
So one thing, you're right,I'm jumping around. But one thing I

(01:03:36):
thought that was really interesting is yougive a nice framework around the kind of
the learning process which you sort ofbasically characterize with ce DO and then feedback.
Is that right? Yeah? Andso I wouldn't I wonder if you
like kind of what made you sortof like create that kind of architecture.

(01:03:59):
Is that just what you sort offound in the research that sort of those
buckets were natural? So two yeah, So two reasons. The first reason
was that there's like, if youif you serve this literature, and we've
been talking about a lot, there'sjust like a myriad of little details of
facts of things that are like,well, that's interesting and that's interesting,
and so trying to step back andsee the big pictures is hard, and

(01:04:24):
there's different ways of doing it.I mean, there's certainly more academic ways
that will like talk about, well, this is the declarative and are procedural
system or neural nets or this kindof stuff, But from a pragmatic point
of view, learning through observation,doing practice, and getting feedback seemed to
be three fairly broad categories of thatcontained as sort of like you know,

(01:04:45):
we're umbrella terms, it contained alot of these details. So that was
one reason is just I wanted tocreate a framework that could integrate a lot
of different ideas so that it wasn'tjust sort of a fairly narrow point,
like we could talk about variability,but we could also at the same time
talk about supposure therapy, we couldtalk about cognitive load theory, all these
different ideas, So that would beone. The second reason is that if

(01:05:06):
you look at successful pedagogy, sothere's so many different ways of learning that
have been tried in different cultures,in different places, from the classroom to
the workplace to you know, allsorts of things, and I survey a
lot of them, and one ofthe sort of recurring themes is that something
kind of like a learn from example, do practice, get feedback loop.

(01:05:28):
However it's structured, is pretty commonin the successful ones. So I talk
about, you know, direct instruction, which is this very successful methodology,
particularly for teaching skills like like likereading and mathematics to its young children,
and it really operates off of this, like here's the example, do it
yourself feedback, and it's just doingthat repeatedly. If you look at you

(01:05:51):
can see this in examples like Igave of science fiction writing. I gave
the TV a butler example that likebeing able to see examples of good writing
doing it yourself getting feedback. Again, you see the same thing. I
use the example of the Tetris playersand fighter jet pods and all sorts of
people. So this sort of throughline of this fairly abstract motif of seeing
learning from other people, doing gettingpractice and getting feedback recurs so many times

(01:06:15):
that I think it represents something importantabout how people learn. That when you
are missing one of these ingredients,you aren't able to learn from other people.
So you're doing everything through trial anderror, and you know you're it
doesn't often work. Very well.If you're not getting any practice, obviously
you're not going to improve, oryou're not getting the right kind of practice,
you're not going to improve. Andif you don't have feedback, you
don't have this ability to not onlynot only feedback just from like a coach

(01:06:39):
or from a teacher, but thissort of dynamic interaction with the environment.
Once that link is severed, it'svery hard to improve as well. So
these three ingredients I thought were veryimportant for someone who might be reading this
book to reflect on, you know, what is the bottleneck? What is
the thing that's keeping me from makingimprovements that I desire, whether it's your
golf game or your career or whathave you. And you know that just

(01:07:00):
naturally suggests, okay, maybe theseare some ways you could fix it and
improve. I guess this now.I think it speaks I think to how
a new generation I think of findinga very natural way of learning because they
have a you know, almost likea bewildering array of examples of others that

(01:07:21):
they can observe. Go back toyour Tetris example, but with anything,
now you know there's examples of otherpeople doing it, and then you then
give it a go yourself, getsome feedback either works or it doesn't work,
and then you can go back toyour observation. And that continuous cycle
of learning is I think how hasbecome a very natural way for young people

(01:07:42):
in particular to learn, which makesme fearful because I still see so much
of the sports world sort of weddedto sort of old ideas around I must
give you these particular movements so thatand I have to teach you them.
Unfortunately in a way it's really notthat enjoyable, but it's so that you
will then be proficient later. Andyeah, you know, it strikes me

(01:08:05):
that you know, you talk abouttwelve maxims for mastery, but here what
you're almost articulating in many ways iswe might want to think about this a
little bit differently, particularly when you'vegot a generation who re learning very differently
from traditional notions of learning. AndI think if we want to sort of

(01:08:26):
keep pace and allow, for example, the physical space to compete with the
virtual space, we're probably going tohave to think about the way we provide
those learning experiences in a very differentway. Yeah. I mean, I
think what you raised as a verygood example, and I think it should
have points out some of the promiseand perils of like these new developments in

(01:08:48):
technology is that, yes, wedo live in a world where, you
know, if I want to lookup how to do anything, pretty much,
there's a YouTube video for it,there's a Wikipedia page, there is
you know, some course or classor thing online. So the potential is
there, the potential to learn thingsis there, but there's also the problem

(01:09:10):
of well, first of all,is that what most people are doing,
you know, online, you're likewasting time on your you know, looking
at random tiktoks, you're just lookingat cat videos. You're not actually learning
something. And then the second issueis just finding that curating the information,
getting that like getting to the pointwhere I can you know, if I
have some home fix it problem,I can find the right video and actually

(01:09:31):
apply it and use those things.So I tend to think that what we're
what we're in a world is sortof paradoxically where we have the ability to
teach ourselves almost anything we want,but to be in a position to make
use of that, to actually beable to take advantage of this just sort
of information overworld that we exist in, this sort of saturated environment, requires

(01:09:54):
itself that we have a lot oftraining, that we have a lot of
background knowledge that you know, sometimeswe don't have sometimes we're not able to
make use of it. So Ithink this is going to be a world
in the future where the people whoyou know, do educate themselves, do
have more knowledge, more skill,and to use an athletic example, like
you have the sort of background ofmaybe different sports, of different things like

(01:10:14):
this, that you have a lotof these different possibilities kind of in this
abstract form in your head, thatyou're able to take advantage of that.
And so I do think we're kindof entering this world where, yeah,
it's becoming easier for some and harderfor others. And so I really try
to write these books because I wantto hopefully steer people into the easier for
them category. So just to sortof, I guess, wrap this up,

(01:10:38):
because we've kind of, like youknow, I've taken this on a
bit of a magical mystery tool throughthe book you on this point around this
feedback and the link link around experience. One thing that really sort of grabbed
me that I really liked was thisnotion of noisy feedback. So I wonder
if you could expand on that idea. Yeah, so in this particular context

(01:11:01):
context, there's an interesting set ofresearch. So we talked a little bit
about expertise, and we talked aboutlike chess players and stuff, and so
a typical finding of this sort ofdomain was that with a lot of experienced
people, as you know, chessplayers and technicians and musicians and this kind
of stuff, build these patterns,these repertoires of what happens, and they're

(01:11:24):
able to make really good judgments aboutwhat, you know, what chess move
you should make what's the winning solutionto this problem? And interestingly, like
kind of in parallel with this researchon expertise about like how wonderful experts are
and how smart they are, there'sbeen this other research of expertise which has
shown kind of how badly a lotof professionals make decisions. So examples include

(01:11:47):
here, like hiring managers are justlike wildly overconfident about how they are about
picking prospective employees. You know,I give some examples. There's all this
research showing that, like psychiatrists arenot particularly good at predicting patient outcomes compared
to you know, relatively simple kindof actuarial models where it's basically like,

(01:12:08):
you know, you just tally uplike pros and cons for this particular person.
Often that doesn't beat expert judgment,even though it's something that can be
done by a spreadsheet. And sowhy is that? Why is it the
case that, you know, wehave some experts who just seem almost magical
and their prowess and their ability thatthey clearly do better than normal people at
these skills, and then there's otherpeople who have like years of training and

(01:12:29):
advanced degrees who don't do that well. And so the solution seems to be
that when we're learning in environments wherethere's not only the situation is noisy,
it's uncertain, so you can makethe same decision and get a different result.
You know, hiring someone's like that. Sometimes you hire them and they
turn out great, so as youhire them and they turn out to be
a dud. But also, ifwe don't get good feedback, we don't

(01:12:53):
get good calibrating feedback about you know, the the actual results of our decisions,
then we're not able to learn fromthat process. We're not able to
fine tune or calibrate our decision making, and so we tend to rely either
on you know, our abstract theoriesor generalizations of things, or we rely
on just you know, we tendedto make this decision in the past,

(01:13:15):
so we just do it more andmore and more. It just becomes more
automatic. We feel more confident withit, and so I kind of I
wrote this chapter where I was contrastingsome of these experts that sort of have
a lot of confidence but don't alwaysmake good decisions with people like poker players,
who live in an environment of uncertainty. You can make the same bet
and get wildly different outcomes. Itcan be often quite difficult to decide whether
or not you made the right decision. But until very recently, we're able

(01:13:40):
to outperform computers in this domain,so that there was a sense that poker
players had real skill here, thatif you were good at this game,
you did a lot better than youknow, a fairly naive model could apply.
So the idea here is that pokerplayers they're much able to learn,
much better at learning from their trackrecord, they're much better at calibrating their
perform mental learning from that uncertainty,and even just using models when they need

(01:14:02):
to. So if you know yourgut decision is not going to be very
good here if you have a modelthat says, okay, well, when
the odds are this, you makethis bet, you're going to be better
player than someone who's just going offof gut feel all the time. Yeah,
I mean, it's it's it's Ithink that's a again. You know,
this is a really interesting idea,and I again, I think it's
quite counterintuitive. I think a lotof people feel that that learning should be

(01:14:28):
removed. It goes back to whatI was saying earlier on about this variability
being noised or signal, Like peopleare thinking very often that, like,
you know, you kind of needto remove some of this messiness in order
to really learn or an actual fact. It's the it's that kind of process
of to a certain extent, trialand error, but it's almost like rapid
trial and error, but in avery safe to fail environment that's actually really

(01:14:50):
turbo charging people's abilities. Yeah.I mean, I think part of the
problem is that when you have asituation where there's law and lots of pieces
of information that you have to integrate, what people seem to be bad at
is like, okay, there's let'ssay there's a dozen factors that might determine
whether or not someone's a good employee. You know, their resume and who

(01:15:12):
they were referenced by, where theywent to school, and their job,
and all of them kind of givesome information, but nothing is like this
the lynchpin that just says this isgoing to be the thing that matters.
The default way that I think thebrain works in processing those candidates is it's
not like we take those fifteen piecesof information, we all sign them await,

(01:15:32):
and then we add them up andthen we get some kind of scorees.
We're not doing this, either consciouslyor unconsciously. That's not how we're
making that decision. If we weremaking that decision, we would do similarly
to models that explicitly do this,that that's how they work. Instead,
I think what we're doing is we'repattern matching. We're doing something similar to

(01:15:53):
what the chess player is doing.Is that we see a candidate and they
remind us of another candidate. Andif the reminder positive, if this example
seems similar to another example that wentwell, then we give them the thumbs
up. If it seems similar toan example that went bad, we give
them the thumbs down. And theproblem is that in the chess example,
where it's a very deterministic environment.It's one where you have like quite fine

(01:16:16):
discriminations on what's a good move,what's a bad move. This can actually
work out fairly well because you're like, oh, this is this situation,
and this is the right move,I remember it. But if you're in
a situation where it's more probabilistic,more spread out, then you have to
be very careful because you can havelike wildly misleading associations and you're not necessarily
taking advantage of all the information.You're like, oh, well, when

(01:16:38):
we hire people from this place,they're always good. But you're only looking
at one piece of information. You'reignoring all the rest. And so you
know, the recommendation I give hereis sort of twofold. One is if
you're in a situation where you can'treally learn that well from example, so
you're the hiring manager and you don'thave good feedback, you don't have good
calibration to be able to like honeyour intuition the way you'd want. It

(01:17:00):
can often be very good to relyon sort of you know, in some
ways less into it of just youknow, you have some spreadsheet. These
are the factors in their favor.These are the factors not in their favor,
and you go for the one that'sthe highest or that's at least the
people who make the final round.The second example is that if you want
to train this ability, you needto have a lot better feedback. You
need to have a lot better calibratinginformation because otherwise, you know, when

(01:17:25):
you just hire people and you justsee the ones that did well, but
the nine out of ten that yourejected, you have no idea when they
go out in the world whether ornot they turn out to be good employees
somewhere else. It's very difficult toacquire this information and to learn from from
good examples. So I think that'sanother example of where we often fail is
that in our complex real world,yes we don't. We don't actually have

(01:17:46):
the information to become skilled, andwe don't actually have the feedback, and
we don't bother to set up mechanismsin our in our places of work in
a professional where we even track thesethings. You know, a little thing
that my company did, which Imean it's small, but it made a
big difference for us, was weactually like started tracking our predictions for sales
when we would do like course sessionsand like this is the prediction, this

(01:18:08):
is what actually happened, and itmade our forecast way better because we used
to just like gues well, Ithink it'll probably do about this before,
but we never calibrated. We neverwent back and like checked, Okay,
well this is what we thought andthis is what actually happened. So we
know whether we're over confident or underconfident, or you know what the overall
trend lines are. Now we dothat. I mean, that's just a
really simple banal point, but Ithink that kind of extra calibration is very

(01:18:31):
important because it's very rarely the default. Hearing you talking about hiring. Actually,
I think in the parallel there forthe sports world is coaches have to
make selection decisions, and particularly inthe space in the world of talent,
you know, very often you knowyou're you're selecting for a squad, a

(01:18:51):
representative squad. And I think there'ssome parallel research. I think it's Joe
Baker from York University, uh whowho was saying that actually that the coaches
in particular they overestimate their ability tomake selection decisions about performers or potential performers
and are actually not much better thanthe lay person in making the decision around

(01:19:15):
who. So the reality of thatand the real again, the real fear
with that is that what we're doingis potentially de selecting a whole heap of
potentially talented youngsters based on some quiteflawed information. So I think this one
really was parallels. There wasn't that. The whole Oakland a'sed moneyball kind of
point was that a lot of thesetalent scouts had their own intuitions honed from

(01:19:40):
years, but they weren't super accurate, and so you could have some nerd
with a spreadsheet being like, actuallywe want to select for the statistic and
we can do it and it turnsout to win. Now, I don't
want to go into, like,you know, arguing over the moneyball point
too much, but I think thatthe research does show that in these environments
where the decision making, so we'retalking about a fairly narrow class of skills.

(01:20:04):
First, I want to make thatclear that we're talking about judgment decisions
where you have to like say youknow this or this, or make this
decision or do that. It's notthe same as like typing or kicking a
soccer ball, because there's no realanalog to like a spreadsheet there. It's
not like a spreadsheet, can youknow, kick a field goal or something
like that. We're talking about judgments. But if we're talking about judgments,

(01:20:24):
especially in high uncertainty, lots ofnoise, and there's lots of the information
that is available that would tell youwhether or not this is a good decision
is diffuse, so you have totake into account many, many, many
pieces of information. And it justseems like the way the brain is hardwired
is that it's better at pattern matchingthan aggregating, and because of that,

(01:20:45):
the pattern matching tendency tends to takeover. And it seems to be the
case that if you get more experiencein these fields without some sort of proper
humiliating, recalibrating kind of experience whichis constantly knocking you down and saying no,
no, you don't actually understand this, is just to get more and
more confident, and more and morecocky and more asshured of your position.
And so you know, this hasbeen behind a lot of the work of

(01:21:08):
people like Daniel Khanneman, who havethis sort of general skepticism of whole broad
swaths of experts and people who patthemselves on the back for how smart they
are when it's like, yeah,but you're not actually looking at your track
record when we actually measure it,you don't seem to do so well,
even though you're so confident that you'rethe smartest person on earth. And so
I think a little bit of humilityis important. But even more important than

(01:21:29):
the humility is you know, youneed to actually track some of these things
if you want to have genuine skill. Yeah. Caniman's book Noise is a
fascinating expos say in the Flaws ofHuman Judgment, isn't it. Hey,
listen, I'm conscious that we're comingup on time and you've you've got a
lot, a lots of other thingsto be doing. But a couple of
questions. But firstly, like,look, I'm like, I'm most of

(01:21:53):
the way through this and I'm reallyI've really enjoyed it. Actually, it's
it's I know they talk about likethe it's a difficult second album, a
difficult second book, but you knowit's a great job, particularly because you've
had two young ones at the sametime through that process. I also know
you write a brilliant blog as well, and people can get old of that,
So what's the best way of peoplekind of like immersing themselves and all

(01:22:13):
the stuff that you produce. SoI mean you go to my website Scott
hung dot com. We have likeI don't know, more articles than you
can read. I think it's likesixteen hundred or something when now it's like
two decades of writing. There.There's multiple book length things on a lot
of these topics, from learning tomotivation to psychology. So there's lots of
resources there you can dig into andthen also check out the book. So

(01:22:33):
we talked about both my first book, Ultra Learning. We also recording an
episode about that and then also GetBetter at Anything as the new one.
I highly recommend you know, justchecking out if you want to dive deeper
into some of these topics. Scott, I've really appreciated you taking the time
to join me today. Thanks forcoming on, and yeah, I'm looking

(01:22:55):
forward to whatever the third one bringsus. Well. I really appreciated talking
to you too. It's always reallygratifying to talk to someone who really cares
and understands about a lot of thesesubjects. So it's been a really really
pleasant conversation. Thanks for listening tothe Talent Equation podcast. If you like

(01:23:15):
the show, then please consider supportingit by leaving a review on your favorite
podcast player, telling your friends aboutit, or even becoming a hero and
show your appreciation by becoming a patron. Just head over to the Talentequation dot
co dot uk and click on theBecoming a Patron button at the top of
the page.

All Episodes

How to help people get better at anything - a conversation with Scott H. Young

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

The Breakfast Club

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}How to help people get better at anything - a conversation with Scott H. Young