What People Get Wrong About Learning

If you could choose one skill to instantly be the best at, what would you choose?

The best skill you could have is learning. It's a meta-skill that is vital to high performance in any area.

So many people approach learning in the wrong way, and it has lasting impacts on their lives. If you learn to learn, and approach learning from the right angle while avoiding common pitfalls you'll become a much more effective person.

You'll acquire skills easier, be more intelligent, and get better results.

What do people get wrong about learning?

There are tons of mistakes people make related to learning.

Many of them are the fault of the school system, their parents, and society. Even though it's not your fault, it's still your problem.

The school system is outdated and meant to create ideal employees. As an individual taking everything in school as gospel will lead you astray.

The approach school takes toward learning turns people away from reading and writing.

People get alienated from two of the highest-leverage tools for learning.

In my personal experience school pushed me away from writing for one simple reason: I didn't choose what I wrote about.

I've hated English class and writing for most of my life. It's the class I've always performed the worst in and disliked the most.

However, I've since picked up writing, and it's one of the most rewarding pursuits I've ever come across.

The act of writing feels infinitely better than it used to. The finished product of my writing is also superior to the past.

I feel lucky to have found writing because the school system pushed me away from it.

The same applies to reading. In school, you're handed a book and told to read it.

You're forced to read a book you didn't choose and dislike from start to finish. It's excruciating. They force you to sink several hours into a book you don't enjoy.

In the real world outside the school system reading is completely different.

There are no rules: you don't need to read start to finish, you can drop a book whenever you want, you can skip entire chapters and skip ahead to specific sections.

Most importantly, you don't need to read what you don't enjoy.

There's an insane amount of books that exist, and you'd be dense to believe some of them won't pique your curiosity.

Drop the “I don't like reading” identity.

The education system also misses the mark of arming students with practical knowledge. It aims to prepare students for the workforce but doesn't teach them about relationships, diet, health, taxes, investing, or happiness.

It also fails to communicate the message that the workforce is business. Every job you can have is in a business (with few exceptions). Even when you work in the domain of science it's still in a business and based around money.

The crux of the problem in modern education is the approach to learning it facilitates.

School encourages kids to memorize instead of pursuing true understanding. The incentive structure with formal tests and grading leads to kids optimizing for the wrong thing.

To get the highest mark with the least work you should memorize. The students approach their studying such that they have the bare minimum knowledge needed to get their desired mark.

Playing the game of school is about optimizing for the output: grades.

The approach of doing the minimum work for the minimum satisfactory grade is facilitated because of the reward structure. Additionally, cheating in the game is rewarding because you get the desirable output with little to no work.

Math is a long unbroken chain of knowledge. As you get more advanced, the more prerequisite knowledge there is.

Everybody starts learning math by understanding. The basics are simple to understand and it's logical. You build the foundation of your understanding as you go through the years, and it keeps building upon itself.

However, each teacher has a pace they teach at. If you fall behind that pace, misunderstand a lesson, or miss some classes it breaks your chain of knowledge. You can no longer build the new knowledge upon what was previously there, and you get degraded to simple memorization.

Some never repair their chain of knowledge, and self-ascribe the label “I'm not a math person”.

Memorization vs. Understanding are the two contending approaches. Memorizing is how you 'game' the school system.

This approach is a terrible habit to bring into the real world and secondary education.

Secondary education is a huge time and financial investment, and the goal is to build yourself as the asset rather than get good grades.

The real world has the same goal, building yourself as the asset rather than solving for the external. Approach learning by trying to understand the basics and the relationships between the core concepts. This is the essence of true learning.

Focus on knowing the basics and understanding the relationships between concepts.

How do I become good at learning?

We'll first need to understand what learning and intelligence are.

Using Alex Hormozi's definitions: Learning is when in the same conditions you perform a different action. Intelligence is rate of learning (i.e., how fast you change the action in the same conditions).

With education, there is always a desired outcome. You want to learn sales to sell more people. You want to learn biology for a good grade on an exam.

Understand that the desired outcome is a person, it's a new version of you. It's somebody who has put in the reps and deserves the outcome.

With learning you're trying to grow into being that person, and ideally do it as fast as possible. The number one enemy of learning is staying in the same spot.

If you want to learn as fast as possible you need to iterate as fast as possible.

The quality of the iteration is based on the feedback and educational resources. You can implement something you've learned, or tweak your approach based on the metrics.

A common mistake is to track the lagging metrics instead of the leading ones.

As a YouTuber, you should track what inputs went into each video (leading), as opposed to the views (lagging). As a salesman, you should track how many calls you make and what you do before the calls, instead of the sales volume.

A limiting belief about education is that intelligence is talent, genetic, and you're born with it.

As a principle, anything can be learned given time.

It’s a ridiculous notion to believe some traits or skills are out of reach because of someone’s innate qualities. Baring physical or mental disability there is no skill you can't learn.

Ego also leads to numerous mistakes. Don't think you aren't subject to this trap either, you're a human and a victim of human nature.

The only way to avoid this is to be conscious of it.

Understand the Dunning-Kruger effect, i.e., the cognitive bias which causes the tendency for people with low skill in a domain to overestimate their abilities, and vice versa for the high-skill people.

Once you get high skill in a domain, you realize how much you don't know.

As a principle, know you don't know shit.

You cannot overestimate the depth of your ignorance.

Let's go over some practical advice now that we've looked at the big picture; what learning and intelligence are, limiting beliefs, and principles for learning.

The pervading question of learning is 'What?'. The biggest problem is finding what to learn. There are a few ways to do this, but an extremely effective way is using the Feynman technique.

The Feynman technique, created by Richard Feynman (one of the smartest ever) has a simple set of steps.

Teach the content you're trying to learn to yourself by writing it down on a piece of paper, or by actually teaching somebody.

This will quickly illuminate the gaps in your knowledge. After this process, you go back to the educational material you were learning from and fill that gap.

Simply repeat this process until you're able to teach the entire thing with no gaps in knowledge.

This hits two birds with one stone as it's useful for learning and it provides you with a good set of notes.

Streamline your notes and teaching; clarify the topic until it seems obvious. Use analogies that seem intuitive to you.

If you truly understood a subject you'd be able to teach it to a kid. If for you to teach somebody there’s a large prerequisite of prior information they need to know, you don't understand the subject.

The Feynman technique also uses a learning technique called Active Recall. This is when you recite a piece of knowledge purely from memory without referencing anything else.

When you teach you shouldn't look at the textbook while making the notes. Try to teach the concept from memory.

Active recall is what you use during exams, tests, and practical application of information. So flex that muscle as much as possible when trying to learn a concept.

The last thing you should understand is neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity is what you're inducing when you learn something new. It's the rewiring of your brain.

When you're learning and feel frustration and overwhelm, know that's normal.

In fact, that feeling is a signal for plasticity. The primary driver of plasticity is error to the point of frustration (and beyond).

Ideally, when you learn you are in a state of alert but calm.

If you feel you're too alert then avoid music or white noise when studying.

If you feel you're more tired than optimal use white noise or music to increase your alertness.

Sleep is where the learning happens. It's a critical part of learning. After an intense learning bout make sure to have a quality sleep.