The Proof of the Pudding: theory vs practice

Let us imagine a pilot, and assume that he had passed every examination with distinction, but that he had not as yet been at sea. Imagine him in a storm; he knows everything he ought to do, but he has not known before how terror grips the seafarer when the stars are lost in the blackness of night; he has not known the sense of impotence that comes when the pilot sees the wheel in his hand become a plaything for the waves; he has not known how the blood rushes to the head when one tries to make calculations at such a moment; in short, he has had no conception of the change that takes place in the knower when he has to apply his knowledge.

          ~ Soren Kierkegaard ("The Storm" in "The Parables of Kierkegaard")


The first time I sparred in my Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class, it became immediately clear that there is a huge difference between the cleanness and neatness of applying a technique in class while you are learning it and when your partner isn't resisting much versus trying to apply a technique in the 'heat of battle' were everything seems to be happening at once and you are trying to defend against your opponent's attacks, counter your opponent's defenses and initiate attacks of your own. Out of a dozen or so 'fights' I 'won' two: one with an arm bar and the other with a figure-four lock (Americana) (which is my favorite lock in terms of level of pain.)

So what did I learn?

Firstly, I learned that the fitness required for a class and the fitness required for a fight are two different things; in a fight you tire quickly so it is important to both conserve energy and to end the fight as quickly as possible. The next day, delayed onset muscle soreness taught me that I needed to strengthen by inner thigh and latissimus muscles.

Secondly, I learned the importance of drilling technique until its correct performance becomes automatic; otherwise self-defence becomes just flailing about with all thought of effective technique flying out the window.

Thirdly, I learned that I needed to become more aware of what was happening in the moment, of openings my opponent was leaving that I could exploit, and of the imminence of a particular kind of attack that I would need to defend against to avoid being beaten.

Most of all, like the pilot in Kierkegaard's parable, I learned that all the theory you learn on land doesn't prepare you for the reality of being at sea.

Honor the process, trust the process

A farmer worried that his seedlings were not growing fast enough. So one day, he pulled up the seedlings to make them look taller. Returning home looking very tired, the farmer told his family what he did. His son ran immediately to the field to find all the seedlings had withered.
~ Mencius (Meng Zi)

One day Mullah Nasruddin wished to learn playing zurna (a kind off shrill pipe) and visited a zurna player. "How much does it cost to learn playing zurna?" asked Mullah Nasruddin.
- Three hundred akche (coin) for the first lesson and one hundred akche for the next lessons, asked zurna player.
- It sounds good, replied Mullah Nasruddin. We may start with second lesson. I was a shepherd when I was a young boy, so I already had some whistle experiences. It must be good enough for first lesson, isn't it?
~ Traditional folktale

It is very easy to become impatient when learning a new skill. It may seem that we are taking forever to get anywhere as we continue to clumsily perform the rudimentary elements of the skill. However, it is important to honor the process. Th properly develop a skill, we need to lay a proper foundation for building our skills further and this takes time and focused practice targeted to the elements of the skill that we currently struggle with. If instead, we try and short cut the process, like Mencius's farmer, we may short circuit it instead.

This also means not assuming that we already know the basics and so skipping over bedding down the basics. Maybe we do have some experience that is relevant. But if we assume, like Nasruddin, that our experience in playing a whistle years before provides a sound basis for learning to play the zurna now, we may fail to notice critical differences, subtleties and complexities in the new skill. Instead, we need to have the humility to understand that we may not yet know enough to know what it is we do not know. We need to pay attention even to what we think we already know if we are to be fully open to genuine learning. In the spirit of the Zen story, we cannot pour tea into our teacup if it is already full of preconceptions.

The flipside of honoring the process is trusting the process.

We need to have confidence that if we do the work then we will reap the rewards. So even when we seem to have plateaued and are struggling to make progress at all (and may even feel that we are going backwards), we need to remain confident that beneath the surface we are building connections that will ultimately bloom as improvements in our skills.

This shouldn't degenerate into a blind faith. If we put the right causes in place then the desired effects must occur, but we still need to be alert to the possibility that we are not practicing correctly or not frequently enough or with the right focus or that we are practising the wrong things. If so, we must adjust our approach accordingly.

We only reap what we sow, so it is important to sow the right seeds and to do so in the right way. If we focus on getting the process right, results will follow. The key metaskills to hone are patience and persistence in the face of difficulty. Results will then follow as a matter of course.

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"Patience Helps New Words Grow" (China Daily 11/18/2006 page10)

A little knowledge...

....is a dangerous thing, so the saying goes and this is true when we begin to learn something new.

Consider tennis: the rules are not particularly complicated and there are only a half dozen or so different strokes to use. But if a person had a few tennis lessons and 'learned' the different strokes and the rules in say eight lessons, no-one would expect them to be able to play even a half decent game of tennis.

But I had to catch myself from making the opposite assumption after my first few lessons of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ). Having had a few lessons doesn't mean that I am now capable of defending myself. I have 'learned' a few techniques, but I suspect that it will take a long time before they feel natural and I can apply them in a real defensive situation. What has really happened is that I have been exposed to a few techniques that I have yet to master, and which I have yet to learn to apply in conjunction with other techniques I am learning and to apply against someone who is resisting them and strenuously attempting to apply the same techniques to me.

One of the huge advantages of BJJ is that you know the techniques work since you experience them both from the perspective of practising them and from the perspective f having them applied to you. This is quite different from some of the striking arts, such as karate, where you never know whether a punch or a kick would really be effective in an actual self-defence situation since you don't ever have the experience of being on the receiving end of an effective punch or kick. But the danger with BJJ is the danger of thinking that because you know the technique and know it works then it will work for you in a self-defence situation. This is where over-confidence could become dangerous: even knowing how to apply an effective technique, you still need to have a realistic view of your ability to apply it in a real situation.

In Self-insight: roadblocks and detours on the path to knowing thyself, David Dunning mentions the case of driver education in schools and how to the extent that it is linked to accident rates, the tendency is more towards increasing accident rates than reducing them because of over-confidence:

...after Quebec mandated formal driver education, the accident rate among 16- and 17-year-olds went up, not down - causing the mandate to be repealed...One key contributor to this paradox may be that training young drivers in emergency maneuvres gives them a false sense of security. On the day of their training, they, indeed, may know how to control a skid, but their skill atrophies over the time where they might have to use that skill in the future. However, left with the impression that they can handle most, if not all emergency situations, they take chances tey should not take.

Confidence may rise faster than competence, partly because we tend to become more comfortable with something as we become more familiar with it, yet familiarity may have little relationship with actual skill.

I'm not totally opposed to over-confidence: sometimes we can only improve by attempting things that in reality are beyond our current level of competence.

However, where our confidence outstrips our competence in the real world, rather than in a learning situation, it may indeed be a dangerous thing.

What will you remember when the class is over?

Memory is a fragile and deceptive thing. We go to a class, we 'learn' something new and exciting, but when we go to try it a few days or a week later, we find our recall is fuzzy and we can't do it.

After my first Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class, I realised that I could barely remember how to do some of the things that had been covered. In the course of an hour we had gone through a takedown, a choke and a sweep with a change of guard, but although some details stood out, most of the details were fuzzy. Admittedly, this was my first class, so a lot of what we were doing was unfamiliar so I didn't have the base knowledge to connect what I was learning to. But I knew that if I wanted to learn this martial art then I would need to take additional steps to lock in what I was learning.

So the first thing I did was search on Amazon for instructional materials suitable to my level. I looked at what books and DVDs were available, what they contained, had a look at previews to see if the level of detail would meet my needs, and looked at the reviews to see how helpful other people had found them. I ended up ordering two books from Amazon to help me.

One was a beginners book (Saulo Ribeiro's Jiu Jitsu University) which took a very structured approach to covering not just the how of the technique but also when it was and wasn't applicable, what counters there were to it and what to do about those counters. In other words, this book embedded the description of the technique into a context of use and I thought that this would make the techniques I was learning easier to remember. Since BJJ is in some ways a physical analogue to chess, in that it involves moves and counter moves, this book was equivalent to a chess discussion of tactics like forks, discovered check etc.

The second was a book more centred on the strategy of the martial art (Renzo Gracie & John Danaher's Mastering Jiu Jitsu ). In the same way as a chess game has an opening, a middle game and an end game, this book focused on the overall strategy of a fight, the objectives of each stage and on the need to plan a few moves ahead.

Strategy and tactics. Two things which provide a context and a structure for individual techniques and which I hope will help me more easily remember what I am learning and to revise it between classes.

The other thing which I realised was that I needed to be totally focused in class in order to learn as much as possible, and to write down the names of the techniques immediately after class so I could revise them later.

However from past experience, at least in the short term, I've found that in any class that teaches three things, if I try to focus on learning all three then the chances are I won't properly remember any of them. Whereas if I focus on learning and remembering one thing and on just getting the gist of the other two, there is a good chance that I will retain at least that one thing. I don't know whether this is a personal limitation or something that applies to most people, but I've found that it is generally true of dance classes I have done and discussing it with other dancers leads me to believe that other people find this to be the case as well.

So if you want to progress in a class that involves any kind of physical techniques, I would suggest the following:

• Pay close attention during the class
• Seek to master one thing and to get the gist of the rest, at least for the time being
• Make a note of everything that was taught in that class immediately after the class
• Find one or more good references so that you can revise between classes
• Try to build a structure and a context into which you can fit what you are learning

If you do these things you will find that you retain more and make more rapid progress in your chosen area of learning.

Fear of the Unknown

Learning is going from something being unknown to it being known to you. It may be a fact, a theory, a concept, a way of doing things that was previously unknown to you becoming known. Or it may be something that you previously weren't able to do that after learning you know how to do.

But sometimes learning can be blocked by fear of the unknown. It can be fear of how you will appear to others if you attempt a particular activity. Or it can be fear that you don't have what it takes to master whatever it is you wish to learn. But whether it is fear of social ridicule or fear of your own limitations, it can still block you from attempting the activity.

Last week, I decided that I wanted to learn Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ). I had seen clips of it on Youtube and it seemed amazingly effective against a wide range of other martial arts. But I was a little bit scared since doing a martial art like BJJ was something outside of my experience and I didn't know how I would cope with it, either physically or in terms of acquiring the skills.

So I checked it out on the Web and found a local club where I could just go and watch a class, and where the first actual class was free.

Last Monday, I went and watched a beginners class and this experience increased my familiarity with what learning BJJ would require and my confidence that I could do it. I saw that there was a wide range of skill levels in the class and that the more experienced students helped those who were less experienced begin to master the techniques being taught. So on Wednesday, I did a free class.

Actually doing the class, I found that it was a little bit more physically demanding than it at first appeared, but I was able to successfully able to do a takedown, a sweep and a choke, with a bit of guidance from my practice partner. I was uncoordinated, forgot technical points that made the techniques effective and generally wasn't very good. But this didn't matter: it was my first class so why would I expect to be instantly good when people spend years training in this martial art?

So now that I've had the physical experience of doing a class, I'm confident that if I make the commitment I can master this new skill. What was previously unknown to me was now known: what learning BJJ would take, that this was within my physical and mental capabilities and that I would be supported in my learning by others around me.

When we try something new we sometimes get the idea that everyone is looking at us, something that psychologists refer to as the Spotlight Effect. But the reality is that everyone else is too concerned about how they are doing to worry about you. And in most classes, they want you to keep coming and so they are supportive of your struggling initial efforts.

Woody Allen once said that 90% of success is turning up. And when it comes to learning a new skill in a situation where other people can see you fail, just by turning up you have made a key step towards mastering a fear that would otherwise undermine your learning. Sure you might struggle initially: if it was easy then everybody would be able to do it. But as someone else once said "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" and in learning unless you are willing to fall on your face once in a while and in public, you may never take that first step towards what you want to achieve.

You can look at it as a three stage process:

1. See how it's done
2. Try it out
3. Commit to learning it.

Through the first two stages you reduce the unknown to the familiar and this gives you the information you need to decide whether the 3rd stage is worth it to you. But when you make that decision at least it is made on the basis of knowledge not fear. Knowledge casts out fear and things are rarely as difficult as you fear they will be.

So if there's something you've been putting off learning because of fear of the unknown, dip your toe in the water and try it.

It could put you on the road to something you may find ultimately very fulfilling.

Going backwards to go forwards

Suppose you are on a journey and you take what you think is a shortcut. You are making great time, or so you think, until you run into a dead-end. So you have to backtrack to the main road and proceed on from there.

A lot of our skill learning is like that. We find what we think is a good way to do something but then later realise that it has become a barrier to further progress. So then we have to go back and re-build our foundations from scratch.

For example, when you first learn to use a computer, you may adopt the hunt-and-peck method of typing, and over time you can become quite fast using this method (and possibly avoid a repetitive strain injury.) But if you want to become faster then you will need to learn to touch type which initially may slow you down considerably. And it will feel much less natural until you have practised it enough to internalise it.

You will notice the same thing if you want to improve your handwriting. You have to slow down to deliberately practise writing more neatly and at first it will seem laborious and time-consuming. But as you persist it will start to feel more natural.

And this will be true of all situations in which you have an entrenched way of doing things. The longer you have been doing something in a particular way the more natural it will feel and the more unnatural and uncomfortable it will feel to do things in a different way even if that way will ultimately be better. The problem is that you are trading something that you have mastered for something you have yet to master with all of the effort and uncertainty and inital erosion of performance that that entails.

Top performers in sports and performance arts of different kinds are aware of this and when they experience slumps go back and rebuild their skills from the ground up, since over time they may ave developed faults in their performance that can only be removed by correctly practising the basics over and over until the fault is eliminated. This can apply to skills as diverse as golfing to latin dance.

Where performance is less than adequate then it means that there is either something you are doing or something you are failing to do that needs to be corrected. And whatever that is, it is the natural way that you perform at the moment. Only by interrupting your natural performance and changing it to something better can you approve.

And this applies not only to physical skills but to intellectual skills as well. The natural way that you write a paper for a course may well be to just write whatever comes into your head until you hit the word requirement. But improving this may mean acquiring new skills such as developing an outline including your major points, write the paper and then edit it. This at first may feel like too much work but once you get into the groove of doing things in the new way, you may be surprised at how much more effective this is and pleased at a greater sense of competence.

Sometimes what you need to do to improve may not be obvious. So in the absence of a coach, you may have to experiment with different approaches and learn from the outcomes of those approaches to refine your skills. And while you are doing this your performance will suffer.

The reality is that you cannot get better without first getting worse, and that sometimes the only way to go forwards is to first go backwards.

How ignorance can help you learn

In a recent article in New Scientist, a number of examples were given of how knowledge can be a curse as well as an advantage. For example:

• Used car salesmen who knew all of the flaws of a car were more likely to sell it for a lower price than they could have reasonably gotten for it.
• Salespeople selling cellphones grossly underestimated how long it would take a new user to learn how to use it.
• Experts tended to overestimate their knowledge and were over-confident in their answers to a quiz regarding people in their field of expertise.
• Knowing too much about something you want to attempt may undermine your confidence to attempt it, even though you might well have succeeded.
• while being made aware of your ignorance can actually enhance your learning.

Research by Lisa Son and Nate Cornell has demonstrated a number of ways in which ignorance (or perhaps more accurately a clearer awareness of your ignorance) can be a significant advantage.

Your awareness of your ignorance can determine how much time and effort you allocate to learning. If you are over-confident that you know something when in fact you don't this can work to your detriment. So how can you determine whether you are being overconfident?

One example that Son and Cornell use is that of flash cards. If you use flashcards as a way of ,say, learning vocabulary for a foreign language then there are at least two approaches you could take.

One way would be to look at one side of the card and then make a genuine effort to try and remember what the word is on the other side of the card and not turn it over to look until you are really sure that you don't know. Using this approach you are unlikely to feel overconfident that you know the word.

The second way is to look at one side of the card and then make a half-hearted attempt to remember what the word is on the other side of the card and then quickly flip it over to see if you are right. Using this approach you are more likely to feel overconfident that you know the word. Once you see the word you are more likely to tell yourself "Of course...I knew that" and genuinely believe that you really have learned it.

They conclude that withholding an answer, instead of providing it up front, can be a useful way to avoid the peril of too much information.

In another experiment they found that being tested on information (and then being shown the answer) was more effective than simply "being shown the question and answer together, even when the participants could not answer the question sucessfully on their own". In a similar experiment they found that providing a list of questions to someone to answer about information in a text that they had not yet read also had positive effects on their learning once they read the passage.

The key principle appears to be that confronting someone with their ignorance before they learn something is likely to enhance their subsequent learning. Son and Cornell conclude that "To benefit from lacking knowledge the learner must know when he or she does not know"

So how can you use this in your own learning?

Well, firstly, if you are learning something from a textbook then try and answer the questions at the end of the chapter before you read the chapter. If the book doesn't have such questions then you could look at the headings within the chapter and try to list what you know about each of these topics and then as you read the chapter see what things weren't on your list and are thus new to you.

Another way is a strategy used by my friend Michelle, who I mentioned in an earlier post. When she was working on a program involving the language VBA, she kept working at it until she ran up against a problem she couldn't solve. In doing this she ran up against the limits of her knowledge and was thus able to identify the next thing that she needed to learn. In this case, the very thing that she was learning provided the feedback she needed to identify her ignorance.

You learn a lot more from genuinely understanding your own ignorance than by trying to conceal it from yourself.

And if you are teaching someone else then you need to become aware that you may have become ignorant of what it means for the person you are teaching not to know what you are teaching. There may be aspects of what you are teaching that may have become second nature and invisible and thus too obvious (for you) to mention.

In Follow the Yellow Brick Road, Saul Wurman says:

Once you know something, you tend to forget what it's like not to know....As instructions are often formulated for the people who don't know, this inability to remember what it's like to not know results in instructions that don't give essential information to the taker.

And conversely, as a learner you need to be conscious of the possibility that if someone is teaching you something and you don't seem to understand then just maybe there is something they are leaving out and they may need to break it down more so that what that thing is becomes evident.

Spend your time well and on the right things

Time is a precious resource that most of us have too little of as it is. Occasionally, I read advice like "Get up an hour earlier" as a way of pursuing some valued goal. but the reality is that most people don't get enough sleep and that quality sleep is necessary in order to consolidate learning.

So what are we to do?

The most important thing is to squeeze as much productivity as possible out of the time that you do have.

Be realistic and honest about what time you do have. All of us have a lot of waste time between other activities, while we wait in line, commute. whatever, time that we probably just currently use to stare into space and daydream. So making good use of this "between time" over the course of a year can add up to a substantial total. Even 15 minutes a day adds up to 91 hours per year. If you are doing something like learning a foreign language then this can make a huge difference to your progress. So if what you are learning lends itself to using this time then go for it. You can make flashcards to test yourself with or put video or audio information onto your iPod so that you can review it while you wait. Even carrying a book to read or a small notebook with information you want to learn in it can be practical ways of keeping information close at hand for moments that would otherwise be wasted.

Making use of those snippets of time is important. But equally important is to focus during those brief interludes. Half hearted inattention is almost as bad as wasting those moments entirely. Focus for that brief period on whatever it is you wish to learn during it, so that there is actually some lasting effect from that transient effort.

Make it easy to become engaged immediately in your learning session.

Make sure that the supplies and equipment that you need to use in your learning session are conveniently placed together for easy access. If necessary, list the excuses that you use to put off your learning session and then change your environment so that those excuses no longer apply. You must learn not to let yourself off the hook but instead reel yourself in to get stuck into your learning.

Don't assume that once you've learned something you've learned it forever

Knowledge atrophies the less frequently it is used and the more superficially it was acquired in the first place. Consequently, it pays to take the time to learn things properly and in depth the first time around and to revisit your knowledge on a regular basis, both to keep it fresh and to become aware of the extent to which it is slipping away and needs to be recaptured.

Acquire principles

When you are learning something focus on acquiring principles which you can generalise and use to generate novelty rather than just brute facts, which you cannot. The more you understand the deeper structures of what you are trying to learn, the easier it becomes to learn more, to see how new knowledge relates to knowledge you already possess, and to discover new things for yourself. So don't just learn what works, learn how and why and when it works.

Be clear on what you want to achieve with this block of time

If your objective isn't clear, then your efforts are likely to lack direction. Set aside some time at the end of your session and examine whether you achieved what you set out to do. If you didn't then seek reasons why you failed to do so: were you distracted, did you lack relevant materials or supplies, was the working environment less than ideal? Work out what you can do better next time to better ensure your objective is met.

Be sensitive to the natural rhythms of your learning

There is a time to expand and grow but there is also a time to consolidate your gains. Focusing solely on expansion results in spreading yourself too thin and having no depth in any one area. Focusing only on consolidation leads to stagnation. It is by alternately extending then consolidating, extending then consolidating tat your capacities grow in a sustainable way.

If you follow these basic principles then you will learn more in the available time and have more time left for the rest of your life as well.

Commonplacing

Back when I was a kid, my family didn't have a huge number of books, but we did have access to a good local public library. So every couple of weeks we would go to the library and I would get out three or four books to take home with me. Because I was reading interesting things and I had to return the books, I would copy the interesting bits into little notebooks so that I could keep them and read them later when I wanted to.

I didn't know it then but I was following a practice honored by time from an earlier era when books were rare and expensive and scholars travelled large distances to read a manuscript copy of a book that interested them. The notebooks that they kept were called 'commonplace books' and the practice of note-taking was called 'common-placing'.

The 16th century Dutch scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, wrote in his De Copia:

Prepare for yourself a sufficient number of headings and arrange them as you please, subdivide them into the appropriate sections and under each section add your commonplace and maxims; and then whatever you come across in any author, particularly if it is rather striking, you will be able to note down immediately in the proper place, be it an anecdote or a fable or an illustrative example or a strange incident or a maxim or a witty remark or a remark notable for some quality or a proverb or a metaphor or a simile. This has the double advantage of fixing what you have read more firmly in your mind, and getting you into the habit of using the riches supplied by your reading.

Nowadays, you can use a software package like Microsoft OneNote to keep a collection of things that you have encountered in your reading on the Web, and it will also track the website where you read it should you wish to find it again or to reference it, and even allow you to search for things within what you have collected. Yet one of the advantages of copying something down in your own handwriting is that it forces you to think about it more and remember it better than it would if you had just highlighted a passage and copied and pasted it.


Of course now, I have a lot of books and I tend to highlight and underline things that really stand out for me. But I can still recommend the practice of commonplacing for a number of reasons:

• Convenience: You have a lot of interesting things you have read in one place and at your fingertips, rather than having to remember which book you may have read something in and the find it.
• Accessibility: If your commonplace book is small enough you can carry it with you for dipping into when you are between appointments or waiting in a queue or simply bored.
• Recall: The very act of copying may help what you have read stick in your memory.
• Self-knowledge: If you look back through the passages that you found interesting enough to copy, then you may get a better feel for what attracts your attention and this may also tell you something about what you may be missing.
• Insight: Reading the same passage at different times under different conditions may lead to you finding things in it that you missed on your initial reading. Over time you may have had more experiences that have changed your perspective so that now a passage says something different and perhaps deeper to you.

So get yourself a notebook and experiment with commonplacing.

Like most things, it won't work for everyone, but if it works for you then you will have found yet another way to enhance your learning.

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For an interesting take on commonplace books, have a look at:

Commonplace Books and the Teaching of Style by Lynee Lewis Gaillet

How long is a piece of string?

The usual answer to this question is: twice as long as half its length. And I guess asking a similar question "How long does it take to learn something?" could be equally uninformative.

But is it?

If you think about it, there are some things you struggle to learn and others that you learn effectively instantaneously.

Consider the following examples:

• You go to see a movie and a friend asks you what it was about. Even if you have seen the movie only once, the chances are that you will be able to give a coherent summary of the movie and the main events in the plot, almost without giving it a second thought.
• A friend tells you that a man and a woman you both know are having an affair. No effort to remember this, right?
• You go to a restaurant and decide to try a dish you have never tasted before. It tastes terrible. You don't need to have the experience more than once to know not to order that dish again.
• You are in a department store and are trying to find out the price of something. You see another customer go and use a price scanner mounted on a nearby wall. So you go and do the same thing. No need for multiple exposures to the experience to know what to do in future.

There is a tendency to think that learning is hard, but as these examples show sometimes it is remarkably easy.

What do these examples have in common that makes them ready sources of learning?

They are vivid, personal, advantageous (either in terms of gaining or avoiding something), they are interesting and (generally) simple.

Of course some of these things are in the eye of the beholder. You aren't likely to remember anything about an affair between two people you barely know. Conversely, a mathematician shown a new way to solve a particular kind of equation may find it easy to remember because of the huge amount of background knowledge that they bring to the party.

So when you are trying to learn something, see if you can find something in it that fits the pattern of "things that are easy to remember". And keep track of the things that you find easy or difficult to remember so that you can experiment with applying the properties of the things you find easy to learn to the things you find difficult to learn.

By acquiring and using this kind of self-knowledge, you can make your learning journey a lot easier and a lot more productive.

Your Brain Can't Read Your Mind: the SAID Principle

In Sports Medicine, the acronym SAID stands for: Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand. The SAID principle basically says that all training is specific to a particular task. While this principle concerns the physiological adaptation of the human body to the specific loads placed on it (e.g. weight training, aerobic training, endurance training), recent research suggests that a similar principle may apply in relation to more intellectual matters.

What this research showed was that, at least in science learning, practicing retrieving and reconstructing knowledge works more effectively than elaborative study with concept mapping. Effectively, if you want to remember something then practice remembering it. This is the principle underlying flashcards: you repeatedly test whether you remember the answer to the question on one side of the cards and practice more the ones you have the most trouble retrieving.

The lesson here is that if you want to learn something you need to keep in mind how you are going to use the information. If you need to recall it, then you need to practice recall, if you need to apply it in some way then you need to practice applying it.

The fact is that your brain can't read your mind. It can only respond to the stimuli to which you expose it. So if you practice recall as part of your study then your brain will take it that the critical thing is recall and build connections accordingly. Target your practise for intended use.

This implies that two people learning the same thing may focus on different kinds of practice. For example, if a person is learning a dance move so that they can freely incorporate it into their social dancing then they will need to practice it as a precursor or follow on to a variety of different moves to permit that flexibility. But another person learning the same move for a routine need only practice it as part of that specific sequence.

It also means that you learn more by doing than you do by watching, partly because by doing we are practicing what we want to do and partly because doing involves greater sensory input.

The other thing the brain needs to know is: what is important? And it works this out by what you focus on, and on the strength of your emotional response. This is one reason why paying attention is important and why it is also of value to find something interesting in what you are learning. The brain also takes into account effort (which to a great extent is a product of attention, and repetition.)

In The Owner's Manual for The Brain, Pierce Howard remarks:

It's funny, when we were in school, we made a point of trying to remember. As adults we casually read or observe without similar efforts at remembering, such as taking notes or reviewing, and then we lament that we are "losing our memory" when we can't remember ... Balderdash. We're expecting results like those from our school days without exerting a similar effort.

So the key principles to keep in mind are:

• practice for intended use
• maximise brain stimulation through focused attention, emotional engagement, and repeated effort.

By employing these principles, you will make your learning more effective by making your brain's job easier.

Logging learning

It can be really easy to deceive yourself about how much time you are spending on your learning unless you track it since our memories are notoriously unreliable. We can remember doing something a few days ago when in fact it was a few weeks ago.

So if you genuinely want to make progress then it can be a good idea to maintain a learning log.

In this log (which can just be a simple notebook), you can record:

• the duration and frequency of your learning sessions and what they covered
• what you have mastered, what confuses you, what questions you would like answered
• if you are learning from a book, the pages you read, the exercises you worked through
• the things you are finding hard that you might want to spend more time on
• a rating of how you felt the session went, along with the time and date
• whether the gaps between learning sessions are causing you to spend too much time re-learning material already covered in earlier sessions. 

A learning log can help you become more mindful of what might otherwise remain below the threshold of your awareness. And once you are mindful of something, you can do something about it.

Once you have been keeping a learning log for a while, you may begin to see patterns in your activity, the days and times when you seem to learn best. Or the times best for learning versus the times best for active practice or doing exercises. In this way your learning log can become, not just a record, but a tool for refining your learning process.

And one more powerful thing your log can do is act as a source of encouragement and motivation. So often we are tempted to measure our progress in relation to our ultimate goal, which can seem discouragingly far away. But far more motivating is to see how far you've come, to look back and see how things you once found difficult and confusing have now become clear and easy.

And this gives you the confidence to persist with your learning because if you've achieved this once, you have every reason to believe you can achieve it again.

Flow and the benevolent tyranny of practice

You have probably at some point in your life had the experience of 'flow' - where you are doing something that you are completely absorbed in, when time seems to stop and there is no awareness of anything except what you are doing. It's an experience that can happen when you are deeply involved in a sport, or playing a game like chess, or perhaps gardening or playing a computer game or dancing or singing or...well pretty much you name it.

Sounds like a great experience, right? Wouldn't it be good for learning to be like that?

Well, no.

According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (the foremost researcher into flow) in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience:

The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limit in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

So flow generally occurs during performance. It may be what an Olympic gymnast or figure skater experiences when they nail their routine in competition. However, it is unlikely to be what they experience in practice.

The reason is that in practice, top performers focus on the things that they find difficult, that lie beyond their current ability to do easily. And they try to do these things over and over again, regardless of the discomfort that it causes them until they master them. They fall down, they pick themselves up and they try again. And they continue to practice these things until they can reliably perform them whenever they need to.  It is repetitive and frustrating and uncomfortable...and the only path to increasing their capabilities in their chosen area.

Whereas flow works at the edge of, but within, your current capabilities, deliberate practice works at the edge of, but just outside of, your current capabilities.

In Talent is Overrated, Geoff Colvin, puts it this way:

...great performers never allow themselves to reach the automatic, arrested development stage in their chosen field. That is the effect of continual deliberate practice - avoiding automaticity. The essence of practice, which is constantly trying to do the things one cannot do comfortably, makes automatic behaviour impossible.

This doesn't mean that nothing great performers do is automatic. Rather, they are constantly assimilating new skills and it is the skills that lie at the edge of their capacities that are not automatic.

If you only focus on achieving the experience of flow then the chances are that,while you may get a lot of enjoyment from your chosen activity, you won't actually get any better at it.

But if you deliberately practice the things that you find hard, then over time they will become less hard and ultimately effortless. And in your desire to become even better you will find more hard things to practise.

That doesn't mean that it always has to be hard. If you reach a point at which you are satisfied with the level of your performance then you can stay at that level and just enjoy the experience of flow.

Like a lot of things in life you set your level of aspiration according to the price you are prepared to pay, and the higher that price, the greater your potential for excellence.

Love the questions

We tend to link action with answers and inaction with questions. But it might be that questioning is the most truly active way to be and that answers allow us to disguise our inertia in habitual actions

~ George Myerson 101 Key Ideas Existentialism


Learning is to a great extent finding answers to questions. And to learn effectively may mean asking the right questions at the right time. The right question is the question that invites an answer that builds on your existing capacities. The right time is generally the time when you would understand the answer. You can only ever start from where you are. As Robert Fritz says: current reality is always your new starting point.

Questioning is about the recognition of a gap between where you are and where you want to be. One approach to learning anything is to make list of all the questions to which you want answers. This creates a focus for your learning activities.

Firstly, it guides your search for information – if you know what you want to know then you can begin to search for it. While what you desire to learn is nebulous and vague, you have no clear direction. Questions promote clarity of intention.

Secondly, it provides a sense of progress. As each question is answered, you gain a greater sense of mastering what it is you wish to learn, of making progress, of covering territory.

Thirdly, it provides a basis for further exploration. As each question is answered, more questions arise that demand answers. More importantly, answers to your initial questions help you sharpen what further questions you need to ask. When you are completely ignorant of a subject, you don’t know what is important and what is irrelevant. However as your knowledge grows, you gain a more refined sense of the lie of the land, of the relationship between different concepts, and a greater sense of what you still find obscure. 

This applies not just to conceptual knowledge but to practical knowledge as well. If you are learning a practical skill then initially your questions may relate to the skill as a totality – how can I do this thing at all? However once you have answered that question, deeper questions may arise: how does the way I hold this tool affect the results I get? How does the way I move affect the visual effect of what I am doing?

Thus questions provide an entry point to experimentation. Once you have asked a question then you may try different things in order to try and find an answer. Each ‘experiment’ is an attempt to answer the question. While some of these answers may be ‘wrong’ in the sense that they don’t answer the question you are asking, they may still yield useful information that extends your knowledge. And sometimes the answers they yield may lead to more interesting questions than the ones you originally asked.

Children ask questions all the time and as a result their knowledge grows quickly. They aren’t afraid of displaying their ignorance because they haven’t yet become aware of the social stigma attached to ignorance. If you want to learn you need to become more like a child and let your curiosity dominate your fear and fuel the questions that will lead to your ultimate mastery of your chosen area of interest.

Experimenting with how YOU learn

When we speak about teaching, it is simply someone else's experience. Your teacher has walked the path ahead of you, and you look at their tracks in the dust. They might provide you with some hints about where to go next. But these 'tracks' are somebody else's past, they are not your future. All the books and courses are simply maps other people's pasts. Absorb and use them, but always remember that your path will be different, and it is this personal path you must travel. Don't try to exactly copy another person's path; use their knowledge, but remain aware that the particular 'landscape' of your own path is unique.

~ Yoshi Oida and Lorna Marshall The Invisible Actor

Everyone learns differently:

• some people like to rush ahead to be able to do things however poorly and then refine their skills 
• other people prefer to master one stage before moving on to the next 
• for one person, a single focused session a day works 
• for another short sessions throughout the day spread over time work better 
• for some people mornings are best but for others evenings work better 

And similarly with sleep patterns, what and when you eat, patterns of activity, exercise etc. All of these things may impact to some degree on how effectively you learn.

Get to know what kinds of things make it easier for you to learn and what kinds of things block or hinder learning. Then play to the conditions that are optimal for you. However you also need to know yourself as well. It may feel like you are learning something when you read a book while watching TV, but you need to test how much you actually learn in this way.

You also need to test whether your habitual way of learning is working for you. You may be comfortable with it, but it doesn’t mean that it is the most effective or efficient method you could use and other methods may work better if you try them. And it is important that you give them a chance before concluding that they aren’t for you. Any new behaviour may feel odd or uncomfortable at first. The ways you learned to learn as a child or adolescent may no longer work for you (if they ever did.). So experiment to see what is true for you:

Be aware of the process of experimentation and experiment with your approaches. As part of your adaptive experimentation experiment with experimentation itself. Be careful not to become too set in your ways of experimenting. Continue to challenge both your understanding and the approach you use to gain it

~ Yoram Wind et al. The Power of Impossible Thinking

In Counter-Clockwise, Ellen Langer makes the point that research in any area whether medical, psychology or whatever can only ever deal in generalities, and that individuals may experience results different from what research would predict. And she suggests that we be attentive to when things work well for us, so that we can encourage the conditions that will permit things to go well for us more often. This applies especially to learning. Each of us brings to any learning situation the accumulated experiences and knowledge of our lifetime so far. So it would be naive to expect that all of us would learn in the same way.

In Uncommon Genius, here’s how Denise Shekerjian describes Lester Brown’s process for discovering what works for him:

Biography and India set him to wondering about his own limits. And so, as a young boy, he started to pay attention and stopped letting things slide…. As he met challenges, he examined all the angles. He asked himself how he felt about this or that, and why he was afraid in certain situations, and how much risk he thought he could handle, and how he felt about competition, and how much could be accomplished in the space of an hour, and how a decision about this would affect something else…He was interested in seeing what he was made of. He started testing and probing and he never stopped. The result is he knows himself very well and that inner knowledge is what he relies on in trying to avoid mistakes and in managing defeats.

And in doing this he was following a practice that goes back more than 2000 years:

Can a man be said, do you think, to know himself who knows his own name and nothing more? or must he not rather set to work precisely like the would-be purchaser of a horse, who certainly does not think that he has got the knowledge he requires until he has discovered whether the beast is tractable or stubborn, strong or weak, quick or slow, and how it stands with the other points, serviceable or the reverse, in reference to the use and purpose of a horse? So, I say, must a man in like manner interrogate his own nature in reference to a man's requirements, and learn to know his own capacities, must he not?
~ Socrates

The point is that by becoming aware of our strengths, weaknesses and propensities we become better able to tailor our strategies both for learning and for life in general to accommodate this knowledge and achieve success. And in doing so, we enlarge those very capacities.

Don't settle for mediocrity!

The key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not live in a shell of static safe mediocrity.
~ Josh Waitzkin The Art of Learning

Failure is easy. In fact, that's the default outcome of everything. If you want to fail, you already know how. Just sit back and watch TV
~ Carl King So, you're a creative genius...Now what?


Mediocrity isn't exactly failure. It isn't that you can't perform a particular skill at all. Rather it is settling for a level of performance lower than you could reasonably attain with a modicum of greater effort.

In Influencer: The Power to Change Anything the authors describe how most of us acquire skills:

...many of the tasks we perform at work and at home suffer from "arrested development." With simple tasks such as typing, driving, golf, and tennis, we reach our highest level of proficiency after about 50 hours of practice; then our performance skills become automated. We're able to exercise them smoothly and with minimal effort, but further development stops...we learn how to make use of a word processor or Web server by mastering the most common moves, but we never learn many of the additional features that would dramatically improve our ability

In my experience, it generally takes me about 6 or 7 weeks at about an hour a day to become reasonably knowledgeable about anything. So 50 hours seems about right.

However, research shows that to reach world class in a particular skill or art generally takes at least 10,000 hours of focused practice. So we give up on learning after 50 hours but the highest level of skills requires 10,000 hours. This opens up a huge scope for finding a level of mastery we are prepared to work towards beyond settling for the mediocrity of the 50 hour point.

This was my experience in learning Microsoft Excel. I reached a certain point where I could do more with it than most of the people around me and I thought I was an expert user. But then I discovered VBA (the language behind Excel that allows tasks to be automated, pop up forms and all sorts of other features) and I realised that I only knew a tiny fraction of what there was to know. And I am still aware that there is an even higher level of knowledge and skill beyond what I currently know and can do.

When we are growing up and learning to walk, talk and perform other skills, we try different things until we stumble on something that will work and then with minor refinements we stick to that pattern. 

As children learning to use our bodies, we try out different methods until one works and then we adopt it. We rarely think to look further for a more efficient and effective way to accomplish results
~ Peter Ralston Zen Body-Being

As Ruthy Alon, a Feldenkrais practitioner says "The disadvantage in selecting from an accidental range of alternatives is an increased chance of error and the trap of remaining stuck with that mistake." And this is what most of us do with most of the skills we acquire: we haphazardly try different things and then settle for the first thing that we find that works.

However this isn't the only approach we could take. In mathematics, when someone manages to prove a new result, it is often the case that the first proof is messy and complicated and doesn't make it clear why the result is true. However what it does is establish what is possible and once it is known that a result is true then it becomes worthwhile to make the effort to find a better proof. So even though the result is already proven, mathematicians continue to search for better proofs that will allow greater insight into why the result works.

And we can do this ourselves in our daily lives. Once we have succeeded in doing something, however poorly, we have established that we can do it. And once we know that it lies within our range of possibilities it becomes worthwhile for us to make the effort to find ways to do it even better. You could call this approach "first succeed then refine".

And the great thing is that it doesn't take that much more to achieve better than average performance. Since most people are prepared to settle for mediocrity, with a little more time and effort you can achieve a level of performance that is perceptibly superior.

Don't take my word for it. Try it for yourself. Do one thing to improve your chosen skill, then do another, then another and soon you will find that you have exceeded what you previously thought was possible for you.

What you know determines what you see

A man takes his car in to a mechanic because of engine trouble. When the man looks at the engine, all he sees is a mass of metal, tubes and wires which don't really make a lot of sense. But the mechanic sees the distributor, carburettor, air filter and so on and also what role each of these plays and how they interact.

The difference is knowledge.

An amateur artist goes to draw something but what they end up drawing looks nothing like the subject. An experienced artist sees the differences in the play of light over the subject, the overlap of contours, and variations of size with distance, and as a result, in drawing what she knows to look for, she captures a much more accurate likeness of the subject.

The difference is knowledge.

Anything you learn will open your eyes to new distinctions and differences that you weren't aware of before. It is as if ignorance is a form of blindness.

When you are learning a new skill, it may at times seem like you are getting worse rather than better, you begin to notice more and more errors and if you aren't careful you may end up becoming discouraged. But the fact is that the errors were already there. It is only with the benefit of increased knowledge that you have gained the ability to detect them, and with that increased knowledge, the ability to correct them.

And this increased knowledge may also open your eyes to new possibilities that were previously beyond your conception and also lead you to aspire to more.

In Body Mind Mastery, Dan Millman tells the following story:

As my freshman on the Stanford gymnastics team became more aware of their errors, they would tell me in frustration how they "used to be better in high school" and were "going downhill." This concerned me -  until I saw films of them the year before, when it became obvious that they had improved radically. Now aware of their errors, they had raised their standards.

Sometimes we tend to think that learning is just putting information into our brains.

But it does so much more:

• it changes what we see,
• it changes our sensitivity to error,
• it changes our standards and
• it changes our sense of the possible and what we can aspire to.

Looked at in this way, learning the right thing in the right way can be life-changing.

Confusion and the skill of backtracking

If you are learning something by yourself it is almost inevitable that you will get to a point where whatever you are trying to learn ceases to make sense.

There can be any number of causes for this. Perhaps you have misunderstood something earlier on and it is only now that that earlier misunderstanding is making itself felt. Perhaps a new concept has been introduced that just doesn't click with you. Or maybe the author is just not that great at explaining things.


In Thinking Mathematically, John Mason describes the experience like this:

In my experience, I have usually been stuck for some time before I become aware of it. At first the awareness is hazy and indistinct. It slowly grows until I am definitely both stuck and aware of being stuck. Only when I feel stuck and I am aware of my feelings can I take action.

Whatever the reason for feeling confused or stuck, one of the most important skills that you can have is backtracking.

What this means is working backwards from where you are, from your current point of puzzlement until you get to a point where everything is clear and then trying to isolate the point at which you ceased to understand.

When I have tutored children, I have used this process in helping them to understand. With one student, who had some difficulty understanding particular kinds of equations, I kept simplifying and simplifying until I reached a point at which he could understand and solve the equations. Then step by step, I added complexity, at each stage making sure that I hadn't lost him and not moving on until I was confident that he was confident, until ultimately we reached the point of understanding where he needed to be.

This is easy in mathematics where each concept builds upon the last, but it is also generally true of most fields. If you are learning how to dance then you can reach a point where you don't understand how to do a particular move. If you have access to a video of the move then you can watch it over and over, and slow it down if necessary to identify the exact point at which your understanding fails and then observe carefully what the dancers do around that point to complete the move. Once you have seen it, you can test your understanding by trying it yourself to see if your new understanding translates into action, and if it doesn't repeat the process until you achieve success.

When I was first learning to dance I had a lot of difficulty with a move called the basket, I always seemed to lift the wrong arm and turn my partner the wrong way. It was only when I slowed down and observed more carefully how the move was done, breaking it down into components I could understand (lift left arm, turn partner anti-clockwise) and then time these components correctly with the footwork that I was able to master this move and then move on to other things.

In Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar, James Marcus Bach describes a similar process that he used:

To learn the computer's language, I must hop from stone to stone. If the material was too hard, there must be a moment in the book (a sentence? a word? a punctuation mark?) where the gap was too wide to leap.

Maybe if I hopped very carefully, I could find a way across....I would study that gap in the stone bridge and maybe find a way past it. I believed I couldn't learn 6502 programming, but maybe I could discover why I couldn't learn it

In the final analysis, the key is persistence and looking at the problem in different ways until you experience the insight that closes the gap in your understanding. If there is no way forward that you can see then you might try using another learning resource as I have mentioned elsewhere for a difference approach.

Whatever you do don't give up: if what you are trying to learn is worth learning then it is worth the effort of struggling through the transient difficulties to achieve genuine understanding.

Mistakes aren't generally fatal

There's a huge difference between not knowing about something that I've never looked at, and not knowing about something I have looked at. Just looking at it is progress, because my ignorance now has a focus
~ James Marcus Bach


When you first start to learn something almost everything you do is likely to be wrong. So if your priority is to avoid mistakes then you will never even take the first step.

In his book Deep Learning, Stellan Ohlsson makes the point that learning is about gaining a more and more precise knowledge of what it is you are trying to learn and eliminating things that don't work:

If the main cause of errors is that the initial rules for a task tend to be overly general, then to adapt a strategy to a task is to gradually specialize those rules by incorporating more and more information about the task environment into them

But the only way to do this is to learn from the mistakes we make:

Errors play an active role in their own elimination; we unlearn errors by learning from them

So the thing to fear is not making mistakes but failing to use them to improve our performance. Mistakes are a signal that you still have something to learn, that there is a gap in your knowledge, that there may be something you have misunderstood. What they aren't is a sign of personal lack.

The fact is that what any single person knows as a percentage of all that is known collectively by humanity is incredibly small, and it is infinitesmally small compared to what remains to be known. All of us have huge areas of ignorance and the point of learning is not to know everything but rather to become competent in the things which are important to us.

The video below illustrates how even great artists make mistakes but by correcting them arrive at works of genius:




The point is to examine what we have done, to see where we may have gone wrong, and then use this knowledge as a platform for advancing further. 

Mistakes are only messengers, not judges; they play a role in advancing our learning but when we succesfully learn we transcend our former errors and leave them behind as we move into new and unfamiliar territory and make higher level errors. If we treat errors as friends who advise us of where we need to look to improve rather than enemies who simply point out our inadequacies, then we will advance more rapidly in anything we choose to learn.

Not easy, but possible

A true process orientation also means being aware that every outcome is preceded by a process. Graduate students forget this all the time. They begin their dissertations with inordinate anxiety because they have seen other people’s completed and polished work and mistakenly compare it to their own first tentative steps. With their noses deep in file cards and half-baked hypotheses, they look in awe at Dr So-And-So’s published book as if it had been born without effort or false starts, directly from brain to printed page. By investigating how someone got somewhere, we are more likely to see the achievement as hard-won and our own chances as more plausible.

~ Ellen Langer Mindfulness

…the reason why I plunged into this project, even though I didn’t know whether I was smart enough to complete it, was because I knew I was smart enough to start. Starting is what matters. I’ll be smarter by the finish.

~ James Marcus Bach Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar


It is very easy to get discouraged when we see someone do something amazingly well that we would like to do. It can seem like we will never be able to achieve what they have achieved and we may give up before we have even started. The problem is that we do not see the hours and days and weeks and perhaps years of practice that have gone into their current performance. We have not seen what they were like when they first started out, how awkward they may have been, the mistakes and missteps they made and the sheer effort that they put into getting where they are.

How I wrote my thesis

When I first started to write my dissertation or thesis after four years of research, I was totally bamboozled and didn’t know where to start. I felt overwhelmed and that I would never be able to accomplish the task. So I took steps to try and make it appear more doable to myself.

I firstly did some investigation and found that the average thesis in my area of mathematics was only about 112 pages long. So OK, I had something to aim for…112 pages didn’t seem like much...

Next I put together a shell of what the chapters of my thesis should be about. I had already had a number of papers published co-authored with others in my field, so I cut and pasted the content into the relevant chapters and then edited them so that they read more like a chapter than a separate paper.

In the process of doing this, I discovered a few more results that looked like they might have been worth investigating while I continued working on my thesis. I worked out what the central focus of my thesis would be and decided to include some additional results in Appendices which were relevant but not part of the central focus.

As my thesis began to take shape, my list of references grew and I also began to write the introduction which described the history of the problem I was working on, previous results and their limitations and how my work fitted in.

In the process of doing all this I taught myself more advanced aspects of Latex (the mathematical typesetting program I was using) and also tracked down a book from the 60’s which contained two key early papers from my field of study.

Gradually, things began to fall into place. My thesis continued to grow and a logical structure emerged that I was able to refine as I continued to edit the work I had done. Finally the day came when I realized that almost all of the work was done and that it had not taken as long as I had originally thought.

By taking things step by step and dealing with the immediate problems I was having and then moving on once they were resolved, I had achieved something that I had previously doubted I could do. My final thesis (after it had been examined and accepted) ran to eight chapters and 187 pages or just more than 50% longer than the typical thesis in my field.

I had done it but it wasn’t easy and I learned a lot by trial and error as I went, so the process of writing it was itself a work in progress.

In the movie Soul Surfer there is a line “I don’t need easy, I just need possible”

A lot of the time we fail at learning either because it looks too hard or because we want what looks amazing to come easily. But if it was that easy, it wouldn’t seem amazing. What we are left with is possible: through honoring the process and applying ourselves we can arrive at excellence – it may not be easy, but it is possible.

---

To view a copy of my thesis in its final form go to my thesis

No Dumb Questions for Smart People

When entity learners run up against something hard to understand or a problem tough to solve, they become early quitters. In contrast, incremental learners chip away at a challenge like a block of stone, gradually making it manageable

~ David Perkins Making Learning Whole



My friend Michelle is one of the smartest people I know but has never had the advantage of a university or college education. What makes her smart is the questions she asks.
 
She is never afraid that asking a question about something she doesn’t know, for fear it would make her look stupid. Her curiosity and desire to remove a little area of ignorance takes precedence over what anyone might think. For example, when I use a word she has never heard before she almost always asks me what it means.
 
And in other areas, the questions she asks seem to target very precisely what it is she doesn’t understand, which implies a finely tuned awareness of when she feels confused and what precisely she is confused about.
 
Consider the following example:

 
• Eight months ago: I gave Michelle some training in VBA (the programming language that lies behind Microsoft Excel). She learned just the basics and there was a big time gap between then and now. She had never programmed before.
 
• Two months ago: I wrote a VBA program for modifying a spreadsheet her team used in its work. When I was debugging it, I was able to quickly see what needed to be fixed just by glancing at the code. Michelle asked me how I could do it so quickly and my answer was that I was used to how the code was structured. But this was an interesting question and one that as you will see sheds light on how Michelle thinks.
 
• A month ago: The program needed to be amended and Michelle decided that she wanted to tackle the task herself and only to ask me if she got stuck. And perhaps not surprisingly with such a can-do attitude, she was able to do most of the changes without any help from me. And the parts that had her stumped turned out to be things that had me stumped as well!
 
• Two weeks later: We were building more functionality into this program and I was showing Michelle how she could use a ‘for loop’ ( e.g. for i = 1 to 100, , next i) to modify some selected values in the spreadsheet. And she asked me what the “i” was for. It was a simple question and a good one yet one I found surprisingly difficult to answer since I had been using such variables for so long that they had become second nature. After a couple of attempts I was able to explain it although oddly enough I wasn’t very satisfied with my own explanation!
   
  And when we were working on a couple of bugs in the program, Michelle was able to pinpoint the problem areas before I could. In effect, her focused work with the program had given her the same sort of familiarity with its structure that she had asked me about only a few weeks before!

  
Now I have a PhD in mathematics, another postgraduate degree in Medical Statistics, and have studied computing in my undergraduate degree. I have around eight published papers in my field. Yet here was someone who had graduated high school yet was able to ask smart questions and to solve programming problems.
 
The question is how?
 
The clue is in the above description of what happened:

 
1. Once she learned the basics, Michelle challenged herself to modify the program herself, rather than getting me to do it. In the process, she gained a better idea of what she understood and what she didn’t. Her drive for mastery overcame any fear she might have had of failing. And in the process she gained an implicit knowledge of the structure of the code. ( Part of this is also that Michelle has a fiercely independent nature and wants to be able to do things for herself.)
2. As she went over the program she became more and more familiar with what different parts of the program did, and was even able to work out for herself the parts she didn’t initially understand. In doing so, she gained greater confidence for dealing with future challenges.
3. Only when she came up against a problem she couldn’t solve did she seek help, knowing that she had reached the limits of what she could do on her own. And yet by stretching herself, those limits were ones that were challenging even for someone who had used VBA for a few years. By challenging herself she was more able to see the current (and temporary!) limits of her knowledge.
4. She watched as I wrote the extra functionality and listened as I explained what I was doing and observed how I troubleshooted problems when some of it didn’t work. In the process, she learned some more about problem solving while programming.
5. She kept asking questions until she got an answer she understood.

Sadly, Michelle is the only person I work closely with who has this level of curiosity and willingness to challenge herself to overcome her ignorance. So many people would rather pretend they understand than risk anyone knowing what they don’t know.
 
And this is why I say that Michelle is one of the smartest people I know. Most people would rather remain in ignorance than admit to it and have it removed, including a lot of people with degrees. (In fact, a few of the people I have known with advanced coursework degrees don’t qualify as smart at all, at least not in this sense.)
 
But Michelle is constantly growing in the things she knows and doesn’t remain ignorant for long about anything because she is prepared to ask and learn. And in this respect, Michelle is as smart as anyone with a PhD because she had the thirst for knowledge and the willingness to try and satisfy that thirst.
 
And it is this learning attitude that qualifies her as truly smart.

Motivated Learning - the Importance of Attitude

In January 2008, I made the following entry in my journal:

My approach to learning VBA last year was pretty much a combination of persistence and experimentation. I'd come up with some cool thing that I wanted to do, have an initial go at coding it, run it and find that it had an error, read some more, try again and iterate until eventually I got it to work. In the process I picked up some of the subtleties of the language. And I was totally focussed while doing it as well as totally confident that I would find a solution

Basically, I saw the thing I was learning (VBA) as a means to a desired purpose (the latest cool thing I wanted to do) and because I kept this ultimate goal in mind, I was able to persist through repeated trials and errors and relearning until the goal was achieved, building my expertise in the process.

Yesterday, I was talking to my friend Michelle about her learning process. Michelle has a powerful learning orientation and has taught herself aspects of VBA as well as how to do complex mail merges with conditional fields in Word. She agreed that for her the motivation for learning these things was that she had very specific objectives that she wanted to achieve and as a result she was able to persist despite the difficulties. And we both agreed that without a reason to learn and something specific to achieve, learning can be difficult, it can be hard to stay motivated or to see the point of learning at all.

The lesson to learn from this is that for anything you want to learn, you need to be clear about why you want to learn it and to see how each step you take is bringing you closer to that goal. Unmotivated learning is just a recipe for boredom and for struggle with yourself rather than struggling with whatever difficulties inhere in what you are trying to learn.

Learning faster using multiple sources

The student's progress may be affected by the limitations of their teacher (whether that teacher is a human being or a book.) Not all teachers teach equally well; all teachers have weak as well as strong areas; teachers have their pet topics and the topics they tend to gloss over. Teachers may also differ in how much they understand what it is like to be a learner and not to know; they may have forgotten how confusing something may be that to them is second nature.

This is something I've noticed across a range of areas.

Example 1

When learning VBA (a computer language), I found that I needed to work with several different books because some books didn't explain some topics very well and just left me confused, other books left out some topics entirely, some had examples that were easy to follow while others had useful exercises to try. If I had stuck doggedly to one source it would have slowed my progress considerably. But by working with different sources, I was able to supplement the weaknesses of one source with the strengths of others.

Example 2

When learning to dance I noticed that my first teacher didn't seem to teach certain moves that I had seen in dances (such as flicks in Jive), but I was able to supplement this weakness by doing classes with other teachers. Similarly in my current style modern jive ( like West Coast Swing, but without the footwork) some teachers focus on complex arm patterns while others focus on dips. By being eclectic, it is possible to learn the best of what many have to offer rather than being held back by the limitations or preferences of a single teacher.

Apart from content there may also be limitations in how well something is explained. As a beginner you may feel that the fault lies with you if you don't understand something. But it is just as likely that the teacher or author hasn't explained it very well and may just not be that good at communicating their knowledge. It may even be that they don't understand it that well themselves and that they take refuge in being obscure or ambiguous.


The lesson to learn from this is that you may progress faster if you seek out the best teacher of a particular part of what you seek to learn, using different teachers or sources for different topics.

You will catch more fish with a net than you would with a fishing pole!

Start Easy

When you look back on your life, you'll see that for every skill you have acquired you have been through basically the same process.

In learning to walk, you started off rolling around on the floor pushing with your legs, learned to push yourself up on your arms, then to crawl, then walk and then eventually to skip, dance, run, jump…In other words you mastered a particular stage and then pushed into what you were now just capable of attempting and tried to master that and so on, each stage setting the stage for further progress.

And similarly with talking, reading, doing arithmetic,…in a series of small steps , building mastery in stages until you gained easy fluency.

This is a life lesson that not everyone learns. Some people will try a new activity and then give up because it doesn't come easy immediately. It is as if they were trying to jump a chasm rather than taking the time to build a bridge. But the reality is that almost nothing worth doing comes that easily and it is only by being patient and serving the required apprenticeship that you can get to mastery.

So how does that apply to your learning now?

Well, suppose you want to learn how to use a computer. Your best bet is to find the easiest book you can and work through it first. This way you will become familiar with all of the basic aspects of computing, the words used and basic functions. This would give you the confidence to try something a bit more challenging, master it…and so on.

The lesson here is to build new competence on existing mastery and in time it will become second nature.

Introduction

Hi. My name is Ian Gray and this blog is about how to become smarter.

Let me say up front that I believe that being smart is a process and an attitude. Anyone can become smarter than they are right now. You aren't born with a fixed amount of intelligence. Rather, your life experiences, your environment, the resources you have had access to have all affected to some degree how smart you are right now.

I was quite smart as a child. I did well in primary school (although in some of the stories I will tell in this blog, you'll see I made lots of mistakes too). However I realised quite early that smart was something I could build.

By the time I hit my first year of high school (when I was about 12) I had already set my sights on finding ways of getting smarter. I read de Bono's Five Day Course in Thinking, Harry Lorrayne' How to Develop a Super Power Memory and taught myself the Trachtenberg Speed System of Mathematics.

And as I progressed through high school, I learned more and more ways of expanding what intelligence I already had. I read books about expanding my vocabulary, studied Polya's How to Solve It, books about memory skills by Tony Buzan, and books about creativity such as Adam's Conceptual Blockbusting. Since I spent five years living in Papua New Guinea with my parents where there was no TV, so I read a lot. When it came to my final year exams in high school I placed in the top 5% of the state (New South Wales, Australia) and in the top 10% in both Mathematics and English. And I achieved this by trying all different ways to expand my intelligence.

Over the years since then, I have completed a Bachelors degree in mathematics, a post-graduate degree in Medical Statistics, and a PhD in mathematics from which I have had 8 papers published in international journals. I also won university prizes in Philosophy, Linguistics and Modern Greek.

And apart from these academic achievements, I have written poetry that has aired twice on the local University radio station, learned to dance in a number of different styles (ballroon, latin, salsa, modern jive) and become a dancer that women enjoy dancing with, have taught myself a computer language and designed some amazing applications, have learned to draw quite well, as well as trying singing and acting.

I don't say this to boast but because I think that with the right process and attitude, anyone is capable of doing what I have done and much more.

I have also tutored high school students one-on-one and found the best ways to build their skills and knowledge, as well as tutoring university classes. And I have spent years reading everything I can find about learning, teaching, expertise, intelligence, creativity, problem solving and many more areas relevant to becoming smart.

In this blog, I will talk about people who I believe exemplify a powerful learning orientation. People like my mother, who orphaned at a young age, left school at 16, yet has spent a lifetime acquiring new knowledge and skills. And people like my friend Michelle, who finished high school but is one of the smartest people I know because of how she approaches learning.

So, I hope you will join me on this journey to find out how you too can become smarter through a good process and a good attitude.