Dear reader,
Last week, we discussed how being highly skilled at something can give us the freedom of time and the resources to do anything we want.
This week, I wanted to follow up on how to do it.
How do you become highly skilled at something?
If you were to ask me that question a year ago, I’d tell you to work hard and learn things or something along those lines. But, as I’ve learned, that advice is not very helpful. Then what is?
I’ve been reading this book recently named Ultralearning. It’s by a guy named Scott Young. Young has completed the 4-year Computer Science course at MIT in 1 year, and he has learned multiple languages by dedicating only 3 months to each language. He’s an interesting person.
Anyway, let’s get back to applicable advice.
There are a lot of useful ideas in Ultralearning, but one of the simplest ideas is that of “deliberate practice.”
I’ve been writing these essays/newsletters for the past year, but I haven’t been intentional about improving my writing. I was only focused on the ideas but not the medium through which I share my ideas, i.e., my writing.
As a result, I hadn’t made any progress in my writing even though I was practicing it seriously every week.
The key to remember is:
Practice doesn’t make perfect, deliberate practice does.
To take another example, let’s say that you want to learn programming. Simply watching YouTube videos of people writing code wouldn’t help you at all. While watching the videos, you would feel like you’re learning, but when the time to apply that knowledge for yourself would come, you probably wouldn’t be able to do it.
I realized this firsthand. When I was in high school, to prepare for my maths exam, I would simply look at the solutions to the problems we discussed in class. At that time, I’d feel like I understood everything, but when the time to solve questions in an exam came, I’d struggle.
The way to apply this idea of deliberate practice would be to do the things you find difficult and try to retrieve information from your brain rather than simply consuming information.
A few examples would make it easy to understand this.
- If you’re learning to program by watching a tutorial on YouTube, pause the video when the educator is about to write a program to do something. After pausing the video, try to solve that problem yourself by making use of the information and concepts you’ve learned previously. Once you’ve tried (regardless of whether you fail or succeed), only then see the educator’s solution to check your own.
- If you’re preparing for an exam, don’t simply read/see the questions & answers or problems & solutions. Instead, write the question or problem, and then try to answer it either by writing or speaking it out loud. Our minds are very clever. Sometimes, we feel like we know a solution, but when we try, we struggle. So make sure you know something by trying it first. Then, review the correct solution to see what you got wrong.
- Similarly, if you are learning a new language, don’t just play around in Duolingo. Instead, try to make real conversations in the language you’re learning. Even if you struggle and are barely able to speak a sentence, you will make progress.
The act of trying something, even if you are unable to do it, usually shows you what knowledge you lack. And then, when you review the correct solution, it is more likely to stick in your mind.
I’m still reading Ultralearning. There’s a lot of interesting ideas. If you want to work on your ability to learn things faster, you could look into that book.
For now, I’ll leave you with that.
See you next week.
Warmly,
Suraj
