Learning and training principles that help you learn the right skills faster, determine your skill level and be less nervous about trifles.
The science of how to learn new things could become one of the main applied disciplines of our time. Each of us learns many skills and abilities throughout our lives. No matter how different these skills are – from cake preparation and search in Google to performance of Beethoven’s sonatas and writing of scientific articles – in their basis the set of the general principles lies. The understanding of these principles would make training more clear and painless process.
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Psychology has been approaching the formulation of these principles since its inception. The Ebbinghouse curve, which shows how quickly new material is forgotten, was discovered as early as 1885 as one of the first such patterns. Today we know much more about learning mechanisms, though still not enough.
Skill acquisition models will not only help you understand how the learning process works, but also help you plan your own classes more efficiently, avoid unnecessary difficulties and get better results in less time.
However, they will not give you the most important thing – regular and conscious practice. You will have to do this part of the work yourself.
- THE MAIN PRINCIPLES OF LEARNING AND TRAINING: HOW TO LEARN ANYTHING IN JUST 20 HOURS
In his book “The First 20 Hours”, Josh Kaufmann, author of the bestseller “Myself an MBA”, offers a learning model with which you can learn any skill in just 20 hours of concentrated practice. If you have to arrange hours and minutes in your work schedule, and you want to not only leave time to relax but also learn something new, this model can be useful for you.
So that learning every time you do not seem the chaos of vague impressions, in the acquisition of any skill can be distinguished by 4 main stages:
Break down this skill into small elements;
Study each of these elements in a consistent manner;
Remove all obstacles and distractions that prevent you from learning;
Regularly practice the basic elements of the skill.
If you want to learn to play guitar or yoga, it’s hardly worth trying to do jazz improvisations or sit in a lotus pose. Start with the basic layout of your hands, playing simple gamma and chords. Choose the specific piece that you want to learn to play in the next 20 days and play for 1 hour each day. But first it will be useful to get acquainted with the literature: theoretical knowledge is important because it allows you to acquire and correct our ideas about practice.
These lessons will not make you a musician, but you can enjoy the game very soon – and maybe even deliver it to others.
There is a belief that good command of any skill requires years of focused practice. What can one learn in just 20 hours if professionals have gained the right experience for their entire lives? Indeed, it will take you much longer to become an expert in a particular field. Many studies conducted in a variety of professional fields, from chess and musicians to doctors and researchers, show that real professionals become real only after about 10 thousand hours of concentrated practice, which is about 6 years of 5 hours a day.
And that’s too good a prediction. What psychologist Anders Eriksson called “deliberate practice” requires a great deal of concentration. Musicians, for example, can only practice really conscious practice for about half an hour per day. This format assumes that you are fully focused on what you are doing and receive feedback from your actions – that is, you can see what you are doing well and what you are not doing well. This is not an easy thing to do at all.
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There are two main lists in Kaufman’s book. Here is the first of them, which describes the main principles of rapid skill acquisition:
Choose an attractive project.
Focus on a single skill.
Determine the target skill level.
Break down the skill into elements.
Prepare everything you need for the activity.
Remove obstacles to the class.
Allocate special time for the class.
Create quick feedback loops.
Work out on a schedule, at short intensive intervals.
Pay attention to quantity and speed.
Each of these principles can be critical. If you don’t choose the right level of skill or the right project for you, you risk wasting your time aimlessly without learning anything specific. Without regular training, you will have to go back to basics every now and then. Without feedback, you will not be able to correct and improve your actions. And so on and so forth.
The second list is a list of principles of effective learning, which also consists of 10 points. Learning is different from practice, but it is just as important. Before embarking on the practice itself, it is useful to save your efforts and do some preliminary exploration. This way you can learn how people have dealt with the same problems before you, save time and give yourself less reason to give up on despair when something is not working out. This is the list:
Explore the skill in question and its related areas.
Admit that you don’t understand anything.
Identify mental models and mental clues.
Imagine a result opposite to what you want.
Talk to the people who are doing it to know what awaits you.
Remove anything that distracts you from your surroundings.
Use interval repetitions and fixations to memorize.
Create support structures (i.e. templates by which each activity is built) and checklists.
Formulate and refine the predictions.
Respect your body.
Mental models are ways to operate on the problems you face in a specific area. A scientist will think in terms and concepts, a programmer will think in terms of variables and algorithms, a musician will think in terms of note intervals and scores. Mastering any skill often requires learning a whole separate language. Even if you don’t move beyond the level of a three-year-old child, it will be a great progress.
If you are already practicing a skill, these principles are likely to be intuitive to you. But understanding comes only when you’re faced with mistakes. You need this list precisely to avoid making too many mistakes that may eventually discourage you from learning.
Kaufmann describes how two dozen of these principles make even the most seemingly difficult task quite feasible. And there’s no mystery to it:
It’s just that every day I’d allocate about an hour to a class of my choice, but that class was reasonable. Skills that at first seemed like an absolute mystery, a few days or even hours later became clear. Each skill required a little theoretical training, as well as about 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice.
- FROM BEGINNER TO EXPERT: SIX STAGES OF MASTERY
One of the most famous models of skill acquisition was developed in the early 1980s by brothers Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus of the University of California at Berkeley. This model, first described in the article “A Five-Step Model of Mental Activity Involved in Purposeful Acquisition of Skills”, is still common today in scientific and popular science literature.
The main thing it can provide is an understanding of the stage you are at the moment.
According to the amended Dreyfus model, the mastery of any skill is divided into six stages:
Beginner
Continuing
Competent
Specialist
Expert
Master
A beginner always follows the rules – for him they have the status of an immutable law. When you start learning a new skill, rules are very important: only with their help you can somehow orientate yourself in the material and gain the necessary experience. Besides, in many cases, rules are quite enough. You don’t have to be a cook to make a passable cake and make your family happy – just read the recipe and follow the instructions clearly.
For the continuing rules are already situational: in one situation one is good, in another it is better to use the other. Continuer can make not one cake, but several, and he will not cook vanilla cake as well as chocolate. This is already a good step towards competence.
The Competent sees not so much the rules as the underlying principles and models. He begins to rely more on his own ideas and experience than on a set of instructions. At this level, you act more freely and can flexibly adjust to the situation. Here begins the area of personal responsibility for the result – an area that many never achieve.
The specialist goes further along this path and a little bit in the other direction. His actions are already less based on principles, and more based on a sense of intuition. The specialist knows what to do at the right time, and his choice is often the right one. In place of many disparate parts, a single whole begins to emerge, “calculation and rational analysis as if melting before our eyes.
The expert in his field acts even more intuitively: he just does – and it works. If he is asked why he has made this or that decision, it can be difficult for him to formulate an answer – he seems so obvious. And it will not be presumptuousness, which is more often encountered at the level of a beginner, but a deep mastery of a skill mastered almost at the level of reflex. This requires many days and months of practice: the expert’s experience “is so great that each specific situation immediately dictates the required actions on the intuitive level”.
A master is an expert who works at the highest level of his abilities. He not only knows intuitively what to do and how to do it, but also does it in his own style. Each master is distinguished by a deep individuality. Few people come to this stage. Each master is usually a celebrity and a prominent authority in his work. If you see a master, you will most likely understand at once: it is a person fully immersed in his work.
It must be said that the boundaries between these levels are moving – there is no clear gradation between them. Besides, moving up these stairs does not always mean something good. For example, an expert will not always be a good teacher, and a person who is on the previous level can feel more comfortable in this role.
The Dreyfus model was created on the basis of research on air pilots and chess players and has some philosophical background related to phenomenology (one of the Dreyfus brothers later even became the author of a famous monograph on Heidegger’s work). Hence its most significant limitations: too much attention is paid to intuition, and too little to conscious improvement.
But intuition is not always worth relying on.
As later works of psychologists-behaviorists – first of all, Nobel laureate Daniel Kaneman, the author of the famous book “Think slowly … decide quickly” – showed, intuition is applicable where there are stable rules and regularities. It is important for doctors, chess players or taxi drivers, but not for stock analysts. When the context becomes unpredictable or too complex, it is better to abandon intuition and use clear algorithms. Alas, human abilities are not infinite. Whatever experience you have, you will still have to make mistakes.
The two models of skill acquisition we have described in this material complement each other well. Josh Kaufman proposed accessible and clear principles that facilitate learning and make regular training more effective. With this model at hand, quickly acquiring a new skill will no longer seem like such a difficult and daunting exercise.
The Dreyfus model allows you to look at it from a different perspective. It will help you determine what level of skill you are currently at and what you will need for the next steps. It does not give specific advice, but it does suggest possible perspectives and confounds excessive self-confidence. Before calling yourself a competent person in any field, it is helpful to think about what this means.
