How to Learn Skills Faster Than Everyone Around You

If you're learning a new skill, especially if it's a complicated skill, you're probably learning that because you need to use that skill to achieve something. And I think it is completely possible for most people to learn a new skill in half the amount of time it normally would have taken them just by cleaning up their approach to skill mastery. So, in this video, I want to teach you three strategies that help you reach skill mastery in half the time. These are strategies that I not only teach but I use myself for any skill that I'm learning. The first point is actually understanding the path of mastery itself. So if you think about learning a new skill, let's say you start here, you're level zero at the skill. You don't know how to do this at all. [music] And you're trying to reach let's say here level five. And level five is what we would call mastery. If we define mastery, mastery is when you have accuracy and you [music] have consistency and you have fluency. These three components must all exist to have mastery and they do not develop at the same rates or even with the same mechanisms of practice. And so the path to mastery usually looks like this. from level zero being like nothing at the skill to getting to level one. All you're doing is you're trying to achieve basic accuracy. Now, note the wording I used. You're trying to achieve accuracy. So, you haven't even achieved accuracy yet. What this means is that you're learning a new skill. you can't do it correctly and you're trying to figure out how to even just do it correctly for the first time. And so the growth that you see, your indicator of progress at this point is just selfawareness. You're gaining an understanding about your habits, your processes, how you think about things, the types of mistakes you tend to make, and the types of biases you tend to have. And everyone has different mistakes and different biases. On the path of learning a skill, there are a million different mistakes you could make. Each individual is not going to make all 1 million mistakes. They're only going to make 20 of those. And you don't really know which 20 you're going to make until you go out there and actually try and experiment and get realworld data. And so in this initial phase on your first step of the path of mastery, as long as you are learning more about the types of mistakes you tend to make, what your process looks like, how you tend to do things, you are actually making progress. And you can see that's actually a very already very different way of thinking about progress compared to how most people measure it. Because most people tend to measure it based on accuracy and fluency straight [music] away. If they're not improving in accuracy and they're not getting faster, they say that they're not improving. And this happens all the time with learning to learn. People will join my program, they're working through some techniques, they're doing it correctly, it's taken them couple weeks of practice, they're able to do it correctly, but then they stop because it takes too long. And they're not recognizing that fluency and speed is something that happens later in your path to mastery, not at the beginning. And so this is an example of why someone would give up despite making good progress. And so at level one you are developing self-awareness where at level zero you did not even have any awareness. And another framework of thinking about this sometimes this is called the unconscious incompetence point whereas this at level one is called the conscious incompetence point. Now, after a certain amount of practice, you have a certain level of accuracy and now you're able to do it correctly for at least one or two times. A lot of the time, we tend to think that now we've learned the skill and so now we should be getting faster. It's still not the case because the next thing that we need to hit off is consistency. That's the next part. So, at level two, our target that we're aiming for is consistency. and your improvement at this point. Your indicator of progress is your success rate. Now, this is really important because you can't measure a success rate with one attempt. If you do if you measure your progress based on a single attempt, it's just binary. Did you do it accurately or not? And so, you might think, "Yay, I'm improving if you did it correctly." And then if you did it wrong, it's like, "Oh, no, I'm getting worse." That's not accurate. You have to measure it across a certain amount of sample size. And this depends on the skill. So, let's say you're learning a really simple skill like learning to to spin your pen. You might practice this, get accuracy one time. You can like you can spin it and you you catch it one time and then you might do it again and again and after for every 10 attempts you maybe get it right once and then the next 10 attempts you get it right twice and the next 10 you get it right three times. So you can see there's improvement here because we're measuring the success rate even though the majority of the time we're actually doing it wrong and we're failing. And so what happens is that during this time what's actually happening in our brain [music] is that our brain is building conditionality on the skill and on the knowledge. It's understanding in this context with these variables in this environment I'm able to do this correctly. This is what it takes. But when you change one of those variables, it's a slightly different context. It's a little bit more challenging, different combination of things. [music] Now, it's a different situation. Someone who was a master of that skill can still do it, but you are not a mask master master yet. You're only at level two. So, for you, you're not going to be able to know how to handle that. You're going to make a mistake. And as you do that, you're gaining more self-awareness. And you're sort of cycling between these two levels. Every single time you encounter a new variable, a new factor that makes it more challenging and your brain is trying to understand all the different context and how it needs to slightly change the way that you perform the skill to be able to succeed more consistently. And this is the part that is often the most timeconuming for skill development. This is usually the part where people talk about this 10,000 [music] hour rule that you need to just practice things 10,000, you know, 10,000 hours to become a master at it. It's because you need to expose yourself to enough of these different contexts and challenges and variables to have consistency. And so there's actually a really practical point that appears when you think about it this way. What do you do if the skill that you're learning doesn't allow you to get many reps in? You can't measure your success. Like if you're using a skill once a month and you need to have at least let's say five or six [music] reps of using the skill to get a success rate, you know, it's going to take you 6 months a year to be able to get enough data to even know what your baseline success rate is. And so this becomes a really challenging situation. And actually the solution to this is that you have to increase the reps. If you're in a situation where [music] the only practice and the only reps that you're getting are so infrequent that you can't even measure your success rate, you're just not going to be able to measure it. And you're also not going to be able to improve very fast because your brain doesn't have many repetitions at learning these different variables and getting that practice. So your options are either find a way to get more repetitions in [music] more frequently or be okay with developing the skill more slowly. And what I find with a lot of top learners that are really able to learn skills quickly is that they're very proactive about this. They'll identify, hey, there's a bottleneck here. I can't measure my success rate because I'm not getting enough reps in of practice. My consistency isn't improving fast enough. I need to do something and change my environment, my reality to allow me to have those repetitions. Whereas a lot of people, probably most people, uh, take a more passive approach to this and just say, "Hey, I'm not getting enough reps in. I'm learning this really slowly." And they just don't really do anything about it. So, you you have to give yourself the ingredients, the opportunity to improve quickly. Now, in the conscious competence framework, uh, this is called conscious competency. Uh and usually what this means is that it requires a very high level of effort and attention and focus and concentration for you to be able to do it accurately. And so going from level two to level three, your indicator of progress is that the effort starts going down. So your effort starts reducing. It becomes easier and that's your indicator of progress. As you continue to develop, the amount of effort you need to put in starts dropping. What this means in your brain is that at this level we are starting to develop a habit. Your existing neural connections about how it performs a skill are starting to become a little bit more reinforced, bit more autopilot is taking over. And so you can spend your focus and attention on the parts that are more tricky. And that improves your consistency because now you're not having to spend all of your focus on just every single step of the process. And so again, at this point, I want you to pay attention to the fact that we're still not very fast. Speed of using the skill has not actually come yet. In fact, it's only in the next level here, level four, where speed comes in. And I'm going to put this in brackets because there's a very important part about speed. Speed is not something that you develop. Speed is a natural byproduct when you're able to do all the lower levels correctly. Well, not not not level zero. Okay, not not that part. Uh but all the levels from one to three. When you are able to have accuracy and you can do it consistently and you can do it with decreasing amounts of effort, what naturally will occur is that your speed will start to increase. And what I've noticed in my years of coaching is that when you deliberately try to increase your speed, it often just increases your rate of error or decreases your consistency. And then you start introducing all sorts of different mistakes and complexities with developing the skill. In reality, if you just don't worry about getting faster at all, you will just naturally get faster unless you're deliberately trying to do it slowly, which most people aren't. And so in level four on the path to mastery, you start noticing without even trying, it's getting faster and faster and faster. Your consistency is not dropping. Your accuracy is staying high, but it's just naturally getting faster until level five. You're at mastery. You have accuracy, consistency, and fluency, aka speed, and they're locked in. This is where you're going to get those really hard plateaus. your accuracy, I mean, your accuracy and consistency are already very high, but your speed is just not getting any faster at all because you're about as fast as it can get unless you completely change your entire process. And it's at these levels here that in the conscious competence framework sometimes we call this unconscious competence and that you're able to do it great without even trying. And so simply just by being aware of the path of mastery, it allows you to have a more accurate measure of your progress. And also because you know what the right thing to measure is, you can also change the way you practice to get good at that metric. For example, if you know that fluency is something that comes much later, you don't worry about trying to get fast. If your current focus is accuracy, you focus on just building accuracy. If your focus is consistency, you just focus on consistency. And so just being aware of this allows you to hit mastery much more quickly and easily with less demotivation. So that's the first part. The second strategy is early interle. Now, my normal approach to learning a skill used to be that I will try to build that accuracy and consistency. Um, and I'll just try to get really really good at it. And then when I feel like I'm at a certain level, I'm going to challenge myself by trying it on different types of contexts and and just more challenging situations. And then, as expected, my accuracy and my consistency will break down because I'm challenging myself at a higher level. And then I'll just continue at that until I'm able to do it. And then I'll I'll move on. That's actually a slower way to develop. And this is what early interle is about. You actually want to continually mix up the challenges and the variety of your practice from your earliest levels of practice. And one of the famous examples of using interle actually comes from uh basketball free throwing. So the idea was that I guess in the old days the method of practicing your basketball free throw was to stand in the like penalty zone line. I I don't watch basketball and I don't play basketball. You know, you stand in one spot and you throw the ball into the hoop and you just continue to do that until you get accuracy. And then what sport scientists figured out was that actually your ability to accurately and consistently throw the ball from that spot goes up when you practice around that area. So you don't just stay in that spot, you stand in front of that spot, behind that spot, to the left of that spot, to the right of that spot while you're moving, while you're staying still. And by creating variation early on and frequently in that practice process, what it does is it allows your brain to find the edges of the skill, which is I know that's like a kind of an abstract imagery, but from your brain's perspective, when you're learning a skill, it doesn't know how to do it in a way that produces a certain result. It doesn't know what to do and how much to do. How much is too much? How much is not enough? What does it feel like to underthrow, overthrow, under aim, over aim? And so by creating slightly different situations and constantly challenging yourself beyond your comfort zone, it actually helps your brain figure out the right way of doing it. In a way, you could say that it's learning more from the mistakes than it is from the successes. And so the way that I like to think about applying interle when you're learning a new skill is to think about lateral versus vertical challenge. So lateral versus vertical challenges. So let's say I'm learning to learn and I'm practicing a mind mapping skill. So I want to be able to do a mind map for this topic using this technique that I've been given. That would be the center point. That's our primary dominant goal. A lateral challenge would be to apply the same technique for a a topic that's similar level of complexity but a different topic or a different set of concepts. So what we're changing with a lateral challenge is the context that we're applying the skill to. On the other hand, with a vertical challenge, we're going to change the level of difficulty. So, this might mean trying to use a mindmap technique for a harder subject or a more complex set of concepts or maybe learning from a resource that's harder to understand. We're keeping the context relatively similar, but we're changing the difficulty of applying the technique. I give you another example. Let's say that you are a software developer and you are learning how to create a checkout page on a website uh with some uh custom billing software. The software is new. You've never really created a checkout in this way before. There's lots of complexities to it. You need to learn how to do this. So you have your goal state which is the specific checkout page. You need to create the project that you've been given and you have the particular component that you're building. You read through the documentation and it says this component is meant to be used in this way and it can achieve this function. So your first round of practice is just to try to do it in that way. It's often the simplest most obvious way of trying to apply the skill. You might do that a couple of times. Get your head around that. And now instead of moving on to the next component, assuming that you've got mastery over this, or instead of just continuing to practice doing that until you're able to do that consistently, we could apply a lateral challenge. So this might be building a very similar thing but integrating it with a different software, a similar level of complexity, similar functions that you're using, a similar architecture and approach but just a different product that you're integrating. Whereas a vertical challenge might be building a slightly more complicated checkout than the one that you've been given as part of your project, creating a more complex logic or a complex workflow. And so these types of challenges, you want to do this very early on when you're learning a skill. And that's going to allow you to learn that skill much more quickly. And this process of applying these challenges is a form of what we call interle. Now before I go into the third strategy, I will say that uh this idea of path to mastery and early interle are two really important strategies, but they are still only two strategies. And there are lots of other little strategies that you might be able to apply in different types of context. And I'm not going to go over those in this video because I think these three really make a big difference for most people. But if you do want to go a little bit deeper into this and you want to get a few more of these types of tips, then I would recommend checking out my free weekly newsletter. If you don't already know, I have a newsletter. It's free and sent out weekly. Uh, and I talk about these types of insights and these tips on how you can learn new skills and learn new knowledge more quickly. I usually talk about some kind of important principle like this path to mastery thing is actually a concept that I talk about in one of the newsletters as well. and I'll give you some practical takeaways for you to practice throughout the rest of the week. And in a way, it becomes this weekby- week pretty digestible course that you can take to start upgrading the way that you learn. So, if you're interested in that, I'll leave a link to that in the description to sign up below. Anyway, moving into the third one, which is something that I call gap seeking. So, before I talked about this idea of the 10,000 hour rule, which I'm sure you know, you've all heard about before, but you don't need 10,000 hours. Some people take this really literally. In fact, I've had people take it so literally, they actually count the amount of hours that they've spent on it, and then they start getting really anxious when they're approaching like 9,000 hours and they're like, I don't I'm not as good as I need to be yet. It's entirely possible for you to spend 10,000 hours learning a skill and still not be very good. And it's also entirely possible to spend half the amount of time or sometimes even like a tenth of that time and be very good. And so what's important is to understand the science behind the 10,000 hour rule. What is it that's meant to happen in those 10,000 hours? Because if you know what's meant to happen in those 10,000 hours, you can just directly trigger that. You can just make that happen. Because it's not the hours, it's not the time passing that makes a difference. It's what happens in those hours. And one of the biggest things that happens in those hours is the idea of finding these gaps. And I think gap seeking is a good one to end on because it ties together the path of mastery and the early interle part into kind of like a single frame of mind that you should have when you're learning new skills. And this is a frame of mind that I didn't used to have and I found really uncomfortable to have when I was younger. And I think reframing the way that I thought about learning new skills with this gap seeking mentality was one of the most important changes that I made that allowed me to start learning skills much more quickly. And so to explain this, I'm going to refer to something called the zone of proximal development. the zone of proximal development which is a a theory that was coined by this guy called Vigotssky who's this um very well-known uh learning and educational theorist and and philosopher years ago. The idea with the zone of proximal development is that you have this comfort zone in the middle and this comfort zone is made up of your current level of skills and habits and processes. So your current skill is represented by the edge of this comfort zone. Anything that is outside of that is beyond your current skill. And anything that is inside of that is something that you find very easy. You already have mastery of it. So when you're learning a new skill, obviously it being a new skill is not going to be inside your comfort zone. So it's going to be somewhere uh outside of this. And if it's a complex skill, it's probably going to be like way out here, right? It's it's far beyond your current level of comfort. Uh and actually even further than the zone of proximal development, which is the area just outside of your comfort zone. The idea is that if you are learning skills inside this zone of proximal development, it's outside of your comfort zone, but still close enough that allows you to learn new skills very quickly. If you go way too far out and you try to learn the skill all the way over there, it's so different to your existing habits and your processes that your brain doesn't really know what to do. And so it's very slow at learning it. And so if you want to get there, what you need to do is get to this point and then you need to get to this point and you need to get to this point and get to this point. So obviously your comfort zone is kind of expanding every single time you're learning it and your zone of proximal development is obviously you know expanding until one day your goal state is inside your zone of proximal development and now you can learn it and that's basically what we're trying to do with this path of mastery. The path of mastery is you hopping your way over from you know here all the way through to this point. Okay, let's just clean that up. Now, here's the issue that happens in reality when you're trying to learn a new skill, which is that it's it's easy enough to go from your current comfort zone into your zone of proximal development and just learn this new skill. So, you can go from here to here relatively easily. And you continue to practice this and it gets more comfortable. You you start gaining this mastery, you know, it starts getting easier and easier. And so, these are all indicators that your comfort zone is expanding out. So, let me redraw this to encompass that. Okay. So now our comfort zone has expanded out and likewise our zone of proximal development is slightly out as well. So we're one step closer. So naturally of course the next step as I just explained is for us to take the next step outside here. This next step is not as easy as it seems. And the reason is that it's actually much easier and sometimes even more intuitive for us to stay inside here and just continue to loop around instead of going to the next stage. And there are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, when you go from where you were before in your comfort zone to here, you at that time experienced your error rate was going up. Your consistency was not very high. You had to travel that path of mastery until it became a new skill and a new habit. And then only then did it become comfortable for you. And now your error rate is very low and your consistency is very good. And so it feels a little off. It feels a little wrong to now deliberately do something that is going to increase your error all over again. It feels like you're making negative progress. And so that point is just a misunderstanding of the fact that you're still making progress. It's just that you're moving on to the next level of this skill. And so that's just something to be aware of. But the other issue, and this is really the big one, is that we as humans have a tendency to reinforce what we already know rather than seeking out new uncertainty. We like to know things. We like to be good at things. We like things to be certain and stable and predictable. And so when we practice for 10,000 hours, what's actually happening in those 10,000 hours is that we are continually exposing us to challenges that show areas of uncertainty. And as we overcome each uncertainty, that's building mastery. But the reason it takes so long when it doesn't have to is that most of that time tends to be spent on just reinforcing what we're already comfortable with. So we develop an initial level of comfort and then we reinforce that. It might take us, you know, 10 hours to get to this point and then we'll spend another 20 hours just reinforcing here. And so the feeling, and this is the part that actually it feels counterintuitive in a way because the feeling is that when this happens, what we're doing is we're stabilizing the skill. And that seems like a good thing. We've learned a new skill, we're trying to stabilize it before we push on ahead. And that's totally appropriate if we were in the earlier stages of the path to mastery. If we are in the accuracy or the consistency phase, we absolutelyutely need to stabilize to improve the consistency or improve the accuracy until we get fluency. But once it's become a habit and therefore we actually feel comfortable with it, there is no real benefit to continuing to stay at that level. And the reason I said that this is kind of like a biologically hardwired thing is that staying inside here and looping at the same level of comfort is a self reinforcing loop. What happens is that we have a task that used to be challenging for us. We learn to get good at that task. We are able to succeed at that task. this makes us feel good. And then we continue to loop and do this because it feels good. And so staying in that zone where we're already comfortable becomes something that we look forward to. And that's self-reinforcing. But it's also inadvertently self-sabotaging if what you needed to get to was way, you know, way over here. And so if you're trying to learn a complex skill or to a high level, you always need to keep a level of awareness on systematically resolving uncertainties. What that means is that you are actively thinking about where your current level of skill is, what feels uncertain, where does your confidence drop with applying this skill and trying to resolve that. going towards the challenge, moving towards the mistakes and the failures. And then once you're comfortable with that, then finding the next zone of uncertainty. And obviously, we can use our, you know, target skill level uh as as an indicator like if there's a certain outcome that you want to achieve, a certain problem that you want to solve, a project that you want to do, you're going to know if you're at the skill level where you know where you can actually do that successfully or not. So you can use that as a goalpost and continue to find areas of uncertainty that allow you to move along in this way instead of getting stuck into that very easy and common trap of just cycling within your new comfort zone. And honestly just this final mentality of gap seeking alone can probably cut down your skill mastery time by like 40 50%. Now, if one of the complex skills you want to develop is learning and you want to be able to learn any new skill more quickly, you might want to check out this video here where I go into that topic in a lot more depth.

Join my Learning Drops newsletter (free): https://go.icanstudy.com/newsletter-achievepathtomastery In this video, I teach three strategies to help you reach skill mastery in half the time. Take my Learning Diagnostic Quiz (free): https://go.icanstudy.com/diagnostic-achievepathtomastery === Guided Training Program === I’ve distilled my 13 years of experience as a learning coach into a step-by-step learning skills program. If you want to be able to master new knowledge and skills in half the time, check out: https://go.icanstudy.com/program-achievepathtomastery === About Dr Justin Sung === Dr. Justin Sung is a world-renowned expert in self-regulated learning, a certified teacher, a research author, and a former medical doctor. He has guest lectured on learning skills at Monash University for Master’s and PhD students in Education and Medicine. Over the past decade, he has empowered tens of thousands of learners worldwide to dramatically improve their academic performance, learning efficiency, and motivation. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 00:31 Strategy 1 - The Path to Mastery 12:16 Strategy 2 - Early Interleaving 18:37 Strategy 3 - Gap Seeking