I've been obsessed with figuring out the
fastest and easiest possible way to
learn new skills for the last decade and
after years of teaching people and
reading the research on this I've
stumbled across a mistake that
guarantees an almost 100% failure rate
on learning any skill and sadly this is
a mistake that most people make every
single day I call this mistake Theory
overload and I think it is one of the
most important things to know about when
you're trying to learn any new skill but
first we have to understand a key often
overlooked ingredient to learning any
new skill that allows us to even learn
skills in the first place and this
ingredient is experiential cycling so if
I practice shooting this bow every day
for a month I should get
bitter right
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maybe but maybe not once I let go of
this Arrow I cannot control where it
goes midair at least as far as I know
where this Arrow lands depends on
everything that I did in the setup
beforehand and by the way like any skill
learning to learn is the same our exam
results our memory our depth of
understanding these things depend on the
processes we used before when we were
studying now imag imagine I shot this
arrow and it
landed here not very good but to do
better next time I have to know what to
change to get it into the center I
cannot keep just firing arrows off
randomly expecting to get better I might
get a bullseye once in a while but it's
not going to be consistent and once the
target moves further away it's not going
to work anymore same thing in learning
if we get a bad exam result we need to
know what to change and just because we
get a better exam result in a different
exam it doesn't mean we actually solved
the problem so this is essentially the
experiential cycle we have an experience
we observe the result we think about
what we need to change and then we do an
experiment to see if it made it any
better without this cycle we cannot
learn any new skill this is pretty
straight forward and obvious but here's
the part that traps people whether it's
learning about learning skills or
learning to shoot an arrow or learning
any other skill the fastest way to learn
any skill is to learn more slowly this
is the theory overload trap now most of
you know that I've got a program that
teaches people to learn more efficiently
and one of the things that I can do on
the program that I can't do on YouTube
is I get to observe how the students
behave and I can track their progress
much more closely so take a look at
these two students and see if you can
guess which one ended up being more
academically successful first one to
look at is this one here sures who was
on the program for 5 weeks and got
through
31% of the program and the second
student that I want you to look at is
Enzo who was on the program for 54 weeks
and got through 20%
of the program who do you think improved
the fastest so despite covering less of
the course it was actually Enzo who
ended up with better academic results he
went from a baseline of
62% to latest exam result of
92% compared to sish and this is the
surprising part sish actually went from
80% to
71% so actually got worse after working
on it for 5 weeks why did sesh get worse
I'll give you a clue it's not just
because Enzo had so much more time to
work on things well the answer is Theory
overload okay now imagine this bowl is
your
brain very smooth just kidding now your
brain has a limited amount of cognitive
resources that it can can spend it's
like how much memory or Ram your
computer has so let's say that these
wooden blocks represent your cognitive
resources now whenever we learn a new
skill we're introduced to new things
that we need to think about so each
thing takes resources to keep it in mind
and think about it hold my arrow more
tightly stabilize my core keep my
shoulders uh relaxed bre breathe more
slowly aim a little bit lower you can
see that my bowl my capacity is becoming
filled up and on top of that there's a
certain amount of resources it takes to
just perform the activity now once a new
skill eventually becomes a habit the
amount of resources it takes goes down
but when you're learning a new skill
it's not going to be a habit it's going
to be unfamiliar and difficult and
awkward and all of those things take
additional resources to overcome so more
and more needs to be invested into just
doing the actual skill and as you can
see now we
are overflowing we've overloaded our
brain's ability to think about things
because we have given it too many things
to think about in the research our brain
trying to think about lots of different
things at the same time is called
multiple element interactivity and it's
a common reason why we enter into what's
called cognitive overload but here is
the thing about learning a cognitive
skill like learning to learn for example
unlike learning a physical skill like
archery for a physical skill we burn
energy using our body using our muscles
for a cognitive skill we burn effort
with our brain which means that the
amount of cognitive resources it takes
to just perform the skill the act of
learning is innately very high to begin
with it takes a lot of mental resources
to understand new information and
process it and organize it and think
about where it belongs and create new
memory and all of this effort helps to
translate the learning into memory and
understanding if we didn't feel this
effort we wouldn't have any memory and
that would be called passive learning
but with effective more active learning
it takes a lot of resources to begin
with which means adding just a few more
things can put us into
overload very quickly so in that case
what is the best way to learn a new
skill especially a cognitive skill well
at the end of the day all of that means
that when we're learning a new skill we
should only ever be trying to experient
expent with one or two things at the
same time so sesh who covered like 30%
of the program in a month would have
learned over a dozen new techniques and
each technique has two or three things
to think about so that means that SES
would have been trying to juggle 20 or
30 things at any given time he was
completely overloaded and therefore his
brain was not able to actually learn the
skills and this is exactly why some
students
if they don't realize this trap can
spend months or even years trying to
learn a new skill and feeling like it is
impossible to get it right because no
matter how much time they put into it
they do not seem to be improving it is
incredibly frustrating so here's the
secret to learning any skill the right
way always balance your new Theory with
practice if you practice ice without any
Theory it's aimless if you practice with
too much Theory you're getting
overloaded so the trick is to balance
new Theory coming in with your existing
skills becoming Habits Like I mentioned
before when skills become habits your
brain figures out a more efficient way
to do it it doesn't require so many
cognitive resources anymore it finds a
shortcut and so
the amount of cognitive resources it
takes to perform the skill goes down as
more of this new skill just starts to
become an old habit and eventually what
took a lot of concentration to do now
takes virtually no thinking at all and
you can still do it just as accurately
and just as consistently we have freed
up more cognitive resources to take in
some new
Theory and turn those into habits for
some skills and techniques it can take
weeks if not months to develop them into
habits whereas for some it can just take
a few hours and by balancing the theory
with practice we can achieve Optimum
skill growth where we are practicing and
every time we practice we are improving
with focus and Direction but we're not
getting overloaded so here's what this
looks like in practice let's say we've
only got 5 hours a week to
practice now that is not probably enough
to form new habits very quickly and so
we're going to need to reduce the amount
of new Theory we take in and because
we've got a low amount of practice and
therefore a low amount of theory the two
of them are aligned and we can achieve
our Optimum skill growth now let's say
we now have a little bit more free time
and we want to dedicate a little bit
more time to learning this skill so we
have now 20 hours a week that we can
dedicate to practice so the amount that
we can practice has now gone
up which means we can also go up in the
amount of theory we can take
in but it's proportional to the amount
of extra practice we're getting so as a
rule of thumb I usually say for every
hour of theory we should have at least 5
hours of practice so for example if we
have 5 hours of practice we would only
be able to take in 1 hour of theory in
this first example whereas in the second
example we've got 20 hours of practice
therefore we can have up to 4 hours of
theory now unfortunately that's just a
rule of thumb and in reality it's a
little bit more complicated because 5
hours of practicing a very complicated
skill is not the same as 5 hours of
practicing a very simple skill like a
new way to tie your shoelaces in which
case 5 hours of practice is probably
Overkill and so what's more important
and accurate than just the number of
hours of practice is actually monitoring
how quickly we're able to form new
habits when new habits form we have the
mental space to take in more Theory so
if we're very slow at forming new habits
then we're going to be slower at taking
in new Theory and the way you can know
that new habits are forming is when you
can feel that things are becoming easier
and faster
without compromising your accuracy and
your consistency and most of the time
you're able to get faster without trying
to get faster the speed comes with the
efficiency that your brain develops at
just getting better at doing it now this
is where I have to give props to Enzo
because Enzo realized that he was
developing new habits more slowly than
we would have anticipated and so he took
a year to cover 20% of the program so
instead of 5 hours of practice for every
hour of theory he was doing more like 15
20 hours of practice for every hour of
theory so even though on the surface it
looked like he was going very slowly his
skill growth was being maintained at an
optimal rate because he was never
letting himself get overloaded and by
the way if you're interested in the
program yourself there's a link in the
description that you check out now while
Theory overload has an almost 100%
failure rate the reverse is also true
Almost 100% of the time I see someone
balancing their Theory intake rate with
their practice and habit forming rate
they are able to learn their desired
skill very smoothly and very quickly
which is why I said that I think this is
one of the most important things to
understand if you want to learn any
skill I hope that helps and if you've
got the capacity for just one more bit
of theory then check out this video that
YouTube thinks you'll like thanks for
watching and I'll see you next time