How to Learn Complex Skills Quickly

Photo by Sirma Krusteva

My notes on the "How to Learn Complex Skills Quickly" by Justin Sung

Why complex topics are hard to learn?

• Complex skills take trial and error, over and over again
• Latent Learning
  • The latency between “Learning” and “Feedback”
  • The more complex the topic of study is, the latency is bigger and the feedback is more distant from the learning

Question: Am I moving in the right direction?

• Help with noticing if we are deviating from the right track
• It's possible to answer this question with the RAIL framework

RAIL Framework

Relevance

• Feel lost and confuse, mindblank, overwhelming
• Progressing in this stage feels like discovering new variables and irrelevant topics start to become relevant
• Actions
  • Exploration: spend time to understand the skill
    • Get diverse opinions from others
    • Learn the theory behind
  • Challenging: be open minded to other beliefs and assumptions
    • What we think what it's important right now, might not be correct

Awareness

• It's also called the plato period. That period you don't see much progress
• It's an important stage where you're doing a lot of mistakes and be aware of and not being afraid of these mistakes is the the key to make progress
• e.g. to be able to do it correctly for the first time, you need to X mistakes, let's say 100 mistakes. The more aware of this mistakes you make and internalize how important it's to make them, it's crucial to make progress in this stage
• When making progress in this stage, we are doing less and less mistakes
• Actions
  • Experimentation: trying to perform the skill and making mistakes
  • Reflection: thinking about why you made those mistakes
    • What am I missing? What are the variables I'm not considering?
    • Gather feedback (we don't know what we don't know)

Iteration

• In this stage, we because it's a brand new skill, it takes a lot of effort, we're not very consistent, and it's pretty slow
• Able to perform the technique correctly at least once or twice
• Not discovering new mistakes but struggling to overcome them
• Signs of progress
  • Consistent execution of the skill (make it correctly more consistently)
  • Execution become easier and faster
• Actions
  • Varied practice
    • Different levels of challenges, context, and conditions
    • Different subjects, workload, mediums, difficulties
  • Adjust
    • Observing and fine-tuning

Lifelong

• It's when the new skill becomes a new habit
• Avoid skill decay
  • Refining it
  • Regularly use it

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