Justin Sung — How to Learn Anything Faster Using Modern Research
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= 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.
Key Insights
The world has changed a lot over the last h 100red years, but the way we learn hasn’t changed much at all. Right now, there are learning rules that are so common and so widely accepted that almost every person believes them to be true. But decades of research has shown that following these rules can be a complete waste of time. These are the ancient learning rules that 90% of the population is following for absolutely no reason. And in this video, I’m going to share with you six of the worst, most outdated pieces of advice that you need to stop following. So, starting with rule number one, to get good at something, practice it more. You have probably heard this rule and follow it all the time. It seems like common sense, but as a learning coach who spent almost 15 years coaching thousands of people on how to learn new skills and knowledge faster, I’ve seen that following this rule can your learning potential. Now, this rule is true to an extent. There are some strong research behind it. You may have heard of the famous Berlin violinist study in 1993 which was published by the Swedish psychologist Ericson out at Florida State University. He studied 30 elite violinists at Berlin Music Academy and found that those with the highest level of performance also had accumulated about 10,000 hours of practice by age 20. And this idea that the more you practice, the more skilled you become became incredibly popular in Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book, Outliers. But here’s the issue. If more practice means you become more skilled, then what we should see is that the people who have greater levels of practice are in fact the greatest level of performers. But in reality, this is not the case. This is not the case at all. A really great meta analysis done in 2014 looking at 88 different studies found that deliberate practice accounts for only a very small amount of the variation in actual performance and skill. In fields like music, games like chess and sport, it accounted for the greatest level of variation. So up to 20% of the performance could be accounted for based on the amount of practice they had done. But this number drops to only 1% when we look at professional tasks for example like computer programming. So in simple terms what this means is that if you are an everyday professional and not a competitive musician or an athlete or a professional chess player the amount you practice only changes how good your skill level is by about 1%. And in reality, how you practice is much more important than how much you practice after a certain threshold. And in fact, Erikson, the researcher who published that 10,000 hours study before, he himself has gone on to say that his work has been massively misinterpreted over the years. And so, if you’re trying to get better at something and you think the reason you’re not getting better at it is because you don’t have enough time to practice more, that’s probably not true. What helps you more is understanding how to practice to make use of the time that you do have. Which actually brings us to the second ancient rule which says to become an expert, focus on just one thing. This idea that narrowly focusing on one domain and then just obsessively practicing over it actually originates from that same study as before, the Berlin violinist one. If you have limited hours in a day and you need to accumulate your 10,000 hours of practice to become elite, then it naturally makes sense that you should concentrate all of those hours in just one thing. Now, in more recent years, people have started challenging this a lot more publicly, largely because of a very, very popular and frankly incredible book called Range written by David Epste. By the way, that’s David Epstein, not related. If you haven’t read range, one of the main points that he says is that uh for a lot of fields and domains that don’t have fixed rules and boundaries like uh music and sports and chess, getting good at it actually requires you to
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