Get Better at Anything (Three Pillars to Learning) | Scott Young

24:00Obviously, piloting a plane, a ton of risk involved and very expensive equipment. So when we're trying to train pilots, it makes a lot of sense that we'll put them in a simulator environment where there's no danger, no harm, but also where they maybe don't have access to all of the controls, but they can start to learn the most important controls at the start. very similar to what we do in our boot camp where we break down conversation into parts, practice it with peers and team members and partners, get some feedback on it, improve in the classroom, and then go out in the real environment and watch it in action.

24:34So that controlled environment and getting some opportunity to get exposed to something to a lesser degree than being up in the air piloting a multi-million dollar plane is super helpful for learning. I mean, the thing that fascinated me from the research is that the research shows that at the beginning, flight simulators are actually more effective than flying a plane, which I think is kind of counterintuitive. Most people would think, well, yeah, you'd be better off learning in the actual plane. It's just you don't have access to it, or it's too expensive, or it's too dangerous. But no, actually, people learn faster when they have more ground simulator hours in the beginning, and then it switches so that you get more benefit from flying the actual plane.

25:11And I think the reason for this is that in the beginning, simplification is often a virtue, that performing a skill in a simplified environment, then the real thing actually improves performance because you learn the fundamental principles. One of the studies I really liked that showed this was that they had people flying in a simulator and there were two settings. One of them was just normal wind conditions. The other one was a crosswind condition. And the interesting thing was that the people who flew in the normal wind condition did better in the crosswinds condition in the actual test than those who first learned under crosswinds, which seems counterintuitive, like how could that be?

25:48But it's probably because in the crosswinds condition, the controls don't behave the way you think they should. And so it's easier for you to figure out what the controls are actually doing in the simpler condition and then add the layer of crosswinds on top than to start with the more complicated scenario. So in some cases, if you're learning to do public speaking, for instance, you go to a Toastmasters meeting, it is a little bit hokey and people applaud for even your bad speech and this kind of thing. But in some ways, that gives you, okay, I can understand these basics of public speaking in this very friendly, no-risk environment so that when I'm giving a TED Talk or I have to go give a sales pitch to a VC who's tired and doesn't want to listen to what I have to say, I'm going to hold it together and actually perform in that situation.

26:31Yeah, under stress and tension to great degree makes it very difficult for you to do the basics if you've never done them before, you've never practiced them. So lowering that temperature around the tension and pressure, but allowing you to focus to a degree on the basics then creates the opportunity when you are faced with that tension and pressure to default back to that basic training. So that crosswinds example makes perfect sense. It's like, well, I know how the plane's supposed to be flying regularly in calm conditions. Oh, wow, now it's doing some things I haven't felt before, but I know what it should be doing.

27:04So very quickly, you can assess and start to improve. Yeah, I think about this example, and I don't know who said it, so you can't get the source for this one. But there was this guy who was like a martial arts instructor, and he was saying, oh, my students always tell me, well, when I actually get in a real fight, like I will rise to the occasion, you know, when the mugger comes or this kind of thing, that's when I, my, my skills, the adrenaline will really come out. And he said, no, it's the complete opposite. You fall down to your worst level of practice when you're in the real situation that like you practice it and you have it perfectly in the gym.

27:36And then you're going to be like, you know, fall down to that level. You're not going to rise up to some new level of fighting ability that you've unseen of just because you're in the real situation. And I think there's some truth to that, that often the things that we can perform flawlessly in the simplified condition are harder in real life. But that isn't a reason not to do it in the simplified condition. It's just to point out that practicing it in that sort of basic zone is very important in order to build those fundamental skills. Yeah, I know, you know, we've had on athletes to the show, and even late into their career, they're, they're practicing in the gym, they're, they're practicing with the stadium empty, they're, they're practicing not in front of a crowd, but they're still working on the general mechanics and tons and tons of reps, even though they're professionals and they're at the top of their game.

28:23Yeah. I mean, some of that is also related to your attitude. I think that, you know, we were talking about before you have to be very selective in choosing what you're going to get good at, because obviously you don't have time and energy to get good at everything. But there's a kind of flip side of that, which is that a lot of people don't really strive to become really good at anything. And I think that's also kind of sad. You know, if you see people who are top performers in their field, they are not just satisfied with their performance. They're like, you know, I'm good enough at this. I don't need to work on it anymore.

28:52They really focus on like, okay, I'm going to go back to those basics and get even a little bit better. And clearly in athletics, which is such a competitive domain where, you know, one 10th of a second or just being slightly faster can make the edge. But I think even in our professional lives, whether you're, you know, a writer or whether you're a lawyer or a doctor or something like this, performing at a high level of skill is something that is also a choice. It's something that you have to dedicate yourself to. And a lot of people don't. And I think that's also partly a factor of why some people really excel over the long term in certain fields.

29:24And what are some maxims that might be surprising to our audience or counterintuitive based on some of the things we're taught by the media? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's lots. So I think one that I liked is the idea that if you want to have sort of broad and flexible skills, doing variable practice. So practicing in different situations is better than a lot of repetition. And this is somewhat surprising because I think most of us have this idea that practice involves doing the same thing over and over and over again. So, you know, the person who's working on their tennis shot stands in the court and they just like hit forehand serves for like an hour.

30:02And that's like how they're getting good at it. But the research actually shows that this lack of variability, this very narrowly controlled practice conditions is actually not so good for the efficiency of the practice. So if you were trying to get better at, let's say, your forehand and your backhand, you're much better off if you mix up the shots than if you try to do them all forehand and then all backhand. And similarly, if you are introducing elements of variability, like we're talking about language learning, you're practicing conjugations. How do you learn it? Well, you learn the present tense conjugation for a certain verb ending, and then you do the workbook that has like 15 of the same thing in a row.

30:39And the truth is, is that while this can be useful in the very beginning for like getting the idea, like if you don't understand what you're supposed to be doing, then it is easier to do it this way. For the bulk of practice, which is mostly what you're doing when you're trying to become fluent at something, mixing it up is actually more efficient. So that's one of the ones that I thought was interesting. Another one we could talk about is the mind not being a muscle. That's another one that constantly I have debates about people because their research is pretty clear, but people seem to disagree with it.

31:08Where did that one come from? Do you know anything about the origination? Because I feel like that caught fire, that the mind is a muscle and we just got to keep flexing it. Well, you know, I'll tell a little story. So I had a little like debate with someone after the book came out and he was arguing that, you know, well, you know what, this, I disliked this chapter because we now have all this information about neuronal plasticity. So the brain can rewire itself and that there's changes that happen in the brain with training and practice. And I said, that's true, you know, but that still has nothing to do with the original point.

31:41So the idea, I'll explain what the idea is and I'll explain why we think it's false, is that originally the way people thought the mind worked is that it was similar to a muscle. So if I think about going to the gym and I lift a lot of heavy weights with my biceps, I should expect that those muscles are going to be strong for carrying groceries, lifting things, all sort of general purpose things that involve my biceps. And there's only so many muscles in the body. So if you just train all of them in the gym, you're going to be generally strong for most things. Now, even this has a few wrinkles of truth in actual practice because the nervous system is involved with lifting things.

32:14But the muscle idea, I think, is very potent. And so there was all these educational and training ideas of the idea that, well, you want to strengthen your memory. And you'll see that. There's people saying, okay, well, you need to be doing these brain training games to improve your memory or improve your reasoning or your critical thinking. And as I discussed, there's a lot of evidence showing that that's not how it works, that when you practice Sudoku puzzles, you get good at Sudoku puzzles, you become faster at doing Sudoku puzzles. And maybe there's a little bit of benefit from like other puzzles that are similar to Sudoku because they actually have overlapping procedures or knowledge.

32:48But it's not the case that you just generally get better at all sorts of puzzles. And it's certainly not the case that like, oh, doing a lot of Sudoku puzzles, that strengthened my mind for, you know, stock picking or something that's like really far afield. And so this sort of idea, this muscle analogy, I think part of the reason it's tempting is any kind of tempting analogy, it's tempting because there's some grain of truth in it. And that grain of truth is that when you practice, you do get good at things you practice. And there is this sort of penumbra of other skills that get a little bit of benefit because they overlap in some of these basic procedures.

33:20But I think we tend to exaggerate how big that zone of transfer actually is, this transfer from one skill to another. And so I think the better model of how the mind actually works, and I think that more fits the data we have, is that you can think of the mind as a collection of tools. So it's a toolbox that you have lots and lots of tools. And as you acquire new tools, you put it in the toolbox. And as you practice and you figure out which tool you should use in which scenario, you practice it. But it's this collection of tools rather than a few muscles that you just strengthen through some kind of bulk practice that really matters.

33:56So if you want to be generally smart about lots of things, you need to learn lots of things. If you want to be a critical thinker in lots of domains, you need to know about lots of domains. You need to practice lots of critical thinking methods. And so I think this is something that maybe it's a little disappointing to people, which is why it's not as popular. Learning Style Series is another one that people love because it gives some sort of optimistic view of things. But I think having the right picture is really important because yeah, if you're like, oh, I'm doing all these crossword puzzles every day because I got to strengthen my mind for the workplace or I want to stave off dementia when I'm older, I just sort of like, oh, okay, maybe not.

34:31Yeah, I definitely feel like it feels good to think that way. It's like, okay, you know, I'm doing this fun thing, but it has all these extra advantages. But as you point out, so few things in life are just static. You're never just going to take that one same jump shot over and over again. There's going to be variance between what's going on in the environment, who you're playing basketball against, maybe where you are on the court. So it's important to recognize that just because we're practicing this one thing over and over again, it doesn't extrapolate out to all these other skills that we need.

35:02Now, to be clear, I want to like just just take it back one notch from what I said earlier. There can be motivational reasons that learning one thing helps you with another thing. So, you know, we talked about language learning. Learning my first language was the hardest because I'd never done anything like it before. And I wasn't sure whether I could do it. But learning like the fourth or fifth, it just becomes routine at that point. And it's not because the knowledge is the same. I mean, obviously, if you're learning like French, and then you go to Spanish or something, but actually some of the words will be similar.

35:30But if you're dealing with like French, and then you go to Mandarin Chinese, there's probably almost no transfer of the actual language knowledge. But what is transferred is that you have maybe some strategies for learning languages, and maybe you have some confidence in yourself for doing that. So building confidence, building self-efficacy can be very important. And so I definitely don't want that to be the takeaway is like, well, there's no point in learning things because Scott said nothing transfers and this kind of thing. But rather, if you're going to do a lot of practice in something, realize that there's going to be a specificity to that practice.

35:59If you are really practicing some particular kind of activity, the benefits are going to be concentrated around that activity. So if you were doing it for some other purpose, that can sometimes be counterproductive. For a lot of folks, having an understanding of how they learn, because we are all different. We all learn differently. There's all ways that we learn that are more appealing to each other. And it's about figuring that out. And for a lot of folks, let's say that learning or having to learn a new skill is novel to them. They got a new job, and they have to learn a new skill. If they're not familiar with that learning process and how they learn, it can be very demoralizing.

36:43And they need to understand how they gather information, how they apply information, how long it takes for them to go from unconscious incompetence to conscious competence. I mean, there's quite a process there. And as I mentioned, it's easy to get demoralized if you don't understand how you learned or have done it enough to where you understand the routine that you need to get to a desired result. Johnny, keeping track of all my old financial accounts across multiple apps and an outdated spreadsheet is just such a hassle. Between old 401ks, sub-savings accounts, and multiple investment platforms that I opened and forgot about, there's just something so fulfilling about seeing all of your numbers visualized in just one place.

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40:27Give and get timeless holiday staples that last this season with Quince. Go to quince.com slash charm for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quince.com slash charm. Free shipping and 365 day returns. quince.com slash charm. Yeah, I mean, the emotions that surround learning are often much bigger than the kind of intellectual difficulty of learning. I mean, things like confidence, like, you know, someone asked me this, because I read quite a few books when I was reading this research, and they asked me, like, do you have like some kind of trick or like strategy used for reading books and papers?

41:09Not that I'm like the best at it, but this was a question that I was asked. And I was just like, oh, well, no, you just like, you just have to sit down and just read them all. and that was like kind of disappointing because he was expecting there to be some kind of gimmick that you use because like him sitting down and reading i guess you know like for a lot of people to sit and read like dry academic paper for like an hour like this is mentally strenuous but to me i feel like that's the that's the kind of switch that gets flipped is that like often you can do it not because the work has actually changed but just because your attitude has changed about it or the emotions around has changed so you know if i'm reading a book i I don't automatically think, oh my God, this book is so boring.

41:45I can't possibly get through it all. I'm sort of like, oh, this is interesting. And I have these questions in mind. And hopefully I'm going to find an answer to those questions or maybe a new question that's related to that when I'm reading it. And so it's very goal-directed when I'm reading it. And that allows me to get through it. And so I think this sort of emotional rewiring is often a bigger factor than just having an actual skill. Like if you have the idea that, oh yeah, learning a language is not that bad. You just speak to people and you practice it. you get more fluent at it and it's okay.

42:13I mean, that is the biggest hurdle, not learning the words and phrases and grammar. Like if you have crossed that hurdle, then I can just throw you in another country and yeah, in like six months, you're going to be chatting with people. Whereas the other person who's taken, you know, high school Spanish for four years is going to be stammering when they go on a trip. Well, even so with the languages, I mean, I myself have spent the last two winters in Colombia. It's the least English speaking country in Latin America. But if I don't actively practice it, what I will do is my body, my brain will actively look for ways to get the things that I need with the least amount of speaking because that's not where I'm strong.

42:56Yeah, yeah. And so I've devised all these little ways of communication with people in order to get the things that I need just to survive. I have to take time out of my day to actively practice those skills and go out of my comfort zone and my little routines to then to try to acquire those things. And that's where the fun is. And yeah, it's going to be frustrating because, well, you don't do it. You know, what you're describing, I think, happens for a lot of skills where there's sort of the kind of easier option. And then there's the option that has lower long term costs, but it's like in the moment, it's going to be more difficult.

43:38The example, this is sort of the insight, you know, since we're on the topic of language learning, this is sort of the insight that my friend and I had when we went and did we did a project. This is now a decade ago, and I wrote about it in my first book, where we went to four different countries. and when we were in each country, we decided we were only going to speak the language that they were speaking there. So we were in Spain, Brazil, China, and South Korea. And when I've discussed this project with people after this, they're kind of like, oh, that sounds crazy. Like I would never do that.

44:07Like I would not go to a country and be like, I'm only going to speak Spanish. That would be too stressful. But the funny thing is, is that when you actually do it, the experience is often the opposite. That yes, it is very hard for like two weeks, But after you've been speaking to people in Spanish, which is often very bad Spanish, by the way, very bad Spanish for like two weeks straight, all the fear of doing that goes away. The automaticity of speaking in Spanish goes way up. So the sort of per transaction cost of speaking in Spanish goes down to it's like, you know, maybe it's still harder than English, but it's at a level where, you know, you can do it and you can manage.

44:43And the result is that after a short period of time, you've done way more practice. And so you've expanded how much you've learned in that period of time. So that's one thing I would encourage people to think about when they're thinking about practicing a skill is how can I make tweaks in my environment or the standards I set for myself or my rules so that, you know, individually that maybe doesn't make any difference at all. Like deciding I'm not going to speak in any English doesn't make you better at Spanish. But if that causes this long-term change in how much I'm practicing, you might have like totally different trajectories that you have with the skills.

45:16So if you tell yourself, I'm only going to do this this way, like I'm only going to touch type now, I'm not going to hunt and peck ever, it's going to be really hard for those first few emails you have to compose. But then, you know, a week or two later, maybe you're actually going to be doing it faster. And so these are areas where I think looking at those leverage points where you can make a small change and have a big impact. well to go along with that i'm an artist i've been playing guitar my whole life and even to this day at 50 years old i'm if i'm learning some artists who i just love and appreciate i have to learn their style the way that they have played it and a lot of times the way they play it is unorthodox because it's the way they've been playing it their whole entire life so but having an understanding of the rules and an ear for music, I might be able to cheat what I'm hearing through my hands to get the desired result.

46:13Now, it may not be exactly the way they played it to get that result, but because I understand the rules, I'm able to recreate those same sounds, which brings us to the maxim that you have here of copying is your first way to get creative. Yeah, I think this is something that's really underrated, because in Western culture in particular, and I think probably since the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, there was this real philosophical shift to, prior to that time period, not only in the West, but every other culture was like, you need to read the sages of old. They are the ones who have all the wisdom, and no one knows anything today, and that's what you have to read and copy them blindly.

46:55And there was a real shift of belief of like, well, actually, should we be blindly copying people? We should think for ourselves and do experiments and stuff. And this led to science. And so in some cases, I think that's led to a little bit of an over extrapolation on this idea that, well, because science is particularly important at the frontier of knowledge, of creating new knowledge, of creating new reliable knowledge. Therefore, you know, we should be scientists in like grade one and like discover everything for ourselves and not have to study or learn from people who have learned it before.

47:24And one of the main things that I sort of took away from this is that, you know, that's just not how our brains work. That's not how we work as a species, that we are a cultural species, that almost everything we know, we didn't learn firsthand. We learned from someone else. Now, maybe we applied it and then we experienced the results and then we believed it for ourselves. So you can, you can do to actually believe it. But if we're talking about like how you learn to drive a car, someone showed you how to drive the car. You didn't like figure out how to operate it through trial and error. And similarly, when you're learning many, many other skills, this ability to learn from examples is so important.

47:58And so copying, it often is seen as this sort of antithesis of creativity, but really they're at the opposite ends of a spectrum of as you get more and more practice, you shift to creativity because you have such a library of examples in your head that you're able to freely remix it and repurpose it and use it in novel ways. So for you, you've spent your life practicing the guitar. You've learned these different styles. You've copied from different people. So when it all gets amalgamated and you perform something, it is going to be uniquely you. And no one's going to be calling you a plagiarist.

48:30But if I, who doesn't play the guitar any time before, if I'm trying to learn the guitar and I'm like, oh, well, you know what? I like how you're doing it. I'm going to just freestyle it like this. I'm probably going to play in a lot of ways that are dissonant and don't sound very nice. Well, you touched on this important point that there's the skill building, there's the learning, there's the observing, but then there's also the emotions and the mindset piece that go along with this. And sometimes our fear of failure or fear of rejection can get in the way of us even attempting to learn. And especially in the beginning, you're going to make a lot of mistakes.

49:07So if you're afraid of failure, if you're a perfectionist, you're probably not going to try to pick up the skill because you are going to fail many times over before you actually pick it up. So for those in our audience who are a bit of a perfectionist, who have that strong fear of failure, how can we start to overcome that mindset to actually learn things quickly? Yeah, I mean, I think, well, we already talked about one of these ideas, this exposure idea that often when we're talking about perfectionism, we're really talking about a kind of anxiety, right? That there is some feared consequence of not performing perfectly or not being good at something or not being seen as competent.

49:41and that this sort of threat detection circuitry we have in our brain, like centered on the amygdala is like beeping. It's like, oh no, no, no, there's danger here, danger. Don't do this. And that is inhibiting our performance. So the language learning is a classic example. It's not just, am I not fluent enough with Spanish? It's just like, am I gonna say something that's gonna make me sound stupid? Or are they not gonna understand me? Or I can hear my accent, it's so bad when it's coming out and they're gonna be like, ah, this gringo, I don't wanna talk to him. You know, all of these sort of emotions are coming into play that are also inhibiting it, even if you could say it perfectly, you know, like if you wrote on an exam paper, you could write it perfectly.

50:19And so exposure is this idea that, well, sometimes those beliefs are unfounded, that there's a threat detection, but there's no actual threat, that you actually speak to the person in Spanish and nothing bad actually happens. And for things that we have a strong fear from, particularly social fears, this is often the case that, you know, the worst thing you get is like, maybe it's mildly awkward for like a second or two, but you're not going to die, which is what like people are imagining that they're going to have happen. What's that, what's that joke from Jerry Seinfeld that, you know, the people's number one fear, number two fear is death.

50:50Number one fear is public speaking. So people would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy. I mean, it's the truth though, that like standing on stage and giving a speech, you're not going to die, but it often feels like something really traumatic is going to happen to like you're jumping off of a building. And so by getting exposure, being in that scenario, then the fear will lessen. So that's one thing. I think the other thing that you can have that will help you with this idea of perfectionism is to shift your mindset too about what your expectations are. You know, to go back to that language learning example that we were talking about, one of the things that my friend and I would do when we were starting to speak these languages very badly is we would memorize the phrase, I have a project to only speak, you know, whatever language for these three months.

51:34And as soon as you say that to people, all of a sudden, you're like, you know, halting attempts to speak their language switch from being like, how bad does this person think my English is? Or like, this is offensive to me to like, you know what, more foreigners should do this. You're doing a good thing. And the attitude totally shifts. And so I think ways that you can shift the sort of your mindset around what constitutes success and failure can be a big thing too. Because, you know, if you start writing an essay and your idea is, I'm going to write this beautiful prose, that can be very inhibiting because you try to write sentences and they're not beautiful prose.

52:08If your idea is, I'm going to get all of my ideas out in a stream of consciousness rant on the page and then edit it later, well, now all of a sudden you've changed what the criteria are for the task. And so there's no inhibition. So I think that's one of the things that you can try to do when you're practicing is if you find yourself encountering that anxiety, that mental block, Get yourself some exposure and get yourself a way to change how you frame the activity so that success is something that you can do. Yeah, I think managing the consequences of that failure helps tremendously. And what we do in our classroom setting is we tell everyone at the start, we're all going to be making mistakes here.

52:45We're going to have fun going through that process of making the mistakes. So, you know, they may have come to the class with the history of feeling, poked at or criticized by family members or teased in class when they made a mistake, and they hone in on that mistake, it's like, oh, that's going to be a real negative consequence in my life. But then when you put them in a new environment with supportive people, much like your example while traveling by framing it as, hey, this is a project I'm working on, lowered the consequence of you mispronouncing something, misspeaking something. And all of a sudden you start seeking other ways that I can start to make some of these fumbles and mistakes early and get through them to pick it up faster.

53:26Yeah. I mean, I think there's lots of different tools that you can have, but I think once you encounter a skill, once you encounter something that you're learning where you recognize that this is the barrier, I think it's often worthwhile to sort of take a step back and be like, okay, forget how do I become the best in the world at this skill and focus on how do I get through my own psychological blocks? Because, you know, as I said, If you are Tiger Woods and you're working on your golf stroke, then yeah, someone who's like a kinematics expert is going to be looking at your swing. But if you're the kind of person who's like, you know what, my problem is that I'm not good at this because I never do any practice.

54:02Well, then you need to shift the conversation you have with yourself to like, well, how do I actually get sufficient practice so that being methodical and perfectionistic and all of these things actually might have a place rather than I'm going to just focus on that. Even though I'm not doing anything, I'm going to focus on doing it perfectly. I'd love to delve into the feedback portion. I know for many of us in our audience, we're thinking about how to give feedback to others, whether we're managing people or we're parents and we want our kids to learn the skill of mastery so they can apply it in various areas of their life.

54:35So how should we be thinking about feedback upon seeking it and giving it? Yeah. So first I'll give a point about giving feedback because this is one of the ones that is very frustrating to me, especially because I talk about learning and I talk about feedback. People will say, I've been asking people for feedback and people just say nice things to me. No one wants to give me real feedback. And I'm like, are you really asking for feedback? Are you asking for people to make you feel better? And I'm just telling you, everyone's asking for people to make them feel better. Almost no one is asking for actual feedback.

55:06And they want encouragement. They want people to say that they're doing a good job. I talked to this researcher, I think his name was Angelo Denisi, and he does a lot of work on feedback in an industrial psychology, organizational context. And his comment to me when I talked to him was that managers often mistake employees saying that they want feedback. They don't want feedback. They want to be told they're doing a good job, right? And so if you tell them something negative, you say, you know what? Yeah, you're not doing that very good with this. It's demotivating. It's discouraging, and it doesn't work.

55:38So I mean, it's very nice to talk about, oh, I'm going to go up there. and take my punches to the jaw, and I'm going to be better for the feedback. But you're lying to yourself when you say that that's what you want, because typically you don't. And when people come and ask you, and they say that they want the honest feedback, very often they don't either. And this creates a problem, because it's very hard to give people feedback when we're all aware of this sort of social reality that we live in. So one of the pieces of advice I have for people who are in this situation is don't ask for people to evaluate your performance.

56:09Ask them what you could do to improve. And the reason why is that when you ask someone to evaluate either your performance, like what you did on a particular, you know, project or task or like, you know, how is my accent? Or you're asking them to evaluate you or your skill in general. Like, you know, how is my Spanish? How am I as a salesperson? This kind of stuff. You're asking for pain because if you get what you ask for, then you're often going to be demotivated. And if you don't get what you ask for, you're going to feel that maybe they were lying to you or trying to be nice to you. Whereas if you say, what are some things that I could do to improve?

56:40you get this sort of evaluating yourself according to a level, you just remove that. And then you just ask for, well, what are things that I could do to change? What are things that I could do to improve? What are things that are not working about what I'm doing? And I could level up my performance. And so I think the more you can shift towards these sort of task specific suggestions, task specific improvements, task specific ways that, you know, maybe you try doing it this way this time, the less likely your ego is going to get involved and the less likely the other person is going to feel like, oh, I'm offending you by telling you that you're actually not that good at this.

57:15Yeah, it's a key point. And I feel for many of us, although we're craving that feedback by not actually shifting the perspective for the person who would be giving the feedback, it can be very challenging for them to rate your whole performance. Like what specifically am I looking for here? Is there something in particular that you've been focused on that you're looking to improve in? Because it's very difficult to tell as an outside observer, especially if you're not even in a coaching role, how to actually give the right feedback that would be meaningful to the person asking for it. And I want to clarify, this doesn't mean that you should never, ever give people feedback.

57:49Like if you have an employee, and they are not meeting the company standard, and they're going to lose their job if they keep this up, then sugarcoating that and being like, well, you know, can you just try to be a little bit more on time instead of showing up three hours late for work every day? Like, that's not a good way of communicating either. If there's serious objective consequences to them not doing it, then you giving them something that's going to sting a little bit is maybe necessary if they don't realize that they're jeopardizing their job with how they're behaving. Maybe they're not paying attention or something like that.

58:17Similarly, I think if you're trying to look for benchmarks or objective performance measures, like your purpose is not just to improve in general, but you really want to know, do you meet a particular standard? Then I try to suggest people look towards metrics that are more objective. So, you know, if you're trying to figure out, you know, what's your selling efficiency or this kind of thing, look at your closing rate compared to other people in your same office. Or you could look at, you know, how many projects do you finish on time and under budget compared to the other project managers? These kinds of objective measures, I think, do kind of distance you a little bit from that evaluative other person specific information.

58:55So when I'm trying to find information about like how I'm performing, and I want that level, I don't want just directions for improvement. Then I try to find some of those benchmarks because sometimes you can have a benchmark and be like, oh, I'm not performing up to standard here. And no one needs to break that advice to you. You just look at the numbers and you see it. You mentioned sugarcoating it. Some people like the compliment sandwich, trying to protect others from the feedback. But what does the science say around the best way to actually give feedback? Well, I mean, as I said, I think the issue here, and I mean, the compliment sandwich probably has some roots and some benefits.

59:29But I think like any kind of management technique, if it's done very conspicuously, it often has the unintended effect. It's like, okay, now they're going to give me the crap sandwich and I'm just waiting for that crap in the middle. Like that's what people are expecting when you do this kind of technique. And I think that if you are a manager and you're like, you pick up these books and you look through these tactics of these social skills tactics and you apply them very conspicuously, I mean, yeah, of course they're going to backfire because the person knows what you're doing, right? They know that you're using this in a sort of disingenuous way to like, I wanted to give you criticism, but I'm like using best practices to sandwich it between two like vaguely nice things I'm saying about you.

1:00:09So the research says that the best way to give feedback is, again, to what we were talking about, focusing on the task and the specific things that the person can do to improve rather than evaluations of them as a person. So one of my favorite meta-analyses on these topics was done by Abraham Kluge and Angelo Denisi. And they found that something like 36 % of the studies that they looked at on applying feedback, the impact was actually negative. So in over a third of the cases, giving people more feedback actually made worse outcomes for learning. And when they dug into this research, they found that a lot of the cases where feedback did have this negative role is that it wasn't focused on the task.

1:00:49It wasn't focused on performance. It was focused on evaluating them as a person or evaluating this holistic sense. And if you think about it, again, going back to our skill specificity issue, this idea that in order to improve, you need to make quite specific adjustments in what you're doing. You can see that, well, hey, you're not very productive or you're not very smart or you're not very good at this is very high on the ego threat to ourselves. We're more likely to react to it emotionally rather than rationally. but it's very low on the information content. Like there's very little you can do with that information other than maybe like work harder.

1:01:25Like if you just weren't working hard enough, maybe that will give you some kind of prodding of like, oh, I didn't know that I was doing a bad job here. I'll just try better in general. But if you are already trying your best, it does nothing for you. It's just demotivating. Whereas if you tell someone, hey, when you do this report, can you make sure you put the date on it this time? Because otherwise, we're gonna get them lost in the filing records or whatever. banal office example I can think of. Now all of a sudden, you're given something very, very concrete and task specific. So I think the best advice that we can have is focus on the task, but then also have genuine empathy for the person.

1:02:00I think that the sandwich technique kind of in a certain way tries to replicate what people who are genuinely concerned with the emotional well-being of others do naturally, which is that they talk to them, show that they value them. They give this sort of sign of appreciation. But if those are just boxes you're checking off in your management to-do list, I don't think that it works as well. I'm excited to share with the audience that. No, I'm kidding. The feedback piece, I think oftentimes we brace ourselves and then if there is a situation where we can't quite make heads or tails, what can we do upon receiving the feedback to make it more effective for us?

1:02:41if maybe we do have a manager who just gives us that crap sandwich. Yeah, I mean, well, there is an onus on us. I feel like every piece of information we receive, there's a gap between how we receive it and our interpretation of that event. So I think sometimes we just take things for granted of like, well, you know, oh, my boss hates me, right? Because he gave me this bad report or, you know, maybe I put it on him and just say, oh, my boss is just sort of an unreasonable person and has unreasonable expectations or they don't like me because I'm an X, Y, or Z, or whatever. We don't realize that always when we're making that, we're doing some active interpretation.

1:03:18And so this isn't to say that those interpretations are right or wrong. They might be right. Maybe your boss is a misogynist, or maybe your boss does have unrealistic standards. But I think recognizing that there is an active component in making that interpretation is very valuable because the question you need to ask yourself, is my interpretation true, but also is it useful to me? Because an interpretation of the feedback can be 100 % true and 0 % useful. And then in which case, like, yeah, you have this true fact in your head, but it's useless to you. You can't do anything with it. So I always bias myself in favor of interpretations that are higher in usefulness.

1:03:55Now that doesn't mean that you should sacrifice truth, but it means you should look for ways that you could interpret this to make it more useful. So if your boss is a real hothead and they just get really angry about things, how can I approach them with information in a way that they're like less likely to get upset? Like if they're going to get upset about this, how do I recognize, okay, well, don't talk to them at the end of the day on Friday when they're like all stressed out and they're about ready to leave in the weekend. Like go like Tuesday morning when things haven't hit a crisis yet.

1:04:20That's when I'm going to broach them with this kind of thing. And so I think the more you can shape that interpretation of like, well, this is what I need to do. And this is, you know, yes, that colleague, that boss, that teacher, maybe I don't like them. Maybe I don't like their style, but this is what I can do to get the most for myself. I mean, that's going to be ultimately what's more productive. Well, thank you for sharing. I think that's so impactful for all of us listening who are growth-minded and on the path to mastery. Do you feel or do science feel that once you master a set of skills, it becomes easier then to master other skills?

1:04:54Is there a correlation to mastery? Because I think so many of us, one, want to master things and or we're potentially starting families or we have kids and we want them to learn that very important skill of mastery. So again, there's sort of two answers to this. One goes back to this mind not being a muscle analogy here of this toolkit idea. So in this sort of intellectual cognitive way of thinking about it, the amount of transfer you should get should be based on how much they share components. So there are skills that are very generally useful because they overlap with so many things. So I think a lot of basic math is very useful.

1:05:30And I'm sorry if you were like someone who hated math when you're a kid. But it is very useful because basically every single quantitative domain uses the same math. So if you learn math really, really well in one domain, you get a lot of transfer because they use math in a lot of other domains. This is why people who do their PhD in physics often go on to Wall Street trading firms. Not because they're doing physics, it's because they're doing math and the math is the same. But that is one sort of perspective of like load up your mind with as many general purpose, useful tools as possible and you will be generally smart.

1:06:01But then the other thing is true is that it's not just intellectual. It's also emotional. It's also about self-confidence. And so I think going back to what we were talking about, I don't think mastering one skill will give you a lot of intellectual benefits in a completely unrelated skill. But mastering a skill tells you something about yourself. and that self-knowledge that I can stick to goals, I can set targets, I can work hard at things, I can complete projects, that self-knowledge is incredibly valuable because it allows you to take on bigger and more ambitious projects. So I like to think of self-confidence, self-efficacy as a bit of a flywheel that we wanna get it starts turning and it's hard to get a flywheel turning in the beginning.

1:06:43It's heavy, it takes a long time till it spins up but once it's spinning, then you can easily apply that momentum to other projects. So if you're trying to think about your kids, for instance, how do I make them into lifelong learners? Get them to love learning things. Get them to feel like they are confident that they can handle their own learning projects and take on things and give them those positive experiences. Because if you can build that self-efficacy flywheel, then you won't know how far they can go. Well, thank you so much for joining us and sharing all these great maxims and lessons with our audience.

1:07:13Where can they find out about your latest book and the work that you do, Scott? Sure, yeah. You can check out the book, Get Better at Anything, wherever books are sold, Amazon, Audible. You can also check out my previous book, Ultra Learning, which detailed some of my self-directed learning projects like the language learning one we discussed. And then they can also check out my website at scotthyoung.com. Thank you for joining us. We appreciate it.

1:07:43Thank you to listening to another episode of the Art of Charm podcast. And now, here's where we showcase one of our X Factor members. Take it away, Zach. Hi, my name is Zach. I'm an educator who's always seeking opportunities to challenge myself and grow, which is why I decided to enroll in the Unstoppable course offered by Art of Charm. This course has had a profound impact on me, offering incredible content and personalized support from the entire AOC team. I've particularly enjoyed the comfort zone challenges, which have expanded my limits. I even got the whole family dancing in random public places like no one is watching.

1:08:21Most importantly, that strengthened our bond and been fun. What sets this court apart is its foundation in acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT, always focused on action. I'm eager to take the next step in my development by joining the X Factor Accelerator. I'm hungry for more. If you're considering joining, I assure you the benefits are real. The AOC team is committed to their promises and offer genuine support throughout the journey. I'm confident that investing time, money, and energy in this course will be worth it for you, just like it has for me and my family. Best of luck. Thank you, Zach.

1:08:56It was a pleasure working with you two and good luck to all your future endeavors. If you've gotten value out of this or any of our podcasts, head on over to your favorite podcast player and rate and review the show. It means the world to us and it helps others find the show. If you've listened this far, you're probably somebody who understands the value of building meaningful connections and expanding your network. Well, do we have something special for you today? Imagine a world-class networking program that helps you grow your social capital, not just through random handshakes and business cards, but through your general interests and core values.

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1:10:08Don't miss out on this opportunity to transform your social life. That's theartofcharm.com slash SC for your free social capital training. Elevate your network, elevate your life with social capital. All right, before we head out, a huge thank you to our producers, Michael Harold and Eric Montgomery. Till next week, go out there and crush it.

1:10:37You threw your love away Like it was just a toy And you sold the world You're a song of a tragedy Cause you had your taste All black on the yesterday Yeah, but I remember you Oh yeah, I remember you It was a bad day But I'd rather run away