The most common mistake in learning new skills, "theory overload," leads to failure by overwhelming cognitive resources; effective learning requires balancing new information with practice to build habits and optimize skill acquisition.
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I've been obsessed with figuring out the
[music] 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 [music] 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 [music] to know
about when you're trying to learn any
new skill. But first, we have to
understand a key, often overlooked
ingredient [music]
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 better,
better, right?
right?
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, 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 did 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 straightforward
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, Suresh, who
was on the program for 5 weeks and got
through 31%
of the program. And the second [music]
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 [music]
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 the latest exam result of 92%.
Compared to Sesh, and this is the
surprising part, Sesh actually went from
80% to 71%.
Sesh 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 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. 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 [music] take additional resources
to overcome. So more and more needs to
be invested [music] into just doing the
actual skill. And as you can see now, we are
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 [music]
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 experiment
with one or two things at [music] 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 Sesh
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
[music] the skill. And this is exactly
why some students, if they don't realize
this trap, can [music] spend months or
even years trying to learn a new skill
[music] and feeling like it is
impossible to get it right because no
matter how much time they put into it,
they do not seem [music] to be
improving. It is incredibly frustrating.
So, here's the secret to learning any
skill the [music] right way. Always
balance your new theory with practice.
If you practice without any theory, it's
aimless. If you practice with too much
theory, you're getting overloaded. So,
the trick is to [music] 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 [music] 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
theory
and turn those into habits. For some
skills and techniques, it can take
[music] weeks if not months to develop
them into habits. Whereas for some it
can just take a few hours. And by
balancing the [music] theory with
practice, we can achieve optimum skill
growth [music] where we are practicing
and every time we practice, we're
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
[music] 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 [music]
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 [music] 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 [music] 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. [music]
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 [music]
[music]
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. [music] 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 can check out. Now,
while theory overload has an almost 100%
failure rate, [music] the reverse is
also true. Almost 100% of the time, I
see someone balancing their theory
intake rate with their practice [music]
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 [music] 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 [music] see you next time.
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