How To Learn Any Skill SO Fast It Feels Illegal

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. 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 better, right? [Music] 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. The same thing applies 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 straightforward and obvious, but here's the part that traps people: whether it's learning about learning skills, 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 observe how the students behave and 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. The 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. 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 a latest exam result of 92%, compared to Suresh—and this is the surprising part: Suresh actually went from 80% to 71%.

He actually got worse after working on it for 5 weeks. Why did Suresh 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 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, 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 to process it, organize it, and think about where it belongs. And create new memory.

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 experiment with one or two things at the same time. So, SES, 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. 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 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. As a result, 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.

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 others, it can just take a few hours.

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 probably not enough to form new habits very quickly, so we're going to need to reduce the amount of new theory we take in.

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 20 hours a week that we can dedicate to practice. The amount that we can practice has now gone up, which means we can also increase 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. 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. 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. If we're very slow at forming new habits, then we're going to be slower at taking in new theory. 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.

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. 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 or 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. 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, the reverse is also. . .

True. Almost 100% of the time, when 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. This 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!