How to Learn Complex Skills Quickly (And Forever)

there are four stages of learning any complex skill that you need to know and there are four corresponding actions that you have to take to be able to learn that skill effectively when we do the right actions for the right stage we're able to progress through that stage very quickly this is what fast trcks our ability to learn skills unfortunately most people are doing actions at stage three when they're only at stage two and when there's this misalignment it creates Wast of time frustration stress and ultimately you will not be able to master pretty much

any complex skill this is where the rail framework comes in to make sure that we are aligned and mastering new skills as effectively as possible by using this framework my ability to coach students on how to study and learn more effectively has become about five or six times faster than before what used to take me 2 years to train now only takes me two or 3 months and I've personally used this framework to learn pretty much every new skill I've picked up over the last 10 years from studying to public speaking dancing archery photography even

using nunchucks in fact actually let me show you I I don't break anything uh as I do this let's give it a [Music] go literally just hit my light nothing destroyed uh and yes FYI that is a skill that serves absolutely no purpose in my life but the best part is that this framework is actually really really easy to use by the end of this video you'll learn how to use rail to learn any new complex skill but first we actually have to understand the scientific principle behind why some skills are even harder to learn

than other skills in the first place so when I was 15 I watched this video on how to tie shoelaces really quickly and I practiced this skill for like 5 minutes and I learned how to do it but learning to tie a shoelace is very different from learning to play an instrument or learning to code or most other complex skills and one of the things that makes a complex skill complex is this thing called the latent learning period latent learning was first described in the 1930s by this American psychologist called Edward Tolman and it basically

talks about when there is no immediate reinforcement while you are learning the skill for example if I'm learning something simple like tying my shoelaces then there's no real latent learning period I'm getting immediate feedback on whether the shoes were tied up well or not but as soon as we enter into any even moderately complex skill the latent learning period stretches out much longer for example if you're learn to play chess you might spend lots of time weeks even just learning the rules and how to move which piece and figuring out the strategy but until you

really play a game and get some real experience you're not going to know where your mistakes are and how to actually improve and so there's a long time between the learning and then the getting feedback on the learning that's the latent learning period and for skills like learning how to study you might not get feedback on how good your new study technique is for weeks or months until actually get an exam result and during that time you might have done hundreds of other things that all affect the outcome it's pretty much impossible to know what

was the reason you got the result that you did and therefore what you need to change to improve and every skill especially complex skills take trial and error and experimentation to improve but we waste a lot of time triing things and making errors over and over again sort of aimlessly but if we can answer just one question it can massively increase our ability to learn any complex skill and that question is am I moving in the right direction because even if we don't know the fastest most direct line to learn a skill if we have

guidelines that tell us whenever we're potentially deviating off track then we know that our experiments and our efforts are going to eventually get us toward towards the goal rather than just wandering around aimlessly for years and we can answer this question of am I moving in the right direction with the rail framework here's how it works in the first stage of learning any complex skill we're pretty clueless we have no idea where to start we don't know how to think about it we don't even know what questions to ask because we don't know enough to

even ask questions and this is a huge problem because it means we don't know where to put our effort and attention because I'm a learning coach I'm going to use learning to learn as an example most people have no idea really where to start increasing their learning efficiency and they come in with a bunch of misconceptions about learning like just thinking that more hours studying is the key to success and even in my training program that I can study where people are actually trying to upgrade their studying techniques it is not uncommon for me to

see someone skip a technique because they don't think it's important or relevant for them when actually it might be literally the most important thing that they could possibly be working on we don't know what we don't know and trying to improve anything without knowing where to direct our effort is the biggest time waste of all but this is the first stage of learning a new skill it is the r of rail and it stands for relevance because improving at this stage means understanding what is relevant for you and what is worth caring about so how

do you know you're at the relevance stage number one you'll feel generally lost and confused about where to begin you either can't think of many things to work on or experiment with or there seem to be so many things to work on and experiment with that it's overwhelming AKA we don't know what to care about yet you'll know you're making progress through this relevance stage when you start realizing more variables to think and care about and things that seemed irrelevant before now become relevant for learning to learn these variables might be things like understanding what

creates Active Learning or being able to assess your cognitive load or learning about different orders of learning or understanding how encoding affects retrieval so as you progress through the relevance stage you're not actually getting any better at the skill like you can't do it properly yet and you're certainly not getting any results for it but you are still progressing and that's the key so how do we make this progress well the actions that help you progress through the relevance stage are number one exploration and two challenging exploration means that we're spending time to understand the

skill talk to people that are already good at it what do they say you should be thinking about and caring about get a diverse range of opinions spend some time to learn more about the theory what are the other variables that you should be thinking about challenging means that we're being open-minded and challenging our own beliefs or assumptions like I mentioned with learning to learn a lot of people think that a certain technique is what they need to get better but in reality what's really holding them back might be another variable that they haven't considered

or don't think is very important like the way that they're practicing or how they're managing their time and the only way that we can really find out what matters is to be open-minded to the idea that what we think is important right now might not be correct now learning to learn is one of the most important skills that you can Master because it makes learning everything else in your life much easier however it is probably one of the most challenging skills to learn because it is an incredibly long latent learning period and seeing people trying

to learn to learn and struggling and stressing because they don't know where to start is not only really sad but it's very frustrating for me because it is so much easier when you know what to care about so to help you with this I've created a free learning system health check quiz for you it's a free quiz that you can take that will evaluate your learning system and score you out of a 100 but more importantly you'll get a personalized report that will give you which components you're doing well on and then which parts that

are holding you back from being a learning Master now for learning to learn this quiz should probably get you almost to the end of stage one of rail and it only takes like 10 minutes FYI it took me like 2 years to get to the end of stage one uh because I had no one to teach me and I was literally spending like thousands of hours reading research papers and thinking about the way that I learned for some people they never reach the end of stage one for their entire lives but you can now skip

all that I've got the link to the quiz in the description below so anyway we're now at the end of stage one relevance we know what to care about we know what the variables are what now well this is the part in skill acquisition research which is called the plateau period it's often the part where most people give up in the second stage of learning a skill we are trying to perform the skill but we are consistently failing sometimes we know why we failed and sometimes we don't we continuously make mistakes and we don't seem

to be making any clear progress this is why it's called the plateau period it's frustrating and demotivating and so this is when a lot of people will give up but not if you know the framework because the second stage is the awareness stage as in we're becoming more aware of our mistakes and the key sign that you're in this stage is that you are trying and making mistakes hopefully lots of mistakes think of it like a checklist let's say to learn a skill correctly you need to make a 100 mistakes in order to finally be

able to do it correctly for the first time in that case progress is about making as many of those mistakes as quickly as possible so making mistakes doesn't feel good but it is helpful and necessary once you know how to overcome the mistakes doing it correctly happens by default a lot of people go through my program hold off on practicing new techniques because they're afraid of making mistakes and getting it wrong they can spend days or even weeks just thinking about it and asking questions to try to avoid every possible mistake they can think of

and then by the time it comes to give it a go the head is so full of things to try to avoid that they become overwhelmed and paralyzed on the other hand people who recognize the value of learning from mistakes can give things a go and pick up a new skill within days so as you progress through the awareness stage again you're still not doing it correctly yet and you're still not seeing good results but you are progressing by becoming more aware of the mistakes you tend to make so how can you progress through the

awareness stage more quickly the two actions here are experimentation and reflection experimentation is about trying to perform the skill correctly and probably making mistakes reflection is about thinking what those mistakes were and why you made them we can then try a new experiment based on that reflection to try to overcome that mistake if it was a repeated mistake that you already knew about you think well what am I missing what's the variable that I haven't considered and if you don't even know what your mistake was in the first place you need to get feedback from

someone who who does know and everyone needs feedback even the highest performing athletes in the world have coaches to give them feedback like I said we don't know what we don't know awareness is about knowing more things so that we can overcome them and it's hard to gain awareness when you're going through it alone so as you move through this second stage of awareness we are making less and less mistakes and at a certain point there are no more mistakes we're making this is the sign that we're nearing the end of stage two now you

might think at this point we're done we've learned the skill we're not making any mistakes time to move on with my life but unfortunately not we're now only entering into stage three of four and stage three is another point at which many people tend to give up now before we get into stage three it's important to know why rail even works and it's because it's derived from another widely studied model called the four stages of competence in this original model the stages are called un conscious incompetence conscious incompetence conscious competence and unconscious competence and I

love this model and I even teach it in my program but the reason I'm teaching you rail is because the four stages of competence is very dense and there are a lot of nuances it's also a little abstract and it doesn't actually tell you what you need to do to progress through the stages the reason I developed rail is so that you'd have something that's a little more practical especially for stage three and that's because stage three can be even more demotivating than stage two if you don't have rail so at stage three we finally

overcome our mistakes we've learned how to do the skill correctly however it takes a lot of effort we're not very consistent and it's pretty slow and that's because it's a brand new skill because it's brand new it's slower and takes more effort than our previous habits and how we used to do things and in the early part of stage three our consistency is so bad that out of 10 attempts we might only get it correct two or three times which is why stage three is called iteration and you know you're in stage three when you've

been able to perform the technique correctly at least one or two times and you're not discovering any new mistakes but you're struggling to overcome all of them every time you know you're progressing through stage three when with each cycle or iteration you feel that your consistency is improving and you're able to do the technique correctly a higher percentage of the time you're starting to feel that it's becoming easier to do it and it requires less effort and you're getting faster as well and it must be in that order if you try to go faster when

you don't have the consistency and accuracy yet you're just going to be increasing your error rate this is a common reason for demotivation and why people might give up at this stage so to progress through this stage more quickly we want to take these two actions which is varied practice and adjust so varied practice isn't just performing the skill again and again it's actually about performing the skill in different levels of challenge different context and different conditions if you're learning a new study technique you want to apply it to lots of different subjects with different

volumes of workload through different mediums and different difficulties it just means you're observing how your consistency changes in each of these different contexts and levels of difficulty adjusting involves fine-tuning your technique so that you can maintain your consistency even when the situation isn't optimal for example how do you adjust your technique for different subjects or for when you're tired or when you don't have as much time to study again I'm using study techniques as an example here but you can use this for literally any other skill and after enough iterations you'll notice that you're able

to perform the skill with a high level of consistency with a low level of effort and you're able to do it very fast this means you've entered the final stage of rail and it's when when your new skill has become a new habit it's just as easy as any other habit and in fact it actually takes effort to do it differently at this stage the actions to take are not so much about improving the technique but about refining it to make it better if it needs to be and regularly using it because if you don't

use it enough you will lose it this is a phenomenon called skill Decay and it can happen for any skill that's neglected and it causes us to slip down into the earlier stages of rail and because stage four is about keeping your skills for life it is called the lifelong stage so you can now use ra to figure out what stage you're in see whether the actions You' have been taking to learn a new complex skill have been aligned for the stage you're at and start taking the right action to progress you to the next

stage more quickly and if you're wanting to get a head start on the rail framework for one of the most complex and important skills that you can ever learn AKA learning to learn then make sure to check out that free learning system health check quiz Linked In the description below as usual thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one