HOW TO LEARN ANYTHING! (HINT: VIDEO GAMES) | METASTARTUP #14

welcome back to another episode of mana startup guys and girls we've been following a trajectory so far we've just completed the business module but I want to take a quick detour to teach you how I learn things I was on a twitch stream the other day just teaching people how to build a website and several questions on the stream and on my Instagram pertain to the act of learning itself what the next person might find easy to learn might be difficult for you and vice versa so I was looking back into the ways I had learned complex things in my life and I came to the conclusion that I follow a very specific way of learning things in this video I'm gonna teach you exactly what that way is and how I started learning complex things in the first place my parents gifted me my first computer at the age of seven and just like all other kids I started playing games of course I started with a game called Road Rash which a lot of you are familiar with but then moved on to a slightly more complex game called Chrono Trigger over the years I got pretty bored of playing single-player games and moved on to an even more complex game called dota which I've been playing on and off since 2005 while my skill and dota kept improving my grades in college weren't doing so well it wasn't because I was stupid but it was because I couldn't bring myself to learn complicated topics that I really didn't care about for a while I thought I was an idiot but at that point I had played over a hundred games and while I was learning a new game I asked myself if I can apply the same techniques that I used to learn this game to the real world in the second year of college I started applying this super effective technique for myself and my GP I started seeing a sharp upswing in the fourth year despite also running a company I was doing the absolute best I had ever done academically up to that point so in the spirit of open source in this video I'm going to teach you the three-step process on how to become a pro at absolutely anything the first step in

this process is repetition it's pretty obvious but you should know why

repetition works and what the science behind it is whether it's you sitting at home using Photoshop or even learning how to ride a bike or doing skateboarding repetition the act of doing something over and over again even if you fail works because of a mechanism

called muscle memory now the word muscle memory is a misnomer there is no memory in your muscles don't remember anything in fact it's your brain that actually remembers the movements of your muscle fibers when something is learnt why our repetition think of the first time you learnt how to ride a bike or even think of the way a baby learns how to walk it performs the same action over and over again until the act of walking is not a conscious one it just happens automatically here's an old video of me

learning to play the ocarina despite me not being an expert most of my fingers are moving on their own unconsciously to play a particular tune so how exactly does repetition in muscle memory work the human brain has over a hundred billion neurons working in concert to make you who you are the more time you spend practicing something the stronger the neural connections this usually works by a positive feedback and negative feedback which means that if you actually end up performing the right activity your brain recognizes the muscle movements that went into performing that right activity and vice versa here's an image I found on Twitter or a long time ago which basically sums up

how this learning process works so every time you enter a new learning environment and just so you know most learning environments are different right it's a new environment you get into every time you start to learn a new thing as you spend some time in that environment you start building up knowledge basically means you know how certain points or certain data points in the environment interact with each other knowledge is transferable you can actually learn things from other people and when you're learning this is the component that you're gaining from them where is experience you got a face or be in the environment yourself so the more comfort you gain with the environment you start gaining experience which means you now know the data point to ignore and at this point you probably started building some amount of muscle memory then comes strategy which is you've basically taken this whole map of information and you broken it down into smaller chunks that you're now going to master in a sequence of events so if you're solving a mad problem you know how to solve one section of the math problem really well and you understand or get that part intuition is the icing on the cake intuition basically means you don't have to actually do anything to execute this bit it becomes unconscious much like walking or driving we can start thinking about other things while you're flawlessly executing this particular task or sequence of events I thought I'd put my money where my mouth is and show you how I learnt a muscle memory based tasks just through pure repetition I am typically an over-thinker so hopefully my ability to overanalyze things will come in handy here and not just at bedtime so this is game I've been playing for awhile called rocket League and last week I saw a really cool video on a technique called the air dribble which is fairly complicated to execute this is what it looks like yep it's as complicated to pull off as it looks so I thought I'd try my hand at this but I kind of failed pretty miserably rocket

League looks like a simple game right you just hit a ball with a car until it hits the opponent's goal but some techniques in this game are extremely complicated to pull off as you can see here I'm practically struggling to even get the ball in the air so after a few hours of practice again and again and again I finally managed to hit the ball in the air once after which it took me a lot more practice actually way more practice to get better two thousand years later after almost a hundred hours of practice and failed attempts I finally managed to get the ball all the way into the goal doing this over and over again now that I'm better at it gives me a sense of Nirvana because this takes ultimate control and even executing it makes you feel like you're in flow because my muscle memory was built I'm not even looking at the controller when I do this technique my fingers are moving automatically if I want the guard to do something on screen I don't have to think about pressing the left trigger the right trigger my body and my fingers do it automatically thanks to pattern recognition and muscle memory but here's the thing why can't you apply the same techniques to linear algebra the thing is linear algebra is just not as fun as rocket Li which is why I was struggling with math in college but then I realized that there was one piece of the puzzle that I was skipping over and that piece was

overcoming frustration because let's face it linear algebra is more frustrating than rocket leap there are two things at play when you learn something first is the amount of frustration which is usually high during the initial phases of learning something and then there's the amount of passion you have towards that topic say is lesser than the amount of frustration you have for the topic then your brain tends to give up whereas the other hand if the passion you have for a topic is much more than the frustration then your brain will continue to keep going the reason I wasn't passionate about math was because I was taught by somebody that looks like this guy I hate the stereotype people but the teachers I had in college and school were really passionate or interested in what they were teaching which made me apathetic about the topic too but as I got older a little bit wiser I realized it's not really their fault it's the system that treats them poorly bridges in India are underpaid and let's face it if you're going to teach something on repeat you're over here for decades you might lose some passion for the topic I rediscovered my love for things like physics only after the advent of YouTube after I started watching channels like veritasium and I wish my teachers could instill me with the same kind of passion that these people have towards their craft when I turn it on it's the tonic water that is bright whereas outside it was dark how does this make any sense well the thing is tonic water contains the quinine molecule for a minute look at something that you're passionate about say it's football look at what happens during a football match it's not just the players that are role models it's the entire ecosystem five human tears it's the commentators the fans and even the media that make this sport something to be passionate about in reality football is as difficult to learn as his math but it's the ecosystem in the football world that convinces every child across the world to want to be a football player and put in the hard work though actually learning this sport now when I started learning the things that were important to me I had nobody to look up to I had no ecosystem built so I could not rely on passion to help me overcome this frustration instead I had to look beyond passion and look for a way to reduce frustration in itself which brings me to my third and final point the ability to upgrade your brain so that you feel little or no frustration when you want to learn something new we've gone through the fact that repetition is the basis of the mother of all learning but these learning systems are not in isolation when you learn one skill at least five to ten percent of what you've learned in that skill translates to another skill you being good at say the ability to type on a computer makes you automatically good at several other things everything you do that uses your brain is actually like a gym it's making you smarter the more complex activities that you perform on a daily basis with repetition these smarter you getting at random new activities muscle memory that you picked up in one task can actually benefit muscle memory that you will pick up in another task thanks to a cool little quirk in our brains called synaptic plasticity but in our busy lifestyles we don't have time to engage in too many activities with eight hours of school or work or whatever there's barely any time left for you to master more than one skill but the advent of computers and the internet has given us something that we've been overlooking as a mental gym yep I'm talking about video games as expected playing video games is actually like doing mental arithmetic in fact it's even more complicated because you're observing many different phenomena on the screen and you're making calculations about how to interact with those phenomena according to latest scientific research gamers are way smarter than their non gamer peers as long as they're playing at least 15 hours per week of a complex game what's more scientists are now learning that if you want to teach a regular complex topic you might as well make a game out of it because that performs way better than regular text or video instructional material in fact I wouldn't be surprised if college syllabuses in the next 10 or 20 years become entirely interactive games because clearly that works way better than anything else we've been exposed to so far plus complex games have the same ecosystem that drive passion that offline games like football and cricket have in fact here's a clip from the latest international order adieu tournament held every year with multi-million dollar prize pools dota is an immensely frustrating game for beginners but many beginners stick with the game because of the passion in the ecosystem it is time to begin the International it is the biggest and the seventh installment of the international adults offense Delta fight and don't just take my word for it leading cognitive researchers across the world are now recognizing the importance of games here's a clip from a TED talk by Daphne beveller a cognitive researcher who actually studies games and intelligence in a lab actually is a very game I showed you at the beginning so it was actually packed shooter games have quite powerful effects and positive effects on many different aspects of our behavior after two weeks of training on action video games they actually perform better and the improvement is still there five months after having done the training so let's recap as long as you

follow the steps of repetition you work towards overcoming frustration by being sufficiently passionate about a topic and you are able to upgrade your brain by learning a lot of sister activities which are activities similar to the current activity that you want to learn you will be able to learn absolutely anything in record time over the last two years we have barely looked at GPA as a metric when it comes to hiring at Avalon labs does it make sense for us to stop looking at GPA and start looking at matchmaking scores you tell me in the comments below and as always don't forget to share like and follow me on Instagram