Learn Faster by Copying How Olympic Athletes Train

Why is it that some people can pick up a new skill in just one or two weeks when it can take other people months? This is a topic I've been interested in for years, and it all comes down to how you train yourself to learn the skill. At first, I thought it was mostly genetics. Some people are just talented. But what I've realized now after spending over a decade learning about learning and coaching thousands of people to learn more efficiently is that certain training methods dramatically boost your skill acquisition speed. In fact, I've actually had the privilege of coaching some worldranked competitive athletes, and I've noticed seven principles about how they train that you can translate into confidently learning any skill you want, whether it's for your career or for your studying. So, the first principle we're going to start with is precision practice. One of my previous students was a national badminton player who was training for the Commonwealth Games and they were telling me about some of the hitting drills they were doing. Basically, their coach would hit a shuttlecock into the air and then they would practice hitting it in all sorts of different ways and they would do this drill for hours. And this is not unfamiliar if you think about a top athlete in any field. We know that they spend a lot of time drilling things. But the question you have to ask yourself is why do drills? What is it about doing drills that are fairly repetitive and fairly specialized that makes it effective compared to playing lots of games? Well, this is tied to the concept of precision practice. Precision practice is composed of two parts. The first is deliberate practice and the second is immediate feedback. Deliberate practice in the research refers to a method of practice where you have a very specific goal. Usually this goal is to work on a specific weakness rather than your general performance and you then engage in higheffort full concentration practice to achieve that goal. So that would be like for example just drilling your tennis serve or just drilling the way you pass a ball. It's often a very intensive practice that's done in short bursts of only a few hours. And the idea is that by engaging in this highly effortful, intense practice with a very specific goal, it pushes that weakness beyond your current abilities, allowing you to develop your skill much faster than you normally would. And what's found is a consensus across multiple disciplines. They've studied this in sport. chess. They've studied this in music. Top performers tend to spend a disproportionately high amount of time doing deliberate practice compared to just good or average performers. Some of the reasons for that uh could be that this type of practice is not just effortful and requiring full concentration but it can also be quite tedious and frustrating. But when you do this type of deliberate practice in combination with immediate feedback, what it creates is this very powerful learning phenomenon that allows you to upskill yourself much more quickly than you naturally would. And part of this is because it reduces something called the latent learning period. The latent learning period is this phenomenon in learning science that refers to the moment you start trying to learn something and then the point at which you first get feedback. When the latent learning period is very long, let's say that you start learning something and you're only tested on your performance 2 months later. This means that all those changes and micro adjustments you're making and all the time your brain is figuring out how to perform this skill accurately, it's not getting calibrated for 2 months. So, you could be actually practicing and getting worse or you could be fluctuating up and down. It's hard to be focused and directed. When it comes to a skill like learning to learn, this is especially obvious because a lot of the time if you're learning a skill like learning or studying, you don't get feedback on that skill normally for months and an exam result comes out. And that result is also very binary. It's telling you the feedback across dozens of changes that you've made in the months prior. And so even when you do get the feedback, you don't really know what it means and what you need to change. So by pairing deliberate practice with immediate feedback, it means that when you practice something, the latent learning period is just crushed down to almost nothing. And so this massively increases your ability to learn new skills. And so the way that you can apply this when you learn your own skills is instead of thinking about the entire skill as one big umbrella, try to break that skill up into component skills. What are the individual parts of the skill that if you were to master each one, you'd be able to master the overall skill? Then think about which of those components you are weakest in. Remember, deliberate practice is more effective when you target your weaknesses because those tend to be your bottlenecks. And then once you've figured out which of those component skills is the highest priority for you and which is your biggest bottleneck, think about how you can test yourself on your performance. You don't have to be able to get like immediate feedback. If normally it would

take you one or two weeks to get some feedback or test yourself on using that skill, maybe you can shorten that down to one or two days. If it's a physical skill that you can see and hear, then you might want to record yourself and review your recording after each practice session. Or if it's something a little less tangible, maybe there's someone uh like a mentor or a senior that you could ask to give you some feedback. if it's a fairly common mainstream skill that you're just trying to learn for the first time, you might even be able to use AI tools like chatbt to give you feedback on your attempts. And so once you've figured out that high priority area and then you've tried to learn it and you've practiced it uh and then you've tested yourself, you want to continue iterating that until that is no longer your weakness and then go back to step one where you evaluate which of the other components is your next biggest bottleneck. And if you do this, what you'll realize is that the amount of time you spend practicing the skill may not really change much, but it becomes much more focused and much more targeted. And the amount of time you spend on reflecting and reviewing your practice attempts goes up by a lot. Some people uh don't do this because they feel like the time spent on reviewing their attempts is a waste of time. But actually, that's where most of the learning is going to happen from. Now having said that, when you start doing precision practice, one thing that becomes apparent is that because you have such a clear specific goal that you're focusing on, it's now less clear what kind of practice gets you towards that goal. After all, there's not like a guide book of all the different practice things that you should do to get better at the skill. You can practice in any way. So which way is actually the most effective? And to solve that problem is why we have the second principle. And the second principle is training specificity. Now, one thing before I jump into this second one is you'll notice that I've got this structure here where there are these five sort of pedals uh and then two blocks underneath it. And that's because these seven principles kind of function like five overall strategies with two prerequisites that make these five strategies effective in the first place. And so we're going to cover the five first and then the two important prerequisites at the end. So training specificity, what is training specificity? Training specificity is the idea that the way you train should partially mirror the way you need to perform. Now in the sports world, back before training specificity was well understood, you'd have athletes that were using all sorts of different training methods to try to get better. The idea was that just the more fit and strong you are, the more crossover that will have with your sport. and so the better of an athlete you're going to be. But what they found was first of all that wasn't always the case. Just because you were fit and strong didn't mean that you performed really well. And sometimes it would actually damage your ability to perform in your sport. And the second thing is that it shifted the focus subtly to just volume of training. Like the idea that the more you train, the better it's going to be. And when it comes to learning, volume is very rarely the solution. The more you study or the more you train a skill is proportional with how much time you spend learning or practicing but only to a certain point and beyond that more volume of training or learning can actually be detrimental. So when you look at Olympic athletes, Commonwealth athletes, these top performing individuals train, the way they train is very targeted. One of my previous students was a parolympic runner who I was coaching on their studying skills while they were going through uni. uh and they would tell me about the drills that they would do and they did a lot of drills around reaction time uh creating explosive power and when they did you know like weight training in the gym it was about generating that explosive power to translate through to their sprinting and in the research the reason training specificity helps you to learn new skills uh more quickly is because of this thing called said s a d I never know how to pronounce it uh it stands for specific adaptation to imposed demands it basically means that your body will adjust to the types of stresses that you apply to it. And this is true for cognitive skills as well, not just physical skills. There's research that suggests that when you learn how to perform a specific task, you build a taskspecific schema for how to do it. So you may get uh really good at decision-m or problem solving in one particular context but that may not actually translate through to a completely different context or set of conditions even though it's technically the same skill of problem solving or decision-m and this is the reason why you can spend a lot of time going to workshops or doing courses where you're learning about specific skills and within the course you may be doing well but then when you actually try to apply it to real life it's much more difficult. that may indicate that there was a lack of training specificity. And so to make sure you have training specificity, try to make sure that you practice how you play before learning a new skill, learning some new theory, taking a course, be really clear about your objectives. How do you need to use this knowledge? learn and

knowledge? How do you need to learn and apply these skills? If there's lots of different ways you need to apply it, or it's really complicated, spend some time to actually write it down. Maybe have it next to you as you're going through and learning it. Keep that goalpost constantly in mind and anytime you feel like you are progressing in your skill, go back to that goalpost. Check yourself with it. If you can test yourself and give yourself immediate feedback, even better. Now, the caution here is getting too specific. So, avoid getting too specific. When you're too specific and too narrow when you're learning new skills, it actually reduces your overall skill acquisition speed, which is a little bit nuanced, but basically, if you overfit to a certain set of conditions, then you actually then limit your ability to translate that in other types of contexts. So, especially early on when you're learning a new skill, you do want it to be a little bit broader and more generalized. You want to think about all the different ways that you play, not just one specific type of situation and problem. And then as your skill development progresses further and further, it's safer to then start narrowing down and becoming even more specific. One way that you can tell that you are probably being too specific in the way that you're training is well there a few red flags that I always look for. One of them is that you're actually relying on wrote memorization instead of understanding why you need to perform a skill a certain way. One of the biggest, actually maybe like the most major part about learning any new skill is the type of adjustments you make when you reflect on your own practice and performance. So you might try something, see that it's not the result that you wanted, and you make a small adjustment to try to get a better result. But the adjustment you make depends on whether you even know what a good or a bad adjustment is. Like I said before, you can make an adjustment that actually makes you worse without realizing it. And so for any skill, you do want to have at least a certain level of theoretical understanding about why you perform the skill in this way, a rationale. And that means that if it doesn't go as expected, which it definitely will at some point, you know how to respond to that and then adjust your technique to eventually get better. So that's the first red flag. If you're relying too much on wrote memorization when you're learning a new skill. The second red flag is when small changes in context throw you off significantly. If you start noticing that the only way that you can perform that skill is in a very narrow set of parameters and conditions, it probably means that you're practicing too narrow. Your training specificity is too high and you need to generalize a little bit, test yourself a little bit more widely. Now, at this point, you're doing precision practice, you're training specifically, and because you're doing so many of these loops of training and then getting feedback, you'll probably start losing track of what to work on next. This is a big problem when you're learning new complex skills that you're very unfamiliar with because you don't know whether you're even improving or not. Sometimes the progress is so slow and you fluctuate every single day. It's almost impossible to tell whether you're actually improving or not. And when this happens, you are more likely to give up and be frustrated because you do not see your progress and then you feel demotivated. So to overcome this, top athletes use this third principle which is data tracking. For a brief period of my life, I used to go to a competitive powerlifting gym and I was training with some of the strongest people in the world. Literally ranked first, second, third in their weight class internationally. This was the first time that I saw a velocity tracker for gym. What this is that it's a device that sits on the floor and there's a little cable that attaches to a like a barbell and then they track how fast the bar is moving when they push it. This means that instead of gauging how tired they were based on just like feeling, they could have an actual number that tells them whether they are slowing down on the speed of each repetition, which first of all is just a cool device. Uh but secondly, it's a trend that I have seen across all the top athletes that I've worked with is that they are very meticulous about tracking data and removing as much guesswork as possible. For top athletes, their off season when they're just training is an incredibly precious time. And so every single week has to be spent very intentionally so that when it does come time to perform, they're at the best of their game. And what I found as a learning coach teaching thousands of students and professionals on improving their learning speed is that most people measure their progress very intuitively just based on gut feel. Or if they do track a metric, the only metric they track is like how long am I spending studying and how much material am I covering. But this is a very superficial and inaccurate way of viewing something like learning. For example, you can have two people spend the exact same amount of time studying something, but the way that they use their knowledge, the problems they can solve, the decisions they can make, how fluent they can use that knowledge, the retention they have afterwards could be completely

different. And so, one of the most common patterns I see when I coach people on learning skills is that they'll come to me very frustrated and demotivated because they're not improving. and they're spending just as long as they used to on studying and they are covering the same amount of content or even less and they're on the verge of giving up. And I'll ask them some questions about other types of metrics. For example, what's your attention like after you spend that amount of time? And what level of mastery do you have? How deep is that knowledge? How can you use that knowledge to solve really complex problems rather than just regurgitating facts? And in almost every situation, what's happened is that their mastery is getting much deeper. Yes, they're going a little bit slower, but they're now reaching levels of depth that they never were able to reach before. Even with 10, 20 times the amount of studying, their attention is getting to a point that's higher than it's ever been for the amount of time. Previously, to hit that same level of retention, they would have had to repeat this uh using flashcards or whatever it is for weeks afterwards. And so because they were only looking at metrics that were obvious and superficial like time spent studying on a given day or amount of content covered in a single session, they were getting demotivated because they weren't seeing the real progress they were making. And so what I recommend for you to enable data tracking in the way that you practice learning new skills, whether it's learning skills or any other skill, is to identify what are the key metrics that indicate progress for you. One way you can do this is track your goal, which you should have actually already identified when you did the training specificity part, like how you want to use this skill, what types of problems you want to solve. And then think about what are the indicators or what are the components that you need to hit in order to be able to reach this final goal. And these can be your sub goals or your submetrics. For example, if your goal at the end of the day here was to set a specific type of very competitive exam, if it's just an academic setting, then in order to do that, you need to have a certain level of retention. You need to spend a certain amount of time. So your time efficiency has to be at a certain level and your depth level. And so if you think about that, it becomes very clear that there's multiple different things to track. And once you do that, you can then divide these sub goals and submetrics into which ones are lagging versus leading metrics. A lagging metric is something that will only change after a period of time. Whereas a leading metric is the metric that you would expect to change most quickly. So for example with learning again speed of learning is usually a lagging metric. Normally you get better at uh getting deeper, more accurate, your brain starts rewiring certain habits and then as those habits start forming, you get faster and faster at using that process. So the leading metric tends to be the quality of learning getting deeper first and then the speed comes afterwards. And this kind of pattern of speed or fluency coming afterwards is usually the case for most skills. If you think about language learning, just having vocabulary and being able to speak accurately is your leading indicator. Uh, and then your lagging metric is going to be how quickly and how fluently you can engage in that conversation. And so, it's really important to identify which are lagging and which are leading because it sets your expectation. If you're expecting speed to be the first thing that moves, then you're going to focus on that metric more and you're not going to realize that actually you're doing exactly what you need to be doing. You're moving as fast as you should be uh progressing. But the only difference is that you're looking at the wrong metric. The additional benefit of doing this is that it makes it much clearer how you can increase your training specificity and how you can give yourself relevant feedback and how to test yourself because you now know that you need to test yourself in a way that shows you these submetrics. So again with something like learning you wouldn't just test yourself on your ability to retrieve facts and regurgitate you know explanations because you realize depth or accuracy is an important submetric. You test yourself on that submetric and you can increase your training specificity to make sure you improve that submetric. And so by now hopefully you can see even just with three of these principles how the process of training and upskilling yourself becomes much less of like just randomly doing stuff and hoping to get better and actually can be a very targeted specific activity where every hour you put into practice you know you are getting a very high level of return. However even if you use all three of these principles you will inevitably with any complex skill encounter a plateau. This is the point where you get stuck. It seems like even though you're being precise and you're training with specificity and you're tracking all your data, your data is just flatlining and it seems like every hour is not really helping you improve anymore. In these types of situations where usually you already have an intermediate level of skill and you're trying to get real expertise, the next principle is what helps you break through a lot faster. That's the

principle of progressive overload. In simple words, progressive overload means that every time you train, you should be doing something that is more intense than your previous session. And it doesn't have to be dramatically more intense, but any small amount of progress is progress. Now, this is also why it becomes really important to do the data tracking very well because if your data tracking is too blunt or too broad, then you're not going to be able to have visibility on the gains that you're making. So for example, if you're training with weights at a gym, you can go from 20 kgs to 21 kgs, like you can make a very small improvement. When it comes to something like learning, a lot of people don't have that fine level of visibility. So this is why we have to be precise. Is your retention going from 91% to 93%? Is your depth going from a level four at 50% to 60%? or perhaps when you look at your entire learning system, uh, one part is improving and making small gains, but the other parts are staying the same. A key principle of doing progressive overload effectively is that you have to know what you can progress on. If you're only aware of one metric that you can adjust to increase your intensity, then that's when you hit plateaus. When that happens, you change to a different variable and you increase the intensity there. And by the way, if setting all this up for learning and learning to learn and creating this robust learning system is a highlevel agenda for you and it's important to you, then one way that you can make this much easier for yourself is by taking my learning system diagnostic. It's a free quiz that asks you a bunch of questions about the way that you learn. And at the end of it, you'll get this report that scores you on your current learning system. Uh, and it will give you some personalized recommendations about which parts you should work on first. You can look through that report to figure out some of the key points of data uh that you start tracking some of your sub goals. You can use that for an idea about how you can increase your training specificity so that instead of thinking about learning as just this big broad concept, you can actually say, okay, learning is really about having a learning system composed of this, this, and this. And you know how you perform each one of those components. So, if you're interested in doing that diagnostic, you can um check that out. I'll leave a link for you in the description. and it takes like 2 or 3 minutes to do and about 5 or 10 minutes to read through the report. So going back to progressive overload, the reason progressive overload works is because of well there are lots of different theories that try to explain this idea. Uh one of them is something called the zone of proximal development. There's a very famous uh educational theory which came out in the late 70s by a very famous educational psychologist called Vigotssky and he basically said that uh you have a certain level of skill. Let's say that that's this circle and then outside that you have this zone here which is your zone of proximal development which is just outside of your current skill level. And the idea is that your ability to upskill uh is much better when you are in this zone here where it's outside of your current reach but you can still do it with enough effort and guidance. It also relates to this concept called desirable difficulties which was published by some researchers called Buork and desirable difficulties basically says that your learning is enhanced when you are put into situations that require higher amounts of effort and stress. And so what progressive overload does is that it constantly keeps you from being inside your comfort zone too long and pushes you into this zone of proximal development where you're experiencing these desirable difficulties. And that creates the pressure necessary for if it's a cognitive skill, your brain to rewire and undergo neuroplastic change. In simple words, do hard things to get better at doing hard things. And so the way that you can apply progressive overload in your own training is well first of all like I said make sure that your data tracking is good. If your data tracking is good, you should be able to see ways that you can slightly challenge yourself in just at least one of those submetrics. And if you hit a plateau in one of those metrics, then you can come back to that later, hit a different metric first. But that is actually the more obvious way of using progressive overload. But the reason that people really struggle to use progressive overload in their training is actually because there are two mistakes which I see all the time that actually stop you from progressively overloading uh usually without you even realizing it. The first one uh the first mistake is actually nonprogressively overloading. So what this means is that you overload yourself way beyond this zone of proximal development and you're like way out here, you know, you're in the middle of nowhere. it's so far from your comfort zone that you are just completely overwhelmed. This happens a lot with people that join my learning program because I teach like a lot of stuff, you know, stuff that took me years to figure out, learn in like 2 or 3 hours of lessons. And so, because it's

only 2 or 3 hours of lessons, people try to learn like 10 different skills all at once and then immediately they just get blasted into overload. And so, this is one of the reasons why I always tell people you have to take it slow, like just one skill at a time. Just lock it in and then move on to the next one. But I see this with people learning basically like every other skill is that it's so easy to consume information and learn about new theory. And it's so easy to just do sort of like garbage reps and just have like trash volume going through where you're doing lots and lots of practice, but you're not really learning from that practice that you actually just overload yourself. You're trying to hit a level of skill that is far too advanced for your current skill level. And so I know that for some people the foundations are boring. uh it's you know tedious. Some people want this great huge goal and so they think that to get this huge goal they need this huge skill. Actually for most people the problems that they have on a daily basis are usually fixed just by having much better foundations. And one thing I found which is true of any skill that I've learned is that there is more value in having a great set of foundations than basically any other point of that skill development journey. How you spend those early days learning a new skill makes the biggest difference to how long it will take to master that skill. And so avoid nonprogressively overloading. There are no shortcuts. Don't get impatient. The second mistake that I see people making is mistaking fluency for growth. So fluency does not equal growth. Okay? So if you believe that fluency equals growth, that becomes the mistake. When you're really good at something, your fluency increases. Your performance increases. This is a good thing. The reason you're learning the skill is to increase your performance. After all, once your performance is getting to a point where it's high and it's stable at that level, it also means you're probably not growing in that skill. So, an error rate making mistakes is actually a sign that you are in this zone of proximal development. Think about a skill that you're fairly confident in that you'd say is well within your comfort zone. If you were to test yourself on that skill a hundred times, you might still make a mistake or get it wrong two or three times. So even for skills that you're comfortable with, it's not often that you get a 100% accuracy and fluency rate. And what most people underestimate is how quickly your accuracy drops off as you progress through this zone of proximal development. Once you leave this comfort zone of existing skills, your accuracy is going to be like 50%, 60%. Which means out of every two attempts, one of them you're making mistakes or getting it wrong. And so what I see happening a lot of the time is that people will learn a new skill. They'll get to a point where they feel somewhat fluent with it and they'll feel good because they're fluent and the error rate is going down, but at the same time it's not as good as it needs to be and they wonder why they're hitting a plateau. The reason they're hitting the plateau is because they're actually not challenging themselves enough. They've mistaken the feeling of feeling good because you're good at something with the feeling of getting better at something which often doesn't feel good. It's often frustrating. It's often full of mistakes. desirable difficulty. And so, one of the easiest questions that you can ask yourself to check whether you are progressively overloading or not is how much effort do you need to put in to complete the task? If the answer is not much, then it probably means that you could challenge yourself more if you wanted to. And that's a good thing. You should celebrate that. It means you got better than you were before. your previous level of challenge is not challenging for you anymore. That's what skill growth is. So that was progressive overload. And these are the first four principles so far. At this point, you should be feeling that the way of upskilling is incredibly structured and meticulous. And it's very rare for me to see someone uh tackling skill development in this way. In fact, ironically, even those top athletes that I coached, even though they applied all of these principles to their sport and their training, uh they didn't apply this for their learning or their studying. When they were studying, they were still just, you know, they were very mindless. They were very random and non-directed. It was very just like volume or like more more hours. And I think goes to show how deeply ingrained some of the beliefs we have about how learning is meant to be are. Uh, and so I think challenging that is actually an incredibly important first step to becoming a better learner. And so I communicated this to my student, the Commonwealth Binton player. And this next principle is a change that she made applying the way she thinks about training to her studying. And this made the most profound difference out of any other change that I got her to make. And this next principle that created such a powerful transformation is the idea of

time intentionality. For this binton player, her time was incredibly precious cuz she had this insane training regime. She never had time to study. She was sort of getting drowned in responsibilities all the time. And so anytime she was training, it was very focused. Training time is training time. When she's on the bus, you know, she understands, okay, this could be a waste of time. So how am I going to use this time on the commute, on the bus? How am I going to use the time when I'm, you know, resting and on the bench during training? Like, could I use that for studying or something? And then, and this is the part that really changed, she would have these blocks of time for studying. Like on the weekend, she'd have like a three-hour block, and that block is just called study. And during that time, she's organizing her notes. She's like rewriting things, doing this mindless repetition. And she's never asking herself the normal question that she asks herself when she's training, which is how effective is this at getting me towards my goal? And by asking herself that question in her studying as well, she realized that of that 3 hours, half of it is really just a waste of time. So what if you wrote notes on a lecture? colorcoded and organized your notes into your favorite app? Did it make a difference to the metrics that actually matter? No. So it doesn't matter if it felt productive, it wasn't. And coming to that realization that she is spending her time doing stuff that is not productive towards her goal is what helped her make the change and motivated her to change the way that she was learning. And I've seen the same phenomenon so many times like uh when I do a workshop with professionals always there's a question where someone is torn between being habit focused versus being outcome focused. Here's the difference. When you're habit focused, you learn a new skill, topic, you train yourself, you spend that time doing certain things because that's the way you are used to doing it. You're used to studying a certain way. That's the way I did it in school. That's how uni. You're used to learning new skills a certain way. And so you justify the fact that you should continue to learn a new skill in that way because it's what's comfortable to you. That's what it means to be habit focused. When you're outcome focused, you challenge all of that. So what if this is the way that you've always done it before? Is it effective for the outcomes and the metrics that truly matter? It's almost certain that some of the habits that you formed that served you in the past are not going to serve you anymore. Do you know which habits those are? are no longer serving you? This is what time intentionality is all about. It's not about just saying I'm going to spend time doing this. It's saying in the time I'm spending, what is my intention? What is my goal? And how are the processes that I'm using aligned to that goal? And then you check and evaluate that rigorously. Whenever I talk about time intentionality, I'm reminded of one of my old friends from high school who studied so much. I mean, he every day after school, he'd go to the library, study until like 10:00, 11:00 p. m. every single day. And I thought, man, this guy is studying a lot, but he's not doing very well. One time I went to the library to study with him, and he is just getting he just gets distracted so much. Like of the 5 hours he's at the library, 2 hours of it is just spent taking a nap. like haphazardly studying while getting distracted on the phone. The outcome he wants to achieve from studying is presumably getting better results. But the proportion of the time that he spends that is aligned to that goal is like 10%. And the thing I love about the time intentionality part is that this is the principle that no one else is going to check for you. Like this is where you can tell people who take ownership and are really committed to achieving a goal are versus the people who just like to say they're committed. You have to show up for yourself. You have to be honest with yourself and check whether you are wasting your time or not. You have to be brave enough I guess uh to confront the fact that you may be wasting your time and that your habits are not serving you and that you have to make the change which can feel difficult, insecure. It can feel anxietyinducing and you have to learn to navigate those feelings. And the way you respond to a misalignment between how you intended to spend your time and what that time is really doing for you, I think is where we separate a lot of those elite performers from the average. So these are the five principles and then as I mentioned before there are two pre-erequisites that this all sits on top of. If you don't have these two prerequisites these five are going to be severely limited or it's not going to be very sustainable. And so this sixth principle that sits as the first foundation uh is something

that one of my students uh actually called recovery training. The idea here is simple. Treat your recovery like you treat your training. There's no point training well if you burn out before you make progress. And this is, I would say, universally true for almost any complex skill. A complex skill is complex because there are a lot of things that you need to get right. That takes time. And for a complex skill, you almost always reach a point of diminishing returns. Which means to improve in that skill, it takes more and more time. Yes, smart training and following these principles makes that much faster and more effective. But still, it takes time. And the limitation for most people learning a complex skill is not whether they can do it or not, but before they give up. For me, when I was growing up, I played the piano for like years, eight or nine years, I played piano. A young Asian boy learning piano. We're all shocked. Uh, but my skill level for the amount of time I played was shocking because I never practiced, you know, let alone not using any of these principles. I didn't do any principles. Like I barely practiced. And I think if I were to start learning piano now, I would probably get to the same level of skill that I got to when I was younger in like one year. I would be able to learn so much faster and more effectively in just one year than I did 8 years as a child. And the funny thing is that at the time I really felt like I'd kind of burnt out of piano. I'd been practicing for so many years and taking so many lessons and classes that I had no energy left for it. And so there's this misconception I think that you get burnt out when you just work too hard or your hours are too long. But that's not always the case. You can spend a lot of hours doing something and not burn out if that thing is really fulfilling and engaging you. What really creates burnout is when you put in effort, any amount of effort, and you repeatedly, multiple times, over and over again, do not get the result relative to that effort. Every time you put an effort, and you do not get a result that reinforces that, you have to use up some of that willpower and motivation to keep going. How many times can you keep that up? How many failures and setbacks and frustrations can you tolerate before you just call it quits? And the reason I'm telling you this in the context of recovery training is that there comes a time when you're learning a skill that you hit diminishing returns. You're putting in a reasonable amount of time and effort, but the results and the improvement you're seeing is it feels unreasonably low. And sometimes the limitation is that you aren't training smart enough and you have to think about these other five principles. But sometimes you are training smart enough. And the thing that's limiting you is actually your ability to consolidate that training to connect all those changes and the changes that are happening inside your brain as your neurons are rewiring themselves. It's letting your stress levels drop down and your energy levels rise up again, giving you the chance to be your best when you are at your training. And these are the things that are limited by your recovery. And so what top athletes often do is that they treat their recovery as meticulously as they treat their training or in some cases even more meticulously because they realize that the fruit of the training is manifesting and growing during the recovery phase. And although most of you watching certainly not me, uh we're not professional athletes, you know, let alone top level athletes, but I think the sentiment is the same. There's a lot of responsibilities. things to do in life and work and family and all these other types of pressures that we have to somehow overcome. And you're trying to learn a new skill or get ahead in life, it's very easy to enter the territory where the thing that's limiting us the most is our recovery. Funny enough, actually, uh the thing that really showed me the power of recovery for me personally is when I actually started uploading YouTube videos and what I found was that when I'm not in a good mood, when I'm tired, when I'm stressed and I'm overworked, I don't teach as effectively. I don't deliver in the same way and it's subtle, but I see the drop. And the crazy thing is that a lot of the time I wasn't really aware of how big the difference in quality was until I saw the numbers attached to it where I could point to the sentence that I said that I probably wouldn't have said if I wasn't so stressed or so tired. And it made me wonder how many of those situations are there in the decisions that I make that no one is pointing out that I'm not getting any feedback for? And how many areas am I limited by the quality of my work that I don't even realize? And so coming from a guy who used to sleep two to three hours a night

because I was just studying every other waking moment of my life, sleep is something that I prioritize and protect religiously now. And the one or two hours of productivity I'm missing out on because I'm sleeping more, I'm more than making up for through just quality and efficiency. And that sentiment is especially true once we introduce the seventh and final principle which is the principle that you need to really perform at your peak even in stressful situations. And this principle is called stress inoculation. Stress inoculation basically means you get used to performing under pressure. Every high level athlete practices under pressure. not all the time, but they make sure to immerse themselves in the same types of pressures and stresses that they might face on game day. And the last thing you want is to put in so much work for weeks or months or even years only for nerves on the day to get in the way. And so what stress inoculation means is that it builds up the psychological resilience and desensitization to that stress. And stress inoculation works. I used to be terrified of public speaking. I would be I remember being in class holding up my speech, hands shaking so much I couldn't even read the words because it's just vibrating everywhere. Can't even speak or breathe properly, hands getting clammy. Now I've done workshops in front of a thousand people. I've walked on stage to present at some of the most prestigious educational conferences in the world. public speaking went from something that I dreaded to a genuine strength and that was almost completely just due to stress inoculation. Every time I stood in that room speaking to people feeling nervous and dizzy and my hands trembling and gaining the skills to overcome that and keep myself calm. As those skills became habits, I gained the ability to perform under pressure. And you can apply the same thing for whatever skill you're learning as well. Maybe it's about giving yourself a time pressure or having it scrutinized by someone or increasing the complexity or having to teach it and present it. Think about how you need to use the skill in the real world at the end of the day and then think about the parts that you might be dreading and then bring those components into your training at regular intervals and turn that potential moment of dread into an opportunity to show your excellence. So, these are the seven principles of learning any skill more efficiently. And if learning to learn is one of those skills you're interested in, you may want to check out this video here where I break down how to build a learning system in detail. If you're trying to figure out how to improve your retention and your memory or your speed of learning, but you're not really sure where to start, this is a good video to start with. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.