Name: How To Learn Any Skill So Fast It Feels Illegal
Uploaded: 2025-04-26T11:18:47.000Z
Duration: 13 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Gerund

So 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.

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 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?

Once I let go of this arrow, I cannot control where it goes mid-air, 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.

But to do better next time, I have to know what to change to get it into the centre.

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.

If we get a bad exam result, we need to know what to change.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 Suresh, and this is the surprising part.

Suresh actually got worse after working on it for 5 weeks.

It's not just because Enzo had so much more time to work on things.

Okay, now imagine this bowl is your brain.

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.

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 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 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 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 Suresh, 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 Suresh 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 skill.

And 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.

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.

And so 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.

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 and turn those into habits.

For some skills and techniques, it can take weeks if not months to develop them into habits.

Whereas for some, it can just take a few hours.

And by balancing the theory with practice, we can achieve optimum skill growth 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 five hours a week to 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 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 can take in.