- Understand learning isn't linear; expect plateaus (Start: 0:23) - Recognize the need to reorganize thinking during learning (Start: 1:23) - Assess the accuracy of skill measurement in your field (Start: 2:01) - Identify what constitutes expert skills in your domain (Start: 3:08) - Focus practice on challenging, not easy, aspects (Start: 4:33) - Regularly self-evaluate to identify areas for improvement (Start: 5:15) - Obtain and utilize feedback from experts or peers (Start: 6:06) - Engage in repeated cycles of practice, self-evaluation, and feedback (Start: 7:26) - Prepare for the effort and fatigue that comes with deliberate practice (Start: 7:49)
Wonderful video! So charming. I love the way you broke it up into small segments to vary the camera angles and backgrounds and avoid a long monologue. You really take the viewer on a journey. And you visualize the concepts so well--the graphs really make the ideas clear. You make learning about learning enjoyable!
Very interesting about plateaus in the beginning. I've searched information about memory in learning and scientific self-education theories for a year, and your channel is such a gift!
I have heard similar ideas from Principles by Dalio. A good video topic in the area of deliberate practice for learning "Why, when we observe an expert performing an action we are unable to duplicate it even after years of practice or more likely never." From the sheer number of coaches in the world, humans seem to lack the ability to mimic or grasp the experts actions even after numerous lessons or YT videos. Proprioception is something we are not wired for or seem to be able to learn.
Don't know if you are going to read this, but thanks for all the content you put out Benjamin! As an electronic engineer student the methods and principles you share have been of great aid on studying better and more efficient in time! Love your videos fam, the way you teach with examples, graphics and understandable language is very nice, also the mini skits like the intro of this video are a fun plus :) Godspeed
I use deliberate practice to train in the field of supermemory. Supermemory is a skill for memorizing information, while deliberate practice is the method to develop that skill.
I stagnate when I can't find what I do that isn't ideal. In competitive PvP video games (that aren't just about faster and more accurate motions), I'm not able to see what better players do differently than what I do. Knowing deep learning reinforcement learning helps me realise how I learn stuff. Thr exploration vs exploitation problem. Trying something suboptimal temporarily to try a new avenue for progress. Overall, there is either that paradigm shift strategy where it's super hard to come with a new idea of something that could be better. Or there is the incremental machine learning style improvement that is limited by our ability to sense the mistake we make. I find progressing at the piano far easier than progressing at advanced video game mastery. With the piano, I can feel when I make a wrong note. I can feel when I hesitate. I can hear when I don't like the intonation. The problem is also how to impact the result. For example, learning the flute or oboe is far harder than the piano. There are dozens of muscles from the stomach and throat and lips that control the sound. I can't find what to do differently to get a cleaner sound. Meanwhile, it's far easier on the piano to feel what muscle change makes an improvement on intonation. And of course 90% of piano learning is about huge finger motions that are easy to evaluate.
If you got feedback, what do you do with it? So if I do know what I'm bad at, do I practice in that main area I'm bad at? Sounds like an obvious question, but just wanted to make sure.
I'm really glad you asked this question, because I don't think enough people do. You're right - in the simplest case, you might see an area that you're bad at and practice that area more to get better at that area. But there are lots of other things to do with feedback, too. And the quality and nature of feedback varies wildly (consider getting a test back with a simple "correct/incorrect" mark vs getting a test back with a detailed explanation about your mistake and how to avoid that mistake in the future). Sometimes feedback gets us to think about why we made a certain mistake. In my first mental math video, I talked about how I was carelessly adding (or subtracting) when I should have been doing the other operation. In that case, it's not a simple "I'm bad at mentally adding things" conclusion. Rather, it's understanding that I'm not paying close enough attention to the operator, probably because I'm going to fast over the problems. Interpreting feedback is not an easy thing to do. And it can take some creativity to figure out what to do next. I'll probably make a video about feedback eventually. : )
@@benjaminkeep I have another question. If your going to focus on the things your bad at, how would you do this... while using interleaving? Since interleaving requires you to mix up related concepts, how would you do this when all the concepts have to be mixed up and you can't really focus on one thing?
@@JarOfPrickles i'm not OP, so my answer might be innacurate, but i guess it depends on what you are learning. for example, if you are learning mental math, you won't be able to do multiplication before being able to add numbers, so you should focus only on doing addition before applying interleaving w/ multiplication. in general, try to do deliberate practice + interleaving with all concepts while also spending more time at what you're bad at, and only focus on one thing if it prevents you from progressing in other areas. (sorry for any mistake btw, english is not my main language)
It would be cool to have videos about how to identify expert skill and how to set up self-evaluation and especially feedback. Especially especially if you don't have access to an expert. I know this all depends on the domains and skills but maybe there a some general(ish) strategies? Or just some real-world examples of skills, self-evaluation and feedback?
One way you can do self-evaluation and feedback for certain skills is to record yourself and compare yourself to gold standards“ (like experts). Now to a certain extent you can use GPT or a similar system for certain fields. In other cases you can get feedback on the output but not on how you are doing it. For example like with cooking you can have people eat your food though it can be hard to get honest feedback. That will take longer but it may also lead to you discovering new methods that current experts don’t know. I am sure you can think of new ideas for how to get evaluations and feedback
What I struggle with is "when" to practice. When should I drop down my book and practice what I learned? how many times should I repeat this action? When I watch a course or read a book, I opt to finish them and "then" practice and apply what've learned.
Basically, yes. But it's not a direct relationship. Offhand, it seems like there's two main paths. One is that passion makes you more likely to spend more time working on something. You don't need to "make time" to do it. You just always want to do it. Or always want to think about it. This could be particularly true if you're only passionate about one thing. The extra time that you spend doesn't guarantee that you learn faster, but certainly makes it more likely, all other things being equal. Another way is that passion can change the way that you pay attention. Generally speaking, people who have a "mastery orientation" to material (that is, they really want to understand and know something deeply) also pay attention to learning material and even study differently than someone who's just trying to get through the class. So this would make the time that you spend learning something more efficient (you're paying more attention during the time that you spend). We usually don't think of passion generally but more things like: Do you really enjoy doing the activity? Or do you really want to accomplish a goal that doing the activity will accomplish? How much do you see the activity as a part of your identity? All of these are forms of passion; or, at least, I think they correspond to what we usually mean by passion. (Sorry for the slow reply - was out for a few days.)
Be careful of passion as it could lead to missing out on other things that could optimise improvement. Eg, sleeping as you have to practice more, cancelled pyhsio as you dont want to cancel practice, eating well as you dont have enough time between practices..i speak from a sporting stance and maybe the word to be more careful of is obsession.
Apparently... not really? I thought I'd be saying something like "yeah, yeah - here's five papers on deliberate practice in drawing." But when I looked into it, it seems to be an under-studied area. I suspect it's challenging to come up with protocols that measure drawing ability; at least more challenging than other areas. From what I can tell, papers are still starting to explore just what the path is from novice to expert in drawing. There's evidence that deliberate practice plays a role, but also some evidence of drawing ability being a heritable (to some degree). See: research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/23563/1/Drawing%20as%20a%20window%20onto%20expertise_preProof.pdf Also check out if you're dying to read an academic article about the cognitive differences between novices and experts in drawing: www.researchgate.net/profile/Florian-Perdreau/publication/318469000_What_can_drawing_expertise_tell_us_about_visual_and_memory_mechanisms/links/596cdbb80f7e9bfdd89f5cfb/What-can-drawing-expertise-tell-us-about-visual-and-memory-mechanisms.pdf Are you an artist? What has your experience been with learning to draw?
@@benjaminkeep NO I'm not I've been learning to draw but I stopped I just wanna convince my bro that drawing is like any skill can be learnt an dis not an inborn gift
@@benjaminkeep I loved the book/concept “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.” Once you get past the awful title (right/left brain 🤦🏼♀️), what it’s trying to do is switch you to a *perceptual* focus. Example: nearly everyone improves drawing instantly by drawing from a reference photo that is upside down instead of right side up…
Thanks for reminding me of that one! When I was a kid, an artist friend of mine tried out the book's method to improve my drawing skills. I think the results were inconclusive. : ) Appreciate you mentioning to look past the title - if I ever get drawing again I'll come back to it. Another good beginning drawing book is You Can Draw in 30 Days by Mark Kistler. It focuses on specific kinds of subjects and gives students some fun challenges to try along the way.
ChatGPT tend to sugarcoat our mistakes and failures, you should be careful with it. In addition to that, ChatGPT can't give you valuable feedback on a lot of things.
That depends on what you're trying to learn. If you're learning to program, you get automatic feedback when you try to run the program: it either works, or it doesn't, and, if the language is sufficiently well-designed, the error messages should give you clues about what's wrong. But it doesn't give you feedback about the design of the program or your process for writing the program or how well you collaborate with other developers. All of these things would have to come from a human (or some sufficiently advanced software). If you're learning to play the guitar, you get feedback while you play (you know if you struck a wrong note, at least some percentage of the time), but you could also get feedback from playing back your recording and comparing it to a professional performance. A guitar teacher could give even better feedback and direction. If you're learning to play tennis, same kind of thing. You know when a ball goes in or out or hits the net. That's helpful. But not as helpful as a tennis coach or even just another player noticing something about your swing.
- Understand learning isn't linear; expect plateaus (Start: 0:23)
- Recognize the need to reorganize thinking during learning (Start: 1:23)
- Assess the accuracy of skill measurement in your field (Start: 2:01)
- Identify what constitutes expert skills in your domain (Start: 3:08)
- Focus practice on challenging, not easy, aspects (Start: 4:33)
- Regularly self-evaluate to identify areas for improvement (Start: 5:15)
- Obtain and utilize feedback from experts or peers (Start: 6:06)
- Engage in repeated cycles of practice, self-evaluation, and feedback (Start: 7:26)
- Prepare for the effort and fatigue that comes with deliberate practice (Start: 7:49)
Wonderful video! So charming. I love the way you broke it up into small segments to vary the camera angles and backgrounds and avoid a long monologue.
You really take the viewer on a journey. And you visualize the concepts so well--the graphs really make the ideas clear.
You make learning about learning enjoyable!
Very kind of you, thanks!
Hoping this channel grows exponentially, both for you and others. As always, great content! Thanks for all your time and effort
Very interesting about plateaus in the beginning. I've searched information about memory in learning and scientific self-education theories for a year, and your channel is such a gift!
I have heard similar ideas from Principles by Dalio. A good video topic in the area of deliberate practice for learning "Why, when we observe an expert performing an action we are unable to duplicate it even after years of practice or more likely never." From the sheer number of coaches in the world, humans seem to lack the ability to mimic or grasp the experts actions even after numerous lessons or YT videos. Proprioception is something we are not wired for or seem to be able to learn.
Don't know if you are going to read this, but thanks for all the content you put out Benjamin! As an electronic engineer student the methods and principles you share have been of great aid on studying better and more efficient in time!
Love your videos fam, the way you teach with examples, graphics and understandable language is very nice, also the mini skits like the intro of this video are a fun plus :)
Godspeed
Many thanks for the kind words!
I use deliberate practice to train in the field of supermemory. Supermemory is a skill for memorizing information, while deliberate practice is the method to develop that skill.
To improve as a teacher, the expert skill is picking good students.
QED.
In the arts you're right. It's about 80%.
I stagnate when I can't find what I do that isn't ideal.
In competitive PvP video games (that aren't just about faster and more accurate motions), I'm not able to see what better players do differently than what I do.
Knowing deep learning reinforcement learning helps me realise how I learn stuff. Thr exploration vs exploitation problem. Trying something suboptimal temporarily to try a new avenue for progress.
Overall, there is either that paradigm shift strategy where it's super hard to come with a new idea of something that could be better. Or there is the incremental machine learning style improvement that is limited by our ability to sense the mistake we make.
I find progressing at the piano far easier than progressing at advanced video game mastery. With the piano, I can feel when I make a wrong note. I can feel when I hesitate. I can hear when I don't like the intonation.
The problem is also how to impact the result. For example, learning the flute or oboe is far harder than the piano. There are dozens of muscles from the stomach and throat and lips that control the sound. I can't find what to do differently to get a cleaner sound. Meanwhile, it's far easier on the piano to feel what muscle change makes an improvement on intonation. And of course 90% of piano learning is about huge finger motions that are easy to evaluate.
My Judo instructor always said, “Perfect practice makes perfect”
Thx for sharing Ben!
If you got feedback, what do you do with it? So if I do know what I'm bad at, do I practice in that main area I'm bad at? Sounds like an obvious question, but just wanted to make sure.
I'm really glad you asked this question, because I don't think enough people do.
You're right - in the simplest case, you might see an area that you're bad at and practice that area more to get better at that area. But there are lots of other things to do with feedback, too. And the quality and nature of feedback varies wildly (consider getting a test back with a simple "correct/incorrect" mark vs getting a test back with a detailed explanation about your mistake and how to avoid that mistake in the future).
Sometimes feedback gets us to think about why we made a certain mistake. In my first mental math video, I talked about how I was carelessly adding (or subtracting) when I should have been doing the other operation. In that case, it's not a simple "I'm bad at mentally adding things" conclusion. Rather, it's understanding that I'm not paying close enough attention to the operator, probably because I'm going to fast over the problems.
Interpreting feedback is not an easy thing to do. And it can take some creativity to figure out what to do next. I'll probably make a video about feedback eventually. : )
@@benjaminkeep I have another question. If your going to focus on the things your bad at, how would you do this... while using interleaving? Since interleaving requires you to mix up related concepts, how would you do this when all the concepts have to be mixed up and you can't really focus on one thing?
@@JarOfPrickles i'm not OP, so my answer might be innacurate, but i guess it depends on what you are learning. for example, if you are learning mental math, you won't be able to do multiplication before being able to add numbers, so you should focus only on doing addition before applying interleaving w/ multiplication. in general, try to do deliberate practice + interleaving with all concepts while also spending more time at what you're bad at, and only focus on one thing if it prevents you from progressing in other areas.
(sorry for any mistake btw, english is not my main language)
It would be cool to have videos about how to identify expert skill and how to set up self-evaluation and especially feedback. Especially especially if you don't have access to an expert. I know this all depends on the domains and skills but maybe there a some general(ish) strategies? Or just some real-world examples of skills, self-evaluation and feedback?
One way you can do self-evaluation and feedback for certain skills is to record yourself and compare yourself to gold standards“ (like experts). Now to a certain extent you can use GPT or a similar system for certain fields. In other cases you can get feedback on the output but not on how you are doing it. For example like with cooking you can have people eat your food though it can be hard to get honest feedback. That will take longer but it may also lead to you discovering new methods that current experts don’t know. I am sure you can think of new ideas for how to get evaluations and feedback
How would you go about identifying the expert skills?
What I struggle with is "when" to practice. When should I drop down my book and practice what I learned? how many times should I repeat this action? When I watch a course or read a book, I opt to finish them and "then" practice and apply what've learned.
Thanks
Thank you
6:38 I'm watching this at like 1or 2 I was shocked lol. It was funny
Is it true that if you love sth you're passionate about sth you will learn it faster ?
Basically, yes. But it's not a direct relationship.
Offhand, it seems like there's two main paths. One is that passion makes you more likely to spend more time working on something. You don't need to "make time" to do it. You just always want to do it. Or always want to think about it. This could be particularly true if you're only passionate about one thing. The extra time that you spend doesn't guarantee that you learn faster, but certainly makes it more likely, all other things being equal.
Another way is that passion can change the way that you pay attention. Generally speaking, people who have a "mastery orientation" to material (that is, they really want to understand and know something deeply) also pay attention to learning material and even study differently than someone who's just trying to get through the class. So this would make the time that you spend learning something more efficient (you're paying more attention during the time that you spend).
We usually don't think of passion generally but more things like: Do you really enjoy doing the activity? Or do you really want to accomplish a goal that doing the activity will accomplish? How much do you see the activity as a part of your identity? All of these are forms of passion; or, at least, I think they correspond to what we usually mean by passion.
(Sorry for the slow reply - was out for a few days.)
Be careful of passion as it could lead to missing out on other things that could optimise improvement. Eg, sleeping as you have to practice more, cancelled pyhsio as you dont want to cancel practice, eating well as you dont have enough time between practices..i speak from a sporting stance and maybe the word to be more careful of is obsession.
3:48 cardboard splashguard
has there been any deliberate practice research on drawing
Apparently... not really?
I thought I'd be saying something like "yeah, yeah - here's five papers on deliberate practice in drawing." But when I looked into it, it seems to be an under-studied area. I suspect it's challenging to come up with protocols that measure drawing ability; at least more challenging than other areas.
From what I can tell, papers are still starting to explore just what the path is from novice to expert in drawing. There's evidence that deliberate practice plays a role, but also some evidence of drawing ability being a heritable (to some degree). See: research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/23563/1/Drawing%20as%20a%20window%20onto%20expertise_preProof.pdf
Also check out if you're dying to read an academic article about the cognitive differences between novices and experts in drawing: www.researchgate.net/profile/Florian-Perdreau/publication/318469000_What_can_drawing_expertise_tell_us_about_visual_and_memory_mechanisms/links/596cdbb80f7e9bfdd89f5cfb/What-can-drawing-expertise-tell-us-about-visual-and-memory-mechanisms.pdf
Are you an artist? What has your experience been with learning to draw?
@@benjaminkeep NO I'm not I've been learning to draw but I stopped I just wanna convince my bro that drawing is like any skill can be learnt an dis not an inborn gift
@@benjaminkeep I loved the book/concept “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.” Once you get past the awful title (right/left brain 🤦🏼♀️), what it’s trying to do is switch you to a *perceptual* focus. Example: nearly everyone improves drawing instantly by drawing from a reference photo that is upside down instead of right side up…
Thanks for reminding me of that one! When I was a kid, an artist friend of mine tried out the book's method to improve my drawing skills. I think the results were inconclusive. : ) Appreciate you mentioning to look past the title - if I ever get drawing again I'll come back to it.
Another good beginning drawing book is You Can Draw in 30 Days by Mark Kistler. It focuses on specific kinds of subjects and gives students some fun challenges to try along the way.
@@benjaminkeep What about cooking ??
gpt is now my main feedback lmao
ChatGPT tend to sugarcoat our mistakes and failures, you should be careful with it. In addition to that, ChatGPT can't give you valuable feedback on a lot of things.
If that ball didn't go into that basket, I might die
how do you get feedback? please
That depends on what you're trying to learn.
If you're learning to program, you get automatic feedback when you try to run the program: it either works, or it doesn't, and, if the language is sufficiently well-designed, the error messages should give you clues about what's wrong. But it doesn't give you feedback about the design of the program or your process for writing the program or how well you collaborate with other developers. All of these things would have to come from a human (or some sufficiently advanced software).
If you're learning to play the guitar, you get feedback while you play (you know if you struck a wrong note, at least some percentage of the time), but you could also get feedback from playing back your recording and comparing it to a professional performance. A guitar teacher could give even better feedback and direction.
If you're learning to play tennis, same kind of thing. You know when a ball goes in or out or hits the net. That's helpful. But not as helpful as a tennis coach or even just another player noticing something about your swing.
Thank you, sound wisdom. No pun intended. Yea, pun intended.