How To Learn Any Skill So Fast It Feels Illegal

So I've been obsessed with figuring out the fastest and easiest possible way to learn new skills for the last decade. After years of teaching people and reading the research on this topic, I've stumbled across a mistake that guarantees an almost 100% failure rate when learning any skill. Unfortunately, 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 concepts to understand when you're trying to learn any new skill. But first, we need to understand a key, often overlooked ingredient to learning any new skill that enables 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? Maybe, but maybe not. 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. 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. Imagine I shot this arrow and it landed here. Not very good. But to do better next time, I have to know what to change to get it into the center.

I cannot keep firing arrows off randomly and expect to get better. I might hit a bullseye once in a while, but it's not going to be consistent, and once the target moves further away, it won't work anymore. The same applies to learning. If we receive a poor exam result, we need to identify what needs to change. Just because we perform better on a different exam does not mean we have 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 any improvement. Without this cycle, we cannot learn any new skill. This is pretty straightforward and obvious. But here's the part that traps people.

Whether it's learning about learning skills, learning to shoot an arrow, or acquiring any other skill, the fastest way to learn is often to learn more slowly. This is known as the theory overload trap. Most of you know that I have a program that teaches people to learn more efficiently. One of the advantages of my program, compared to what I can do on YouTube, is that I get to observe how the students behave and 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. The first student to consider is Suresh, who was in the program for five weeks and completed 31% of it. The second student is Enzo, who participated in the program for 54 weeks and completed 20% of it. Who do you think improved the fastest? Surprisingly, despite covering less of the course, it was actually Enzo who achieved a better academic result.

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 went from 80% to 71%. In fact, he got worse after working on it for five weeks. Why did Suresh get worse?

I'll give you a clue: it's not just because Enzo had so much more time to work on things. The answer is theory overload. Now, imagine this bowl is your brain—very smooth. Just kidding!

Now, your brain has a limited amount of cognitive resources, similar to how much memory or RAM your computer has. Let's say that these wooden blocks represent your cognitive resources. Whenever we learn a new skill, we are introduced to new things that we need to think about. Each new thing takes resources to keep it in mind and consider. Hold my arrow more tightly.

Stabilize my core. Keep my shoulders relaxed. Move more slowly. Aim a little bit lower. You can see that my bowl, my capacity, is becoming filled up. On top of that, there is a certain amount of resources required to simply perform the activity.

Now, once a new skill eventually becomes a habit, the amount of resources it takes goes down. However, when you're learning a new skill, it is not yet a habit. It will be unfamiliar, difficult, and awkward, and all of those aspects require additional resources to overcome. Therefore, more and more investment is needed just to practice the skill itself. As you can see now, we are overflowing.

We've overloaded our brain's ability to think because we have given it too many things to consider. In research, our brain trying to think about many different things at the same time is called multiple element interactivity. This is a common reason why we experience what's known as cognitive overload. However, there is an important distinction when it comes to learning cognitive skills, such as learning to learn, compared to physical skills like archery. For a physical skill, we expend energy by using our bodies and muscles.

For a cognitive skill, we expend effort with our brains. This means that the amount of cognitive resources required to perform the skill is inherently very high from the start. It takes a significant amount of mental resources to understand new information, process it, organize it, think about where it belongs, and create new memories. All of this effort helps translate learning into memory and understanding. If we didn't experience this effort, we wouldn't have any memory.

And that would be called passive learning. However, with effective, more active learning, it takes a lot of resources to begin with, which means that 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. For example, Suresh, who covered about 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 skills. 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 feel like it is impossible to get it right. No matter how much time they invest, they do not seem to be improving, which is incredibly frustrating. 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 the new theory coming in with your existing skills becoming habits. As I mentioned before, when skills become habits, your brain figures out a more efficient way to perform them.

It doesn't require as many cognitive resources anymore. It finds a shortcut. As a result, the amount of cognitive resources needed to perform the skill decreases as this new skill begins to transform into an old habit. Eventually, what once required a lot of concentration to do now takes virtually no thought at all, and you can still execute it just as accurately and consistently. We have freed up more cognitive resources to learn new theories and turn them into habits. For some skills and techniques, it can take weeks, if not months, to develop them into habits, whereas for others, it can take just a few hours. By balancing theory with practice, we can achieve optimal skill growth, allowing us to practice while improving with focus and direction, without becoming 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 probably not enough to form new habits very quickly. Therefore, we need to reduce the amount of new theory we take in. With a limited amount of practice and, consequently, a limited amount of theory, the two will be aligned, allowing us to achieve optimum skill growth. Now, let's say we have a little bit more free time and want to dedicate additional time to learning this skill.

So, we now have 20 hours a week that we can dedicate to practice. The amount that we can practice has increased, which means we can also take in more theory. However, it's proportional to the amount of extra practice we're getting. As a rule of thumb, I usually say that for every hour of theory, we should have at least five hours of practice. For example, if we have five hours of theory, we should have at least 25 hours of practice.

So, for example, if we have five hours of practice, we would only be able to take in one hour of theory in the first example. In the second example, we have 20 hours of practice; therefore, we can have up to four hours of theory. Now, unfortunately, that's just a rule of thumb, and in reality, it's a little bit more complicated. Five hours of practicing a very complicated skill is not the same as five hours of practicing a very simple skill, like a new way to tie your shoelaces. In that case, five hours of practice is probably overkill. What’s more important and accurate than just the number of hours of practice is actually monitoring how quickly we’re able to form new habits. When new habits form, we have the mental space to take in more theory. So, if we’re very slow at forming new habits, then we’re going to be slower at taking in new theory.

And the way you can know that new habits are forming is when you can feel that things are becoming easier and faster without compromising your accuracy and consistency. Most of the time, you're able to get faster without trying to get faster. The speed comes with the efficiency that your brain develops as you get better at doing it. Now, this is where I have to give props to Enzo because Enzo realized that he was developing new habits more slowly than we would have anticipated. So, he took a year to cover 20% of the program.

So instead of five hours of practice for every hour of theory, he was doing more like 15 or 20 hours of practice for every hour of theory. Even though it looked like he was progressing very slowly on the surface, his skill growth was being maintained at an optimal rate because he was never allowing himself to become overloaded. By the way, if you're interested in the program yourself, there's a link in the description that you can check out. While theory overload has an almost 100% failure rate, the reverse is also true. Almost 100% of the time, I see individuals balancing their theory intake rate with their practice and habit-forming rate. They are able to learn their desired skill very smoothly and quickly.

Which is why I said that I think this is one of the most important things to understand if you want to learn any skill. I hope that helps, and if you've got the capacity for just one more bit of theory, then check out this video that YouTube thinks you'll like. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.