by Scott Young
The relationship between task complexity and arousal is interesting because the latter can be modified. In one experiment, sleep-deprived and well-rested subjects worked on a cognitive task.9 Unsurprisingly, the sleepy subjects didn’t do as well. More interesting, however, was that the sleepy subjects did better when a loud noise was played in the background, while the well-rested subjects did worse. The conclusion drawn by the researchers was that the noise increased arousal levels, which benefited the low-arousal sleepy subjects, but it increased arousal too much for the well-rested ones, causing their decline in performance. This implies that you may want to consider optimizing your arousal levels to sustain the ideal level of focus. Complex tasks may benefit from lower arousal, so working in a quiet room at home might be the right idea for math problems. Simpler tasks might benefit from a noisier environment, say working at a coffee shop. This laboratory experiment shows that you should find out what works best for your own ability to focus through self-testing. You may find you can work better on complex tasks even in the noisy coffee place, or you may find that even for simple tasks you need the quiet room in the library.
Improving Your Ability to Focus
Focus doesn’t need to be exclusive to the domain of those who have endless hours and large swaths of free time on their schedule. As was the case with Somerville, the ability to focus is even more important for those whose lives make such large commitments of time impossible. With practice you can improve your ability to focus. I’m agnostic about whether focus can be trained as an ability, in general. Just because you’re disciplined about one thing doesn’t automatically make you disciplined about everything else. However, what does generalize is that there is a procedure you can follow to get better at focusing. My advice is this: recognize where you are, and start small. If you’re the kind of person who can’t sit still for a minute, try sitting still for half a minute. Half a minute soon becomes one minute, then two. Over time, the frustrations you feel learning a particular subject may become transmuted into genuine interest. The impulse to engage in distractions will weaken each time you resist it. With patience and persistence, your few minutes may become large enough to accomplish great things, just as Somerville did almost two hundred years ago.
Now that we’ve discussed how to get started on learning hard things, let’s move to discussing the right way to learn them. The next principle, directness, is the first to explain what types of things you should do while learning and, more important, which you should avoid if you want to be able to use what you learn.
Chapter VI
Principle 3
Directness
Go Straight Ahead
He who can go to the fountain does not go to the water jar.
—Leonardo da Vinci
After growing up in India, Vatsal Jaiswal moved to Canada with the dream of becoming an architect. Now, four years later, armed with a newly minted degree and entering into the worst job market since the Great Depression, that dream was beginning to seem very far away. Getting a foothold in architecture can be difficult, even in good economic times. But just a few years out from the market crash of 2007, it was nearly impossible. Firms were laying off even experienced architects. If anyone was hiring, they weren’t taking chances on some kid just out of school. Out of his graduating class, almost nobody had found an architecture job yet. Most had given up, taking jobs outside the field, going back for more education, or moving in with parents until the economic storms abated.
Another rejection. Jaiswal leaves the offices of yet another architecture firm, walking back to his sliver of the one-bedroom apartment he shares with two roommates.1 After hundreds of résumés submitted with no reply, he’s moved on to trying a more aggressive tactic of going directly to a firm’s offices, pleading to speak with whomever is in charge. Still, after weeks of knocking on doors and making dozens of unsolicited office visits, there’s no job offer in sight. He hasn’t even gotten a call back for a single interview.
Still, Jaiswal suspected that his struggles could be blamed on more than just the recession. From the snippets of feedback he could pry out of the places he applied to, he sensed that the companies didn’t see him as a useful employee. He had studied architecture in school, but his program had focused mostly on design and theory. He had been trained in creative design projects that were isolated from the reality of building codes, construction costs, and tricky software. Because his portfolio of school projects didn’t resemble the detailed technical documents the architects worked with, they thought hiring him would involve a lengthy training period, something few firms could currently afford.
Jaiswal needed to come up with a plan. More résumé submissions and office walk-ins weren’t going to work. He needed a new portfolio that could prove he had the exact skills firms wanted. He needed to show them that, rather than being a burden, he could get to work straightaway and be a valuable team member from the first day.
To do this, he would need to know more about how architects actually drew plans for buildings—not just the big theories and designs, which he had learned in school, but little details of how they did their drawings, what codes they used to represent different materials, and what the drawings showed and omitted. To do that, he found a job at a large-form print shop, the kind that does printing on the large sheets of paper favored for architectural blueprints. Low paying and low skilled, a job in a print shop wasn’t Jaiswal’s end goal. Still, it could help him scrape by financially while he prepared his new portfolio. Even better, the print store gave him daily exposure to the blueprints firms were using. That allowed him to absorb countless details about how the drawings were put together.
Next, Jaiswal would need to upgrade his technical skills. From his walk-in visits, he was aware that many of the firms he was applying at were using a complex design software called Revit. If he could master its ins and outs, he thought, he could be immediately useful in the technology-heavy entry-level position he desired. At night, he pushed through online tutorials and taught himself the software.
Finally, he was ready to construct a new portfolio. Combining his new Revit knowledge with the knowledge of architectural drawings he had gained while working at the print shop, he made a new portfolio. Instead of the assorted projects from university, he focused on a single building of his own design: a three-tower residential structure with raised courtyards and a modern aesthetic. The project pushed his skills with software further, forcing him to learn new methods and ideas beyond the basics of his online tutorials and exposure at the print shop. Eventually, after a few months of work, he was ready.
New portfolio in hand, Jaiswal submitted it again, this time to just two architecture firms. To his surprise, they both immediately offered him a job.
The Importance of Being Direct
Jaiswal’s story perfectly illustrates the third principle of ultralearning: directness. By seeing how architecture was actually being done and learning a set of skills that was closely related to the job position he wanted to perform, he was able to cut through the swaths of recent graduates with unimpressive portfolios.
Directness is the idea of learning being tied closely to the situation or context you want to use it in. In Jaiswal’s case, when he wanted to get enough architectural skill that firms would hire him, he opted to build a portfolio using the software those firms used and design in the style those firms practiced. There are many routes to self-education, but most of them aren’t very direct. In contrast to Jaiswal, another architect I spoke with aimed to improve his employability by deepening his knowledge of design theories. Though that might have been interesting and fun, it was disconnected from the actual skills he would be using in entry-level work. Just as Jaiswal struggled to get work with his university portfolio, many of us are building the wrong portfolio of skills for the kinds of career and personal achievements we want to create. We want to speak a language but try to learn mostly by playing on fun apps, rather than conversing with actual people. We want to wo
rk on collaborative, professional programs but mostly code scripts in isolation. We want to become great speakers, so we buy a book on communication, rather than practice presenting. In all these cases the problem is the same: directly learning the thing we want feels too uncomfortable, boring, or frustrating, so we settle for some book, lecture, or app, hoping it will eventually make us better at the real thing.
Directness is the hallmark of most ultralearning projects.* Roger Craig did his Jeopardy! testing on the actual questions from past shows. Eric Barone learned video game art by making art for his video game. Benny Lewis learns to speak languages quickly by following a policy of attempting some back-and-forth dialog from the very first day. What these approaches share is that the learning activities are always done with a connection to the context in which the skills learned will eventually be used.
The opposite of this is the approach so often favored in more traditional classroom-style learning: studying facts, concepts, and skills in a way that is removed from how those things will eventually be applied: mastering formulas before you understand the problem they’re trying to solve; memorizing the vocabulary of a language because it’s written on a list, not because you want to use it; solving highly idealized problems that you’ll never see again after graduation.
Indirect approaches to learning, however, aren’t limited to traditional education. Many self-directed learners fall into the trap of indirect learning. Consider Duolingo, currently one of the most popular language-learning applications. On the surface, there’s a lot to like about this app. It’s colorful and fun and gives you a potent sense of progress. But I suspect that much of the sense of progress is an illusion, at least if your goal is to eventually be able to speak the language. To understand why, consider how Duolingo encourages you to practice. It provides English words and sentences and then asks you to pick words from a word bank to translate them.* The problem is that this is nothing like actually speaking a language! In real life, you may start by trying to translate an English sentence into the language you want to learn. However, real speaking situations don’t present themselves as a multiple choice. Instead, you have to dredge up the actual words from memory or find alternative words if you haven’t learned one of the ones you want to use. This is, cognitively speaking, quite a different task from picking out matching translations from a highly limited word bank, and also much more difficult. Benny Lewis’s method of speaking from the start may be hard, but it transfers perfectly to the task he eventually wants to become good at: having conversations.
During the MIT Challenge, I recognized that the most important resource for being able to eventually pass the classes wasn’t having access to recorded lectures, it was having access to problem sets. Yet, in the years since this project, when I am asked for help by students, they often decry the absence of lecture videos from some classes, only rarely complaining about incomplete or insufficient problem sets. This makes me think that most students view sitting and listening to a lecture as the main way that they learn the material, with doing problems that look substantially similar to those on the final exam as being a superficial check on their knowledge. Though first covering the material is often essential to begin doing practice, the principle of directness asserts that it’s actually while doing the thing you want to get good at when much of learning takes place. The exceptions to this rule are rarer than they may first appear, and therefore directness has been a thorny problem in the side of education for over a century.
The easiest way to learn directly is to simply spend a lot of time doing the thing you want to become good at. If you want to learn a language, speak it, as Benny Lewis does. If you want to master making video games, then make them, as Eric Barone does. If you want to pass a test, practice solving the kinds of problems that are likely to appear on it, as I did in my own MIT Challenge. This style of learning by doing won’t work for all projects. The “real” situation may be infrequent, difficult, or even impossible to create, and thus learning in a different environment is unavoidable. Roger Craig couldn’t practice Jeopardy! by being on the show hundreds of times. He knew he had to learn in a different environment and prepare to transfer that knowledge to the show when it came time to do so. In such situations, directness isn’t an all-or-nothing feature but something you can gradually increase to improve your performance. Craig’s approach to start by learning from actual past Jeopardy! questions was a lot more effective than if he had just started learning trivia from random topics. Jaiswal was similarly limited when learning architectural skills, as the places he wanted to work wouldn’t hire him. However, he worked around that by training on the same software they used and designing a portfolio that was based on the same types of drawings and renderings that were done in actual practice. The twin challenge of directness is that sometimes the exact situation in which you want to use the skill isn’t available for easy practice. Even if you can go straight into learning by doing, this approach is often more intense and uncomfortable than passively watching lecture videos or playing around with a fun app. If you don’t pay attention to directness, therefore, it’s very easy to slip into lousy learning strategies.
One of the big takeaways of Jaiswal’s story might not be the triumph of his self-directed learning project but the failure of his formal education. After all, his difficulties started after he had already spent four years studying architecture intensely at university. Why, then, would such a small project, postgraduation, make such a large difference in his employability? To answer that, I’d like to turn to one of the most stubborn and disturbing problems in educational psychology: the problem of transfer.
Transfer: Education’s Dirty Secret
Transfer has been called the “Holy Grail of education.” It happens when you learn something in one context, say in a classroom, and are able to use it in another context, say in real life. Although this may sound technical, transfer really embodies something we expect of almost all learning efforts—that we’ll be able to use something we study in one situation and apply it to a new situation. Anything less than this is hard to describe as learning at all.
Unfortunately, transfer is also something that, despite more than a century of intense work and research, has largely failed to occur in formal education. The psychologist Robert Haskell has said in his excellent coverage of the vast literature on transfer in learning, “Despite the importance of transfer of learning, research findings over the past nine decades clearly show that as individuals, and as educational institutions, we have failed to achieve transfer of learning on any significant level.” He later added, “Without exaggeration, it’s an education scandal.”2
The situation is even more disturbing than it sounds. Haskell pointed out, “We expect that there will be transfer of learning, for example, from a high school course in introductory psychology to a college-level introduction to psychology course. It has been known for years, however, that students who enter college having taken a high school psychology course do no better than students who didn’t take psychology in high school. Some students who have taken a psychology course in high school do even worse in the college course.” In another study, college graduates were asked questions about economic issues and no difference in performance was found between those who had taken an economics class and those who had not.3
Providing multiple examples seems to aid transfer a bit, yet the cognitive science researcher Michelene Chi noted that “in almost all the empirical work to date, on the role of example solutions, a student who has studied examples often cannot solve problems that deviate slightly from the example solution.”4 In his book The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach, the developmental psychologist Howard Gardner pointed to the body of evidence showing that even “students who receive honors grades in college-level physics courses are frequently unable to solve basic problems and questions encountered in a form slightly different from that on which they have been formally instructed and tested.”5 Nor has this fail
ure of transfer been limited to schools. Corporate training also suffers, with the former Times Mirror Training Group chairman John H. Zenger writing “Researchers who rigorously evaluate training have said that demonstrable changes following training are hard to find.”6
The recognition of the failure of general transfer has a history as long as the study of the problem itself. The first attack on the problem came from the psychologists Edward Thorndike and Robert Woodworth in 1901, with their seminal paper “The Influence of Improvement in One Mental Function upon the Efficiency of Other Functions.” In it, they attacked the dominant theory of education at the time, so-called formal discipline theory. This theory suggested that the brain was analogous to a muscle, containing fairly general capacities of memory, attention, and reasoning, and that training those muscles, irrespective of the content, could result in general improvement. This was the predominant theory behind universal instruction in Latin and geometry, on the idea that it would help students think better. Thorndike was able to refute this idea by showing that the ability to transfer was much narrower than most people had assumed.
