Day 30: Learning Technique 16: Experimenting

Today we discuss our learning technique #16, experimenting, which is exploring applications of skills outside of the predetermined ways you originally learned those skills. You will learn what this technique is, the science behind it, why you should use it, and finally how you can apply it to accelerate your learning.

Resources for this lesson:

• Transcripts
• Worksheet
• List of Scientific References

Summary

What is Experimenting?

When you're doing an experiment, you're exploring applications of skills outside of the predetermined ways you originally learned those skills.

There are 3 types of learning experiments:

• Experimenting with learning resources: discovering the right guides and resources that are going to work for best for you for learning.
• Experimenting with technique: learning all the subtopics or specialties of a skill in order to become a master of the broader skillset.
• Experimenting with style: studying other master's styles, taking the foundational ways of performing a skill, and adding your unique twist to create a new style.

Why it matters: As you approach mastery, it becomes more difficult to continue progress with your learning. Experiments allow you to practice a skill in novel ways.

What does the science say?

As a skill develops, it's often no longer enough to simply follow the example of others. You need to experiment and find your own path.

• There dozens of teachers and resources for beginners, but there are almost zero for those reaching master levels.

Abilities are more likely to stagnate [2] after you've mastered the basics.

• Not only must you learn to solve problems you couldn't before, you must unlearn stale and ineffective approaches for solving those problems.
• The master not only knows how to solve a problem, but knows the very best way to solve the problem. The best way to apply his knowledge [3] in an efficient and clean manner.

Many skills reward not only proficiency of applying the skill, but also originality.

Why should you use it?

By creating your own experiments, you lead yourself down a path of mastery that sets you apart from everyone else who knows this skill. This is going to make you unique and more valuable.

How do you use it?

There are five tactics that you can use to start running experiments.

Copy, then create: copying the work of another master, and then using that to create your own work or own application of that.

• Copying simplifies the problem of experimentation somewhat because it gives you a starting point for making decisions.
• When you're attempting to emulate or copy another work, you have to deconstruct it and understand why it works.

Compare methods side-by-side: trying two different approaches and varying only a single condition to see what the impact is.

• With this tactic you gain an understanding of what works and which methods are more suited for your personal style.
• You will get much better information about which method works best if you limit the variation to only one factor,.
• Solving problems multiple ways or applying different solution styles to problems, will increase your breadth of expertise.

Introducing new constraints: introducing new constraints that make the old methods impossible to use.

• This tactic shakes up the way you solve problems and apply a skill to avoid becoming dogmatic in only applying the skill in one way.

Creating a hybrid of unrelated skills: combine two unrelated skills to create a unique skillset.

• For many areas in life, combining two skills that don't necessarily overlap can bring a distinct advantage that those who specialize in only one of those skills wouldn't have.

Exploring the extremes: push the boundaries of what other people have done with this skill.

• Pushing to an extreme allows you to search the space of possibilities more effectively while also giving you a broader range of experience.

‍

Activity

Run one of our three types of experiments

• experiment with the learning resource
• experiment with the technique
• experiment with your own style

And use that experiment to help better learn and master the other learning techniques of this course.

‍

Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.