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Ass-Kicking Email: Learning by Doing

Hey,

It’s commonly accepted that one of the best ways to learn something
is by actually doing it.

Business skills are often best learned by actually running a
business. Programming skills come from actually hacking together
programs. Writing expertise comes from doing a lot of writing.

While this is certainly true, it’s actually a little strange.

After all, schools, self-study programs and other educational
initiatives have as their PRIMARY goal of learning. Whereas when
actually engaged in an activity, learning is typically a by-product.

When I attend business school, my entire goal is to learn skills of
business. When I run a business, my goal is mostly to keep the
business going, learning is merely a side-effect of that process.

Considering education has learning as it’s sole goal, why do we find
that learning by doing still works better in many cases?

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Part of the reason that learning-by-doing often works better than
deliberate education, is that it is highly optimized to the real
world.

When you take on educational tasks, it’s easy for teachers and
learners to get sidetracked and miss what is crucially important to
the outside world.

Another reason might be simply the institutional disadvantages of
education towards certain types of skills. Teaching ethics, for
example, is relatively easy to do in a class. Instilling actual
moral deliberation and judgment under pressure is extremely hard
to simulate.

—

But if learning-by-doing, which most of the time is simply
learning-as-a-by-product outperforms a lot of formal education, is
there a third alternative?

Is there a way to learn even better the skills we normally believe
can only be learned by doing?

I think there is.

The fix isn’t to exchange learning-by-doing for a sterile
environment. It’s to refocus the goals of the activity more
stringently on learning and improvement.

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Learning by Deliberate Practice

I see two ingredients in this superior way to learn skills:

1. Taking on real projects you care about.
2. Making decisions based on the principles of deliberate practice.

Taking on real projects is the “doing” part of learning-by-doing.
This means you don’t engage in fake, hypothetical activities, just
to get a grade. You pick projects you actually care about.

The second step though, is to guide your development of these
projects based on deliberate practice. I’ll share a few examples:

—

The first way you can do this is through using your project to test
a particular hypothesis. That is, the project is your attempt to
answer a question about the world that would be difficult to uncover
otherwise.

When I write new ebooks, I usually have my stated goal in terms of
sales and audience reaction. But I also use them as an opportunity
to test theories about writing and business.

When I first released Learn More, Study Less in 2008, my hypothesis
was to see if people would pay for a premium ebook (which turned out
to be incredibly successful).

Later I tried multiple pricing tiers with a different ebook, and it
failed miserably. By incorporating explicit tests into my projects,
I learned more than if I had just pursued the status quo.

—

Another way to do this is to engineer projects to focus on maximal
challenge per unit of time.

When I work on projects, I try to outsource or reduce elements that
don’t push my skills in a particular area. This means I end up
learning more, than if I made a new project which didn’t challenge
me.

—

A final way to do incorporate deliberate practice into your real
world projects, is to make them small and focused on areas you
aren’t great at yet.

Large projects tend to have a lot of filler. Parts where you’re no
longer learning new things.

Smaller projects tend to be more tightly focused on a challenge.
Plus you can guide these smaller projects to test you in a specific
way.

For example, if you were trying to improve your speaking skills,
taking on small, unusual opportunities to speak in public would be
more beneficial than sticking just to class/work presentations.

—

Try to think of your own ways you can structure your real world
projects to increase your learning rate!