4048: The Science of Automating and Perfecting Any Skill by Benjamin Hardy on Learning Mastery

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[00:00:57] [SPEAKER_03] This is Optimal Living Daily. The science of automating and perfecting any skill by Benjamin Hardy of BenjaminHardy.com. And I'm Justin Malik, your very own personal narrator. Read to you every single day of the year so that you don't have to go find blogs and articles yourself. I find the best authors online in my opinion and simply read them to you for free. So that'll get right to it and continue optimizing your life.

[00:01:22] [SPEAKER_03] The science of automating and perfecting any skill by Benjamin Hardy of BenjaminHardy.com. Achieving automaticity is about making a newly learned skill a part of who you are as opposed to just a thing you can do. Learning something new is all about memory and how you use it.

[00:01:47] [SPEAKER_03] At first, your prefrontal cortex, which stores your working or short-term memory, is really busy figuring out how the task is done. That's the part of your brain involved with conscious decision-making and planning. But once you're proficient, the prefrontal cortex gets a break. In fact, it's freed up by as much as 90%. You can now perform that skill automatically, leaving your conscious mind to focus on other things.

[00:02:13] [SPEAKER_03] That level of performance is called automaticity and reaching it depends on what psychologists call over-learning or over-training. Here's how to over-train your brain to do something so well that you can do it unconsciously and what to expect once you can. Above and beyond automaticity. If you've learned how to drive, chances are you've spent minutes at a time behind the wheel thinking about something else altogether, not even realizing you've been driving.

[00:02:43] [SPEAKER_03] Something similar happens with more complex, specialized skills too. In his book, The Art of Learning, chess prodigy and tai chi world champion Josh Waitzkin explains automaticity this way. Quote, Now my conscious mind focusing on less seems to rev up its shutter speed from, say, 4 frames per second to 300 or 400 frames per second. The key is to understand that my trained mind is not necessarily working much faster than an untrained mind.

[00:03:12] [SPEAKER_03] It's simply working more effectively, which means that my conscious mind has less to deal with. End quote. Developing automaticity, in other words, is the process of going from doing to being, empowering you to become an expert and innovator. Repetition, repetition, repetition. The first step toward automaticity is repeatedly learning small sets of information.

[00:03:38] [SPEAKER_03] If you're playing basketball, for instance, that might mean shooting the same shot over and over. The key here is to go beyond the initial point of mastery. Overtraining is about continuously practicing something you've already learned inside and out. Once you've overlearned a skill, you no longer need a script but can perform or even teach that skill in different ways and in different contexts.

[00:04:01] [SPEAKER_03] Great speakers overlearn their talks so they can present their material differently to each unique audience under various circumstances. Automaticity, in other words, isn't just about being fluent at your craft. It's also about being fluid and flexible. As Pablo Picasso once said, quote, quote, learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist. End quote. The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in war.

[00:04:30] [SPEAKER_03] The second step toward automaticity is making your training progressively more difficult. Simple enough, this is akin to increasing the weight and intensity of a workout. You want to make the task harder and harder until it's too hard. Then you bring the difficulty back down slightly in order to stay near the upper limit of your current ability. As you increase the intensity of your training, you'll also begin adding time constraints.

[00:04:56] [SPEAKER_03] Some math teachers ask students to work on difficult problems with increasingly shortened timelines. Adding the component of time challenges you in two ways. First, it forces you to work quickly. And second, it saps a portion of your working memory by forcing it to remain conscious of the ticking clock. The fourth and final step toward automaticity is practicing with increasing memory load. That is, trying to do a mental task with other things on your mind.

[00:05:23] [SPEAKER_03] But simply, it's purposefully adding distractions to your training regimen. Again, math teachers might have students remember an obscure fact and then ask them to recall it immediately after finishing a math problem. In his book, Relentless, Tim S. Grover tells of basketball players chugging a few beers during halftime in order to prove they can outplay their competitors under impaired conditions. Going from doing to being.

[00:05:48] [SPEAKER_03] This overtraining process is meant to push you through each of the three stages involved in acquiring procedural knowledge, the kind associated with doing a specific task. We start at the declarative stage where we learn to describe how something works and our understanding is theoretical. Then we begin to apply and practice what we're learning in what's called the associative stage where we can both think about and perform the skill simultaneously.

[00:06:15] [SPEAKER_03] Automaticity comes at the third and final automatic stage. But overlearning takes us further. There's some evidence that exceeding automaticity makes the procedural knowledge you've just acquired more flexible, explicit, manipulable, and available to consciously access. In other words, you can now do something so unconsciously that it's become part of who you are, not just a thing you can do.

[00:06:41] [SPEAKER_03] That comes about in an internal shift right around the third or automatic stage. You see it clearly in children learning how to read or to do math. The beginning is difficult and many resist it. But as they get better, they begin to associate meaning and see the value in the new skill. If they don't, then this internal shift won't happen. Once the learner begins to believe they can get beyond automaticity when they can see intelligence as fluid rather than fixed,

[00:07:09] [SPEAKER_03] their motivation shifts from extrinsic to intrinsic. In layman's terms, it's about having your heart line up with what you know in your head. I've recently seen this change in my eight-year-old foster son. And he's now reading because he wants to, not because he has to. And we now have to force him to stop reading. When you first start doing something, you have to focus on the mechanics. The knowledge you're trying to gather truly is procedural, so your performance is guided by mimicking others,

[00:07:38] [SPEAKER_03] by rules, procedures, and guidelines. But automaticity unlocks a much wider sphere of action. And at that level, performing a skill becomes more natural and individualized. It's here that what you do becomes a natural extension of who you are. You just listened to the post titled, The Science of Automating and Perfecting Any Skill, by Benjamin Hardy of BenjaminHardy.com.

[00:08:07] [SPEAKER_03] And I'll be right back with my commentary.

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[00:09:04] [SPEAKER_03] Thank you to Benjamin. I'm sure we've all experienced this in different areas of life. Driving is a good example. But even if you don't drive, there are tasks that we do so often that while it may be very complex on the surface, at some point we're able to do it without thinking about it at all. But I want to point out that there is a downside to this as well, or at least a balance that we should be aware of. Because in the driving example, this is not necessarily a good thing.

[00:09:32] [SPEAKER_03] When we zone out, totally forget that we're driving, only to realize it later when we've passed our exit on the freeway going 70 miles per hour. That's dangerous, really. And also why we think it's okay to text and drive at the same time, which it definitely isn't. So there's both sides to this. And I think that balance comes from improving our mindfulness and awareness, our concentration, but also our ability to notice when we've zoned out and when we should come back to the present moment.

[00:10:02] [SPEAKER_03] We talk about this pretty frequently and it comes up in various articles, so I won't dive more into that. But just a reminder that there is a such thing as too much of a good thing. We always need to keep ourselves in check. So something to think about this weekend. And with that, have a great weekend if you're listening in real time. And I'll see you tomorrow where your optimal life awaits.