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Prevent unnecessary frustrations during your learning

As you might imagine, there are pitfalls to avoid when learning new skills. Sometimes, the best way to learn is to avoid things that are counter-productive to your learning.

In my journey to deliberately learning new skills every month, I’ve made tons of mistakes. I was disorganized and couldn’t easily make sense of what was going on in my learning.

In the past 3 years, I’ve learned close to 90 skills, each at various proficiency levels. Some of them I thought I’d be good at but wasn’t, and some I thought I could never do and proved myself wrong.

By avoiding the following pitfalls, you can expect to get this result more frequently: surprise yourself with competence. The three pitfalls from this article come both from my experience and from the amazing Learning How to Learn course.

Illusion of competence

You may have experienced this one in school like I did a few times. You know when you think you’re prepared for a test and you think there’s nothing more to learn? You stop studying and then you take the test and realized you didn’t know everything. You only THOUGHT you did. You thought you knew everything about the topic. This happens a lot for interviews as well.

Are you a pawn pretending to be a queen or a queen pretending to be a pawn? Source unknown.

The illusion of competence is a belief that you have nothing else to learn. We do that all the time with our learning. That’s also why we plateau. We think that there’s nothing else we can learn at the moment. Most of the time, there are sub-skills you can learn to continue improving.

And because there are no ceilings when it comes to what we can learn, we can never be too competent. We can always learn more.

When you catch yourself being overly confident in a skill but haven’t yet spent countless hours practicing it, it’s possible that you’re suffering from the illusion of competence. In the real world, find (non-dangerous) ways to test yourself.

Ask a professional you trust to evaluate you. Ask your peers. Ask strangers. Getting honest feedback from people is always a great way to get a better picture of how well you’re doing.

Overlearning

On the flip side, there is overlearning. It’s the thinking that you’ve not learned enough and keep studying the same material in hopes that you’ll learn more. You focus on a specific thing and become very good at it, overlooking most other important sub-skills.

A lot of people do this because it’s “comfortable”. As you get better at some things, they’re easier to do, making it tempting to do them as opposed to things that are harder. The problem with doing things that are easy for you is that you’re not actually learning anything. You may be tweaking a technique, but if it’s easy, you’re not learning — it’s that simple.

You see that frequently at the gym. You start an exercise using certain weights and it’s hard, to begin with. As you keep practicing, your muscles grow and it becomes easier. If you don’t increase the weights when it becomes easy, your muscle growth is greatly slowed down. You’re simply not working hard enough for your muscle strength to deplete for them to grow back.

Your brain is an organ that behaves like a muscle. When you overlearn something, you’re making some neural connections “stronger”, but you’re not creating as many anymore — meaning you’re simply not learning much anymore.

Einstellung Effect

According to Wikipedia, Einstellung refers to a person’s predisposition to solve a given problem in a specific manner even though better or more appropriate methods of solving the problem exist.

It’s dangerous because you keep doing things that might be wrong, re-enforcing neural connections you’ll have a hard time disconnecting once you learn a new “truth”.

Imagine that for you, 4x7 = 29. You’ve always accepted that as truth. Then you become an architect and mess up the measurements of a building. How disastrous could that be?

You may have seen your grand-parent do things a certain way and wondered why, since you know better ways of doing them. Most of the time, it’s simply because it’s the way they’ve always done things. It works for them, so they never fixed it.

The thing is, what you learn now about anything is likely not optimal or downright wrong. We see that all the time in science. One day something is accepted as truth, the next day it’s considered a safety hazard.

The same is true in learning. One day, a method is the best. The next day, it’s irrelevant. An example I like to use is about the Olympics. You know how the high jump works currently, right? The jumper runs to the side and jumps leaning backward, landing on their backs. Like this:

Years ago, it wasn’t like that.

They still ran to the side, but also jumped on the side, passing one leg after another while in mid-air. Everyone did that. It’s called the scissor kick technique. It looks like this:

It was the accepted way of doing a high jump until someone dared to try a new, more effective method — he jumped backward, crushing all the records.

When it comes to learning, regularly questions your methods and the methods you learn about from any material you use. This simple process will “give you permission” to see different perspectives and allow you to try more things.

Everything you need to know

Whenever you feel like you can’t learn anymore, beware of the illusion of competence. You don’t know what you don’t know.
If you find yourself comfortable with your learning, it’s likely because you’ve overlearned with the same material. Switch it up.
If you find yourself overusing a method or technique, you might have the Einstellung effect. Remain curious and experiment with new ways of achieving the same — or better — results.

You can do this!