Experiments You Should Be Running For Success How To Become A Better Learner

Experiments You Should Be Running For Success

things I think a lot about even with this podcast is how to get our teams failing more often if that's even the right thing to be aiming at the type of

experiments we should be running how we should be running them anything else at all yeah I mean I don't think I don't I

don't lionize failure for its own sake right it's just I think it's inevitable if you're experimenting enough that you'll have some failure but I think one

useful thing to do like a guy I love who's made a big impression on me named ed Hoffman was used to be the chief knowledge officer at Nasa that's like

after NASA had some disasters most every they did was very successful but obviously they had some high-profile

disasters he was brought in because they were deemed not a learning organization they weren't learning from lessons of

the past and he was brought in to help create a knowledge system so that people would learn from the lessons of the past

and one of the things he does in organizations when he goes in because now he consults is he goes around he

asks people what are you good at that we're not using right and people always have an

answer for that and that leads to well what's some what's an experiment that we can run to try to use that thing that

you're good at that we're not using so I think that can be kind of a foundational question to help people set up some of those experiments but also a big impact

would be and this is a tough one you going ahead and failing in an experiment

because that's going to set the agenda right but you would actually have to fail like this can't be you go out for a

jog and you trip on the curve or something like you have to fail something of consequence uh and and then your

reaction to that can set a tone um so that's on the the team level so I just I want to really think about

how on an individual level I can become a better learner because one of the things I do

How To Become A Better Learner

obviously for a living is I do this podcast and I meet all these incredible people and they say things to me that in the moment change my life but I feel

like I forget them five minutes later often some of them stick some of them don't so I've always wondered how can I become a better learner people come up

to me in the street and say you might you must know so many things about so many things and also my audience they

they tune in every week they listen to these incredible people how can we become better Learners what is it we can

do to ret retain information better and then also bring it into practice in our lives oh to retain inform okay for

retaining information one repetition and familiarity is important right so if there's something that's really

important to you you should reread it because the first time you go through if you're hearing new things new terms

you're using your working memory just to keep up basically so so to put this in

kind of a simple way like there's research where you look at school kids and if they're given um like an essay

about baseball say the kids that are deemed really good readers and there are kids who are deemed poor readers and the

the kids who will do the worst on comprehension are the poor readers who don't know anything about baseball but the kids who know about baseball but are not as good readers will still have

better comprehension than the kids who are good readers but don't know anything about baseball if they only get to go through once because having some

knowledge helps you fit it into what's called your semantic Network the spiderweb of all the ideas in your brain

so one going back over things that can be taking notes whatever it is but when

you learn something new try to fit it into your semantic Network when you learn something connect it back to

something you already know so like when you have these conversations you probably have a better tendency to remember things where you say you know

that reminds me of some other guest that either agrees or disagrees with something that some other guest said and you've attached it if you think of your

brain as like the spiderweb things are attached by threads and if you vibrate one thread it's more likely to shake

these other ideas into your brain so when you're learning something new stop and try to fit it into your existing

base of knowledge if you want to return better can can I use that to sort of fit it into an example so I'm thinking of

you you said something about um what is something I don't use but I'm good at

would the listener that's listening to this now in order to embed that think of something that they are not using that

they're good at because then it kind of brings it into their absolutely okay absolutely use it as quickly as you can

again repetition but fit it into your network of ideas like stop if you have to because you know you can read a ton

but if you're not kind of and and I think I think reading even things that you don't retain still change your

sensibility at some level even if you can't consciously pull up all of the ideas and statistics and so on but for

things that you really want to be able to access connect it to other things that you already know and someone's called

space repetition like if you can have a way where you come back to it at

intervals that'll be much better so I use this um like readwise as a programming

I'm not like affiliated with them in any way it's just a thing that I use where if I have highlights in Kindle books or

ebooks it will feed me back my highlights at intervals things that I thought were important

regularly and that's taking advantage of what's called spaced spaced repetition where if you you want to actually leave

a space almost to the point of forgetting something and then if it's brought up again you're embedding it

better in long-term memory so this is for for learning anything spaced repetition language learning all this

kinds of stuff so you would think that you just repeat a thing a million times as soon as you have it and that's the

best way to Grapple on to it that's not the most efficient use of time it's actually to to space it out and quizzing

yourself is a great way to retain so there's something called The Generation effect which is if like if you have to

do highlighting versus uh flash cards flash card quizzing is much better the generation effect is being forced to

come up with an answer primes even if it's wrong in fact sometimes especially if it's wrong

primes your brain to then retain the right answer it's actually something called the hyper correction effect where if you're really wrong about an answer

you're much more likely to remember the right answer once it's given to you so if you're looking up a piece of

information I suggest you guess what it's going to be before you get the answer it doesn't matter if you're right

or wrong might feel bad to be wrong but it doesn't matter you'll better retain it when you see the right answer but if I'm wrong then I'm I guess I'm more shocked so there's even more retention of that new answer it's Salient.