Scott Young

There's definitely some hypothetical ceiling to how good you get at things, but I think most people plateau well below their ultimate attainable ability because of this process of the brain to take skills that you repeatedly do and try to make them automatic and low effort.

Also, why you might want to start humming right now.

Well, I mean, all those things are right.

And I don't want to say that, you know, you don't need that.

This isn't some secret flip that you don't need those things.

But I think sometimes we can spend a lot of time doing something and not get much better at it.

And sometimes you can work on something for a short time and make progress rapidly.

And so I think there's a real disconnect sometimes between our ideas of how we make improvement and a lot of the research, a lot of the things we've discovered about how learning works and about how skill acquisition works.

I think there's three factors that matter for being able to get better at anything.

The first is being able to learn from other people.

Most of what we know comes from other people.

And so if you are not able to learn from other people, if you're having obstacles,

to figuring out what it is that experts know, that's going to slow your progress.

The second factor is practice and not just any kind of practice.

There's a lot of interesting sort of quirks about how our brain works that oftentimes we can spend a lot of time doing something, a lot of time practicing something and not make that much improvement.

And the third factor is feedback, being able to get quick and immediate feedback on what you're doing right, what you're doing wrong, and how you can correct that.

Well, I think that's true for some things.

I think the research shows that languages, for instance, if you start learning a language, and by learning, I don't mean like just go to a few classes, like you are immersed in some context where you're speaking it all the time, that people who learn before puberty, sort of, you know, in that younger age, they tend to reach a higher level of eventual proficiency.

But

the actual research on like how quickly people learn so not just like where you eventually get to but how quickly you get to whatever level you get to um it's surprisingly sparse showing that younger people are better so even in even in the language learning case it seems that adolescents and adults actually do better than small children at reaching those kind of like beginner and intermediate milestones which makes sense if you think about how like your adult brain is just like you know you have so much better self-regulation ability of so much better ability to like