Scott Young

It's obviously different than racing.

Well, I think watching someone when you're learning a skill is incredibly important, especially at the beginning because a lot of what we're trying to do when we're learning a new skill is that there is an enormous combination of possible ways that you could approach it and most of those don't work.

And so when you watch someone, you are narrowing down that possibility onto a much smaller subset.

And this is particularly true, I think, for more intellectual skills.

So if you're trying to solve a math problem, for instance, and you don't have the right background knowledge, I mean, anyone who's been in a difficult math class will know how hard it is.

Whereas if you see someone demonstrate the problem, well, all of a sudden, you know how to do it.

And so a lot of our knowledge really just is that.

It's this library of methods and procedures that we've learned from other people.

So, you know, you open with the example of learning to draw.

And I think the reason a lot of people struggle with learning to draw is that no one's taught them the methods.

And there are lots of methods.

There's lots of ways that like, oh, well, this is how you do this.

And this is how you solve this problem.

And if you don't have that, if you haven't, you know, not, you don't have that basic foundation, then, you know, you don't draw very well.

And you say to yourself, wow, I just don't have any talent.

Yeah, and I think the thing is exacerbated by the fact that when you are good at something, this kind of this process of making a skill more automatic makes it more unconscious so that it's harder for you to teach people too.

You know, I had an experience of trying to teach someone to swim and I've been swimming my whole life and they didn't know how to swim and I had to explain to them how to tread water.

It was very difficult because I know there's a method for treading water, but I just do it.

I don't think about it.

And so often when you're learning to draw, let's say,