Book extract - Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery

In Get Better at Anything, Scott Young, bestselling author of Ultralearning, explores why it’s so difficult for people to learn new skills, arguing that three factors must be met to make advancement possible, and offering 12 maxims to improve the way we learn.

Life depends on learning. We spend decades in school, acquiring an education. We want to be good at our jobs, not just for the perks that come from being one of the best, but for the pride that comes from mastering a craft. Even the things we do for fun, we enjoy to a large extent when we feel we’re capable of getting better at them.

Yet learning is often mysterious. Sometimes it comes effortlessly, as when we quickly find our way around a new neighbourhood or pick up the routine at a new job. In other cases, it’s a slog. We may spend hours in the library, with little to show for it on the final exam. We may want to switch companies, industries or even professions, but not feel qualified to make the leap. Decades spent driving a car, typing on a computer, or hitting a tennis serve don’t reliably make us much better at them. Improvement is fickle, if it comes at all.

In Get Better At Anything, Scott Young argues that there are three key factors in helping us learn: learning from others, practice, and feedback. Using research and real-life examples, Young breaks down these elements into twelve simple maxims of learning. Whether you’re studying for an exam, learning a new skill at work, or just want to get better at something you’re interested in, these maxims will help you do it better.

The extract that has been published with permission from the publishers focusses upon the art of copying. It is a skill that is often devalued as it is feared that it is treading into the dreaded waters of plagiarism, copyright, or it may be such a strong influence upon the individual copying a master’s work, that they will not retain any originality of thought and expression. Whereas, Scott Young argues that in fact copying is a form of apprenticeship where you learn the fundamentals from your guru. Later, what you do with the learnings, is an expression of your skill and mastery. He cites the cognitive load theory experiment conducted by the psychologist John Sweller. In this, the undergraduate students selected for the case were given mathematical problems, most of which they were able to solve. The surprising analysis was that their focus was on the goal and not necessarily in comprehending the principles or rules underlying the problem. Whereas upon further experimentation, he discovered that if the students suppressed their means-end analysis, then they would inevitably have more cognitive capacity to learn from their actions. The goal-free and worked-example effects showed up repeatedly in experiments, but they went against the prevailing intuitions of the time.  Initially Sweller’s research was considered controversial, but the property of the mind he based his findings on was not. Researchers have known for the better part of a century that the mind is fantastically limited in the amount of information it can hold on to simultaneously. The text produced below expands upon the applications of cognitive load theory, helping in better learning strategies. Always remembering that a beginner may be ineffective in problem solving compared to their ability to study worked examples. As they advance, they will benefit more from practice than from simply watching. The worked-example effect has its strongest influence when the patterns of problem solving are still unfamiliar. Eventually, copying must be replaced with original observations for creativity to flourish.

Read the extract and perhaps, later, purchase the book to read in greater detail the 12 maxims he promotes. These are: problem solving is search, creativity begins with copying, success if the best teacher, knowledge becomes invisible with experience, the difficulty sweet spot, the mind is not a muscle, variability over reputation, quality comes with quantity, experience doesn’t reliably ensure expertise, practice must meet reality, improvement is not a straight line, and fears fade with exposure.

Scott Young is a Wall Street Journal podcast host, computer programmer and an avid reader. Since 2006, he has published weekly essays to help people like you learn and think better. His work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, TEDx, Pocket, Business Insider and more. He doesn’t promise to have all the answers, just a place to start.

Creativity Begins with Copying

Rules are not the fetters of genius. They are the fetters of men with no genius.

—Joshua Reynolds, painter

•     Can you solve a problem without learning how to solve it?

•     How much of creativity comes from borrowing others’ ideas?

•     Does imitation lead to a shallow understanding?

In November 2017, records were shattered when Leonardo da Vin- ci’s Salvator Mundi sold for over $450 million. This more than doubled the previous record-high price for a painting, when Pablo Picasso’s Woman of Algiers sold for slightly below $180 million in 2015. A  Da  Vinci  selling  for  astronomical  sums  isn’t  surprising. The  artist left few completed paintings in his lifetime. Those that exist are universally recognized as masterpieces, from the immense crowds drawn daily to the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, or his enigmatic depic- tion of The Last Supper. Nor is Da Vinci alone in veneration. Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, and Michelangelo all rightfully deserve the status of master painters. Although we tend to fixate on their genius, I’d instead like to turn to their training.

Artistic training in the Renaissance followed an apprenticeship model. At twelve or thirteen, novices would submit themselves to a master’s workshop. Italian painter Cennino Cennini describes the process at the turn of the fifteenth century:

Know that there ought not to be less time spent in learning than this: to begin as a shopboy studying for one year, to get practice in drawing on the little panel; next, to serve in a shop under some master to learn how to work at all the branches which pertain to our profession . . .

for the space of a good six years. Then to get experience in painting, embellishing with mordants, making cloths of gold, getting practice in working on the wall for six more years; drawing all the time, never leaving off, either on holidays or on workdays. And in this way your talent, through much practice, will develop into real ability.

Apprentices proceeded through a structured sequence of both sub- jects and media to slowly introduce themselves to the skills of the craft. First was copying masterworks. This enabled a novice to closely study how an adept translated light and form into marks on a panel. Next was drawing from plaster casts of sculptures. This added the difficulty of translating a three-dimensional object into a two-dimensional representation, but avoided the challenges of a live model who might move around during a sitting. By the time apprentices worked from life, their mastery of the fundamentals was secure enough that all their attention could be paid to subtleties such as posture or expres- sion. Artistic media went through a similar progression, from charcoal drawings, to grisaille paintings done in shades of black and white, and finally to full color in oil or tempera paints.

Copying from masterworks formed the backbone of artistic instruc- tion. Da Vinci himself argues for the proper sequence of study: “Of the order of learning to draw: first draw from drawings by masters done from works of art,” only then, “having acquired that practice, under the criticism of his master, he should next practice drawing objects in relief of a good style.” The idea of spending considerable time copying seems antithetical to modern perceptions of artistic training. Artists are supposed to be fountains of originality and drills are alleged to kill the creative spirit. Yet despite the imitativeness of the training, artists of the periods in which such methods were widespread often produced work of breathtaking originality. Even though the Renaissance-era training methods were apparently successful, they are largely out of fashion today. To understand why, we need to briefly review the history in the evolution of artistic training methods.

A Brief History of Artistic Training
The history of art education in the West begins in Greece. The ancient Greeks celebrated art, but not the artist. Visual arts were the province of an artisanal class that was barely above the slaves who upheld an aristocratic society. Poetry and philosophy were the proper study for a member of the elite; painting was not. This attitude persisted through the Middle Ages, when the artistic production was controlled by the guild system. Only in the Renaissance, with the arrival of painters like Da Vinci and Michelangelo, did the status of individual artists begin to rise above that of mere craftworkers. Instrumental to this shift in perception was Renaissance painter and art historian Giorgio Vasari. His major book, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Ar- chitects, created the image of the artist as an intellectual, on par with scholars and philosophers. To that end, Vasari convinced Cosimo de’ Medici to found the first art academy in Florence in 1561.

Yet this elevation of the status of the artist had a paradoxical ef- fect on the craft. As historian of art education Arthur Efland writes, “When the artist rose to the position of genius, new educational

questions presented themselves, for how does one instruct a genius? Is it appropriate to train the potential genius like a lowly apprentice?” This tension grew during the Romantic movement. Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes of his suggested artistic training reg- imen: “So I shall take good care not to provide him with a draw- ing master, who would only set him to copy copies and draw from drawings. Nature should be his only teacher, and things his only models.” In the nineteenth century, this attitude would be further exaggerated by Viennese art educator and champion of the creative self-expression movement Franz Cižek. “Cižek has been compared to Rousseau in his insistence on avoiding all adult influence, but in some sense Cižek was more extreme,” Efland writes. “Rousseau rec- ognized some need for adult guidance, while Cižek’s class was not taught at all in the usual sense of teaching.” This tension between craftsmanship and creativity, which was largely absent in Da Vinci’s time, persists today. “In our arts climate,” artist and educator Juliette Aristides writes, “historical education and art training are often con- sidered antithetical to genius. Rising artists are frequently expected to tap their knowledge directly from the ether, disconnected from history and labor. However, when the instincts of the individual are elevated above education, the artist can become stuck in a perpetual adolescence where his passion outstrips his ability to perform.”

Patiently learning from examples, before creating original work, was central to a classical artistic education. Yet the power of examples is not limited to artistic skills. Somewhat surprisingly, cognitive psychologists have found that, in some situations, studying an example can lead to more useful skills than solving the same problem on your own.

……

When Is Copying More Effective than Creating?

The mind’s bottleneck suggests a reason for learning failure: complex subjects and skills aren’t broken down into simple enough parts. Faced with a confusing situation, novices must rely on means-end analysis and other effortful search processes to solve their problems. This problem- solving investment is often necessary for arriving at answers, but crowds out cognitive capacity that could be used for learning and generalizing patterns that could be applied to future challenges. Worked examples, goal-free exploration, and organizing materials to minimize split atten- tion and redundancy can all make learning more effective.

This focus on complexity also means cognitive load theory is most relevant when solving a problem or understanding a concept requires integrating many different unfamiliar pieces of information simulta- neously. This is certainly the case in producing art. Each brushstroke in a painting requires the simultaneous consideration of chromatic hue, color saturation, and tonal value. Each element of the painting must consider perspective, lighting, and size. Da Vinci’s notebooks are filled with rule-of-thumb heuristics for the proportions of body parts and detailed anatomical studies of skeletal and muscular struc- tures. A realistic depiction requires integrating far more information than a geometry puzzle, which is why few students can do so without considerable practice.

Not all problems of learning are an issue of complexity, however. Compare grammar and vocabulary when learning a second language. Grammar can be quite mentally demanding. An English speaker beginning to learn Japanese, for instance, must deal with the men- tal juggling of converting her thoughts from the familiar order of subject-verb-object (“Dog bites man”) to the subject-object-verb order in that language (“Dog man bites”). For lengthy sentences such men- tal juggling can easily consume all of our cognitive capacity, which is why clear exemplification and practice on textbook exercises can be so helpful. Learning vocabulary, in contrast, is relatively low in cognitive load. Each word simply needs to be memorized. Thus it is much more feasible to acquire a wide vocabulary through immersion in conversations. In a similar way, chemistry involves concepts both complex (understanding quantum-mechanical electron orbitals) and simple (memorizing masses on the periodic table), and driving a car requires the complex process of simultaneously manipulating the steering wheel, gas pedal, and brakes, along with the simple process of recognizing what different traffic signs mean.

Because complex problems become simpler with experience, many of the effects of cognitive load theory disappear, or even reverse, as expertise develops. The expertise-reversal effect demonstrates that while problem solving is often ineffective for beginners compared to studying worked examples, this advice flips once students become more advanced. With the patterns of problem solving secured in mem- ory, students benefit more from practice than simply watching. Just as nobody could become a skilled painter without actually painting, mastery requires doing, not just observation. The worked-example effect has its strongest influence when the patterns of problem solv- ing are still unfamiliar. This is why, despite his advice to begin with copies, Da Vinci was a strong proponent of learning directly from na- ture as one’s artistic abilities developed. Eventually, copying must be replaced with original observations for creativity to flourish.

This tension between the strategies of learning that work best when beginning in a field and those that work better as experi- ence develops may also explain part of the tension in art education. Experienced artists, who benefit more from problem solving than from additional instruction, may incorrectly extrapolate the mental processes they use when creating new art with the methods that work best for teaching someone who lacks their extensive experi- ence. Psychologist Paul Kirschner calls this the fallacy of confusing epistemology, or how experts invent new ideas and knowledge, and pedagogy, or how we ought to teach people to master the techniques already known. Because the mind’s bottleneck is more constrained when learning new information than applying old information, problems can look trivial or excruciating depending on your past experience. Learning is the process of acquiring patterns in memory that help us cross that chasm.

Applications of Cognitive Load Theory

Cognitive load theory suggests a few steps we can take in order to learn new skills and subjects more efficiently.

Application #1: Seek Out Worked Examples

Whenever you’re facing a new subject of any complexity, look for resources that have a lot of problems with worked-out solutions. In the beginning, these can offer a way to rapidly assimilate the problem- solving patterns. As you progress, you can cover up the answers to use them as practice opportunities.

Application #2: Reorganize Confusing Materials

Avoid the split-attention effect by reorganizing materials so that min- imal mental manipulation is required. If you encounter a diagram that requires looking back and forth, recopy it so that the labels are right next to their referents. Comprehend formulas better by rewriting them with the plain-English meaning of each variable placed in context.

Application #3: Use the Power of Pretraining

Before embarking on a complex skill, see if it has any component parts that you’re likely to find difficult. If you can practice these components, committing them to memory, you’ll free up capacity for performing the skill later. Memorizing words in a new language with flash cards won’t solve the problems of speaking, but it will ease one thing you need to think about while doing so. Similarly, understanding how color mixes, light shifts to shadow, or the rules of perspective before you begin a new painting can help you focus on expressing a vision rather than getting tripped up by technical problems.

Application #4: Introduce Complexity Slowly

Since the working memory demands of a skill decrease with expe- rience, this provides a rationale for starting on simple problems and proceeding to more complicated ones. Video game designers use this brilliantly when they design tutorial levels that have a few of the game’s features, allowing players to use goal-free exploration to learn the me- chanics without laborious instruction. As you progress, introduce new complexities in a steady fashion.

Application #5: Put Craft Before Creativity

Originality is simply an exploration of an undervisited region of the problem space. There’s certainly a difference between technical virtu- osity and visionary creativity. Yet too often we put the two in tension, when they really are complementary. It is easier to see further when you have first mastered the techniques. It is only possible to bend the rules when you know which ones can be broken.

From Beginnings to Mastery

Much has changed since Da Vinci’s day. Photography and mechanical reproduction of artwork mean that the skill of meticulously representing reality is no longer so remarkable. The avant-garde of art has shifted toward concepts, further removed from the verisimilitude of the Renais- sance. It would be silly to suggest that all new artists should be trained in a style that flourished centuries ago. Art changes, and with it the techniques of great artists.

Yet, just as training regimens cannot remain static, it is import- ant not to throw out the principles that worked well. Whether the goal is to produce the moody, chiaroscuro portraits of the Renaissance, the airy alla prima landscapes of the Impressionists, or even the bold arrangements of abstract art, creating something beautiful requires not just originality, but the means and methods to transform vision into a concrete manifestation. Studying the methods of those who came before us is not an impediment to originality, but an inescapable ingre- dient. In the next chapter, we’ll look at how building that foundation is essential, not just for temporarily reducing cognitive load, but for motivation and long-term mastery.

—Jaya Bhattacharji Rose

Scott H. Young Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery HarperCollins Publishers, London, 2024. Pb. Pp.320 Rs 450