Cal Newport - How to learn any hard skill

These are my notes from Cal Newport’s How to Learn Any Hard Skill (A System That Works). It’s an amazing episode and I recommend that you go watch it instead of reading my summary notes.

Notes

The common mental model that we have is that “the difficulty of what you know is a reflection of how smart you are”. I.e. the more difficult the things that you know, the smarter you are. But this model is wrong, as it doesn’t reflect how learning actually works. Most people are able to learn “complex” things, and most people can learn many things.

However, you are not able to learn everything as learning takes time and time is limited. We should shift away from the idea that the limitation for learning is brainpower, the limitation should instead be considered the time available or spent.

Knowledge is gained in small increments, think of it as climbing a long set of stairs, one step at a time. In order to climb each step we need deliberate practice, practice with carefully designed exercises that will push your understanding to the next level. Deliberate practice will feel uncomfortable as it will take you out of your comfort zone.

While learning you should not focus on how far away you are from the top, instead focus on what the next step is that you can take.

We should try to get good at at least one thing that is complicated and valuable in both our professional and personal life. Humans have the ability to ability to think, which is a key element of being human, we can do things that are complicated and can do them well. There’s something deeply satisfying about being able to do something that’s complicated really well.

Note that getting good at something that is complicated will take time. Knowledge and experience is accumulated gradually, and we need to go step by step. You can’t learn everything, pick a few things to get great at.