
Why Do Some People Learn Faster? - mikeleeorg
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/why-do-some-people-learn-faster-2/
======
tpatke
I think about Spolsky's post on programmer productivity quite often [1]. I
think the most interesting part of the post is when he says, "The mediocre
talent just _never_ hits the high notes that the top talent hits all the
time." Obviously, I wonder if I am a programmer who can hit the high notes
and, if not, what it will take to get there.

When I read a post like this, I try to apply it to making myself a better
programmer in the "high note" sense. Trouble is - it just doesn't apply (and I
am a huge fan of Dweck's work). This article is one for the masses - not
people who are trying to create the next Google. Motivation, hard work and an
ability to learn from mistakes are all necessary, but ultimately not
sufficient for our craft.

If I had to guess what the missing ingredient is, I would say creativity.

Heck - we are programmers. We get immediate feedback on our mistakes all day
long and anyone reading this post has most likely gotten really really good
and learning from those mistakes. ...but, how many of us are hitting those
high notes?

[1] <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html>

~~~
kevinalexbrown
EDIT: So I got a coke and thought about this a bit. I like your point, but I
feel like maybe the high-noters are high-noters precisely _because_ they're
ruthlessly self-critical and growth-minded. Ever see someone who was really
good at something cringe after what you thought was an amazing performance,
because they missed, e.g. the f6 in Mozart's Queen of the Night? They're
better (honest?) at seeing their mistakes, and they're better at addressing
them. Maybe that's the natural talent?

Aside from the tone, maybe, this article is not 'one for the masses.'

Jony Ive didn't just sit down and whip up the iPod, to use Spolsky's example.
We don't see the blood/sweat/tears that goes into it. From Ive:

 _One of the hallmarks of our team is this sense of looking to be wrong ...
It’s about being excited to be wrong because then you’ve discovered something
new._

Obviously Ive has the creative ingredient. And some are going to be
predisposed with talent. Michael Jordan may have had his famous "4am club"
where he hit the court every morning to just drill, but so did Scotty Pippen,
and he never hit the Jordan high note clutch performances that make my jaw
drop watching 20-year-old replays. So I see your point, that talent matters.
But the other way to look at it is that Jordan was just better at learning
from his mistakes in those 4am practices.

So no, this is not some pedestrian piece of feel-good soup. Great work, in
programming, design, anything, is about repeatedly pushing a boundary,
recognizing where you messed up, fixing it, and repeating that all over again.
The people who do this best are the people who believe that by iterating they
can get better. This works even as you get all the way up into the
stratosphere of a field.

[1]
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1367481/Appl...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1367481/Apples-
Jonathan-Ive-How-did-British-polytechnic-graduate-design-
genius.html#ixzz1nEKjLSAN)

~~~
pheaduch
What is this 4am club? I'm a big Jordan fan and I haven't heard about any of
this and a quick Google search comes up nothing about Jordan practicing at
4am.

~~~
argumentum
It was actually termed "breakfast club":

[http://www.maxpreps.com/news/WpxTIZzCckWkptFeAcuDrw/how-
mich...](http://www.maxpreps.com/news/WpxTIZzCckWkptFeAcuDrw/how-michael-
became-his-airness.htm)

Don't know if it was actually at 4AM or not.

~~~
literalusername
According to your link it was 7:30AM.

------
trustfundbaby
I wish I had happened on this article 10 years ago ... I was always very good
at school, so I picked up what I thought were bad habits. Reading this now,
it's clear that what I was doing was protecting myself from failure. When I'd
do badly on a test in a class that I thought I should do well in, I'd stop
taking the class seriously so that when I got a 'C' I could kid myself and say
"I did that and wasn't even really trying"

Oddly enough, I never made much of the fact that if I really wanted to do well
in a class (because I was in love with the subject teacher for example ... :D)
I could actually put the work in to get to the top of the class ... I just put
it down to being smart.

This had a lot of bad repercussions when I went to college. For the first time
in my life I was not only competing with a shitton of people just as smart as
me, but almost as many people who were WAAAAAY smarter. Trying really really
hard to only make B's was a huge blow to my psyche and I was very demoralized
and uninspired for a long time. It wasn't until I realized that not only did
it take hard work, but for me, inspiration or passion was necessary to truly
excel at something. That's when I realized that I just had to shun things I
really wasn't interested in and devote myself to things that I really wanted
to be good at.

Even nowadays, I still look at people in this field who I consider quasi
geniuses (DHH, Yehuda, Resig) and wonder if I can ever get to that level, and
whenever I doubt myself, I go back and read this very deeply inspiring article
from John Nunemaker [http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2010/01/12/i-have-no-
tale...](http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2010/01/12/i-have-no-talent/)

~~~
bgutierrez
All of the greatest under-achievers I've known were constantly told how smart
they were by people with the best intentions, and they had experiences similar
to yours.

------
wallflower
"Most people say it's easier to pick up languages when you're younger," says
David Green, of University College London, who specialises in bilingualism.

"But people can learn languages at any point in their lives. Being immersed in
a language is important. Personality is a contributing factor too - not being
able to tolerate feeling foolish from making inevitable errors will make
learning a new language a difficult process.

"The cult of the hyperpolyglot"

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17101370>

~~~
david927
David Green is wrong. It's easier to pick up languages when you're younger.
Noam Chomsky discovered that the brain is specifically geared to learn
languages around 3 to 6 years old. Kids at that age get the language in a way
that you'll never get after.

 _But people can learn languages at any point in their lives_

Of course. I learned German, from nothing to fluency, in my twenties; and the
same with Czech in my thirties. But if you ask me, for example, how a German
or Czech name _sounds_ , my answer won't match with native speakers. You can
get all the definitions, make no mistakes in the grammar, but you won't
_understand_ it at a deeper level. A language is way to express a culture, and
the culture is gigantic and ineffible compared to the language.

~~~
paulhauggis
"Kids at that age get the language in a way that you'll never get after."

This is just an excuse that will limit you. Yes, kids might learn at a faster
rate, but they also don't do anything else but learn that language for years.
Most people have busy lives which doesn't allow for this unless they
completely immerse themselves. As an adult, you also have the advantage of
understanding difficult concepts (because you've already learned them in your
native language), which speeds up the learning process.

" You can get all the definitions, make no mistakes in the grammar, but you
won't understand it at a deeper level. A language is way to express a culture,
and the culture is gigantic and ineffible compared to the language."

Then you don't really know those languages as well as you think. Part of
knowing the language is knowing the culture. This requires immersion,
studying, and discipline.

I've been studying Japanese for the past 5 years and I've started a couple of
meetup groups in my area for studying. What I've found is that 99% of the
people that try to learn a new language as an adult give up at some point.
Mostly when they get to any point of difficulty. You also have to be
disciplined enough to study it every single day.

Something else I've learned is that the similarities between starting a
business and learning a new language are actually very similar.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>This is just an excuse that will limit you.

Apoligies if I am making a strawman or unfairly characterizing you, but lately
I've been seeing a lot of "Get Motivated" stuff here and on reddit that is
completely false.

Sorry, but children do have the "language acquisition" device. I'm bilingual
and learned both my languages during those golden years. My memory as a child
is amazing, and I can name scene for scene the movies I watched once as a
child, yet I can barely tell you the plot of the movie I saw last month.
Childhood learning and the malleable brain really isn't something in dispute.
Immersion isn't remotely comparable.

My wife lived for 5 years in Russia and studied the language all through
college. She's no where near my childhood learned Greek which I speak maybe 5
or 6 times a year. Her Russian fades quickly too. If she's not using it, she's
losing it. Oh, she speaks 4 laugnages at a proper adult level too. She needs
to keep using all 4 or she will also lose them. She's no stranger to language
learning or immersion. My Greek is permanent, btw, no need to practice or
anything. Its forever mine.

There's just something really sad about how the motivation crowd has been co-
opted by the meathead sports metaphor crowd "GIVE 110%!!!!". There's science
and reality at work here. Yelling and overly positive platitudes aren't
helping. If anything its a disservice to the people who really are looking for
answers while trying to get motivated or trying to learn a second language.
Motivation and learning and hacking them is a lot more complex than just
willing yourself to make it happen. There's a fair bit of complexity here,
especially when people have unrealistic expectations and do not love the
process of learning and trying. Loving the process, being humble, asking for
advice, accepting the pain, accepting looking like an idiot, etc are far more
valuable to me than the whole "TRY HARDER!!!!" sports cliche.

~~~
aik
Due to past research it has become accepted fact that children learn languages
faster. However there has been a lot of research lately that has shown this to
be false. So sorry I don't believe this is simply a motivational tool (however
even so, belief that you innately don't have a particular ability often leads
to self-limiting behavior).

I agree though that a language learned at childhood more easily sticks with
you than one learned later in life. This makes sense for a number of reasons.
However this is a completely different topic than one's ability learn a
language.

Just curious -- how many years did you spend immersed in Greek? In addition,
speaking Greek 5-6 times a year is great. If you changed that to 0 times a
year, I can assure you that your ability to speak it would dissipate.

[http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128224.000-age-no-
ex...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128224.000-age-no-excuse-for-
failing-to-learn-a-new-language.html)

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/06/050615060545.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/06/050615060545.htm)

~~~
david927
That research hasn't yet made the grade. You'll constantly find articles that
state "some linguists" are doubting the Critical Period Hypothesis [1], just
as you'll find doubts for many hypothesis, but it's quite well accepted within
the linguistic field. And if you talk to people that have been deeply exposed
to language acquisition, like "drzaiusapelord" above (and ignore the spirited
Redditors who went to Japanese class a couple times), you'll find that it
holds. Language is fascinating and with immersion and other techniques can get
to 99%. But if you didn't hear it and speak it at 6, you'll _never_ get it
like a native speaker.

Here's a great example: I worked in Berlin for a Jewish woman who moved to
America when she was 5. She didn't speak any English, only German, at the
time. When she came back to Germany at 15, she had to learn German from
scratch (completely from scratch). She was 50 when I worked for her and her
German was flawless, but my German friends said that she occasionally made the
tiniest of mistakes which made it clear she wasn't a mother-tongue speaker.
She didn't make such mistakes in English.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Period_Hypothesis>

------
crusso
Really, this kind of research points to the folly of the "everyone gets a
trophy", "sheltering ego is most important in learning" school of thought. The
every-day evidence of that folly litters the corpse of the American public
education system.

Praise your kids when they do well. Point it out when they've made mistakes
(in a graceful way). Teach them that doing better next time is always within
their power if they apply themselves.

Most of all, let them know that you make mistakes but that you learn from your
own mistakes and are willing to work hard to do better. Be a good example of
coping with life and its difficulties, including the difficulties of
parenting.

~~~
ajross
No, that's just a straw man arguing for the opposite extreme. It's even better
established that consistent failure and lack of praise anticorrelates with
educational achievement. The point is balance and sanity, not policy flamage.

~~~
crusso
Speaking of straw men...

Did you read what I posted or make up something in your mind based upon your
preconceptions?

All I said was that praise should be deserved. When you disconnect someone's
mental model from reality, it has consequences.

~~~
ajross
When you start your post with a phrase like "folly" that "litters the corpse
of the American educational system", I think it's a little disingenuous to
claim that "all" you said was that praise should be deserved. You have an axe
to grind, and you picked up a stone from this article to do it. But the
article isn't about broad education policy, it's about very narrow findings in
psychology. So yes, your post looks to me like a poorly-informed, knee jerk
flame.

History, if you will, is littered with the corpses of people who thought they
knew exactly how to fix the american educational system (or whatever: pick
your policy obsession, it's all the same).

------
zanek
I totally agree with the points in the article. I actually have actively
pushed myself to learn from my own mistakes since I was around 22-23 yrs old.
For me, it was a natural, logical way to learn.

I looked at it like riding a bike. Almost noone says they cant ride a bike if
they make a mistake and fall. They try to adjust their balance better or think
about what caused them to fall. They key is that they get back on the bike.
However, in other areas of life, people dont think that what they are doing is
like riding a bike when it really is.

With that approach I was able to teach myself programming, linguistics, etc.
Its kind of awesome to read this article a decade or so afterwards.

------
espeed
This is a perfect example of what Alan Kay meant when he said, "A change in
perspective is worth 80 IQ points."

I had this epiphany three years ago, and it has been my manifesto ever since
(<http://jamesthornton.com/manifesto>).

~~~
gitah
Wow great read. I've been having similar thoughts lately and your manifesto
puts my thoughts in words perfectly.

My frustration is that I want to see things in another perspectives, but I
simply can't a lot of the time..

------
ericHosick
I agree that learning from mistakes is really important. I also think that
memorizing and rote learning are a detriment to being fast at learning. You
can't "get it" if you are memorizing.

If you have a firm grasp of something then you understand how to manipulate
the concept in different contexts. Adding a new idea allows you to simply
twist contexts to include the new knowledge and you've "learned" how to do
that new thing.

As things get more complex, so does the contexts and thus it gets harder to
"learn" if you've been doing rote learning all along. Rote learning is
memorizing a new idea in a specific context and there is no room for morphing
that context.

If you get good at morphing contexts to fit new ideas then you can also get
good at taking two different contexts, merging them at getting new concepts
out of it: this is the act of inventing.

------
tmh88j
While I do agree that learning from your mistakes is a huge part of education,
I think your interests are a close second. Generally, I'm intrigued by
something that others deem to be difficult. I scored better grades in all of
my engineering, math and science classes than my intro courses like
psychology, economics and so on which I attribute to being more interested in
science and thus being able to focus more.

For example, I was always very intrigued by calculus because most people talk
of how difficult it is. I wanted to know why it's so difficult, so the first
opportunity I had I took a calculus course. The subject itself wasn't
necessarily interesting, I wanted to know what the fuss was about.

------
silentscope
"Education is the wisdom wrung from failure."

I really couldn't disagree with this more. No doubt, failure is important in
learning. However, to be educated or have an education, at the end of the day,
you need to get something right.

Personally, I don't learn by failing fifty times and never succeeding. I don't
learn how to lose weight if I try fifty diets and never lose a pound. I don't
learn how to talk to a girl if I speak with a dozen of them and get shot down
every time. I don't learn how to rockclimb by falling off the rock and never
gaining elevation.

That is negative re-enforcement. I have learned what not to do--the opposite
of what I set out to accomplish. Education is progressive. I learn by failing
until I succeed, if only a little bit. Then I go back and try to succeed even
more. That's the hard part, not calling it quits. Finding inspiration and
success in the smallest scraps of result.

Just don't sell education or yourself short.

~~~
ars
You so completely missed the point that I wonder if you actually read it.

You have to learn FROM the mistake. Learn what you did wrong, and don't do
that again.

Simply repeating your mistakes does nothing.

Can you really try 50 diets and not know what doesn't work in a diet? Don't
repeat the same mistake in each diet - that's pointless.

~~~
silentscope
I suppose my point is: how do you know what's a mistake until something works
AND doesn't work? Point counterpoint, right?

------
fuzzythinker
Very similar to "The secret to Raising Smart Kids" from Scientifc America in
2007, bookmarked, but seems behind a pay wall now:
[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-
secret-...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-
raising-smart-kids)

------
jakesandlund
I know it has been mentioned before about this same study, but I can't
remember where: what do you do when your kids are finding the work too easy?
Praise them for their effort? That seems like it could backfire if they think
they can get by in life with hardly any struggle, while still being
complimented for their labor. Obviously, you could give them something
challenging to learn, but what about when they're in school with kids that
have a wide spread of natural talent? They will probably get good grades and
be praised by their teachers for their intelligence, meanwhile getting bored
of the same material over and over again. This seems to suggest the need for
more individualized teaching, either by the parent, or by a teacher of some
"gifted" class.

------
dacilselig
Having a Bsc in psychology, I can remember that this was one of those concepts
that I picked up from my classrooms and have used for myself. I believe that
you could expand on this and say something similar about your athletic
abilities. Being from Canada, I've played a lot of hockey and would be told
that I was quite good. Having that thought in my head stagnated my ability as
a player. It would be mean that when I had a bad game, I would question put
blame on other factors and not myself. After reading this article, it made me
realize that my self-perception about being a good hockey player was not a
good way of seeing myself. After having a bad game, I shouldn't feel bad but
rather I focus on finding a way to improve my weaknesses.

------
orbitingpluto
Why do I sometimes learn faster?

1.) When I've had a decent night's sleep. 2.) When I've made efforts taken to
manage stress. 3.) Coffee!!!! (Dyn-a-mit-eh!) 4.) When I'm just in interested
in why I made a mistake. 5.) Active presence of mind that I should be focusing
on the task at hand. 6.) When I'm interested in the material. 7.) When I don't
give a damn how about smart or dumb I might think I am. 8.) Removal of any
negative influences at the moment. (PHB)

And most importantly,

9.) When I've exercised that same day.

------
narrator
Memory and learning is not just something that magically happens, there's a
lot of electro-chemical machinery underlying all of it that is greatly
influenced by gene variation and other factors:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation>

------
shawndumas
Fixed mindset -- “You have a certain amount of intelligence and cannot do much
to change it.”

Growth mindset -- “[W]e can get better at almost anything, provided we invest
the necessary time and energy.”

A fixed mindset and a growth mindset are _not_ mutually exclusive beliefs.

As I see it there are three dependent factors in accomplishing a complex task:

1.) intelligence -- raw computational power (impacted _minimally_ by
sleep/diet/use)

2.) knowledge -- data stored regarding a given task (impacted _immensely_ by
attention/research/exposure)

3.) wisdom -- the application of 1 on 2 (impacted greatly by
experience/composure/analysis)

Knowledge, and to a lesser extent wisdom, can come as a result of investing
time and energy. Wisdom is an amplifier of intelligence and knowledge; it can
produce an order of magnitude increase in efficacy with very little change in
either of the other two.

Both can be true...

------
wtvanhest
I'm going to apply this to my management style and make sure I praise people
for working hard, trying hard, but not being smart, or naturally good at
anything. They know they are good at stuff naturally, but for the team to be
most effective, the smartest people need to work the hardest.

------
tintin
Isn't this all about interest? When you are interested in a subject you are
more likely to try again and learn from your mistakes. People with an almost
unhealthy interest in a subject (people with Asperger for example; they think
Newton had this) are the brilliant people on the subject.

~~~
crusso
What does interest have to do with the article and the experiments performed?

Seems to me that the performance of the test subject depended upon the type of
praise given, not the interest of the subjects (which would have been
consistently random across test groups)

------
netmau5
It's great to see a formalized study validate some of my long-held beliefs.
For me, the biggest drawback of being self-critical has been "what if I draw
the wrong conclusion from this mistake?" Some people call it tenacity: to try
again and again after failure. But I think it's paranoia. The thought that I
learned and will now stand-by something completely wrong due to a flaw in
reasoning is a frightening path towards ignorance.

------
joering2
hope its not too much offtopic, but if I had children right now, i would
definitely use my time differently to teach them things today than 20 years
ago. in schools they still _mostly_ teach you to remember useless stuff (no, I
am not talking about basics of history) instead of teaching you how to get
necessary information, analyze it and get to conclusions. its not a miracle to
anyone living in the age of internet that most information you need could be
found on internet in less than 30 seconds (you dont need to pack it all inside
your brain). ergo i would teach my children fast-reading (real fast) so they
can analyze data quickly, and would teach them how to analyze facts and put
them together to get to solid probative conclusions. also, how to do basic PI
work :) to find data you looking for by assembling big puzzle from different
places of small chunks over the net.

------
horsehead
This seems really related to the post from yesterday about how the one fellow
learned from his daughter not to be afraid to fail (or maybe that was earlier
today?).

