Join Scott Young, author of Get Better at Anything, as he discusses key strategies for mastering skills in the workplace. In this episode, Young introduces innovative approaches to fast-tracking learning in our technology-driven world. Listen in to discover tips on breaking free from old habits and adjusting to the challenges of today’s work environment.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Scott Young, bestselling author of Ultralearning and podcast host, has been publishing essays since 2006 to help people “learn and think better.” His work has been featured in major outlets like The New York Times and TEDx.
A TETRIS ANALOGY
In a modern world rich with technology, we have unprecedented access to more efficient ways of improving our skills and knowledge. Scott Young, our most recent guest, uses the classic game of Tetris to illustrate how unconventional techniques — like using a glove to flick the controller like strumming a guitar — allow players to perform faster than they would through traditional methods. It turns out that innovative strategies emerge because we can now learn from others more easily through platforms like the internet and live streaming, and this wealth of information accelerates our learning curve in ways we wouldn’t naturally discover on our own.
Young highlights that this principle extends far beyond gaming. “The speed at which we can innovate, the speed at which we can learn, really crucially depends on how easy it is to learn from other people,” he says. When knowledge is locked in the heads of a few, progress slows, but when shared widely, learning becomes faster and more effective. He emphasizes how environments that facilitate the transmission of knowledge help foster innovation and growth. The Tetris example, while niche, represents a broader truth about the power of shared learning in modern times.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Externalizing What Works
“I know a guy who was running a fairly large sort of remote team that was doing things like customer service and that kind of stuff. And one of the policies that he had was whenever anyone encountered a problem that had not been documented before, they had to turn on a screen recorder, show themselves doing it — annotating what they’re doing — and then upload it to this documentation, and this was like part of their job. So over time, this sort of repository ended up being like hundreds and hundreds of videos of every single kind of situation that you might face. […] This is just one example, but the difficulty in so many of our contexts is that if you don’t know how to do something, you have to go bug the person next to you and stop them from doing their job to get this information. [We need] the ability to externalize our knowledge and make resources for other people to learn from.”
Great vs. Good
“The amount of different ways you could approach a business problem, hiring decision, all of these things is enormous. There are way more possibilities of what you could do than you could even contemplate in your lifetime. So one of the things that Herbert Simon found when he analyzed people solving problems is they often do what they’re called ‘satisficing,’ which is to not pick the best solution or to exhaustively list out all the possibilities and go through it, but to pick something that is good enough, to pick something that, at that moment, fits the criteria and does an okay job. And if you look at real-world managers, […] this is what they’re doing all the time. They’re not letting great be the enemy of good.”
The Power of a Little Success
“It’s a basic truth that when we experience success, we are more motivated to do those things. And so when we have very little experience with something — you know, we’re a new trainee in a job — we don’t have a lot of confidence in what we’re doing. And we experience a lot of negative feedback, either a lot of frustration because we don’t know how to do what we’re doing or a lot of demotivating […] from-the-top-down negative feedback. The most typical result is demotivation. The most typical result is not, ‘Oh, well, now I’m inspired to work harder.’ It’s that I am going to just sort of tune out, or I’m not even going to try. And so what we need to do is build a base of success, build a base of confidence, so that people can achieve some things, and then once they achieve some things, and you build a little bit of confidence, then it’s time to move on. It’s time to raise the challenge level.”
Old Habits Die Hard
You can learn things about the world — ways of thinking about the world and ways of operating in your industry, tools for using and evaluating ideas — and you can get very comfortable with those. And that can often impede your progress in learning new things. I know there’s the old physicist joke that science precedes one funeral at a time. And it’s just because if you spend a lifetime investing in one way of looking at the world, and then it turns out that there’s another way of looking at it, or to use a more practical example, if you spend a lifetime performing your skill in one way, and then there’s a new way of doing it that comes around, a lot of those people are reluctant or have a difficult time making the transition because it often requires different skills. If you came of age in an analog domain, and then now all of a sudden they’re doing your job with a digital world, it can be difficult to make that transition. And so I think supporting reskilling is very important.”
Playing the Game
“The temptation every company has is to sort of metric-ify and gamify everything. You may end up [seeing] that those metrics actually end up being much less informative than they would be otherwise because people find ways to game them. They find ways to achieve the metric without achieving the reason that it was stated, so my philosophy is that we want to create tools for people that they can use for themselves to have their own improvement, but we want to be careful that the tool that we’re giving is not also something where we’re dangling the carrots and sticks out there so that they may, instead of using it for improving themselves, use it to distort whatever their performance is to reach the numbers.”
LEARN MORE
Grab a copy of Scott Young’s book, Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery, on Amazon or wherever books are sold.