[CTQ Smartcast] How to Become A Learning Machine? With Tom Vanderbilt

Tom Vanderbilt is an American journalist, blogger and author. Apart from writing for publications like The Financial Times, Wired, Slate and New York Times Magazine, he has authored several books like Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America, Traffic and Beginners, a book that goes deeply into learning.

In this Smartcast, hosted by CTQ co-founder BV Harish Kumar, Tom spoke about the mindset required to become a good learner and what roles curiosity, feedback, and mentoring play in the learning process. If you are a leader looking for some actionable tips on how to build a continuous learning organization, you will find this episode immensely useful.

 
 

Prefer an audio version of the Smartcast? Listen below.

 
 
 

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(Read the shownotes below or skip to the transcript)

SOME OF THE THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT

  • Tom’s version of learning.

  • A child’s approach vs an adult’s approach to learning.

  • Why is having a correct mindset important for the learning process?

  • The role of curiosity in becoming a learning machine.

  • How to manifest your curiosity?

  • Hacks to manage information and knowledge.

  • Skills that can help adults to improve their learning process.

  • The role of feedback and mentoring in learning.

  • What role can peers play in your learning journey?

  • Meta journeys of learning.

  • Learning as a social activity.

  • Advice to leaders on how to encourage learning in organizations.

PLUS

  • Future relevance of schools and colleges, non-fiction books and games.

AND

  • Tom’s experience of playing Fortnite.

LINKS TO BOOKS, PEOPLE, PLATFORMS, METHODS AND ARTICLES MENTIONED IN THE SMARTCAST

BOOKS

PEOPLE

ARTICLES

SYSTEMS AND METHODS

PLATFORMS AND APPS

MINISERIES

OTHERS

If you enjoyed this Smartcast, you will also like How To Be Future-Relevant In A Shape-Shifting World? With Abhijit Bhaduri

TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE

00:00:00

Harish: Tom Vanderbilt is an American journalist, blogger and author. He has written for publications like The Financial Times, Wired, Slate, New York Times Magazine, among others. Tom has written great books like Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America, and Traffic. His latest book Beginners is about Tom's year of learning, inspired by his young daughter's insatiable need to know how to do almost everything, Tom set out on this journey purely for the sake of learning. He aims to learn five skills, choosing them for a difficulty to master and their lack of marketability - chess, singing, surfing, drawing and juggling. We spoke to Tom about the mindset required to become a good learner, what we can learn from how children learn the role of curiosity, feedback, and mentoring in learning. Tom also gave some actionable tips for leaders who want to build a continuous learning organization. So go and listen to this insightful discussion, as we pick Tom's brains about how to become a learning machine.

00:01:28

Harish: Yeah, hi, welcome, Tom. Welcome to the CTQ Smartcast.

00:01:32

Tom: Thank you. Harish. Great to be here.

00:01:33

Harish: Yeah, thanks. So let me put you in the deep end right off the bat. Right. So what do you know about learning that not many other people know?

00:01:46

Tom: Well, hopefully, something but let's see. I mean, one thing that struck me working on this book and trying to learn the things I was trying to learn. Early on a very common concept that everyone sort of knows or thinks they know, which is the learning curve. And, you know, we always hear this expression, oh, there was such a steep learning curve. And I think we take this to mean that something was very difficult to learn. But at the risk of being sort of academic and pedantic here, learning curve, the actual phrase, which comes from the world of psychology, refers to, if you had sort of an x-y axis, you know, time on one side, progress on the other. So a steep learning curve means that you're actually making a lot of progress in your learning very early on, sometimes at a very sharp upward rate. So, in fact, this is something that should be celebrated, not feared, the idea of a steep learning curve. And it was something that I was trying to learn a number of skills in my life. And I found that in all of these things, the progress was really quite remarkable, in the very beginning stage. It's not that it didn't become much harder as I went on. But this almost created sort of an intoxicating feeling to me in which I was really sort of emboldened. And I think this is one of the great things about being a beginner, it's a word that a lot of us as adults associate, in a sort of fearful way. But, you know, humans as essentially learning machines throughout their lives have this amazing capacity to adapt, and to learn something, we could get up and running pretty quickly in a given skill, not that it's going to come equally fast for every person, or that some skills won't be harder than others. But so that's just one concept that I ended up thinking differently about and I almost used it as sort of a motivational tool when I'm thinking about something.

00:03:56  

Harish: Right. Yeah. So I think that is an underrated aspect of learning that we, at least we as adults, sometimes, either just don't give enough attention to, at times, I guess. So coming back to this thing about great learners, children are great learners, we all know that, you know, it's, it's almost assumed that yeah, if you are a child, you're a great learner. I wanted to bring back what you just said for the earlier question, as well, right? So, children are great learners, because they're also trying to learn a lot of new things. They are novices in almost everything, right, which is why the learning curve is much steeper for them. They're also getting excited about learning new things. They're actually happy about learning new things, right? They need to probably learn to just survive, from walking to expressing the need to be fed, and all these things. They have an innate desire to learn. What changes when they become adults?

00:05:01  

Tom: Good question. Yeah, I mean, as you mentioned, survival is not to be underestimated as a learning motivation. I mean, this is the thing, you know, children are strongly motivated to learn. Not even out of any sense of motivation, but like you say, just to function in the world. And this is something, by the time we reach our adult years, we've pretty much taken care of all those fundamental tasks, so nothing is going to seem as urgent as walking, talking. So it's going to be hard for the adult to summon that kind of intensity, and if you weren't sort of dropped, you know, a foreign country, you know, it sounds like a spy movie or something and just dumped on the street and given $100, and you have to survive, you know, you'll probably learn that language much more quickly than if you were sitting in the comfort of your home doing Duolingo at your leisure. So the motivation aspect is very strong there. But a lot of other things change. One thing that changes is the learning environment, children just have the most supportive learning environment possible in general. Learning institutions, teachers, mentors, parents, who basically applaud anything the child does, the merest hint of progress is taken by most parents, including myself as a major achievement, even failure is perceived in a less than critical manner, because oh, there, it's just a child, they'll get better, of course, they're going to make mistakes. On the question of failure, this is an interesting point. I think that I, for example, in the book, spent some time at New York University, there's something there called the Infant Action Lab. And what they do is study the process of infants learning to move and to walk and crawl. And they basically record infants for hours on end. And they found that the number of falls that happened to a learning to walk infant in an hour is astronomical, it could be upwards of 70 times per hour. So you know, and luckily, they're built to sort of handle this in a way they're sort of soft and cushioned, and their bodies are not rigid. But in the average adult, if you went to some sort of, I'm not sure, like a tennis lesson, and you were trying to serve a tennis ball and you failed 70 times in the first hour, it would be very hard for that adult learner to continue on. I mean, what else changes in the adult. I mean, we should point out that definitely the cognitive firepower, the cognitive architecture changes, I mean, children, it's been called, the less is more hypothesis. Because children actually have so little that's currently occupying their brain, the absorption of new material, new information, new skills is that much easier. whereas adults, when I began this book, I was in my mid 40s, and I had already learned a lot of things, a lot of information. So just to take language, again, if I went to try to learn a new language, say, Croatian, you know, number one, I would have the grammatical structure of English firmly entrenched in my mind. And that would be an obstacle that would get in the way. So it's true with many other things, when learning to sing, I had to overcome a lot of my habits from speech, because those are two contradictory acts, and they can kind of get in the way of one another. So children have this immense openness and kind of unformed aspect that allows them to just bring this in. Another thing I would say is they don't really have a conscious notion of being a beginner. I mean, the concept, novice, beginner doesn't mean anything to them, they're just trying to take something on, whereas adults, the word beginner, as I sort of mentioned before, is very loaded, it's not a state that we want to be in, it's a word that we don't look upon kindly. And it's just, it's not something that we're accustomed to very often. So we want to sort of move through that or avoid that stage. The problem with avoiding that stage is that it can actually short circuit the learning process. So in some ways, you have to embrace this beginner. So that I think, sums up some of the things that just one last point is that children really have nothing, but time. I mean, they have no job. Their job is to simply learn. Adults are very busy. I started playing chess for the book I would love to become a chess grandmaster but I am not Magnus Carlsen or Vishy Anand, you know, I don't have 12-13 hours a day to sit in my room as a kid and you know, read through chess books and do chess puzzles and play games, I just don't have that time. So that's another thing that happens, we lose that immense amount of time. So people often focus too much on how children's brains are sort of more nimble and faster than adults. But there's all sorts of contextual factors that matter as well, that if adults had some of the same time positive environment as children, they would probably make quite a bit of a game.

00:10:30

Harish: Right. Yeah, I think that's a very important point, Tom. In fact, I was thinking about this, when you made the comparison between walking and tennis, right, so if you were to go and play tennis and start trying to serve, and you actually fail 70 times in an hour, even though the coach is actually giving you a very good feedback, you as the player would not want to be in that position, right? Because you somehow assume that you have just because we are bigger in size, and you know some things outside the court, well, you should be able to learn how to serve much, much faster than what a so-called novice or a beginner should take. And I think it is that mindset that you need to have which, as you say, the child just doesn't even know that there is this concept of a mindset of a beginner's mindset. Right? So do you think that is, I mean, way more important than the learning environment? Or just the cognitive ability? As you contrast a child and an adult?

00:11:41

Tom: Yeah, I think so. I think mindset is huge. I mean, number one, because often when I was failing in certain tasks, it was my brain sort of getting in the way, it wasn't my actual physical ability. And, and often, part of that was a lack of confidence, or a pressure I was putting upon myself, because I thought, you know, oh, my God, I'm 50 years old, I should be able to do this. So the great thing about taking on that beginner mindset is that it frees you from that pressure. And pressure is very counterproductive to learning. I heard this time and again, from coaches I was dealing with, that adults just simply put too much pressure upon themselves, they treat the exercise with nothing but pain and struggle as something to get through as quickly as possible. Whereas if we could sort of bring some joy to it, and use that concept of beginner-dom to allow ourselves time and freedom for exploration, and to grant ourselves the ability and permission to make mistakes, knowing that without mistakes, there is no learning. I mean, look, mistakes are a key part of learning. And I should say, when you were talking about tennis and feedback, I mean, the only problem is if you fail 70 times an hour, and you'll never succeed once. The only problem with that is that feedback actually seems to work better when it's positive feedback. So when you're told why you did something correctly, rather than sort of pointing out why you did something wrong, hopefully, you will get something almost a bit right so that the instructor can give you a bit of positive feedback. But that's just, yeah, so I think mindset is huge. And you need to go into these learning exercises, with a sense of humility. And the concept is called intellectual humility in psychology, and it means admitting to yourself and to others that you have something to learn, which is, it sounds sort of ridiculous, but this is often a stumbling block. We don't think we need to learn something, or that we can't teach ourselves or that we should have already learned that. So all those kind of fall under the concept of mindset, I think.

00:13:58

Harish: Right. And again, extending the idea of intellectual humility to curiosity, right? And I mean, if I look at your example, I see you being curious about topics as wide-ranging as football to the Cold War to traffic. So what is the role of curiosity in this the holy grail of becoming a learning machine?

00:14:24

Tom: Yeah, curiosity is huge. Sometimes an editor for a magazine will call me up and say, we'd like to write this piece about topic X. And they'll say, you know, how much do you know about that? And I have to admit that if I always told the truth and said, Oh, you know, I really have never heard of that. I know nothing about that. I would not get any work. So you know, part of being a journalist is having that sort of gumption, the sense that you're going to take the risk, and that you will be able to learn enough about that subject in a short time. And again, I'm not supposed to be an expert. In writing a story, I'm simply supposed to talk to the experts and tell their story and synthesize information. So it kind of is the same with this book that I wrote. If I thought, all these things I took on singing, drawing, surfing, there was nothing in my previous life that would indicate that I would be good at any of those things. I was never encouraged. Oh, I bet you have a wonderful singing voice, you should do that. So if I listened to my own negative self-talk in that regard, the book would not have happened. So I think there's this key thing where curiosity often involves, you know, opening a door and stepping beyond this threshold into this new region. But again, you have to give yourself that beginner flexibility that it might take you a while to really understand the field, to understand what's important about it, what the resources are. But yeah, I mean, and I think the act of skill learning itself tends to breed at least it did for me. Even more curiosity. I mean, this was something that surfing, for example, became not just a motor skill, not just a fun way to spend an afternoon at the beach. But, you know, because I was exposed to this new part of my world, this ocean that lay right at the foot of one of the world's largest cities, New York City. You know, I suddenly started seeing the world in a new way and asking questions, I hadn't really asked about topics like oceanography, or the migratory patterns of seabirds. Things that I might not have had occasion to ask. So, this sort of the act of putting your body in the world in a new way actually helped open my mind in new ways also.

00:17:05

Harish: Right. And I think one thing that I've noticed with at least some people, which I've heard, is they do get these questions, like you said things around oceanography or migratory patterns of birds, but then they leave it there. They don't take that next step of actually finding out more about that topic, answering the question that they had, and then the next stage of actually manifesting that curiosity as well. It could be writing a note, an article, a blog post, or just sending an email to their teammates, things like that. So what do you do as a manifestation of your curiosity, which is not about writing that article, or writing that book, but you have these questions in your mind? How do you deal with those questions? What happens next?

00:17:56

Tom: I guess for me, it's mostly a research process whether that's the internet. Or before the internet, I used to spend a lot of time in places like the New York Public Library, the main branch, or finding someone who actually knows something about that topic. And just in some sense, beginning a conversation, it always doesn't directly lead to work from some article, sometimes it's just an itch I need to scratch and but I have all sorts of lists, where I've written things down of things I would like to look into, and certainly I haven't done all of that. You know, I guess, it's sort of a self selecting process, the things that strike you at the moment or seem most interesting, or most importantly, those are the things you focus on. But I think, again, it's just a matter of opening that door and knowing that there are in this day and age to not follow your curiosity, when there are so many resources available the world over, I mean, you have access to every library in the world, digitally access to almost every printed book in history. So it's just friction free, really. So it's a matter of just I guess, listening to your own voice and, and maybe not giving yourself an expectation that, oh, I'm not going to do that, because it might not be important to me, or we don't necessarily watch a movie or a television show, because we know how it's going to end or we know it's it's going to be good. We sometimes just process the exploration and I think learning and curiosity should function the same way.

00:19:41

Harish: And any secret hacks that you use in terms of keeping notes and how you do your information management, knowledge management?

00:19:52

Tom: I know that there are people that fetishize this but my process is very, I should say poor and perhaps a bit old school, I have a sort of a large Moleskine notebook that I just write lists. It's not a nice bullet journal or anything. It's just a very simple thing. And I've tried to, I have something called Bear, an app on my computer, which is sort of a note-taking thing, which I do use to some extent. But a lot of my information is just Microsoft Word, a data dump that I then do a lot of Ctrl F, searching for that fragment of what I had. So that’s it. I'm sure it could be better. I would love to hear any tips from you or others about how to get better at that.

00:20:43

Harish: Yeah, we've been experimenting a lot with some of these spaced repetition apps, like Anki, and Readwise, which sort of keeps surfacing some of these ideas from time to time. And yeah, some of these read-later apps like Pocket, is something which we found very useful. But yeah, traditional note-taking, I think, is the best way. We've been trying to do some of that in the Cornell method of note-taking and stuff like that. You know, hitting someone side of the page and all of that. We try to keep experimenting with these things. Some of them stick, some of them are like fads. So the bullet journal never worked for me or my co-founder, Ramanand.

00:21:32

Tom: Right. It's funny what you say about manifesting, it strikes me that, you know, for me, the mere act of holding pen to paper, actually seems like a form of manifestation. And I know, there's been research about this, but just that act of writing something down. There's a great advertising slogan by a company called I think Field Notes. And they said, I'm not writing it down. So I'll remember it later. I'm writing it down. So I remember it now. I mean, there's something about the way we encode memory more strongly through that act of actually writing and doing that little bit of physical labor. And it to me, it reminds me the same thing of I'm admittedly a devotee of print media and books, and I have read ebooks, but I feel like there's just a more tangible relationship with the word on the printed page that to my mind, I have better memory retention of that material. It seems less ephemeral. And, again, there's been some research on this. But anyway, that's just my own personal proclivity.

00:22:45

Harish: Yeah. So before we go forward to the next question, I actually had a trivia quiz question for you. You know, based on all the stuff that I've read about you, and we love our quizzing. So we thought I will not let you go without at least one quiz question. Right. So here's the quiz question. So, again, you might be knowing this, but definitely this is related to your work. So what did John F Kennedy ask his head of press to do just before he signed the order placing an embargo on trade with Cuba? He asked him for something very specific to be done for him.

00:23:32

Tom: I’m guessing something like many boxes of Cuban cigars, or bottles of rum brands.

00:23:41

Harish: Perfect answer. He actually asked to get 1000 cigars. And as soon as he got them, he then went and signed.

00:23:51

Tom: I have not heard that story before. It's a great story. But I just used intuition. Right.

00:23:58

Harish: Very well worked out, very well worked out in that case. So yeah, I mean, I again, I was just fascinated by the breadth of topics that you have covered. And I thought since you've done so much work on the Cold War as well. Let me throw this quiz question at you. So yeah, let's move to the next question. Not a trivia quiz question. But do you think there are some types of skills that are more amenable for adults to pick up and think of as corporate professionals? Are the skills that are more amenable for learning? Because, you know, they say there are some skills that have this wicked learning environment, whereas in some of this, feedback, which is quite obvious. What's your take on it?

00:24:48

Tom: Yeah. It's a great question. I'm trying to think of some examples here. The one advantage adults do have, of course, is an entire history of learning things. So we have all these meta structures on how to learn, we are in theory stronger than a child who takes every new thing, as they see it, they don't necessarily have a methodology. So the more complex something becomes, I could see where the adult would have that advantage. And if you at the game of chess, for example, your children, such as my daughter are often better in the beginning stages that at just pure calculating sort of power and let's say pattern recognition, they have this nimble brain, but what they don't necessarily have is the sort of patience and for the long game, and these concepts of strategy, and deeper questions, such as human psychology of how your opponent is acting. That's sort of the stuff that comes into place in a game like poker, but which also has its place in chess, at least psychologically. So a player might hit a certain period of maturation where they're certainly very good for young players. In fact, there's a 12 year old Grandmaster in the state of New Jersey now, but you see the world champions in professional sports, in their 20s, going into the 30s, this period of maturation. So I would think when it comes to just raw skill acquisition, younger children do have that advantage, but when it's a more complex, wider-ranging set of things that need to come into play, I think adults can have a strength there.

00:26:48

Harish: And what do you think, is the role of feedback and mentoring in learning? And here again, I'm talking more from the perspective of adults, right? And does it change depending on what you're trying to learn, the level of expertise you're aiming for. So are you just trying to understand the basics of chess or tennis? Or do you want to, you know, really, reach the ATP tour-level?

00:27:13

Tom: Yeah, feedback is very important, obviously. And it's very important as you suggested as to when it's delivered, how it's delivered, by whom it's delivered, and what is actually delivered. And I think, you know, one thing I encountered in my learning process in various skills was that it was often desirable to be around other beginners or other people of mixed talent, but not outright, super proficient like the instructor. I mean, most instructors if you're going to teach something, you know, most people are proficient at that level. And the problem is that often they are so far from where you are in your learning journey, that it becomes hard for them to connect the dots and put themselves back in your shoes. And in some ways, the novice and the master are kind of identical, at different ends of the spectrum. I mean, the novice knows nothing about the skill, but the master sort of knows everything, but he's forgotten what it's like to know nothing. So they're both operating in these states of ignorance, in a sense. So, I found that even with good teachers, it was still great to have other students around, because I would often sometimes directly learn from them, they would sort of give me advice, I was in a drawing class, and we would walk by and say, oh, your shading might be improved if you use this pencil, something like that. But I could also see a range of skills that was closer to my own. And it gave me a sense of how I might get to that next level. Whereas if I take a drawing class with, let's say, the modern-day DaVinci, whoever that may be, it's going to be hard for me to exactly figure out what he's doing, because he has gone through so many stages. So, but yeah, I mean, obviously, I received a lot of feedback over the course of learning. There's two things that feedback can do: it can sort of correct your technique, which is important, but it also provides motivation. And so I think an excessively negative feedback, it just becomes self-defeating I think and you start to wonder, why should I even go on? So I think feedback, as much as it has that correcting possibility needs to be, needs to come with this idea that, you know, we're trying to push the person along, not push them back.

00:29:38

Harish: What is the role of mentoring for adults while learning and am I correct in saying that when you're talking about feedback, the mentor doesn't necessarily have to be this, you know, expert who is a mentor, but even a peer, just somebody who's slightly ahead of you on the curve is also to be seen as a mentor?

00:30:00

Tom: Absolutely, yeah, I mean, there's this concept of the community of learning where something like choir. I belonged to a choir, it was a range of people and a range of skills. And I sort of was learning by doing, you know, I was taking vocal lessons on the side, which was sort of the raw pedagogical material. But then I was trying to put that into practice, and not put into practice in my own sort of sterile environment at home to myself, but I was doing it where it counted, like we had to produce a material to perform in front of a live audience. So there was not only a very strong motivational component, but I could sense that there was a reason for what I was learning and that sort of made it more tangible. And made it sort of clicked a little bit more. And I guess what I was going to say about feedback before, another issue that comes up a lot nowadays, with the absolute proliferation of online learning, you know, there are, all these things I did in the book with possible exception of surfing is a little bit hard, I could have really learned almost exclusively online or at least picked up quite a bit of material. And so I had nothing but praise for YouTube, Coursera, and Khan Academy and Duolingo, and all these places, but there comes a point where, for certain activities, some of these more wicked environmental skills that you mentioned are just learning by yourself in the absence of feedback. Playing guitar, you can mimic someone's guitar playing on YouTube and become a pretty effective guitar player. A pretty effective mimic, I mean, there may be some higher skills at which you're going to have to sort of interface with an actual coach or mentor to understand some of the nuance. And then there are other skills, like, let's say, a tennis serve, where you really need to have someone at some point watching you serve, because you can't watch yourself, and you need that feedback to be actionable and from an external source. So you can watch someone serve a tennis ball 1000 times on YouTube, and I doubt that you'll actually learn how to serve a tennis ball. I mean, there's definitely something where watching something helps us to enact the actual motor skill, but to really sort of pick it up, this is where feedback becomes important, and it's with certain skills, that it's that much more important. In certain, you know, the game of chess, computerized engines have really stepped in to allow a lot of this sort of auto feedback through essentially AI. So there are a lot of great resources in that regard. But for me, there were still a lot of real in-person teachers, coaches, mentors. And just one last point, even as I was still a fledgling, beginner novice and some of these skills, I myself was already beginning to teach other people who knew even less than I did. And that, of course, is just a completely powerful way to, you know, this sort of virtuous cycle of that. I don't even really fully understand the mechanism at work, but just cementing and growing your own knowledge by having to explain it to someone else. And then they may ask questions of what you're asking or telling them. And that may make you think about the thing in a new light as well. So I think in medical school, they have an expression, ‘see one, do one, teach one’, and that sort of refers to this thing. So just a couple of months ago, for example, my daughter was asked to do a drawing for a school. So she drew this picture of our cat from a photograph. And then she showed it to me, and she was feeling upset about it, that it wasn't as good as she wanted. So I, without wanting to actually do the drawing myself. I tried to teach her some things. And it felt very satisfying, because I was able to do something with this knowledge that I had acquired myself, it gave me a certain sense of competence and confidence. And I could sort of feel something clicking as I did like oh, this is how this works. And it was through that teaching process.

00:34:27

Harish: Right. Yeah. I think that that's fascinating. I think it's very important to think about what all is required to be proficient in the skill that you are trying to learn. For example, we have Olympians who have learned throwing a javelin just by watching YouTube videos, but if you look at it, the environment is not very wicked, right? It's not the same as what you will need to master by serving in tennis, which is going to be very different because you have to master different ways of serving based on the surface, based on your opponent's strategy, position in the game. But it's not that we can, it's not going to change that much for a javelin throw, you're always going to just go max out, right?

00:35:22

Tom: Yeah, I mean, and for example, I always go back to surfing, because this is a very difficult sport until you're actually on that board, in the ocean, on those waves. And I should point out that no two waves are the same, waves are always changing, oceans are always changing. So there's no sense watching a video of someone surfing to what is actually involved in that. So you really need to put your body through the process and oftentimes even my coach was unsure of what feedback to give me because the environment is so complex, that he wasn't sure how I could have actually done something any better than I did. So it was just sort of like, throw your hands up. Luckily, not everything is like that. And there's usually a more, much more clear path. But making mistakes is important for learning, it's sort of an essential process. But I think one of the great things about being amongst other students is that seeing people make mistakes is a very instructive way to learn. And you can sort of work out in your own brain, how they could have avoided what happened to them, or just in terms of motivation, like, oh, I didn't do that, and I feel better. But if you're always working with an expert level performer, they don't tend to make mistakes, or they figure out how to correct their mistakes instantly. So you never see this process that's so important. Right.

00:36:55

Harish: Coming back to your book, when you started your learning journey. Did you have any tripwires in mind that if I'm not able to cross this level, I will probably not write about this or pick up another skill? I will give myself some more time, or you knew that whatever be the proficiency level you achieve, just documenting the journey is a good book idea or book project?

00:37:25

Tom: Yeah, it's a great question. I tried not to have goals ahead of time that were too rigid. Because I mean, number one, I didn't really know what would even be required. I'm not even sure I knew what goals to set because I didn't really know enough about the skill itself and what was reasonable, what was practicable, what was achievable. And I think that that's constructive in the end, because while achieving goals is greatly rewarding, not achieving goals is perhaps, 2x as demoralizing. So I kept my goals very small, and really tried to make learning itself the goal. Whatever progress I could walk away with, you know, it would still be a process of growth, which I thought was important. And also, one thing to think about with learning as an adult skill, or even knowledge that once you go down that path, often you're already kind of just learning a little bit begins to separate you from, you know, 98% of the population. I mean, to do something like juggling, I started with one ball. I did two balls. I played three balls. I did four balls, I got sort of stuck on you talking about tripwires. I was stuck and still cannot do five which is actually a very difficult skill, it takes a year of dedicated, deliberate practice. So I'm trying not to view it as a great failure. And I take comfort in the fact that people like you know, famous mathematicians, or scientists like Richard Feynman, who were interested in juggling also did not do five balls. So there are people that can juggle 11 balls, and I also chose skills that I had a sense that I was genuinely interested in and that I would enjoy even sort of failing at or even being sort of mediocre at, I would still enjoy it and I would still find something to take away from that. So there were some things I thought about at the beginning, I wondered, I was always a terrible math student, for example. So I thought well, it would be really really good to know statistics for my job but I was in the back of my head I was worried that I had all those teenage feelings coming out again that maybe I'm going to be really bad at math again. And this is going to be nothing but frustration. And I'll get stuck, I'll implode so I walked away for that reason. And also because I wanted to make it purely sort of a pleasure project and not things that would actually directly affect me in my job, not that there's obviously anything wrong with improving one's skills for one's career, but that would be a separate project for me.

00:40:17

Harish: Right. And in the process of writing the book did you also do a lot of research on things like deliberate practice, Erikson's work around that, the idea of flow, or you mentioned Feynman method of learning where you actually learn something by trying to explain it to someone things like spaced repetition, where these things that you already knew, or did you do deliberate research before embarking on this project?

00:40:48

Tom: Yeah, I mean, some of them I was vaguely aware of, but I definitely did do further research, if only to hopefully give myself a leg up. And in some cases, I did profit from these things. In some cases, it's a bit like, you know what food you're supposed to eat that provides the most nutrition. You know, I should always eat this every day. But there were days I was lazy. And I just wanted pizza. So, the point being that, I know, for example, that the benefits of spaced repetition, and in doing a game like chess and trying to get better at chess, I use things like Chessable, which is an app built around this very idea you, it gives you lessons and sort of revisits what you've already learned, at certain discrete moments in time, to when it's most productive for the learner. So I tried to do those things, but also, I found myself, you know, it's sort of easier in some ways, and more fun to simply play many games of chess, especially something like blitz chess, which you can squeeze in during your lunch hour at work. However, as fun as that is, that is not necessarily deliberate practice, which would involve playing a game, then analyzing it afterwards, really understanding what the mistakes were then trying to move those forward into your next game. I often don't analyze the games, some of the stuff takes just a certain extra level of dedication. But anyway, to answer your question, yeah, I did want to at least have some knowledge of what we've learned about Learning How To Learn, a great book by Barbara Oakley. Yeah, I didn't want to try to write that book. Because I sense it has already been written by various people. But, I certainly found no disagreement with any of those strategies, and it's just a matter of sometimes having the discipline to apply them.

00:43:00

Harish: And do you think there is a newfound interest in learning about the meta journeys of learning? For people, we have books like Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, or, Maria Konnikova’s book about Poker, The Biggest Bluff, they're all about these, you know, or even if we take your book, right, it's all about your journey, you are the hero in this book. And I want to probably derive some vicarious pleasure out of reading about your journey. So is there something that is happening in the last few years that people really want to read more about these kinds of journeys?

00:43:46

Tom: Yeah, well, I mean, number one, I should say that both of those books you mentioned, which are both excellent, those people, those authors became incredibly proficient in the things they were trying to conquer, which, of course, I'm very envious of, and in awe of. I mean, I wish I was a better chess player today than I was when I started. I'm okay. But I'm not ready, like Maria Konnikova, to go to Atlantic City and start trying to beat top chess players. So, but yeah and I think both of those books, because those authors also draw upon some of these things. We've learned that what we talked about something like the Flynn curve, this idea that IQ has risen over the last few decades, and I think there's been sort of a Flynn effect with learning as well because there are so many resources available and we've learned so much about the most effective way to learn that. I think people are progressing in certain fields faster now and hitting new highs.I mean, chess grandmasters or professional Fortnite players, the video game. There's just so many ways to be around the best people and to learn faster from them that, you know, everything sort of sped up, I think. But yeah, in terms of journeys, I mean, those books, as I said, have this wonderful arc in which the person does become very good. And of course, they focused on one thing, and they put all their energy into that one thing. Maybe if my book had been just a single focus on chess, or singing, I would be better at any of those things. But I was trying to send a message to other people that as fun as it is to read about those sorts of books, not everyone is going to be able to pull that off, and you may not have the skill and the time, this so-called, 10,000 hours rule, 10,000 hours of practice required to become an expert level performer. I was probably lucky to have 100 hours with these skills. So was that still worth it? Were the things I could learn, would it impact my life in a positive way? I think the answer to all those questions is yes, but I have to kind of just give up the idea that it's going to be here and then I'm going to be dwelling you know, sort of here. And then that can still be in an interesting place. Because before I wasn't even down here, I wasn't even visible. So you know that that was sort of the message I was trying to send. And that you should not necessarily think that it's only going to be one thing, poker, scrabble, chess, whatever, that you should feel free to dabble to experiment, and maybe something will click among all those things. And it's also okay to walk away from something if it's not providing you with the right amount of pleasure. 

00:46:53

Harish: So yeah, life will come in the way. So you know, don't get into these kinds of life-changing projects, unless you've been asked to write a book about it right?

00:47:00

Tom: No, many people find the time and they do and, of course, one thing that's interesting about the pandemic, you know, that I think a lot of your viewers, people suddenly were forced to think about things in a new way, they might have had new ways to spend time because the former ways they spent time were no longer available to them. So all of us might have this mental list in our head of things they would like to do. The only thing stopping you was time and your own habits, but suddenly, there was an interruption of your habits. And you might have had more time, so the door opens. And we've seen people, the statistics here are quite clear, you know, from the sales of guitars to guitar lessons. Just anything with a learning bent or a self improvement bent, have gone up during the pandemic. So maybe the only positive take away from the last few years, I think.

00:48:02

Harish: Yeah, anything can be a trigger right, Queen's Gambit leads to craze about chess.

00:48:12

Tom: Yeah, yeah. I mean, after watching Queen’s Gambit that door was open for many people. Also, as an example, I would talk to people who watched the Queen's Gambit. And I said, Oh, you should try to play chess. And they said, Well, I just don't have the time. And I said, you just spent 10 hours of your life watching Queen's Gambit, you could actually learn quite a bit about chess in 10 hours, you're not going to become a grandmaster. So, I think people often time is really just an excuse for other issues that sort of, you know, failure, confidence or imagination, but anyway, yeah, but many people did take that journey. And chess websites, like the other websites I mentioned, are doing record business these days. Not that I predicted that when I started to play chess. 

00:49:07

Harish: No, it was also your book that led to this. Right? So you've also written about making learning a social activity. So in this context, what is your take on these whole cohort-based courses that's become sort of the craze right now?

00:49:27

Tom: Just so I understand that phrase, you're essentially talking about taking group classes or going through material at the same time as others?

00:49:39

Harish: Yes, as opposed to these self paced courses like Coursera, which allowed you to sort of do this as an individual in your room.

00:49:55

Tom: Yeah, I guess, you know, I think certain skills or bodies of knowledge lend themselves better to that self paced, self regulated solitary school. Something like chess is certainly that I mean, the histories of many of the top players involved being by themselves learning at their own pace, going through books. I mean, at some point, you do have to play another person, you just sense, you know, have a sense of who's out there. But in this day and age, you can do that without leaving your house. So it's still a very solitary thing. Whereas I think, in other cases I did much better with group learning and cohort learning. As I mentioned, drawing, for example, art class, I mean, number one, just going to an art school and being surrounded by the environment, it lent the activity, in my mind, a more kind of sense of seriousness, and then having other students in the class. And having a time and place I needed to be every week, just improved my sense of accountability and my motivation. Whereas, you know, I often find that when I try to do something at home, at my own pace, I find myself not doing it, it's always something I can put off till tomorrow because I'm busy with something else. So, I find that other people are a great motivator. And, as I mentioned before, there's this idea that no matter what the thing was, I was actually learning not just from the teacher, but from these other people around me. And I was also teaching them in a way, which is part of the learning process. So you know, it's kind of the sum was greater than the parts there was this kind of magic almost that took over. So, I think, again, it probably depends on the thing. I am probably an inherently social person. So I sort of liked doing things with others, although there is that added question, though, of things of notions like embarrassment, this is a great stumbling block, for many people. They would prefer to learn at home or in the privacy of their home with an instructor because they don't want to be seen looking foolish in front of others. And but I found that, in all of the experiences, I had that was never an issue that people were these, this is a self-selecting community of adult novice learners there, you know, it's a very open-minded, very accepting group, that is mostly busy with their own issues of what they're trying to learn. And they're probably also worried about looking foolish. So, we often have the sense that people are looking at us more than they really are, I think it's been called the spotlight effect in psychology. Whereas no one typically cares. They, yeah, sure you fell, you fell while surfing, but so did 10 other people. And that just makes it also more fun as well to sort of go through a certain experience with a group. I did, for example, an intensive five day drawing seminar, you know, Monday through Friday, nine to five. You know, by the end of that week, I felt much closer to this group of people I was with, I felt like we'd all gone through this process together. And we had to do a before and after portrait drawing and all of our portrait drawings. The beginning was sort of not that great, some were better, but then at the end, everyone was better than where they had been. So it was just a sense of bonding, and just made the achievement seem even more memorable.

00:53:47

Harish: Yeah, yeah. So pick the right kind of skill and the right kind of person for these cohort-based communities, in the courses, think about all those aspects, right?

00:54:00

Tom: Yeah. And I guess in some cases, there are practical considerations, there may not be a cohort, you have to go with what's available to you at the moment.

00:54:09

Harish: So we have a lot of these, you know, CXOs, and founders who are regular listeners and viewers of this Smartcast. So if you were to give three pieces of advice to these leaders, about the kind of environment they should have to encourage learning in their organization. Everyone, all leaders want their organizations to be these continuous learning machines. So if you were to give three pieces of advice to these people, about how they should think about learning in their organization, what would they be?

00:54:48

Tom: Great question. I feel it's a bit overwhelming for me. After my book came out, for example, I had a call from thinking of India, Ravi Kumar of Infosys, who's a great proponent of, and I quote him in the book about, in this day and age, we need to learn, we need to relearn, we need to unlearn. And, so he was very keen on these topics. And I don't know, you know, as a person who has a very solitary individual job, I'm hesitant to give advice based on organizational behavior, because I'm just not that familiar with what goes on in organizational behavior. But some of the takeaways, I think, from just my own process, I think maybe applicable here, which is that, what I mentioned before, is that goal setting. I think we need to give a certain amount of flexibility and space for people to operate as beginners. I mean, you know, this is, again, it's a very difficult position for people to find themselves in. But it's also an increasingly common one. There's a computer science professor named Peter Denning, who talks about, he wrote something called the Beginner's Creed. And you find this in the software world quite a bit, which is that people who were experts on something last week, suddenly, the ground shifts, there's a new technology, there's a new system, and they are suddenly beginners. And the change is quite momentous. And I think adaptability is the watchword. Today, rather than learning one very deep set of skills, there are certainly professions that are required. But for most of us, I think learning how to learn is going to be the most important thing that we have to deal with. And so you can't have this kind of rigidity of goals and expectations being too high that we need to give time and space for people to prosper. We often get hung up on the idea of innate talent a little too much, and that we think that there's been studies, for example, about child prodigies in music. And when you look at the sort of the successful concert pianists, today, most of them were not clearly identifiable at a very young age, as going to be great. They were pretty good. But they really didn't mature until much later. And their talent really didn't bloom until much later. So you know, if someone has sort of looked at them and thought, well, you're simply not good enough and sent them on their way and not let them into some class, it might have short-circuited that career. So I think, yes, some people have a certain amount of inherent talent, but there's another part of talent that needs time to grow and to be encouraged and may come through an unexpected direction. So the other themes from the book, just embracing racing failure. I mean, there can really, I mean, Daniel Dennett, the philosopher says this, he's talking about evolution. But, evolution, human natural selection is filled with mistakes, that's how things you know, get better. That's how things evolved. You need to sort of work through the mistakes. But it's been called sort of an error-free learning environment, which I think is a very counterproductive way to learn. Just a quick story, you know, when my daughter was young, she was learning to ride a bicycle. And like many parents, I got a bicycle that had the training wheels, as we call them in the US. And I sent her on her way. I was very happy because she had this short term gain, which is she was riding. I put this in quotes, she was riding her bike around the park. But what she really wasn't learning was exactly how to ride a bike, the way a bike is actually written with the dynamics of balance and the body. So she was speeding along, and then she took a turn. And she fell over because, you know, she was sort of encouraged to have a false confidence by these training wheels. And so anyway, so I took the training wheels off, I took the pedals off, and she just kind of did it like a balanced bike, what we now call a balanced bike. And so this was more struggle, sort of in the short term, but the long term was that she actually learned how to ride a bike, you know, probably actually more quickly than with the training wheels, and she's actually a very good bike rider. I'm proud to say she's doing it very young. So you know, but that requires making some mistakes and making the right kind of mistakes. The training wheels crash was not really a correct mistake because she didn't learn anything about a real mistake you make on a bike, she just learned a sort of artificial training mistake that wasn't applicable to real but like so. I think just having people make sort of mistakes in the real world is often painful in the short term, but can allow this larger, long term growth. So those would be something, yeah, perhaps some of the themes I would add.

01:00:04

Harish: Yeah. Nice, Tom. So we come to the end of this conversation, but we are not going to let you go without asking for your hot takes on certain things. So I'm going to ask you about the future relevance of certain things. And you can give me a hot take on that. So what do you think is the future relevance of schools and colleges as seats of learning?

01:00:31

Tom: Great question. I think, probably perhaps, companies were seeing that shift there as well to less entrenched, sort of dogmatic bodies of knowledge and more, more siloed, sort of narrow learning and more cross-disciplinary, flexible learning that can function better in the real world as it is. That's, you know, sort of my sense, but I'm not sure it's been a while since I've been in college.

01:01:08

Harish: What do you think is the future relevance of nonfiction books?

01:01:14

Tom: Hopefully, very relevant, from my point of view. But this is a thing that the book business has done well during the pandemic, I would like to think that reading is one of these things that might have been rediscovered a little bit with as people had, you know, sort of more time as to how the type of nonfiction might change, to be honest, I'm not sure I would, I would love to see a wider selection of voices that we're hearing from and, you know, as a sort of white male, I'm perfectly conscious of how I'm overrepresented, especially in the type of book that I often tend to write, which is science, sort of business, psychology and things like that. So, yeah, that's a great question. But yeah, I'm going to have to think after this conversation about, you know, how this is going to be. But I think the world is increasingly complex to try to understand. So hopefully, there will be the need for these sorts of guides. And one way it may change is that it may have to become a little bit more nimble, as we've been discussing things will have to be shorter books, faster books. Of course, I say that, and then people love to read something like Sapiens which is a study of the history of humankind. So I think we still appreciate the big picture as well.

01:02:53

Harish: And the final one, what do you think about the future relevance of games, or rather the specific game of Fortnite?

01:03:00

Tom: Funny story, I wrote a piece for Wired Magazine about playing Fortnite with my daughter, because like many children during the pandemic, she was doing a lot of it. And I found myself sort of doing it as a guardian to make sure it was sort of okay. I found myself because it's a very well crafted game with a very sort of addictive dynamic, I found myself a bit you know, addicted to it. And as a long time, at least, when I was younger, a video game player, this was not such a stretch, but I didn't necessarily want to play with 10 or 12-year-olds, as most adults don't want to so I quickly, I actually heard got an email from someone who said, I read your article, I liked it. Do you know that we have a Fortnite over 40 group that plays? So I've been dabbling in that a bit much, you know, and it's one of those things that it would be easy to dismiss as sort of like childish youth culture, you know, mass culture kind of thing. But I found that it's a very interesting world on many levels and increasingly one that is not just a game, but it's sort of a space that people inhabit. There are events, I mean, artists are releasing their albums through the Fortnite platform so you know, I found it a very interesting place. I try to limit my playing to some extent but yeah, so I think that they keep predicting the death of Fortnite, but it keeps coming back with so who knows!

01:04:54

Harish: On that note, I think, we have to keep that open mind about everything. That's one of the biggest takeaways for me from this conversation, I think we covered a whole range of topics. And, you know, starting from your own learning journey to the idea of learning, how to learn, and bring it back to corporate learning. So, thanks a lot for this fascinating conversation, Tom.

01:05:23

Tom: Thank you, Harish. Very great questions. Thank you.

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