Life Kit - Improve your chances of learning a new skill

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

Mastering a new hobby, like bowling or baking, can be a frustrating process. But experts say it doesn't have to be that way. If you set yourself up for success at the start and allow yourself to make mistakes — you can stick with it. This episode originally published October 26, 2021.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Life Kit from NPR. Hey everyone, I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith in for Mariel Seguera. When was the last time you taught yourself something new? That is a question NPR producer Ramel Wood likes to ask people. She used to help produce NPR's game show, Ask Me Another, and she'd always ask potential contestants, hey, what's something you've taught yourself recently that you're proud of? She says it was a great way to open people up. So she called up a few former contestants to see if they remembered how they'd answered. This is Sam Capoli. He lives

in San Diego, and he taught himself how to drive a stick-shift car. Do you remember what the motivation behind that was? Yeah, well, my mom had tried to teach me years ago, and I was like a high school kid. It was my first year of college. It was a while back, but I was just not amenable to it, got too frustrated, and dropped it without giving a second thought. Then they sold the old car that had the transmission, I felt sad or guilty like I had missed out on the part of like the family for doing that. And here is Amy Paul. She's a stay at home mom in Houston. And a few years ago, she was trying to learn how to do a pull up.

Her motivation? Escape rooms. She got really into them with her family. Amy was great at the puzzle rooms, but she struggled with the other kind. I get to the physical ones and I can do maybe the first room or if my husband and my brother-in-law and one of my sons is on the team, they can go do the hard stuff. And so there are several things that require arm strength and it was like rock climbing kind of things or holding yourself up. And I can't do any of that. So I was like, I'm going to get stronger arms so that I can be a

better teammate for this questing. And so that was my motivation. And Rommel also turned to an expert at learning new things, her daughter, Mercy. Here they are at bath time. I can turn on the lights. In what rooms? In some rooms. Whoa, so did you teach yourself how to do that? Did you just walk up to a light switch one day and say, I think I know how to turn that on, and then you did it? No. When I was a baby, I couldn't do it. But when I was a three-year-old, I could do it. Oh, three-year-olds can turn on the lights? Yeah.

So how did you learn how to do it? Did you do it because you saw other people do it and you thought you wanted to try it? Or how did you decide one day to turn on the light? When somebody reached the light for me, and I recently learned it from that, and I learned that I, I don't know what I was going to say, but I have a new tattoo. Those are very cool. For the record, it's a new tattoo. Those are very cool. For the record, it's a temporary tattoo. In this episode of Life Kit, how to learn a new skill, how to get the confidence to try something new, and how to maybe be a little bad at it, or even a lot bad at it, but still keep with it.

This was the first thing, by the way, that Ramil ever hosted at NPR. So, you know, she's walking the walk. My kid is constantly learning how to do basically everything, but she doesn't seem phased by it. She's like, yeah, no duh. Of course I couldn't turn on a light when I was a baby, but now I can. So I talked to Rachel Wu. She's an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside. And she studies how we learn over the course of our lives. She explained to me why my three-year-old has the upper hand when it comes to learning. The theory that I have is that it's easier to learn as a baby because

you're not bogged down as much with a lot of things that adults are totally that makes a lot of sense learning takes a back seat when you get older because we have more responsibilities something really needs to excite you or motivate you to learn something new sam's motivation to learn how to drive a stick was because he feels like he missed out on something that his mom tried to show him amy wanted to learn how to drive a stick was because he feels like he missed out on something that his mom tried to show him. Amy wanted to learn how to do a pull-up so she could be a better escape room teammate. For me, I'm trying to learn how to be a better producer by learning what goes into hosting a show. So before you set out to learn how to do something, maybe have a goal in mind.

What is your endgame for the skill you're trying to master? Which leads us to takeaway one. Once you've pinpointed the skill you'd like to learn and set a specific goal, set yourself up for success. Rachel told us that it's easier for kids to learn new things because their whole lives up to a certain point are centered on learning. They don't have outside factors distracting them from their goals. Rachel says we can learn from that. You know, using that open-minded learning approach, right? So just not dismissing something and thinking that something is irrelevant to learn. Number two, getting some kind of instructor who also believes that you can do it

and, you know, is good at kind of taking things and cutting them up in a piecemeal way so that you can get the appropriate amount of challenge and difficulty throughout the whole process. What Mercy didn't mention during her bath were the many times over the course of her life that me or her dad would lift her up to reach the light switches. Or how we would wrap our hands around her hands to show her how to push the lever up and down. She didn't resist these lessons.

She was genuinely curious. So if you're older than, say, three years old, find someone in your life that can cheer you on. Maybe text them a voice memo of your progress playing the piano so they can give you notes or just say, hey, great job. And the third is having a mindset yourself of, you know, I can do this with enough effort, you know, with enough time, dedication, effort. I can get to where I want to go. So let's say you fancy yourself a person with an open mind.

Got it. That you have access to people who are invested in your success. Yep. That the thing you're trying to learn is relevant to you and your life. Why is it so hard to stick with something after you set out to master it? I have struggled with this my whole life. I'm really good at identifying things that I'd like to learn, but then I bail the moment I hit a wall or lose interest. Rachel also feels this. Definitely experienced that. And especially most recently with piano, but also with German too. I'm like, why am I not much more fluent? And so what I do in those cases is I remind myself of how slowly kids are allowed to progress,

right? So if you're learning a language, we don't expect a kid to have their first word until, I don't know, nine months, like maybe 12 months. Let's say 18 months, you get 50 words. I could totally learn 50 words in 18 months, right? I could learn 100 words in 18 months. So reminding yourself that kids

take a long time to learn stuff. And it's not just that it's easier for them. It's because they have kind of nothing else to do except learn this stuff. So in addition to figuring out what it is you want to learn and setting a specific goal, it might be helpful to think about setting up realistic timetables to hit that goal. Cut yourself some slack and give yourself the same amount of time to learn something as you'd give a trial to learn it too. Let's head into takeaway number two. Settle in and start to tinker with the challenge at hand. You can approach learning a new skill a bunch of different ways. Like our learning expert,

Rachel. She challenges herself to learn something new every few years and she's racked up a lot of skills. She's an accomplished violinist, singer, piano player, painter, sculptor. And as she just mentioned, she's learning how to speak German. Her husband is German, and she thought it'd be fun to learn his language. Das ist Liebe. She was taking a few German classes on the campus where she works. And even though she was dedicating about five hours a week to learning the language, she found herself hitting a wall. So she turned to a familiar voice. I would watch sitcoms that were English, but then dubbed in German, specifically The Nanny,

because I know every episode, I'm a big Fran Drescher fan. And I know, like, I know actually every line. And so for me to know the line and then hear it in German, then, you know, that actually provides a lot of meaning. So what Rachel does, she pulls up the episodes

and then slows down the speed to 50%. She also uses this trick with Pixar films and with German audiobooks for kids. The point here is that Rachel didn't just take

a German class and quietly toil with it for hours every week. She split up her paths to learning in a bunch of different ways. Rachel's approach and my own experience

with Mercy and the light switch reminds me of how Sam finally learned how to drive a stick. A co-worker of his was selling a car with a manual transmission. He made an offer and started watching YouTube videos on how to do it. When the day came to pick up the car, he asked his mom to tag along.

I was a little nervous on the way back. She was like, you know, everything will go right. You test drive the car. And I was like, sure, but could you drive it back for me? So I revealed to her that I knew it by telling her that I didn't actually know how to do it all that well, and I still wanted that little bit of help from her in the end. Sam didn't know how to drive a stick when he bought his new car, but he eventually learned by tinkering. He paired those YouTube videos and brought along his original instructor, his mom, to help him through it. In Sam's case, maturity helped him learn.

He was finally able to ask his mom for help in a way that he was incapable of doing as a teenager. So if you've been telling yourself, hey, it's now or never to become fluent in a language, learn how to play an instrument, or maybe you want to start completely over in a field of study, it's really not. Take Nell Painter. Nell is a historian and former professor at Princeton. She wrote a book called Old in Art School, a memoir of starting over. It's about what it's like to go back and earn a bachelor's degree and an MFA in painting when she was in her 60s. When people speak to me saying, oh, you did this, you started something new in advanced age.

And in art, advanced age is over 32. But especially if you're in your 40s or your 50s or your 60s or your 70s, how can I do that. I have said often, I'm so glad that I was old when I did my MFA in painting, because the crits could be really cruel. I had experience. I had knowledge. I had the wisdom of age. But at any age, doing something new is going to be really hard in the beginning. Babies don't just start walking around turning on lights. As we learned, that's three-year-old stuff. Here's Nell again talking about what her first few art classes were like. So you draw, draw, draw, draw, draw, draw. You look at the model, you work, you draw, you work, you know, oh, oh, I gotta get this right. And then the teacher comes and says, rub it out and draw it again 10 inches to the right. So once again, you draw and draw.

Get this all right. Work, work, work, work. It's hot as hell. You're sweating like crazy. You draw, you work, work, work, work, work. And then the teacher comes in and says, rub it out and draw it 10% smaller. And the lesson is you can rub out your work. It doesn't all have to be a master. It doesn't all have to be right. And it doesn't all have to be safe. You can rub that sucker out.

Yeah. Mel's instructor was trying to illustrate that you can't get too attached to any one thing. You have to keep shifting your perspective and attack your art from different sides. And if all else fails, you can always just start over. Here she is again with some really solid advice. One thing is, don't ask too much of yourself at the beginning. Know that when you start something,

you're not going to be very good at it, but keep at it. Keep at it. Don't be afraid to mess up. Which brings me to takeaway three. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Mistakes and failing aren't just part of learning a new skill. They are essential. Manu Kapoor is a professor of learning sciences and higher education at ETH in Zurich, Switzerland. And he writes and teaches about the benefits of renormalizing failure and the idea of productive failure.

First of all, you might be wondering, what is productive failure? Well, very simply, you know, we're used to saying, you know, we can learn from errors or mistakes are good when they happen. And failure is good when it happens, provided we learn from it. So productive failure is the idea of saying, well, if failure is so good and compelling a teacher, then why do we wait for it to happen? Manu designs experiments where students are, more or less, set up to fail. He proves his concept of productive failure through the act of normalizing failure. I will design certain problem-solving activities for you where you would get the feeling that you can do something with it, you can generate some ideas, and those ideas will not be correct because the problem is designed in a way that you would not get to the correct answer.

At first, I thought it sounded kind of mean. But then he went on to explain to me that after the students realize their solutions are wrong, they often generate new and better solutions to the problems that were first laid out to them. It teaches them that there are often more than one way to fix something, and by extension, learn how to do something. Which reminds me of Amy, who, when I was interviewing her to be on Ask Me Another a few years ago, she had just started researching proper pull-up techniques. When I spoke to her recently, I asked her for an update on her progress.

I've done nothing since then. I can't physically do a pull-up if I wanted to. She started training, and then she started experiencing some pretty intense pain in her shoulder. So she went to a doctor who told her something she wasn't expecting. I think you have a frozen shoulder. And I was like, what the heck is that? And I had never heard of it before. And it's just this weird thing.

So I went to the next doctor and he's like, oh yeah, that's like the worst case I've ever seen. And I was like, so what do I do? He's like, oh yeah, that's like the worst case I've ever seen. And I was like, so what do I do? And he's like, you wait. Amy's doctor told her that over time, sometimes a frozen shoulder can unfreeze itself. It's been three years and Amy is still waiting, but she shifted her attitude towards her initial goal of being able to do a pull-up. My oldest son, who is on the high school golf team is a, shall we say a little scrawny and both his coach and his like the guy he takes lessons from and both said, you should do some like fitness training, strength training to bulk up, get stronger. And so I thought when my shoulder's better, I'm going to see if there's somebody that the both of us can go to where he's too scared to go by himself. Maybe we just need guidance together. Amy was met with an unsolvable problem.

An intern came up with a solution she might not have otherwise arrived at. So I just want to go back to something Manu told me about normalizing failure. How we can often set unrealistic expectations for ourselves and how we can often set unrealistic expectations for ourselves, and how we can use failure to propel us through some of those expectations. Students come into the classrooms with very different kinds of norms, that if I'm struggling, it's not good. If I solve the problem incorrectly, it's not good. But it takes time. It's a constant effort to tell yourself that this is something I do not know. I cannot possibly expect myself to get it immediately.

And when I'm struggling, I just need to tell myself that this is exactly the right zone to be in. And then to do it again and again and again. And until such time, you just become comfortable with being uncomfortable. Because you're learning something. Now is the part of the show where I'm going to get really serious with you. We've heard a lot from Manu about his work and how he studies productive failure. But we've heard very little about how this work is applicable to his real life. He's developed a new productive failure experiment for a class of one, himself.

He's trying to master the art of... Scrambled eggs, yes. Yes, eggs. And he's refusing to make it easy for himself. And, you know, I could have followed a recipe. I mean, everyone doesn't even need a recipe, right? They just put some eggs, smash them together, and throw it on the pan.

Sure, but Manu is not a man about to mess with suboptimal eggs. So what are his egg hopes and dreams? You know, to have not the full scrambled eggs, but the partial soft scrambled eggs where there are chunks inside, but it was also scrambled. Ah yes, the soft scramble. Here are some of the ways Manu is tinkering with the process. Maybe you cook eggs at a higher temperature, or you use more milk, or just just like this called deliberate practice with variation. He's tinkering, but he's still making mistakes.

I would always overcook them. I could never stop in time. You know, it's a simple thing. You just, you know, you wait and you wait and you know it's not enough. Oh, it's too much. He's still pushing, still chasing the perfect soft scramble. I would say I'm in forever beta mode. He's going to keep trying new techniques, and one day he might even crack it.

He might finally figure out the perfect heat-to-no-heat stir ratio that will lead him to the soft scramble of his heart's content. But then it might also lead him to the freewheeling world of omelets, or God help him, hollandaise. He's constantly trying, forever in beta mode. So whether you're trying to host a podcast for the first time, drive stick, do a pull-up, turn on the lights, learn German, become a painter, or learn how to scramble eggs, I think the most important thing is just to try it. It'll open you up to a world that

maybe wasn't there for you before. And one day you might find yourself in the position to teach someone else what you've learned. Like Sam. His drive to learn a manual transmission has built him up a little bit of a reputation among his friends and family. What I've offered to all of my friends, I think it's become kind of like a joke at this point. Okay, don't worry. Sam will offer that, but you don't feel like you need to take it up. It's just, it's fine. I want to give someone that same experience that my mom tried to give me.

So let's recap. Takeaway one, set yourself up for success. Approach learning with a clear objective of what you want to master. So let's recap. Takeaway one, set yourself up for success. Approach learning with a clear objective of what you want to master. Have an open mind. Find yourself a good instructor and surround yourself with supportive people who are invested in your success. Takeaway two, keep tinkering with the challenge at hand. If you're struggling to learn how to do something, stop and adjust the process. Play around with your method.

Introduce different avenues of learning. Takeaway three. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. They are an important part of the process. They are inevitable. So get comfortable with being uncomfortable. That was NPR producer Ramel Wood. For Life Kit check out our other episodes we've got one on how to start a new hobby and another one on how to be more open-minded you can find those at

npr.org slash Life Kit and if you love Life Kit and you want more please subscribe to our newsletter that's npr.org slash Life Kit newsletter. Also, have you signed up for LifeKit Plus yet? Becoming a subscriber to LifeKit Plus means you're supporting the work we do here at NPR. Subscribers also get to listen to the show without any sponsor breaks. To find out more, head over to plus.npr.org slash LifeKit. And to everyone who's already subscribed, thank you. This episode of LifeKit was produced by Andy Tagle. Marielle Seguera is our host. Our visuals editor is Beck Harlan. Our digital editor is Malika Garib. Megan Cain is the supervising editor. Beth Donovan is the executive producer. Our production team also includes Audrey Nguyen, Claire Marie Schneider,

and Sylvie Douglas. Engineering support comes from Stu Rushfield. I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Thanks for listening.