Ulrich Boser on How to Get Better at Learning

have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Alric Boser, a best selling author and senior Fellow with the Center

for American Progress. Before the Center, Alric was a contributing editor for the U. S News and World Report. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. In February two thousand nine, HarperCollins published his book The Gardner Heist, which examines of a dozen masterpieces from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and his new book is Learned Better, Mastering the Skills for Success in Life, Business and School, or how to become an

Expert in just About Anything. Hi, friends, there's a couple of other ways to feed your good wolf in addition to just listening to this show. One is that you can support us on Patreon and that will allow you to get additional bonus content as well as a mini episode for me each month. You can do that by

going to one you Feed dot net Slash Support. And the other thing that you can do is join our Facebook group where we have discussions about the episodes and other ways that people feed their good wolf and deal with challenges in life. And that is it One you Feed dot net Slash Facebook. And here's the interview with al Rich Boser. Hi, Aleric, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. I'm happy to have you on.

Your book is called learn Better, Mastering the Skills for Success in Life, Business and School, or how to become an Expert in just About Anything. And I love this book because, as you mention, and we'll get into it a lot more detail. Learning how to learn, or knowing how to learn, is such a critical aspect of life, and most of us don't get taught how to do it. So I'm excited to work through this with the listeners. But let's start like we always do with the parable.

There's a grandfather is talking to his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins?

And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and the work that you do, which you are wonderful and powerful parable. When I was thinking about the parable and as it relates to learning, I actually had in my head a different parable, or a different expression, and that is better off teaching someone how to fish rather than simply give them a fish.

And it relates to this sense that I feel like learning to learn, how to get better at getting better is is really when it comes to this powerble Really it's sort of like how do you feed yourself? Right? How do you feed what is good? How do you feed experience? How do you feed sort of wisdom and expertise and the ways that sort of feeding yourself at least it comes to kind of knowledge and skill and

dispositions in more effective ways. And that's really what I've really been along fascinated And how do we do that? How do we feed ourselves better? Yeah? I love that teach a man to fish idea. It's so powerful. So let's talk about the learning process. So it's one of the most important predictors of learning is whether you actually know how to learn. You say that out of a bunch of different studies shows that learning methods dramatically shifted outcomes.

And then the other thing I love this phrase you say, learning to learn is what expert it's called the ultimate survival tool, one of the most important talents of the modern age. So let's talk a little bit about the learning process. Is there a lot of different ways to learn? Talk to me a little bit about what you think is the best learning process and the importance of having

the process. Sure. One thing to keep in mind is that there's just a lot of folk wisdom and conventional ideas around learning, and a lot of it is is frankly wrong. So there's this idea that people have learning styles, right, that some people are auditory learners and some people are visual learners. Is really no evidence for that. There is a lot of people who love to use highlighters, often see people using them, whether it's at work or at school,

and there's no research behind them either. What we do now have evidence for is, you know, certain approaches, certain processes is in learning are far more effective than others, and it's really important that people figure out exactly what they want to learn, make sure they're generating that learning in other words, that they're really sort of mentally doing and reflecting on it. You know, how can you think back on your learning? And when people really take this

type of approach, they learn a lot more. And it sounds like a lot of what I got from the book is going to be very actively engaged in the learning process. And so, you know, highlighters are interesting because I think most of us think if we highlight something in a book, then we might remember it. The only way I've ever found that useful when I want to go back later and find what it is I want to spend more time on, I'm able to do that, which is kind of how I arrive at questions for

the show and all that is. I'll read the book and I'll take a ton of highlights, and then I'll go through those and go through another round of work with those till it's a smaller group and keep sort of iterating through it. But it's this active engagement more so than the passive taking in of information, even if

you passively take it in multiple times. Yes, so the way that most people use highlighters is different the way that you described, and I really like the way that you are using them, and I'm seeing research on that specifically, But I would suspect that it's effective if the way most people use highlighters right, that they're just they think if they highlight something like that material is going to

train sort of their head. And it gets to this bigger idea that we really often think that our brains are like computers. Right, if there's information that comes at us, we're just going to know it right. It's just sort of like day that comes in and gets sort of stored somewhere in the back. But that's not really how the brain works. We need to make meaning out of something and when we make more meeting out of it

or far more effective. My favorite example of this is like visiting that researcher and Florida, and he asked this question, what is the capital of Australia. Actually, let me ask the question of you, eric, capital of Australia. Any guess I'm going to guess mel Born, But that's probably not right yet, so it's not right. You want to go for option number two? You have a second guess. That was I either guess Melbourne or Sydney myself, but you have a second guess. You know. I ran through like

basically every city that I knew in Australia. I was like Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne. And then when he told me the answer, which is Cambera, I was like, no way, Like that's that's crazy, Like I've never heard of Canberra before. UM and researchers call this idea that or described this idea of a hyper correction EF fact if you will leave something is true, or at least you think that

you should know it. In my case, I really thought that I should know the capital of Australia, right, and it seemed like some that like basic trivia, that that people should know. And then you've proven to be wrong, You're far more likely to retain that information in the future. And I give us example right, because I think it helps us understand how to bring Really isn't a computer right?

I mean, then this hyper correction effect example one, making the error actually makes us learn more right by guessing incorrectly. You know, you said Melbourne, you're making an error and it's going to help you learn the len Then that moment of kind of like shock and surprise, We're like, holy can't it's you know, Camba, I've never heard of that. It's really forcing you to kind of engage in some sense making and kind of finding meaning. You're like, oh,

why don't I know this? And um, I think helps us understand, you know why when we're using highlighters, we're just sort of passive, like not really thinking that much. That feeling that so often happens. Right, But you've read a whole page of texts and at the end you're not really sure what you're learning. As opposed to asking yourself questions, coming back to information, looking for connections one

more effective ways to retain knowledge. Yeah, you talk about that in the book Multiple Different Places, Which is that idea of if you think about the information and meaningfully and you ask yourselves questions about it, or you think about it, you look at it from different angles, is a lot better. And it makes me think of you know, one of the early episodes we had you Know, and probably the first ten episodes, was a guy named Todd Henry.

We had him on subsequently, but the thing he said that you Know has stuck with me so much since that early episode. He said, if most of us were to change the way we consume information, for every hour of information we consume, we spend an hour of information processing that you know, which we that we read, asking ourselves questions about it, thinking about how it applies to our lives, trying to apply to our life. He's, you know,

our lives would change. And I think that is so very true because just consuming more and more information, which is what most of us do, doesn't necessarily make us any smarter or more knowledgeable. Would be a better way to say it. I think that's a great way to look at it. If we want that information and want to use that information to solve problems at a later point. Right, if we want that information so we converted into expertise, we need to give our brain that time to make

sense of it. It's so easy for our brains to get overloaded, so we need information in smaller chunks, and we also just need time to have these types of reflections, these moments of understanding. One bit of researcher I find it's really fascinating that I think puts Todd's point in a somewhat different line is someone did research a number of years ago looking at what sort of pause and instructor or speaker should have if they're really delivering important information.

And they found in the study that, uh, the audience learned more, right, they retain more if if there were long pauses and pauses of three seconds. I'm not going to subject your listeners to three seconds because it's awkwardly long. Right, it's like a moment, you know, if you know, you guys, edit this if it was a three second long pause. But like that's that's gotta go. I was gonna say, Chris would trim that right out, and that's why right

of us are learning anything. So good job, Chris, Thanks Chris. We're grateful for it. But if you listen to like speakers and whatever your politics are, you know, Barack Obama, Um, he speaks so slowly and and you know, I think that's part of what makes him such a great speecher. Right. These pauses are are allowing the audience to really sort of engage makes sense of that material. Uh, And I find that fascinating. Um, it's a it's a somewhat different

spin on that same idea. But you know, even in conversation, even when we're kind of teaching or learning or having even a simple conversation like we're having and we need that moment to process. I was trying it for three seconds, You're right, that is a long time. I was trying to give it three second pause before the next one came up. But you are probably just about to go. You still there on the tip of my tongue, like there's something there's something wrong here. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's

that's that's a great finding. The other thing that I found really interesting about it was the criticality of understanding relationships between things. You know. It goes on to say identify cause and effect and to see analogies and similarities. But I love that idea of relationships. One of the ways if I'm trying to learn something new that that I like to do it is to try and consume a lot of information, but try and get it from

three or four different people. So ask the same three you know, or ask three or four people about the same thing, and there's something about the way each of them says it's slightly differently that allows it after a few times of hearing it slightly differently, it clicks into focus in a way for me that it doesn't if I only hear it from one person. Yeah, I was so glad that you asked about relationships, because when we

think about that makes them so powerful? Is is also relationships? Right, it's it's well, let me actually approach this from a slimly different angle and then and then come back from the parable if it's if it's okay, And that's you know, when we really want to learn something, we want to be able to learn that something in different situations. So if you learn three plus five equals eight, you know, you can vary up the surface features of it, so

you can change it into a word problem. You can see it numerically, um, you can use it in different like situation and maybe one it's like a little stressful you're trying to figure out, you know, what you should leave on a tip on your first date. Now, when we vary those surface features, we know that deep features really what it means to add three plus five in a richer way. And we do this kind of all

the time, right when we're skiing. If you want to get better at skiing, you know, you want to vary where you can ski so you can figure out different situations. And what I find fascinating about this is it's really about relationships. It's about analogy, taking one thing and figuring out the ways that things time to together. And it really changes the way that I think about learning. Right. So I recently took a wine tasting class. I want

to know a little bit more about wine. And you know, ultimately, what manners to me about wine isn't like do I know where the most like Bordeaux is produced? What I want to know is like what wine tastes good with certain foods? And so I took a wine pairing class, and I feel like I learned so much more, right, I learned why the cannons in a red cut against the fattiness of of cheese. I learned about, you know, why sat wines go with spicy food. That type of

learning is so much richer. And uh, the idea of a parable is really the same thing, right, Like we can use that same idea like what is the one you feed in so many different situations, and it gives us a richer understanding of the underlying theireness of feedingness. So it's if that's any idea, And here's the rest

of the interview with al Rich Boser. The idea and I think I won't get the words exactly right that you use in the book is that the advantage of analogies or you know, of looking at relationship is that it's easier to remember something new if you can hang it on something old that you already know. So you've already got this one memory or understanding or idea, and you're more likely to get the new one if you can kind to you know, I like that analogy of just sort of hanging it on it as a way

to remember the new things. That's exactly right. And when you hear people talk about, oh, we now need an uber for babysitting or an uber for haircuts, you know it only works if you uber right, you're you know, and you're like, oh, okay, I know uber is, and so uber for haircuts, like how would that work? Or were for childcare? You know, how would that work? But if you need to know that uh initial thing, well, and then it allows you to use what you know

to understand something. One of the ways why these types of analogies can be so powerful. Yeah, and so in the book, you've got a systematic approach, and I thought it would be useful just to kind of walk through the various steps in learning something. Um, I'll just read them real quick and then maybe we can just take a spin through each of them briefly and you can help us understand what each of these is. So the first one is value, then target it, develop, extend, relate,

and rethink. So let's start with value. What is the role of value in learning? It's very hard to learn something if you don't know anything about it. So how can we find value in something and try and delve deep into what that means? But what's really important about motivation and it's it's a one way street, you know. So often we're like, oh, if the topic is interesting to me, other people are going to find it interesting.

And I don't know if you've ever had this experience area where you know someone is just like, oh, we're going to talk about statistics when I mentioned, you know, justin Bieber or something that might be of interest to other other people. That's not really it works. You know, Motivation is a one way street, and it goes from the person to the material. And when we think about learning, just that idea is is really important, right. You want to find meaning both in the motivational sense but also

in the understanding sense. So I have to value it in order to actually learn it. It's not going to do me any good if I don't. And so this idea of basically what's wrong with a lot of school, right is that our children don't value what they're learning. It makes it very difficult for them to pay attention or to learn if they don't see the value in it. That's exactly right. If you're not able to see the value in it, you're not gonna want to learn about it.

What the research says I'm finding value is is that it is this one way street. And one way we can do that is just to ask people. You know, sure you're gonna learn about statistics. You're probably not waking up in the middle of the night wondering about you know, Stata or sps S or P squares, but just writing or taking a few moments to yourself being likely and why is this going to be valuable to me? How's this going to improve my career, how's it going to

improve my family life? Makes people a lot more motivated to learn. Ye, So the next stage is to target. What do you mean by that? What's important about target is two things. One, our brains get very easily overloaded, and at the beginning of the learning process, you want to learn in small chunks. So you know, people often are like, oh, I you just have to do hands on learning. Uh, and the hands on practice and getting

your hands dirty really important. But at the beginning of the learning process, you know, just take things in small bites because it's it's a much more effective way to learn. And like, think about something like riding a bicycle. You know, um, you wouldn't just sort of go out there and and you know, just jump on. And if you didn't know how to ride a bicycle, let's helpful to know you know,

what are the breaks, do how to balance? And so targeting, especially at the beginning of the learning process, just figuring out exactly what you want to learn and the best way to learn it becomes very very important. So the next one is developed. Practice is so key when it comes to learning, and there are better ways to practice one what is central to to practice is getting feedback and anyway that you can get feedback is really crucial. So there are some basic ways you can ask get feedback.

Videotaping yourself is a great way if it's a performance of some sort, and then there are other ways to get feedback where you just make sure that whether it's your colleagues or your friends or your family, that you create that norm that they should give you feedback and they need to give you critical feedback. Uh So tremendously important. So this aspect of the learning process is really just sort of practicing, developing and getting better at at that

type of practicing and that type of developing. And then the next one is extend. This goes back to what we described a little bit earlier you want to start using your knowledge in different areas and and really start taking it out for a spin. And when we think about learning at this stage, creating arguments. Building arguments is a wonderful way to create new knowledge, to extend what

you know and really sort of developed that expertise. Another example of this is is just elaborating on something a great way to learn. If you're learning about Russian history or biology or Microsoft Excel, just elaborating on it shows

a lot of evidence in the research. Yeah, it makes me think of one of my favorite books of all times, Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, And in the very beginning he encourages, you know, very strongly, like you know, turn around and start teaching this to somebody else, like immediately, because that that idea of being able to teach it to somebody else drives it home so strongly, and it makes us think about how to present the

information back in an understandable way. Yes, so when you think about elaborating, right, it's that idea. And then plus when you teach it to someone else, if you're doing it in person, you have that experience of looking at a person's eye and realizing, oh, I didn't explain that how well? Right, And so it can be more iterative and more social. Um. I find that there's a little bit of research that I find wonderful where just talking to yourself while solving problems, um is another way to

do this. When you're elaborating, you're also slowing down. And there was a study this was a couple of years ago that found it's the same as having a ten point increase in your i Q. So talking to yourself while you're solving problems again the same type of thing of of teaching someone else or elaborating this core idea is the same as you know, having a very significant boost in your gro intelligence. Wow, that's that's interesting. We've

got two more to go here. Relate is the next one. Yeah, we talked about this a little bit earlier, but analogies um as a number of researchers now believe it is the essence of thoughts. We're always thinking in categories and it's a powerful way to learn to relate things to others. So a very simple example, you know, what does it mean exactly? The definition of a dog? Right? And one way to to learn is just to relate all sorts

of different dogs to each other. You know, if you look at the schnaus or German shepherd or mass if you're like, oh, you start relaying them, figuring out what the category is and helps you learn a lot more about saying dognus. But we can use this in so many different areas. You want to learn more about the oceans. It's not important to know sort of you know, what's the average temperature of the ocean. What's important to know

is uh, the temperature of the ocean goes up. You can relate that to the fact that water expands, and this helps us understand, you know, why climate changes can be so hazardous to island. So when you're learning something, you know, it's so important to to relate it to others. We talked at the beginning of you know, learning the capital of Australia and as alone it's like an interesting fact, but you know, why is it that many nations, the US and included, to have these kind of obscure places

as their capital. And we could go on a whole riff about that. It says a lot about the political process. It says a lot about kind of financial and political power and the nature of geography um and and that actually helps us understand at a much richer level issues of politics and geography and history, much more so than just having that isolated fact, so relating them to each other. And our final stage is rethink so important when we're

learning to take that time to process information. And there are a couple of reasons for it. When we forget, we forget at a regular rate, and we're widely overconfident about how much we remember. So just taking time to recall what you know about something, to revisit material forgetting in many ways is your friend. It allows you to relearn, to rethink, and we should do more to take advantage

of that in all forms of learning. And also ultimately you learn to gain perspective to develop richer insights, and so taking that time for learning is so crucial. Talk

to me about medic cognition. You you brought up i Q a couple of minutes to go, and there's studies that show that people who are good at this meta cognition, which you're going to walk us through here in a second, are able to learn better than people who even have you know, way higher i q s. So what is metic cognition and why is it so helpful in helping us to learn better. Metic cognition is a fascinating thing and researchers really talk about it as thinking about thinking,

you know, what are you? What do you understand about? What you understand? One issue of metic cognition is that people are often wildly overconfident. So my favorite question on this veryans do you know how a toilet works? There's a question for you. I read the book, so it's not a fair question, but I would say that no, not very well. You do uh well, you read the books,

so it isn't a fair question. But if you ask the public and locks most people and I often do this in talks, are like, sure, I know how it a toilet works. But then you really start, you know, pushing them like why is it that if you put a little bit of water into a toilet bowl, you know, doesn't flush, but if you put a lot of water into it, suddenly it'll flush. And you know, why does it have that weird little s tube that's on the side of This is really an issue of meta cognition.

We spend a lot of time on on toilets, and so we think we know how they work, but really, when it comes to the engineering of them, we just simply don't know what we really know. And so meta cognition really at this basic form is an argument that's at the heart of the book. It's at the heart of this learning process. What do you want to learn? How are you going to learn it? How do you

know that you know it? Um And asking yourself questions at a very basic level when you're reading or watching a Ted talk or listening to a podcast is like do I really get this? Can I explain us to a friend? Will kind of connect and and then reflecting of like what can I do to to learn this better? Is is a really powerful tool for UH learners of

really in the age. Another of metic cognition that you talk about in the book is that when people are upset or they are stressed, they are unable to learn well. And so another way to use metic cognition is about being aware of what our emotional state is and working with our emotional state allows us to actually learn better. This is something that's really fascinating to me, and you know, a lot of people, including you guys, have talked about this.

But let's sort of drill down this idea a little bit more. I think it's just so important when we so often think that cognition and emotions are too totally separate things, right, like our thoughts and our feelings are, you know, just totally independent, But really they're they're intermixed, like how we feel and how we think. You know, they really kind of rolled to together, and we really underestimate that when it comes to learning, and they're really

wonderful examples of this. You know, if you encourage people to think about their asked, right, do you know, tell them to start thinking about their childhood bedroom and and their first grade teacher, you know they'll they'll start to lean back, that has been shown in a number of studies. And tell them about retirement, how they're gonna move to the Bahamas, they start to lean forward. And it's a very clear, very concrete example of the ways that are thinking.

Our body work together. And you were asking about meta cognition and feelings. What's important here is that we need to feel sort of calm, We need to feel ready to learn, We need to feel safe when we want to learn, because our emotions and are thinking are feelings and are learning that they're not two different things that they they are often the same thing, and so having that feeling of safety makes us far more able to learn. Absolutely.

So we're nearing the end of time, but I want to hit a couple of things that we have covered a little bit, but I want to I want to call them out as as sort of key points, and then you can bring up any key points you think we've missed. But one of the big ones over and over is digestible parts, right, break it down into smaller parts, learn less at one time. You know, there's a study in their shows of after about ninety minutes, adults are

kind of done. And so lots of this breaking it into small parts was one big one, definitely, it's a really big one. You know. For a long time, we thought short term memory could take five to seven items. That's where our telephone numbers are the length that they are. But increasingly we realize that we can't even take that much into into our brain at one time. And companies have realized this on their on their own right, and this is why like nine, one, three, one, one, really

important numbers are so short. So digestible parts, it's the way to go when it comes to learning. Yep. The next is active learning strategies versus being passive things like self whizzing or self explaining or describing it in your own words. But but really going from just consuming something and hoping you remember it. Even old flash cards make an appearance in this book, right that they actually are useful because you're quizzing yourself and you're you know, you're

forcing yourself to recall versus just shoving things in. It's a great example. It's so important tests have a terebratle reputation. They deserve them in many ways. But like low stakes pop quizzes kind of brain dumps really are very effective ways to learn. My favorite study when it comes to this is a researcher gave people, uh, some text. Some people read the text once and then took a test. Some people read the text twice, right, So they read

it once and they reread it took a test. The people who read the text once and then put it away and then just started writing everything that they knew about it, creating some connections and associations learned any percentage points more so, and they took the same amount of time. Right, I mean, it doesn't take longer to to necessarily do that type of bring them than it takes to um, you know, reread the material. So just quizzing yourself in both ways of recalling facts is a great way to

make sure those facts are in your head. But also just like why did this happen? Engaging in recall, just summarizing material great way to to make learning a lot more active. Yeah. Another technique you call out is called hypotheticals, which you know, the examples you've given the book are you know, ask what would happen if living things didn't evolve over time? Or if you're studying Shakespeare, you know, consider what would have happened if if the young Lovers

had not died in the play. You know, just pose hypotheticals about what you're learning. Yeah, and encourages these types of why, these types of elaborations as types of different angles of of looking at something that create that richer sense of of understanding. So any other sort of short hitters that you would add to that that list of like if you're gonna learn three or four things in this, here's what i'd take away. Anything else that you'd add in there that I missed so easily we forget so

much we should incorporate that into our learning. What does that mean practically speaking? If you're going to, you know, take a Spanish class tonight, start early so that you have time to forget build in uh time in which you know that there's just going to be moments where you're not thinking about that material. Anything you can do essentially to stay away from cramming is very very effective. Excellent, Well, Ulrich, thanks so much for taking the time to come on

the show. And the book was really interesting to me, And um, I've always thought of myself, as you know, one of the things I'm good at is learning pretty well. And reading the book, I was like, okay, well, I think you know that I do do most of that stuff, which is probably, but I definitely picked up a few tips that will be helpful to me moving forward. That's great. Um, really glad to hear that, in part because I've learned so much from the show. So thank you so much

for having me on. Yep, it's been a pleasure, Take care, Thanks again, bye bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the one you Feed podcast. Head over to one you feed dot net slash support The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.