Want to learn a new skill? You need to do these 2 things.

Plus, knowledge vs. muscle memory, doing brain surgery on aliens, why AI's are still stupid, and how to launch a tennis ball into space.

Aug 12, 2024

Imagine that you want to learn how to draw.

You start by reading lots of books about drawing. You learn about perspective, and lighting, texture, and all that stuff.

Then you actually try to draw something — and it sucks.

You decide that drawing books are useless. You read all of them, and you still can’t draw! So you decide that instead, you’re just gonna draw as many pictures as you can.

Over time, your drawings get a little bit better. But you look at other people’s drawings and they’re still better than yours. They can do stuff that you can’t even begin to do, because they know drawing techniques that you don’t know.

What’s going on? You’re learning the wrong way.

At first you decided to read a bunch of books (learning from theory). Then you decided to just put in lots of reps (learning from practice). You actually need to do both. And here’s why.

Learning From Theory

One way to learn is to read books. When you read books about something, you fill your head with ideas, and then you’ll build a theory of how it works.

But the problem is, your theory is gonna be wrong. It’s gonna leave important details out. It’s also gonna mislead you about some stuff.

For example, when you’re learning how to draw, it’s not enough to know how perspective works. You also need to know how to draw perspective. That means you have to know how to move your hand around on the page and manipulate your pencil, and you can’t read about that in a book.

So if you really want to learn something, you can’t just read books about it. Because the books never have all the answers.

Why don’t the books have all the answers? Because a) some things are obvious to experts who write books (so obvious that they don’t write about them), but not at all obvious to beginners, b) some things are impolite to say publicly, c) some things are just impossible to express in words, and d) some things are impossible to understand until you have the experience to make sense of them.

Also, books only put knowledge into the rational, informational part of your brain. The problem is that the rational, informational part of your brain can only do 1 thing at a time. And most skills involve doing like 10 things at a time.

For example, if you’re learning to ballet dance, you can’t consciously move your right arm to the side and twirl your left leg and rotate your hips all at the same time. You have to practice each of these movements individually until you can do them unconsciously. Then you can put them together.

Learning From Practice

The other way to learn is to just do stuff. When you do stuff, you get feedback. You see what went right and what went wrong. Then you try again.

The problem with learning from practice is that you don’t always know what your feedback is telling you.

For example, imagine that you want to put a tennis ball into space. So you throw your tennis ball as far in the air as you can. The problem is, your tennis ball keeps coming down — and you have no idea why. No matter how hard you throw the tennis ball, it keeps falling back to Earth.

To figure out how to put the tennis ball into space, you need a theory. So you read about the laws of gravity. Then you read about rocketships. Then you build yourself a little miniature rocketship and launch your tennis ball into orbit.

Without theory, all you have is blind trial and error. And blind trial and error takes forever, on a good day.

(This is one reason why AI’s are so hard to train, and why you need huge mountains of data to train them. AI’s don’t actually understand the stuff that they do, so they can’t make educated guesses. They can only learn by brute force.)

So you need practice AND theory.

If you try to do practice with no theory, you’ll eventually hit a plateau. You won’t realize what you’re doing wrong, so you won’t be able to get better.

If you try to do theory with no practice, you’ll run into the shortcomings of your theory. There will be tons of stuff that you’re just not prepared to deal with.

That’s why you need theory and practice. When you use both of them together, they make up for each other’s shortcomings.

Theory helps you figure out what mistakes you’re making. Practice helps you figure out how your theory is wrong.

So you gotta do both. You gotta read the books and put in the reps.

Should you do more theory, or more practice? Generally you should do about 80% practice and 20% theory. Although these numbers depend on the skill.

Some skills are more muscle memory and less theory. You can’t learn to ride a bicycle by reading books about riding bicycles, because riding a bike is all muscle memory, and you can’t build muscle memory by reading a book!

On the flipside, if you’re learning to play poker, you should focus a lot more on theory. That’s because poker is a feedback trap: if you just pay attention to your results, you can learn the wrong lesson, and actually play worse based on your experience.

Here’s what I mean. Imagine you have an inside straight draw, and so you shove all-in. The inside straight hits, and you make a bunch of money. You learn that drawing to an inside straight is good, so you keep doing it over and over again.

Now imagine that before you started playing poker, you heard somebody say that drawing to inside straights is bad. Then you never draw to an inside straight in the first place, so you never learn the wrong lesson.

This is an oversimplified example, obviously, but you will suck at poker if you don’t understand concepts like variance and expected value. That’s why internet players who understand poker theory can wipe the floor with experienced pros who’ve played for 30 years.

One more note: sometimes all you have is theory. For example, imagine you’re a brain surgeon. One day, an alien spaceship crashes next to your hospital. There are two aliens on board: one urgently needs brain surgery, the other breaks its hands and cannot perform the surgery. So you are asked to do brain surgery on this alien.

What the hell are you supposed to do? You can’t possibly have practiced performing a surgery on these aliens, because you didn’t know they existed until about 30 minutes ago. All you can really do is learn as much as you can about how their biology works, and then make your best effort.

How To Make The Most Of Practice And Theory

How to make the most of your practice: get really good feedback. Figure out how to tell whether you’re doing a good job. If the thing you’re learning doesn’t give you good feedback, hire a coach to tell you if you’re doing the right thing.

Pay attention. The more focused you are while you practice, the faster you build muscle memory.

Don’t worry about getting bored. Practice is boring. You’re just doing the same rote things over and over again. It doesn’t feel like you’re learning. Don’t worry: you are learning.

How to make the most of your theory: understand your theory as much as you can. Instead of just memorizing the rules, try to understand why the rules are the rules. Think of exceptions to the rules. Think about edge cases where the rules lead to something weird.

And whatever you do, don’t get attached to your theories. If you fall in love with your theories, you won’t be able to discard them when they don’t make sense. This will make it impossible to realize you’re wrong. It will also make it impossible for you to creatively break the rules.

Hey! Thanks for reading.

My name’s Theo and every Monday I publish an article about whatever was on my mind the week before. Usually it’s about psychology or how our society works.

If you liked this article, you might also like my article “The 7 Deadly Sins Of Thinking”, which is about cognitive biases and how to be less stupid: