Nat Eliason Skill Building Learning Series

NAT ELIASON
And there you have it! The 7 core lessons for teaching yourself anything. Here they are
again in case you missed any:
1. How to build a self-perpetuating motivation machine

2. How to teach yourself anything with the sandbox method
3. How to practice deliberately to reach the top of your field
4. How to break through learning plateaus and never stop growing
5. How to go from novice to expert
6. How to navigate through layers of abstraction to learn effectively
7. How to decomplicate artificially complex information
8. Bonus Notes: PEAK by Anders Ericsson.
9. Bonus PDF: Dreyfus Skill Levels Model paper.
The Motivation Machine: How to Get & Stay Motivated
for Any Goal
nateliason.com/motivation
Nat Eliason October 16, 2017
“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we
need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” – Einstein
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Ryan has decided to learn Spanish. He downloads Michel Thomas’s tapes, buys a book on
language learning, signs up for Duolingo, installs Anki, and gets to work.
In the beginning, he’s flying. He learns hundreds of words, gets the basic grammatical
structures down, he even signs up for iTalki and has some conversations with natives. He’s
on top of the world, confident that he’ll be speaking fluently with his Latin American friends
in no time.
Two weeks in, his progress begins to slow. The gains aren’t as easy now. He has to spend
as much time on reviewing the words he’s learned as on picking up new ones. The
Duolingo exercises don’t feel as broadly relevant. The Michel Thomas tapes have gotten
into narrow specifics around past participles and por vs. para rules. His progress slows.
The high he felt at the beginning has worn off and it’s becoming a slog to learn the material.
After another two weeks, it’s become such a slog that he starts missing days of practice. A
week later, he has stopped entirely.
What started as a fast-paced, frenzied, exciting project hit what Seth Godin calls “The Dip”:
“The Dip is the long stretch between beginner’s luck and real accomplishment. The Dip is
the set of artificial screens set up to keep people like you out… Extraordinary benefits
accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to push just a tiny bit longer than most.”
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The Dip is not a new idea. Startup founders have known about it for ages, as whatFred
Wilson and Paul Graham call the “Trough of Sorrow”:
Tim Ferriss wrote about a similar curve in The 4-Hour Chef to describe his progress
learning languages:
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There’s a pattern here. Across language learning, company building, and any kind of
creative project, there is a dip. A long period of low motivation, little excitement, and
unrewarding challenges. Most people quit during the dip. But if you can manage to not quit,
you can make it to the end and reap the rewards.
Discussions of The Dip leave out an equally challenging piece, though: The Start. People
like Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss, and Y Combinator alums have no problem with The Start, so it
gets overlooked. But The Start is a much bigger problem since you can’t reach The Dip if
you don’t get through The Start, and many more people fantasize about doing something
than actually do it and give up.
I began thinking more about The Dip and The Start more when I read The Motivation
Hacker by Nick Winter. In the book, Winter sets out to accomplish 17 goals in 3 months,
including learning 3,000 new Chinese characters, learning to skateboard, running a startup,
building an iPhone app, reading 20 books, and learning knife throwing of all things.
What the book highlights is that the biggest problem we face with completing our
projects isn’t productivityor time management, but motivation management. When
you’re sufficiently motivated to accomplish something, you’ll move heaven and earth and
start a war with Troy to do it.
When you’re not motivated, no amount of SMART goals or Pomodoros or screaming

affirmations in the shower will help you.
In The Motivation Hacker, Winter designed a system to ensure that he would accomplish
his goals over the three months. I don’t want to spoil the ending, but he was mostly
successful, and his book outlined effective motivation techniques any of can employ.
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There were a couple areas he didn’t cover as much, though. First, Nick is a self-starter, so
there wasn’t as much focus put on The Start as there was on surviving The Dip. Further, it
was a system built for those three months, not an ongoing motivation system, though I’m
sure he incorporated many of the lessons into the future.
What I want, and what I imagine you want as well, is a motivation machine where any
goal we desire will be started and completed. A system for perpetual motivation based
on the best practices we can find from decision science, psychology, and behavioral
economics. One where The Dip is easily traversable and The Start is never an impediment.
Here’s what I came up with. It’s a very detailed article, and I’ve included checklists to
help you implement this as easily as possible.
What Is Motivation?
The definition of motivation is: “The reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a
particular way,” or rephrased, “The general desire or willingness of someone to do
something.”
Motivation is your desire and willingness to do something and to keep doing something. We
need it to embark on creative projects, get in shape, make that phone call we’ve been
dreading, and resist the extra glass of wine at dinner. Without sufficient motivation, none of
these desires translate into action.
LessWrong gives us a more helpful equation:
As they describe it, your motivation is a function of your Expectancy (how likely you think
you are to accomplish the goal) multiplied by the Value of the goal to you, divided by the
product of your Impulsiveness (how distractible you are) and the Delay (how far off the
result seems).
Consider something simple like taking out the trash. When the trash is empty, there’s no
Value to taking it out, so you have low motivation to do it. When the trash is full there’s
more Value, and you can reasonably Expect you’ll be able to do it, but you might get
distracted by the Internet (Impulsiveness) and still not do it. It might not be until the trash is
overflowing and has flys around it (very high Value to taking it out) that you can finally
overcome your Impulsiveness to do it.
Or, consider learning a language. The Value may be high since you’ll be able to converse
fluently on your trip to Puerto Vallarta, but your Expectancy could be low from not already
knowing a second language. Layer on high Impulsiveness from your social media
obsession and high Delay from the trip being months off, and you’ll be unlikely to find the
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motivation to practice.
Getting motivated then requires you to do some combination of:
Increasing how likely you Expect you are to accomplish the goal
Increasing the Value of achieving the goal to you
Decreasing your Impulsiveness and distractibility
Decreasing the Delay by making the results of the goal more immediate
Or if you want a simpler version, you can look at how Anders Ericsson and Robert Poole
defined it in Peak:
“When you quit something that you had initially wanted to do, it’s because the reasons to
stop eventually came to outweigh the reasons to continue. Thus, to maintain your
motivation you can either strengthen the reasons to keep going or weaken the reasons to
quit. Successful motivation efforts generally include both.” (emphasis mine)
Whichever definition you prefer, motivation is a living system. Your reasons to continue and
stop will constantly shift, as will your Value, Expectancy, Impulsiveness, and Delay, so
building an effective Motivation Machine requires constantly re-tipping the scales in your
favor.
We can thus break motivation down into two areas: creating motivation to get started, and
maintaining motivation to continue. Some people are amazing at getting started but terrible
at following through. Others are amazing at following through on what they’ve committed to,
but can never quite motivate themselves to start something.
Depending on which part of the challenge you find yourself on you’ll have to more
aggressively design that part of your machine. You’ll either need to make it so easy to start
that you can’t say no, or make it so easy to continue that you never stop.
Getting Motivated to Start a Project

Before we continue, a clarification. When I talk about “getting motivated to start a project” I
mean actually starting it. Many people will say they’re “motivated” to learn Spanish or take
up basket weaving, but they never start. These people aren’t motivated, they just have an
interest. They likely want to have done the project, not actually do it. Our challenge is to
design a system that easily and reliably motivates you to action, instead of only talking
about your interests over happy hour.
Drawing from our two equations, designing your motivation to start a project is a function of
two variables: increasing your reasons to start, and decreasing your reasons to delay
starting.
Increasing Your Reasons to Start a Project

If your house is on fire, you’ll be motivated to start the project of “leaving the house.” You’ll
also wish you had sooner started the “fire extinguisher” project and the “second story
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window ladder” project. But absent the fire, you have little motivation to start either of these
projects, so how do you create that motivation before your Pomeranian decides that
playing with steel wool by a power outlet is a good idea?
Increasing the reasons to start a project deals with the top of the motivation equation:
Expectancy and Value. We have to create ways to dramatically increase the Value of
starting the project now, as well as increase our Expectancy of succeeding.
Increasing the Value of Starting a Project

The easiest way to increase the value of starting a project is to clearly define what
outcome you will get by accomplishing the goal. If your goals aren’t motivating, you
may not have attached a sufficiently high value to them.
If you only want to learn Spanish because you feel like you should learn a second
language, you’re unlikely to see high enough Value in it. But if you have a reason like “I
spend at least a month each year in Spanish speaking places and I want to be able to
make friends when I’m there,” you have a much stronger value.
If you’re trying to pick up a professional skill, “I should learn some programming” won’t get
you very far. But if you’re thinking “if I learn some programming I can start building my own
web apps and run them on my laptop while traveling the world like Levels” you’ll have a
much higher value attached.
However you choose to frame it, focus on creating a value that is intrinsically
meaningful to you. If you try to justify pursuing a goal because of something youthink you
should do or that you’re supposed to do, it won’t work. That’s not high value. They can’t just
be goals that you have chosen, they have to be goals that were generated
autonomously and that resonate with your personal desires.
The best way to increase Value is to have a specific project you want to work on. “Learn
programming” is not motivating, but when you want to be able to build a certain site you
have the idea for or design a mobile app you want to see in the world, you’ll be amazed at
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how motivated you become.
Increasing Your Expectancy of Succeeding at a New Project

Your Expectancy is how likely you believe you are to succeed at this project you’re taking
on. Increasing it requires pulling two levers: decreasing your learned helplessness, and
increasing the perceived ease of accomplishing it.
If you’ve ever taken on self-directed projects and failed before, or you’ve never been able to
get yourself motivated to start them in the past, you may have developed a degree of
“Learned Helplessness” around motivating yourself. It’s a psychological phenomenon in
which repeated failures conditions you to not bother trying, even when the factors that
caused you to fail in the past have been removed.
There are certain kinds of statements that give away if you’ve developed learned
helplessness:
“I’m not good at teaching myself new things.”

“I’ve never been good at waking up early.”
“I’m just not good with languages.”
“I don’t think I have the motivation to do my own projects.”
“Some people are just better at getting themselves to do things.”
If those sound familiar, the only solution is to realize you’re not stuck and force yourself
through the activity, or get someone else to help force you through it. This was apparently
the only way to de-condition the dogs in the original experiments from their learned
helplessness:
“To change this expectation, experimenters physically picked up the dogs and moved their
legs, replicating the actions the dogs would need to take in order to escape from the
electrified grid. This had to be done at least twice before the dogs would start willfully
jumping over the barrier on their own. In contrast, threats, rewards, and observed
demonstrations had no effect on the “helpless” Group 3 dogs.” – Wikipedia (emphasis
mine)
Luckily, the other way to increase Expectancy helps alleviate learned helplessness as well.
Part of why goals can seem unachievable (and thus low Expectancy) is that they seem too
big. What does “learn programming” even mean?
To avoid this, break your goals down and keep breaking them down until they reach
the point where they’re hilariously easy. If they’re easy, but still have a high value
attached to them, you’ll find it much easier to find the motivation for starting.
Say you want to learn design. You find Karen Cheng’s guide to learning design, but
accomplishing that whole list is a pretty big goal, so you start with the goal of getting
through her first recommendation, “You Can Draw in 30 Days.” Even that might feel
daunting. So you start with the goal of doing three drawing exercises from the book. That
feels more achievable while still being attached to the high Value goal of becoming an
employed designer.
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But even with these interventions, you may still put off starting, which is why you need to
decrease your reasons for putting it off.
Decreasing Your Reasons to Delay a Project

With strong reasons to start project you still might not feel like you need to do itnow, which
is why you also have to tackle the bottom of the equation: how to decrease the Delay (by
making it seem like you’ll hit the goal sooner), and decrease the Impulsiveness (so you
don’t procrastinate and do other things).
Impulsiveness isn’t such a problem when getting started since you’re more likely to get
distracted and procrastinate during The Dip. Our main focus for getting started is
decreasing how far off the potential end of the project seems, or framed positively, how we
can make the project feel more urgent.
Increasing Urgency
By breaking the project down as we did for increasing the Expectancy, you can decrease
the Delay since the smaller scope of the broken down project will have a nearer completion
date. Finishing Karen’s full guide might take months, but finishing the first three exercises in
the first resource might take an afternoon.
To make it more effective, though, assign a date to complete it by. “Finish the first three
exercises” isn’t particularly urgent, but “finish the first three exercises by Friday” is. There
are two competing philosophies for how to best do this:
The Parkinson’s Law Philosophy: The Parkinson’s Law philosophy says that you should
set an artificially short deadline so you don’t waste time dilly-dallying on unimportant things.
It says that by giving yourself a smaller window to complete the task in, you’ll be more likely
to get it done efficiently, since “work expands so as to fill the time available for its
completion.”
The problem with this philosophy is that while it’s good for creating more urgency and
lowering your Delay if you fail to get it done in your tight deadline, you might decrease your
Expectancy in the process.
The Planning Fallacy Philosophy: The Planning Fallacy philosophy says that you should
set longer deadlines than you expect you’ll need since we’re terrible at predicting how long
projects will take us. According to Kahneman and Tversky, only 48% of students completed
projects in a time estimate based on “everything going as poorly as it possibly could.” Given
this data, it seems we should double or quadruple our estimated time of completion to get
an accurate view.
Which philosophy is right? The planning fallacy it turns out applies more to larger, less
well-defined projects. You would have a hard time estimating how long it will take to write a
book (especially if you’ve never written one before), but if you write articles a few times a
week, you should have a fairly accurate view of how long it takes you to write one.
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The solution, then, is to set a deadline that’s just below how long it has taken you to do
a similar task in the past, so that it’s motivating enough to make you start now and work
efficiently (taking advantage of Parkinson’s Law) while avoiding overexerting yourself and
failing (from the Planning Fallacy).
Say you’re trying to learn programming. Don’t set out to do two hours of practice a day. Set
a pair of goals: at least 20 minutes of practice a day, and that you’ll finish half of the
Codecademy HTML & CSS course in the next week. 20 minutes a day is reasonable to
avoid the planning fallacy, but then having to finish the course in the next week will
motivate you via Parkinson’s Law to be efficient while you’re practicing.
Use a Commitment Device

If you want to add an extra layer of motivation, you can also create a commitment device to
prevent yourself from backing out. A commitment device is:
“…a means with which to lock yourself into a course of action that you might not otherwise
choose but that produces a desired result.”
Commitment devices usually fall into one of three categories:
Physical Commitment: Han Xin, a Chinese military general, would do this by making his
soldiers fight with their backs to the river so they’d have nowhere to retreat to and be forced
to fight for their lives.
In this commitment device, you physically prevent yourself from not accomplishing the goal,
such as by throwing out all of your junk food, only showering at the gym, installing a site
blocker like Self Control, or getting yourself banned from casinos.
Public Commitment: Elon Musk did this with the first Tesla Master Plan in 2006, and then
again last year with Part 2. He told the world what they were doing, and then he had to live
up to it.
In this commitment device, you state publicly what you’re going to do so that you’re
motivated by the harassment of your friends if you fail to do it. The only downside is that
sometimes, announcing your goals can lead to you not accomplishing them, so be sure to
be specific on the outcomes and deadlines instead of saying “I’m going to write a book!”
Financial Commitment: This was popularized by Tim Ferriss in The 4-Hour Body and
again in The 4-Hour Chef. He described it as the “Stakes” that you need to accomplish your
goals. Without them, it’s easy to slack off and delay.
In this commitment device, you put money on the line using a site like Beeminder or Go
Fucking Do It (I’ve had bad experiences with Stickk) saying that you’ll hit your goal by X
date, and if a friend doesn’t verify that you did it, you lose the money. You can also simply
bet someone in person, or you can have a competition (such as a weight loss competition)
where the winner gets the pot of everyone else’s bets.
Getting Motivated to Start a Project Recap

Before we move on to staying motivated during a project, let’s recap the core points about
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getting motivated to start one:
1. Increase the perceived value of the project by creating a robust, clearly defined
eventual outcome you’re excited about.
2. Increase your belief in your success by starting with a small goal and identifying any
symptoms of learned helplessness
3. Increase the urgency of the project by creating a commitment device to follow through
on it, and by decreasing how far off the first milestone is so you start sooner.
Again, there are checklists at the end to help you remind you of the finer details.
Staying Motivated During a Project

Starting is easy. Keeping going is hard. All projects will eventually land in The Dip and
you’ll have to decide if you’re willing to push through to the other side, or if you’re going to
quit and move on to the next thing.
Getting through the dip is primarily a function of maintaining motivation, which we can solve
based on the motivation equation from the beginning and a similar breakdown from the last
section. We need to make sure that we have consistently high reasons to keep going, and
consistently low reasons to quit.
Increasing Your Reasons to Keep Going

To keep going, you’ll have to maintain the same or greater level of Expectancy and Value
that you used to get yourself going. That will require maintaining your belief that you can
achieve the goal, and keeping in mind the greater goal that you’re working towards.
Maintaining Your Sense of Expectancy in the Project

One reason that you might give up or lose motivation is if your belief that you can pull off
the goal diminishes. If your Expectancy decreases too much, you may no longer feel
sufficiently motivated to push through the distractions and challenges regardless of how big
the potential value is.
To maintain your sense of Expectancy, keep giving yourself small wins. Keep
accomplishing small bits of the project on a regular schedule so that you’re reaffirming your
ability to succeed. Making a small amount of meaningful progress towards your goal is
incredibly motivating. Teresa Amabile calls this the “progress principle”:
“Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday,
the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. And the more
frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be
creatively productive in the long run. Whether they are trying to solve a major scientific
mystery or simply produce a high-quality product or service, everyday progress—even a
small win—can make all the difference in how they feel and perform.” (emphasis mine)
It’s also a key for feeling good about your work. According to the same research,“Steps
forward occurred on 76% of people’s best-mood days… If a person is motivated and
happy at the end of the workday, it’s a good bet that he or she made some progress.”
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Unfortunately, the reverse is also true.
“…perceptions suffered when people encountered setbacks. They found less positive
challenge in the work, felt that they had less freedom in carrying it out, and reported that
they had insufficient resources… Small losses or setbacks can have an extremely
negative effect on inner work life. In fact, our study and research by others show that
negative events can have a more powerful impact than positive ones.”
This means that there are two Motivation Loops going on with respect to your
accomplishments and Expectancy. In the Positive Motivation Loop, your small wins provide
greater Expectancy of future success and thus greater motivation:
But in the Negative Motivation Loop, your setbacks decrease your Expectancy of future
success and lead to lesser motivation:
The solution? Set small, incremental goals that are sufficiently exciting to be
motivating and which you have a reasonable expectation of hitting. A good technique
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for this is setting process goals instead of outcome goals. An outcome goal is great for
planning, but it’s bad for day to day tracking since you can’t control your outcomes. You can
only control what you do in pursuit of those outcomes.
Instead of setting a goal like “Learn Spanish,” you might set an outcome goal like “Have a 5-
minute conversation with a native speaker in 3 months.” Then your daily process goal might
be “spend 20 minutes on BaseLang or iTalki practicing Spanish each day.” Spending 20
minutes a day is a very doable process goal, that will lead to achieving your outcome goal
and that has a greater ability to create daily small wins and move you through the Positive
Motivation Loop (LessWrong refers to this as “Success Spirals”).
This Positive Motivation Loop will maintain your Expectancy and desire to continue at the
micro level, the day-to-day. Now you need to make sure that you’re also staying motivated
at the macro level, around the Value.
Maintaining Your Sense of Value in the Project
Your value in the project comes from whatever greater goal the project is attached to.
Maybe you’re only seeing the “goal” of spending 20 minutes on Spanish practice (low
Value) but you know that’s feeding into the ultimate goal of making friends with locals in
Spain (high Value).
The challenge is keeping that high-level goal in front of you while you’re working through
the minutia and day to day of working to accomplish it. You can do this multiple ways, but
here’s what’s worked well for me.
I think of my goals on three levels: quarterly, weekly, and daily. The quarterly goals are the
loftiest: finish a book draft, grow my business to > $30,000 MRR, dial in my productivity
system. From those quarterly goals, I can create weekly goals as well as monthly “check-
in” goals to make sure I’m on track. Then from those weekly goals, I create my daily goals,
either each night when I wrap up or each morning before I get started. (For more on this,
read Getting Results the Agile Way).
By having a tiered process like this, every day in my daily review I’m reminded of the
weekly goals that my tasks are feeding into, and every week during my weekly review I’m
reminded of the bigger quarterly goals that those weekly goals are supporting. The goals
themselves are supported by “areas” (based on Tiago Forte’s “PARA” model), and those
areas have the really lofty focuses: growing this blog, writing a book, getting in the best
shape I’ve been in.
Each review reminds me of the higher level that the goals are feeding into and keeps them
front and center in my mind so that the daily minutia is connected with a greater purpose.
There are plenty of other ways to do this, but the most important part is that you do it. If you
jump around from one task to the next without seeing clearly how it fits into the greater
architecture of your goals, you’ll be unlikely to keep that Value front and center in your
mind.
Find a way to keep reminding yourself of what your daily tasks are supporting. That’s
the only way to keep the Value up.
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Decreasing Your Reasons to Stop a Project
With starting a project, the challenge you had to get over was Delay: making yourself start
the project now rather than later. But for keeping going on a project, the challenge you have
to get over is Impulsiveness: making sure you don’t get distracted by shiny objects or
minutia instead of sticking with your goal.
As such, these methods will focus on preventing distraction, avoiding procrastination, and
stopping doing the “urgent unimportant” tasks instead of the “important non-urgent” ones
you should be doing.
Build a Habit
The more of your ongoing projects that you can turn into habits, the easier it will be to keep
a number of them going at the same time.
This is most easily demonstrated with physical goals: waking up at a set time, exercising,
eating well. If you can create habits around them following Charles Duhigg’s advice in The
Power of Habit, you won’t have to think about doing the day-to-day parts of the goal
anymore and you’ll be much less likely to fall off the project.
“This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells
your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine,
which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your
brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future.”
Say your goal is to lose 10lbs. You know that eating better will be a big part of getting there,
so you start by building the habit of cooking dinner three nights a week. You put it in your
calendar (cue) to give yourself the reminder, order the groceries in advance (cue / routine),
and then do it for a few weeks, not worrying about changing what you eat (reward via small
wins).
Once you have that habit in place, it will be easier to tweak the recipes you’re cooking so
they’re healthier, instead of trying to both get in the habit of cooking and eating healthier.
According to Duhigg, the easiest way to change a habit is to keep the Cue and Reward
the same while only changing the Routine, in this case, which recipes you choose.
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“That’s the rule: If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the
routine and change the habit. Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and
reward stay the same.”
Or, if you prefer eating out, get in the habit of eating the same thing at the same place
every day for lunch, as long as it’s something healthy (you can add a second option if you
want to be really wild about it).
Find Flow
The easiest way to reduce your Impulsiveness while hacking away at your project is to get
yourself into a state of flow. Described by Steven Kotler in “The Rise of Superman”:
“Most of us have at least passing familiarity with flow. If you’ve ever lost an afternoon to a
great conversation or gotten so involved in a work project that all else is forgotten, then
you’ve tasted the experience. In flow, we are so focused on the task at hand that
everything else falls away. Action and awareness merge. Time flies. Self vanishes.
Performance goes through the roof. We call this experience flow because that is the
sensation conferred. In flow, every action, each decision, leads effortlessly, fluidly,
seamlessly to the next. It’s high-speed problem solving; it’s being swept away by the river
of ultimate performance.”
It’s the experience of complete and total immersion, of being in “the zone” where you’re
completely absorbed in the task and effortlessly flowing through it. If you can get into it,
there’s no need to worry about impulsiveness: you won’t feel it. You’ll be wholly engaged
with the task at hand.
His book on the subject is worth reading (it’s more accessible than “Flow” by Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi), but the gist of getting into flow is that you need clear goals, immediate
feedback, and an ideal balance between challenge and using the full extent of your
abilities.
“Applying this idea in our daily life means breaking tasks into bite-size chunks and setting
goals accordingly… Think challenging, yet manageable— just enough stimulation to
shortcut attention into the now, not enough stress to pull you back out again.” – The Rise of
Superman
And most importantly, you need total focus, or what Cal Newport would callDeep Work:
“Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration

that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve
your skill, and are hard to replicate.”
Set Clear Follow-on Goals
One challenge you may run into is not being sure what to do after you hit your incremental
goals. When that happens, it’s easy to procrastinate or waste time since you no longer feel
the sense of urgency that you had before, and you no longer have a clear goal and
deadline that you’re shooting for.
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To avoid this, lay out your follow-on goals from the start of the project, instead of only
picking the first place to start. Writing out the first step will be helpful to make sure you take
it, but if you only clearly define that first step, you might not continue past it, so laying out
what the follow-on tasks will be will help reduce lag time between accomplishments.
Maintain Energy
The most important part of keeping your motivation high though is simply making sure you
have the energy to be excited. If you’re exhausted, hungover, hungry, or out of shape, you’ll
struggle to learn or work at your best.
If you develop a lifestyle that supports your efforts, you’ll have no difficulty keeping your
motivation levels high. I shouldn’t have to explain in too much detail since you already know
what this entails:
Optimize your sleep (8 hours, dark, regular wake up time, etc.)

Cut back or quit drinking
Avoid sugar and excessive stimulants
Walk and exercise daily
Eat lots of plants, meats, fats
You know the drill.
Building Your Motivation Machine

Pulling together the information from this article, you now have a simple system you can
use on a daily basis to give yourself the motivation to start new projects, keep working on
what you’ve committed yourself to, and break through the learning and progress plateaus
that will happen along the way.
First, figure out what you need to do:
Do you need the motivation to start? Or do you need the motivation to continue?
If you need the motivation to start:
1. Clearly define an exciting, high-level value to starting the project

2. Set small, easily achievable goals for the project to start
3. Create a deadline for the first goal that’s motivating without being overly ambitious
4. Pre-commit yourself to accomplishing the goal using a commitment device
If you need the motivation to continue:
1. Keep setting intermediate process goals that you know you can achieve
2. Regularly remind yourself of the greater vision your daily goals are feeding into
3. Build a habit around the goal so you keep working on it
4. Find the sweet spot within the process that gets you into flow
5. Clearly define your follow-on goals so that you know where to go next
6. Keep your energy up with good lifestyle habits
With these processes, you should have no issue getting over The Start and working
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through The Dip.
And if you want to make sure you always have the motivation to keep going, I made
checklists for myself for starting and pushing through projects (as well as a reading list) that
you can get a copy of as well.
You might also like:

How to Break Through Any Learning Plateau and Never Stop Growing
Hacking Your Time, Habits, Productivity, and More with Sebastian Marshall
The Goal Setting Template for a High-Output Life
Secrets of Memorization, Flow, and Rapid Learning with Lucas Miller
How to Profit from Chaos: Lessons from Antifragile by Nassim Taleb
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Self-Education: Teach Yourself Anything with the
Sandbox Method
nateliason.com/self-education
“It is better to know how to learn than to know.” –Dr. Seuss
At no point in history were you more capable of teaching yourself anything than today.
Picking up new skills has become as easy as firing up Google, doing some research,
practicing in the right ways, and pushing yourself through the plateaus. But despite this
incredible access to information, few people take full advantage of the opportunity they
have for self-directed learning.
We’re stuck in the myth that to learn something you need to be educated on it when you’re
perfectly able to educate yourself. It’s no longer necessary to get a college degree to be
qualified to do something, and while big, old companies haven’t realized that yet, it’s
common wisdom in smaller, more forward-thinking startups. Plenty of successful people
today got where they are today by teaching themselves the skills, and there’s no reason
you can’t do the same.
Self-education can free you from a job you hate, from a college major you aren’t excited
about, and it will be a core skill for the 21st century. Your ability to respond to changes in
the landscape of work and technology will be dictated by how skilled of a self-educator you
are. How well you can take full advantage of the information available to you to grow your
skillset.
I started studying how to learn outside a classroom around my sophomore year of college
and primarily focused it to marketing and writing. Over the years of teaching myself new
things, and now interviewing other people who have done the same, I’ve honed in on a
method for educating yourself on anything.
If you follow this process, there’s no reason you can’t take yourself from novice to expert in
any skill or topic without a college’s help. It starts with rethinking how we actually learn.
This is one part of a 7-part masterclass on teaching yourself anything. If you want the other
6 parts, you can get them for free here.
How We Learn
In high school, college, and most forms of higher education (in the United States, at least)
the model of learning you operate in trains you to stop figuring things out for yourself and
expect information to be handed to you.
How “well you do” in school is based on your grades. Your grades are based on your test
scores, papers, and projects, which are based on how well you apply information that was
handed to you. For at least twelve years, you’re trained to regurgitate and apply information
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that’s pre-packaged for you but never trained to find that information on your own.
There are no classes where the professor shows up and says “figure out how to build a
website by tomorrow,” and then leaves. It’s more likely that you’ll be taught one way to build
a website (probably using some awful tool like Dreamweaver) and then expected to follow
the steps you were shown.
But that’s not how learning works in the real world. If you want to do anything remotely
independent (entrepreneurship, creative work, freelancing, writing, lifestyle businesses, etc.)
then you have to be able to figure things out without being handed the knowledge
beforehand.
The way we’re taught to learn:
The way you really learn:
If this sounds like “guess and check,” the process that some teacher probably told you was
“bad” at some point, that’s because it is guess and check. And it’s a magnitudes better
method than expecting to know the solution to your problems beforehand.
When you teach yourself something on your own, there’s no curriculum, no playbook, no
textbook, no professor to walk you through the steps. You move from one problem to the
next slowly getting better at guessing and checking. You don’t need a formal education in a
subject, you just need the ability to experiment, push your abilities, and respond to
feedback.
But after years of having knowledge spoonfed to you, starting to learn this way might be
intimidating. You have to train (or, retrain) your ability to be self-taught first. And the easiest
way to start getting into that habit is to follow a technique I’ve developed called the
“Sandbox Method.”
The Sandbox Method for Self-Education

The sandbox method is an ongoing process for self-education, based on the latest
scientific research on how we learn and how we process information. It recognizes that we
don’t need to memorize facts, formulas, or other minutiae anymore. Instead, we need to
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develop an intuitive understanding of our skills, expose ourselves to a broad swath of
information about the skill, and constantly push ourselves to improve.
It can be done on your own, with a mentor, in school, in a company, any time. It’s a process
for continual learning and improvement, broken out into four cyclical steps.
Step 1: Build Your Sandbox

Before doing any research on how to do, or how to better do, what you want to learn, you
need to create an environment to practice it in. You’re going to spend most of your time
practicing and experimenting, not studying, so you need a way that you can easily exercise
your skill and improvise.
This is your “sandbox,” an area where you can freely play around with the skill you’re trying
to learn without having to worry too much about taking it seriously. The sandbox lets you
explore, experiment, and fail, without staking your entire future, savings, or reputation on it.
It’s an ideal environment for rapid learning.
This sandbox should be:
1. Low cost or free: so you don’t delay in starting

2. Low-stakes: so you’re not afraid to fail or show your work
3. Public: so that you have to put your work out there in some manner
Some examples:
Programming: Accounts on Github, Heroku, and StackExchange for building

projects and asking for help.
Writing: A personal blog hosted on WordPress, Medium, or SquareSpace.
Photography: Your camera and Instagram account.
Design: Sketch, and a Dribbble account to show your work on.
Marketing: A blog or information site hosted on WordPress that you can try to grow.
Whatever you want to learn, this sandbox must be in place before you get started. If you
don’t have an easy way to practice whatever you’re trying to learn and to put your work out
in the world as you’re going, then you’ll learn much slower and have a harder time getting
feedback.
Putting your work out there when you’re a novice is scary, but it will train you to get
comfortable with having people see your creative projects before they’re perfect and before
you’re an expert. School trains students to be afraid of the judgment of their work from
being graded all the time, but if you can get over that latent fear and start sharing what
you’re working on with the community around your skill, you’ll advance much faster and
make useful connections along the way.
With your sandbox in place, you can start researching and learning more about your target
skill.
Step 2: Research
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To continue expanding the borders of your sandbox, the extent of the skill that you can
practice and apply, you’ll need to do a certain amount of research. The resources exist
online to teach yourself anything, you just have to figure out what’s worth reading,
watching, or listening to.
In the beginning, the best kind of information to look for is recipes. Clear ways of using
the skill that you can immediately incorporate into your sandbox and try out. If you don’t
practice what you’re reading (on your own, not just in the confines of the education platform
like Codecademy) then you’ll never truly learn it.
So as you’re practicing the skill, go through materials that will broaden your understanding
of it and give you new recipes to experiment with. These typically fall into a few categories:
Books
I love books as a learning resource. I’ve used them to improvemy photography, get better
at marketing, learn how our minds work, learn how to learn, and many people swear by
books as a self-education resource. They’re great for picking up broad techniques and
mental models for certain skills and can be invaluable introductions to new parts of the
skills that you might not have thought of.
You can also use books for harder skills like programming. At leastone person I’ve
spoken with taught himself how to program primarily through textbooks until he knew
enough to figure out problems on his own using StackOverflow and the debugger.
They can also be great for improving your language skills, both by teaching you how to be a
better language learner and helping you learn the intricacies of a language’s grammar. You
won’t learn proper pronunciation or how to listen to a book, but they can be useful
resources for mastering the finer points.
Whatever you’re trying to learn, books are a great resource to start with since they’re
generally more vetted and edited than what you can find online. But there are still plenty of
great, sometimes better, resources to be found on the Internet.
Blogs and Online Resources

Second to books, there’s tons of written content online you can use to self-educate. Some
people have written whole blog posts on how to teach yourself marketing, teach yourself
design, learn JavaScript, and if you search around a bit you can probably find a well-written
guide to teaching yourself anything.
Some of these resources will explain specifically how to do something, and some, like the
ones listed above, will help you navigate everything else out there. If you’re trying to
navigate the Internet’s vast collection of self-education resources, finding a good blog
article or online resource that can cut through the noise is a huge boon.
The easiest way to find these is to simply Google “how to do X” or “how to learn X” or “how
to get better at X.” You’ll typically find a good article, discussion on Reddit, or related
question on Quora that you can dig through to get started.
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Online Courses and “MOOCs” (Massive Open Online Classrooms)
If you prefer watching and listening to reading, then online courses or “MOOCs” are a
perfect solution for self-education. The Internet is full of free and paid online classes that
can teach you anything from programming, to marketing, to design, to (I assume) basket
weaving.
Some colleges, even, have opened up free recordings of their courses. You can go through
MIT’s OpenCourseWare, Harvard’s open learning, and free class recordings from tons of
other universities.
There are also great dedicated platforms for online courses. I personally have used
SkillShare, Khan Academy, Coursera, Codecademy, and Udemy. There are also plenty of
amazing teachers on YouTube (like this Ruby on Rails series), teachers on Teachable (like
Tiago Forte), and teachers who have built their own schools from scratch (likeWes Bos).
Many of these materials can be expensive, but there are plenty of free online courses too.
And some of the free ones are better than the paid ones. Check out highly viewed
YouTube channels for skills you’re trying to learn, and look at free university recordings
and TED talks if you want to learn a subject. In many cases, these freely distributed
courses are the best resources out there.
And Take Notes!

As you’re learning, take notes on everything so you can refer back to them later. I like using
Evernote and keeping highly detailed notes, since this makes it easy to find things that I’ve
learned in the past and exactly where I’ve found them. It helps you remember everything,
too, by building up a “personal wiki” in the words of Andy Hunt.
You should also consider publishing your notes as you go (as I do with books I read) since
that forces you to clarify your understanding and articulate it in a way that other people will
understand.
Step 3: Implement and Practice

Within your sandbox, how you practice what you’re learning will be as important as what
you choose to practice. The wrong practice methods can lead to hours, days, even years of
wasted repetition, but the right practice methods can accelerate you to the level of
competency in a matter of months.
The ineffective practice that most people engage in is called “naive practice,” named by
Anders Ericsson in his book Peak. Naive practice is how most people trick themselves into
thinking their practicing, while really, they aren’t learning anything.
Some examples of naive practice would be:
Playing a competitive game like Go casually with a friend.

Playing songs that you already know how to play.
Looking up a recipe, baking a pie, and then keeping making that kind of pie in the
future.
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The problem is that in this kind of “practice,” you’re not challenging yourself. If you go
through the motions of naive practice, you’ll likely improve very little, if at all, so you have to
incorporate the elements of purposeful and deliberate practice to make sure that you’re
truly learning while you’re practicing.
Practicing purposefully within your sandbox requires that you:
1. Honestly assess your limits to figure out where you need to improve.
2. Set a goal just beyond your current ability to motivate yourself to stretch beyond your
comfort zone.
3. Practice with intense focus.
4. Get feedback, in whatever way you can, and incorporate that feedback into your
practice.
Getting feedback will be the last part of our self-education system.
Step 4: Get Feedback

As you practice deliberately within your sandbox, continuing to do research to fill in the
gaps of your knowledge, the last (and necessary) piece of the self-education process is
getting feedback.
If you’re trying to improve your weightlifting, it’s hard to know if your form is good or not
without a coach there to give you corrections. When you’re learning a language, it’s hard to
know whether you’re pronouncing words correctly without someone to critique you. You
can learn a lot on your own, but without a coach, mentor, or tool to provide feedback, you’ll
get stuck eventually. Or, worse, you might keep ingraining bad technique, making it harder
to unlearn later.
For some skills, you can find online tools that will give you feedback. Sites like
Codecademy tell you what you did wrong, and quizzes on more education-heavy sites like
Coursera check your comprehension as you’re doing.
There are also online communities that have good systems for giving each other feedback.
There are free, community feedback systems like reddit’s /r/learnprogramming for getting
coding feedback. There are also more enforced feedback-sharing sites like Lang-8, where
you give feedback to people trying to learn your language in return for feedback from
people whose language you’re trying to learn.
But the best form of feedback is always a coach, tutor, or mentor who already knows how
to do what you’re trying to learn. They’ll be able to provide the most targeted feedback, and
if they’re good, they’ll be able to preempt your plateaus and give you ideas about how you
can design your learning program to avoid them.
If you don’t have anyone who can coach you in person, try finding someone online. If you
want to be a better writer, hire an editor on UpWork to give you feedback. If you want to get
in shape, find an online service focused on improving your weightlifting abilities. If you want
to learn a new language, find someone on iTalki that you can have conversations with.
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You could also reach out to someone you look up to and ask for small bits of advice. They
won’t give as much hands-on coaching, but they can still be incredibly helpful.
Another option is to use less direct forms of feedback. The market can be one good
feedback loop, since if you’re regularly publishing art, writing, photos, music, you can get a
sense for what people like and don’t like based on what they respond to. Be careful with
this method, though. Sometimes you’ll get pulled in the direction of mass appeal instead of
best work. Fifty Shades of Grey is one of the best-selling books of all time… but it’s not
exactly a literary work to model your writing off of.
Continue the Self-Education Loop

Once you’ve gone through the process of designing your sandbox, researching how to
improve your skill, applying that knowledge to purposeful practice within your sandbox, and
getting feedback on your work as you’re going, you simply repeat the process to continue
developing your skill.
When you reach a learning goal, or feel like you’ve become comfortable with an aspect of
the skill, you have to go back to the research phase to assess what else you need to learn,
adjust your sandbox to allow you to learn that skill effectively, then purposefully practice it
and solicit feedback to keep pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone.
This creates the self-education loop. A perpetual cycle of constant learning and
improvement, where you never have to stop improving your abilities or stagnate at a
learning plateau:
Troubleshooting
Finally, it’s possible that you’ll eventually get stuck somewhere. When that happens, you
have to assess what the problem might be.
Did you reach a point of “good enough” and plateau? Then you need to learn how tobust
through learning plateaus.
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Have you lost motivation and stop practicing? Then you need to learn how to build aself-
perpetuating motivation machine.
Are you practicing diligently, but not improving? Then you may need to get a better
understanding of how to practice purposefully and deliberately.
Best of luck! And if you really want to master self-education, then be sure to get the full
(free) 7-part masterclass.

Useful Skills, Silent Risk, and The End of Jobs with Taylor Pearson
A Simple Exercise to Discover What Skills You Should Learn
Is it Risky? Or Challenging?
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How to Use Deliberate Practice to Reach the Top 1% of
Your Field
nateliason.com/deliberate-practice
Nat Eliason July 3, 2017
In the late 1970s, Anders Ericsson devised a very boring experiment.
His subject, Steve Faloon, was instructed to memorize random strings of numbers.
Ericsson’s interest was in how many numbers Steve could keep in his head with consistent
practice. The research and common wisdom at the time said you could only hold around 7-
8 random bits of information in your head at a time, and so far, Steve was proving the
research.
In each session, Ericsson and Steve would sit down, and Ericsson would read him a
random string of numbers at a rate of one per second. By the end of their fourth, one-hour
session together, Steve could reliably recite back strings of 7 or 8 digits, but he’d struggle
with 9, and never successfully remembered 10.
Until he made a breakthrough.
During their fifth session, Steve succeeded at remembering his first 10 digit string and
followed it up with his first 11 digit string. It may seem trivial, but when the average person
(including Steve at first) can only remember 7, this is a 57% improvement over average.
Steve was only getting started though. He and Ericsson continued their work together, and
by the end of the 200th(!) session, he could reliably memorize strings of 82 random digits.
He didn’t have any gift, he didn’t receive any special training, he simply practiced, week
after week, in a special way. The same way that’s created chess prodigies, world record
holders, Olympic gold medalists, prolific writers, and any master of their craft that you’re
familiar with today.
Anders Ericsson devoted his life’s work to studying this technique for effective skill
development and coined the term “deliberate practice” to describe it.
If you feel you’re already very familiar with deliberate practice and just want some examples
to get some ideas flowing for how to improve your skills, check out my catalogue of
deliberate practice examples.
What is Deliberate Practice?

If you’re reading this blog, then my guess is that this isn’t the first time you’ve heard of
deliberate practice. It’s very much in vogue in the learning community, ever since the
research on it was misinterpreted by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers.
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But I don’t feel that most sources have done the topic justice. Until recently, most of the
books discussing deliberate practice have had to interpret it themselves, as done in Talent
is Overrated, The Talent Code, The Practicing Mind, The First 20 Hours, and Outliers, and
when you read Ericsson’s original work outlined in his book Peak, it’s clear that he feels
he’s been misunderstood.
Here, I’m going to explain deliberate practice and how anyone can use it for their own skill
development drawing solely from Ericsson’s work. I recommend you pick up Peak anyway
since it’s a fantastic book, but this article should serve as a sufficient primer.
Naive vs. Purposeful vs. Deliberate Practice

Deliberate practice is a method of practicing primarily aimed at rapid, continuous
improvement. Its goal is to avoid getting trapped on learning plateaus and to keep
progressing as effectively as you reasonably can.
It can best be understood at first in contrast to the “naive” practice that most people engage
in.
Naive Practice
Naive practice is what most people are doing most of the time when they’re practicing.
They’re going through the motions, repeating what they normally do with the skill, without
being challenged or having a set goal.
This might include:
Playing tennis, chess, scrabble, or any other competitive game casually with a friend
Writing the same type of articles you normally write
Playing music you already know how to play
Practicing a song, but continuing on when you miss notes
Looking up a recipe, baking a pie, and then keeping making that kind of pie in the
future
The problem is that in this kind of “practice,” you’re not improving or challenging yourself.
As Ericsson says:
“People often misunderstand this because they assume that the continued driving or tennis
playing or pie baking is a form of practice and that if they keep doing it they are bound to
get better at it, slowly perhaps, but better nonetheless… But no. Research has shown that,
generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of “acceptable” performance and
automaticity, the additional years of “practice” don’t lead to improvement.” (emphasis
mine).
Then the question, of course, is what do you do? If you recognize that you’ve reached that
plateau where you’re not really improving, just going through the same automatic motions
over and over again, how do you move up to the next level?
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Enter purposeful practice.
Purposeful Practice
Purposeful practice is one step below deliberate practice, but it’s far superior to naive
practice.
Contrasted to Naive Practice, Purposeful Practice has a few key characteristics:
Purposeful Practice Has Specific Goals: While in Naive Practice you’re hitting the ball,
playing a game with a friend, running through the same routine, in Purposeful Practice you
set specific, narrower goals for what you want to successfully do.
These goals could sound like:
Play this piece all the way through, at this speed, with no mistakes, three times in a
row
Land 20 serves in a row inside the box
Remember 10 digits in a row
Program an email signup form without checking Stack Overflow
Run 10 100m sprints in under 12 seconds each
This is an area where SMART goals come in handy. Obscure goals like “get better” won’t
be useful, but by making your goals specific, measureable, actionable, relevant, and time-
bound, you can make small improvements that will over time lead to big improvements.
Purposeful Practice is Focused: Whereas you might be distracted in naive practice,

purposeful practice requires your complete undivided attention. It requires Deep Work.
Purposeful Practice Involves Feedback: The only way you can improve is if you have
some idea of how you’re doing relative to your goals and what parts you need to improve
on in order to get closer to your goals.
For Steve, this was the correct/incorrect result when he tried to repeat the numbers back,
but also his own self assessments of what was easy or difficult with each string. For some
skills, like tennis, you either need a coach who can show you what you’re doing wrong and
how to correct it, or you need to videotape and critique yourself in order to improve your
performance.
However you do it, feedback in some form is necessary, and the more often and precise
the feedback, the better.
Purposeful Practice Requires Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone: If you never push
yourself beyond what you’re already capable of, you can never improve. Ericsson gives an
example of how he did this with Steve:
“As he increased his memory capacity, I would challenge him with longer and longer strings
of digits so that he was always close to his capacity. In particular, by increasing the number
of digits each time he got a string right, and decreasing the number when he got it wrong, I
kept the number of digits right around what he was capable of doing while always pushing
him to remember just one more digit.”
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This is a perfect example of how you want to get right up to the edge of your abilities so
you’re challenged, but not so far beyond your capabilities that you’re overwhelmed. If they
had started at 20 digits Steve would have given up. But by increasing his load 1 digit at a
time, he got progressively better and it never seemed too challenging.
Purposeful Practice Requires Creative Problem Solving: Occasionally you’ll run into
barriers where it feels like you can’t get past that next threshold. At these points it’s best to
try differently, not necessarily harder.
For example, with Steve, he hit a barrier at 22 digits, so he changed up how he was
memorizing them in 3 and 4 digit chunks.
When he hit another barrier, Ericsson slowed down how quickly he read out the numbers,
then slowly worked back up to normal speed, and Steve broke through.
At another barrier, Ericsson increased the number of digits he was giving Steve by 10 to
completely overload him, but to both of their surprise, Steve remembered a significant
portion of them which gave him the motivation that he could keep doing better.
Purposeful Practice in Summary: According to Ericsson: “Get outside your comfort zone
but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to
monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation.”
To make it deliberate, you need two more variables.
Deliberate Practice
Deliberate Practice is the same as Purposeful Practice, but with two key differences.
Deliberate Practice is in a Well-Defined Field. Deliberate practice requires the field be

well developed and rigorous enough that there are clear differences between experts and
novices.
This would include fields like musical performance, chess, ballet, diving, almost anything
that’s competitive and been around for a while. What doesn’t qualify is non-competitive
tasks like gardening, many hobbies, many common labor force jobs like engineering,
consulting, teaching, and anything where you can’t show clear criteria differentiating
experts from intermediates from novices.
Deliberate Practice Requires a Teacher Who Can Tailor Practice Activities.You need
a good coach who can provide the practice strategies that help you develop the areas you
need to, based on the feedback they provide.
Ericsson makes the distinction a little clearer:
“… we are drawing a clear distinction between purposeful practice— in which a person tries
very hard to push himself or herself to improve— and practice that is both purposeful and
informed. In particular, deliberate practice is informed and guided by the best performers’
accomplishments and by an understanding of what these expert performers do to excel.
Deliberate practice is purposeful practice that knows where it is going and how to
get there.” (emphasis mine)
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He also says, though, that you can still get many of the benefits of deliberate practice
without having a personal coach. Memory competitors study the techniques and methods
of the grandmasters and use those techniques to design their own study methods, so even
though they don’t have a coach, they’re still getting the benefit of the experience of their
predecessors in the field.
For anyone who wants to take advantage of deliberate practice but doesn’t have access to
a personal coach, he gives this formula:
1. Identify the expert performers in your field

2. Figure out what they do that makes them so good
3. Design purposeful practice around learning how to do that yourself
Putting it All Together: A Deliberate Practice Roadmap

Now that we understand the components of deliberate practice, we can put them together
into a roadmap for applying it to any skill.
Before Starting: Find a Teacher or Substitute Teacher
To truly engage in deliberate practice, you need a teacher or a coach who can guide your
learning process. They should be able to give you small, specific goals to improve parts of
your craft and point out where you might be weak.
If you don’t have access to a direct coach for your skill, either because of money, location,
or the skill not being well suited to a teacher, you have to figure out a teaching substitute on
your own. The main value of a teacher is in the tailored practice, goal setting, and
feedback, so you have to reproduce that on your own.
That means you need to find an expert in your field who you can study and try to emulate,
you need to set small, concrete goals for improving parts of your skill, and you need a
feedback mechanism to figure out where in the skill you’re weak.
Once you have a teacher or an effective feedback and goal setting method, you can start
the deliberate practice loop.
Step 1: Assess Your Limits
Figure out where the boundaries of your current skill level are. What’s the weakest part of
your writing? How much weight can you lift? How fast can you run? What programming
functions do you know off the top of your head? You need to get an idea of where you’re
weakest or most want to improve.
Step 2: Set a Reaching, SMART Goal
Pick the area of your skill that you feel the most limited by, and set a goal to improve that
aspect. The goal should be just beyond your current capabilities in order to stretch you, but
it should not be so far beyond where you are now that you’re overwhelmed.
This could be playing a piece without errors three times in a row at a certain speed, lifting 5
additional pounds, writing a 1,000-word article within a time constraint, running 400m a few
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seconds slower, whatever you feel you want to improve.
Step 3: Practice with Focus
Start practicing with that goal in mind, and give the practice your complete focus. You can’t
be distracted or doing multiple things, you need to give it your undivided attention to get the
full benefits.
Step 4: Get Feedback
During your focused practice, you need a feedback mechanism for how you’re doing
relative to your goal. This will ideally be a skilled teacher or coach who knows what to look
for, but you can also devise your own feedback methods based on the criteria discussed
above. Either way, a feedback system is necessary for knowing where you need to
improve.
As you go, your feedback mechanism will inform you how you of where your weaknesses
are (step 1) and help you set better goals (step 2), but it will also help you identify when
you’ve hit plateaus which require their own special method of goal setting.
Maneuver Around Plateaus
As you keep moving through the deliberate practice loop, you’ll get stuck at skill level
plateaus. When these are encountered, you need to creatively maneuver around them
instead of throwing more work at them. This is done by stressing your body and brain in
new and different ways relative to the skill. For example:
Making yourself type 20wpm faster to get your fingers used to the feeling, while
letting yourself make errors
Making yourself type 10 wpm slower, but with perfect accuracy
Changing the kinds of exercises you’re doing for weight lifting
Removing some chess pieces from the board to focus on others
Not letting yourself use certain kinds of words in writing (e.g. adjectives)
Roll against a better Jiu Jitsu practitioner than you usually do
By stressing yourself in new ways, you’ll notice which parts of the skill are holding you back
so that you can tailor your training to those pieces.
And the last piece:
Maintain Motivation
People stop improving because they stop pushing themselves, and because they lose
motivation to continue improving at the skill. They reach a point where they feel like they’re
“good enough” and the perceived benefit of trying to get better is outweighed by the
perceived benefit of relaxing.
You, therefore, need to weaken your reasons to quit and strengthen your reasons to keep
going. Ericsson gives a few ideas for how to do this:
Keep yourself in shape by staying active and sleeping well.

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Remove things from your environment that could pull you away from practice, such
as your smartphone.
Building a habit around your practice, such as by doing it first thing in the morning.
Limit your practice sessions to an hour to avoid burnout.
Celebrate your wins to motivate yourself to keep improving.
If you fall below a plateau, commit to yourself that you’ll get back to it before quitting.
Put together a group of people working on the same thing so you can motivate each
other.
With these four steps and two external pieces, we can create a diagram for deliberate
practice:
And there’s your roadmap. Study it, internalize it, return to it, keep pushing yourself beyond
your comfort zone, and in time, you’ll become a true master of your craft.
If you want more examples of ways to use deliberate practice on your own, check out the
companion article to this one where I’m listing as many deliberate practice examples as I
can find or think up.
And if you really want to master self-education, then be sure to get the full (free) 7-part
masterclass.

Self-Education: Teach Yourself Anything with the Sandbox Method
45 Deliberate Practice Examples for Rapidly Improving Your Skills
The End of School and Building a Valuable Skillset with Zak Slayback
Q&A Time! My Thoughts on Escaping the Road to Nowhere
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How to Break Through Any Learning Plateau and Never
Stop Growing
nateliason.com/learning-plateau
“There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond
them. If it kills you, it kills you.” – Bruce Lee
In my discussion of developing consistent motivation, one challenge became obvious: what

about when you hit a plateau?
A major source of the motivational Dip that strikes in the middle of projects is performance
plateaus: the quick, exciting gains you had in the beginning start to slow, and when they do,
your motivation to continue will decrease significantly.
This is especially common in skill development, and was one of the challenges that Anders
Ericsson encountered in his research for Peak:
“When you first start learning something new, it is normal to see rapid— or at least steady—
improvement, and when that improvement stops, it is natural to believe you’ve hit some
sort of implacable limit. So you stop trying to move forward, and you settle down to life on
that plateau. This is the major reason that people in every area stop improving.”
But getting through that plateau of contentment is critical to hitting the bigger goals
you’ve set for yourself. Doing so requires learning how to break yourself out of that
contentment, out of that plateau, so that you can keep learning and keep getting better.
It’s fairly easy with the right techniques, which we can break out into three categories, and
then organize into a five-step checklist at the end.
Lean into the Challenge

“Growth comes at the point of resistance. We learn by pushing ourselves and finding what
really lies at the outer reaches of our abilities.” – Josh Waitzkin, The Art of Learning
You might stop learning if there’s a challenge you’re avoiding. A hurdle you have to cross
that’s scary. One you might fail. Growth has been comfortable and easy up till this point,
and you don’t want to take on a challenge that turns the fun game into a serious
commitment.
But these challenges are exactly how we get better at the skill. If you’re trying to learn
stand-up comedy but you’re not performing in front of an audience besides your friends,
you’re unlikely to get the feedback you need to improve. If you’re trying to learn a language
but only doing exercises on Duolingo, you’re not truly learning it since you’re not having
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conversations with people. If you’re practicing songs you already know how to play instead
of potentially embarrassing yourself with new ones, you’ll never get better than those
songs.
The first step to breaking through a learning plateau is to identify if there’s a big challenge
you’re avoiding. If you’ve been spending tons of time on Codecademy “learning” to program
but haven’t built something you can put in front of another person to use, then you’re stuck
at a plateau. If you’re only cooking recipes you find online and not trying to make new
recipes on your own, that’ll be a plateau too.
You have to take the training wheels off at some point, and the sooner you do, the sooner
you can fall down a few times and figure out how to ride the bike. Each stage of the Dreyfus
model is a natural plateau, and taking off the training wheels is the critical move to get past
the Advanced Beginner stage and continue towards Expertise. If you never start using your
intuition, you can never become Competent, so it makes sense to make that leap sooner
rather than later.
But if it feels like you’re already taking on the challenging parts of the skill and using some
intuition: talking to natives, publishing web apps, sharing your writing, getting in front of an
audience, and there’s no clear greater challenge you could start pursuing, but you’re at a
plateau nonetheless, then the next step is to mix up your technique.
Mix Up Your Technique

If you know where your limits are and you’re leaning into them but they aren’t budging, you
have to try something else. This is best seen with weight lifting. If you’ve been trying to
increase your bench press, deadlift, squat-rack-curls, but they aren’t increasing, the next
step is to stress the muscles in a different way. Borrowing from Peak again:
“…the best way to move beyond [the plateau] is to challenge your brain or your body in
a new way. Bodybuilders, for instance, will change the types of exercises they are doing,
increase or decrease the weight they’re lifting or the number of repetitions, and switch up
their weekly routine. Actually, most of them will vary their patterns proactively so they don’t
get stuck on plateaus in the first place.”
In the “Starting Strength” training program, popular among novice weight lifters, the routine
changes every few weeks to preempt plateaus and maximize your strength gains. By
switching up the exercises and decreasing the frequency of more draining ones, it helps
you avoid hitting a plateau for how much you can lift (for a while, at least).
Drawing on the theory of constraints, this process works because it avoids one lagging
muscle group becoming a bottleneck to progress. You could, for example, have strong
enough quadriceps to squat 225 pounds, but if your lower back can’t keep the weight
steady you’ll fail the lift.
The simplest way to apply this to learning is to change your practice methods and
education sources. If you’re trying to learn a language, don’t just use Anki, Duolingo, or
iTalki. Focus on one at a time while doing smaller amounts of the others and rotate your
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focus every few weeks as you start to plateau or get bored. What you’ll find is that by taking
a break and coming back to each one, you’ll blow through where you were before.
Tactical Improvement
If you find that you’ve hit a plateau you can’t break through just through a diversity of
practice methods though, then it’s time to get more tactical. Start by identifying what part of
the skill might be holding you back, and then see how you can devise a training method that
focuses on that part of the skill. Maybe you have a huge vocabulary of Spanish words from
doing Anki practice, but you struggle putting them into grammatical sentences. The solution
isn’t to keep practicing on Anki. It’s to get on the phone with a native and hammer away at
sentences, or start writing massive numbers of them for feedback on Lang8.
Any time not spent improving the weakest part of your skill is a waste. It only
increases your frustration over being stuck at the plateau while doing nothing to get past it.
As soon as you see that you’re stuck, you should figure out how you can modify your
practice to deal with the weakest part of your skillset.
This is a core element of deliberate practice, and how Ericsson helped Josh Foer get
through a plateau on how many cards he could memorize:
“… I suggested to Josh that if he wanted to speed up the pace at which he could memorize
the order of a deck of cards, he should try to do it in less time than it normally took and then
look to see where his mistakes were coming from. By identifying exactly what was
slowing him down, he could come up with exercises to improve his speed on those
particular things instead of simply trying, over and over again, to produce some generalized
improvement that would decrease the amount of time he spent on an entire deck of cards.”
Now with these three techniques combined, we can develop a simple method for avoiding
and getting through plateaus.
A Checklist for Breaking Through Learning Plateaus

If you think you’ve hit a learning plateau, follow these steps to get through it.
1. Identify a challenge you may be avoiding and face it head on

2. Mix up your practice methods to stress all parts of the skill
3. Attempt new challenges to identify weak parts of the skill
4. Develop tactical practice techniques to improve the weak parts of the skill
5. Repeat at the next plateau
As long as you follow the steps faithfully, you should have no issue moving to the next level.
masterclass.

Self-Education: Teach Yourself Anything with the Sandbox Method
3/4
The Motivation Machine: How to Get & Stay Motivated for Any Goal
How to Use Deliberate Practice to Reach the Top 1% of Your Field
Hacking Your Time, Habits, Productivity, and More with Sebastian Marshall
4/4
The Step-by-Step Guide to Go From Novice to Expert in
Any Skill
nateliason.com/become-expert-dreyfus
Nat Eliason June 26, 2017
One of the major themes of Nat Chat has been how people developed their skills on their
own, whether explicitly by studying the methods of learning, or indirectly through practice.
I’ve been trying to find a more rigorous way to define different skill levels and how to move
between them, and I think I’ve found it.
I read “Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware,” a book for developers
on how to improve their learning process, and in it, Andy Hunt (the author) references a
model for skill development called “The Dreyfus Model” created by Stuart and Hubert
Dreyfus at UC Berkeley in 1980.
That first version of the model was later revised by Stuart Dreyfus in a paper in the Bulletin
of Science, Technology, and Society where he broke skill level down into five categories:
1. Novice
2. Advanced Beginner
3. Competent
4. Proficient
5. Expert
I’m going to first explain what defines these categories, then show you how you can use
that knowledge to assess your own abilities and progress towards expertise by taking
advantage of the differences in cognition at each skill level.
You’ll find that this is more useful than abstract ideas like the (misinterpreted) 10,000-hour
rule, and lets you progress well beyond basic skill hacking as described in The First 20
Hours, The 4-Hour Chef, and other books which can’t get you past the Advanced Beginner
stage.
First, the five levels of expertise.
The Novice Stage

The novice stage is the first level of skill acquisition, where you are just getting started in
the skill and have little familiarity with it.
The defining element of the novice is a reliance on recipes. Novices need clear
instructions on how to do something in order to do it. They don’t have an intuitive
understanding of the skill, so they need someone else’s recipes to follow in order to
complete any task within the skill.
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Some examples of that might include:
1. Following coding guides on Codecademy or Learn Python the Hard Way

2. Using a pre-packaged marketing guide for launching a business
3. Knowing the rules and score of chess, but no strategies
4. Following composition templates for taking good photos
5. Shifting a manual transmission based on rules (e.g. 2nd when speedometer hits 10).
A student graduating from college who only ever focused on their grades and
extracurriculars might be a novice, but might not even be at that stage. This is part of why
college can be so worthless for teaching skills: it doesn’t provide recipes and practice that
let you truly develop skills.
The Dreyfus brothers break each level down by four criteria which help us to understand
each level better. For the novice, here’s how they rank:
Context: None
Novices have no context for why they’re doing anything. You can tell them to add more
sugar or salt to a recipe, but they don’t know what that is going to do or why that’s the right
decision in the situation. You can tell them to move their bishop into enemy territory, but
they won’t know why that’s a good idea. You can tell them to use shorter headlines to rank
higher in Google, but… you get the idea.
Perspective: None
Novices also don’t know what variables in the skill are worth focusing on and which ones
aren’t. They want to look at everything at once. They can easily get overwhelmed by too
much information, which causes them to freak out and get exasperated and wonder how
anyone can possibly be good at what they’re doing.
The novice driver tries to look at every gauge and road variable, the novice marketer tries
to track every metric, the novice cook keeps checking the food every few seconds.
Decision Making: Analytical

Since the novice doesn’t have an intuitive sense for the skill, their decision making is
analytical. They look at the data they have, plug it into the recipe, and go with whatever the
recipe spits out. The oven hits 10 minutes and they flip over the steak. The car hits 10mph
and they shift to 2nd gear. They get their fifth set of 5 reps and they add 5 pounds.
Engagement: Detached
Since the novice is only following a recipe, they’re completely detached from the process.
They don’t have an emotional or intuitive investment in the goal setting, deciding what to
do, or the outcome. When something goes wrong they will blame the process, when
something goes right they will say it’s a good process. They have no personal involvement
in what’s happening.
The Challenge
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The challenge with being at the novice level should be obvious.When you can only follow
recipes, you get derailed very, very easily. Your reaction to errors is to blame the recipe,
and without a good system for troubleshooting on your own, you can get stuck.
But as the novice gets more experience following recipes and gaining more and more
context of the skill, eventually they can start to move to the “Advanced Beginner” stage.
The Advanced Beginner Stage

The novice becomes an advanced beginner when they can start to troubleshoot their
problems and work on their own. You’re still primarily using recipes, but you have more
contextual awareness of when to use which recipes.
The defining characteristic of the Advanced Beginner is recognizing “aspects” of a

situation. You can see what’s different about one situation and move through the layers of
abstraction and use that information to apply different recipes and guidelines to solve the
problem.
You don’t have a full “big picture” view of the skill yet, but you’re starting to develop more
context and are not completely lost when something goes wrong. Instead of blaming the
recipe when you hit an error, you know to look for another recipe.
Finally, you start to be able to use less rigorous “maxims” instead of recipes. A novice won’t
understand “shift up when the engine sounds like it’s racing,” but an advanced beginner
will.
Some examples might include:
Building a web app but relying heavily on Stack Overflow to figure out new things /
troubleshoot.
Recognizing when you’re “overextended” in chess and what to do about it.
Learning to shift up in gear when “the engine sounds like it’s racing.”
Reading a few different marketing guides to cobble together a strategy more relevant
to your situation.
Looking at a scene and being able to identify what photographic composition
styles might be appropriate.
For the four criteria, the only one that has changed is Context.
Context: None -> Situational

While the Novice has no context of what recipes to use when the Advanced Beginner has a
better idea of what recipes are relevant and can start to use maxims in their decision
making. They can combine situational information (the sound of an engine, the road
conditions) with non-situational information (the speedometer) to figure out what to do.
This is only possible after a certain amount of exposure to the skill. A Novice won’t know
what an engine should sound like, but after a while following the recipes, they can learn to
identify these situational cues.
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The Challenge
While the Advanced Beginner can start to understand the context of the situation and make
decisions based off of it, they still aren’t sure what information is relevant and don’t know
how to filter their inputs. They can easily get overwhelmed by everything they feel they have
to keep track of (especially as they absorb more recipes and maxims), and so they can feel
like they’re never going to master it.
But eventually, with more exposure to the skill and more practice, the Advanced Beginner
can start to understand what information is important and what isn’t and move to the
Competent stage.
The Competent Stage

As you progress through the Advanced Beginner stage, you add more and more recipes
and maxims to your experience with the skill that help you perform better and better.
Eventually, you hit the point where it’s completely overwhelming and you have to develop
rules about what recipes to apply when.
The development of these rules is the key characteristic of the Competent.You have
a better sense of what is relevant and what isn’t, and you can draw on a wide collection of
recipes based on those situational rules.
These rules might sound like:
1. “Focus primarily on shutter speed when it’s a fast moving subject.”

2. “The unbalanced pawn structure in this game is important because [other variables].”
3. “To slow down off the highway, focus on speed, not changing gears.”
4. “For this kind of article, I should apply SEO maxims like X, Y, Z”
The second characteristic of the Competent is that since you’re picking your rules and
using those rules to apply different recipes, you become emotionally involved in the
outcome.
While the Novice and Advanced Beginner are largely detached from the outcomes, the
Competent can experience joy at making the right choice of recipes and remorse at
choosing the wrong one. The locus of blame shifts from the recipe to yourself, since you
are now involved in choosing what to do.
That characterizes the two main shifts required to become competent:
Perspective: None -> Chosen

You’re starting to recognize what recipes and maxims apply in different situations and so
you choose which ones to apply based on the context. You can look at a situation and
decide which recipes to apply, instead of trying to apply them willy-nilly or based on
someone else’s recommendation.
Engagement: None -> Engaged Outcome
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You still aren’t personally engaged in the deciding what your goal is or how to do it since
you’re following rules, but you are engaged in the outcome since you decided which recipes
to apply to the situation. This is great when you get it right, but frustrating when you get it
wrong.
The Challenge
Since you’re making decisions about what rules to apply and you’re emotionally involved in
the outcomes, you can easily burn yourself out and exhaust your interest in the skill by
getting things wrong.
The key here is to not beat yourself up when things go wrong, but rather to use it as
data. If you beat yourself up for wrong decisions then you will burn out and quit, but if you
can use it as data to improve your decision-making process, then you will start to move
towards proficiency.
The Proficient Stage

As you react emotionally to your decisions at the level of Competence, your positive and
negative responses to decisions will reinforce the correct ones and discourage the incorrect
ones and you will develop an increasingly intuitive sense of what recipes and maxims to
apply to the situation.
The defining characteristic of the Proficient is an intuitive sense of what the goal
should be given the situation. While the Competent has to create or find rules for what to
do in a situation, the Proficient has an intuitive sense of what the goal should be, but not
necessarily exactly how to do it.
For example:
They can feel in the seat of their pants that they are going too fast, but have to decide
how best to slow down.
They can recognize a vast repertoire of chess positions but have to decide what to do
in them.
They can tell that an article should be optimized for SEO, Social, or Referrals, but
have to decide how best to do it.
They can tell that a subject demands a focus on Aperture, but have to decide how
best to optimize it.
They can understand what someone is saying in a foreign language but must decide
the best response.
There are two main shifts of the four criteria when you go from Competent to Proficient:
Perspective: Chosen -> Intuitive

Whereas the Competent performer chooses what criteria to focus on and what recipes and
maxims to use based on that, the Proficient performer knows what criteria to focus on.
They’re absorbed enough in the skill to be able to intuit what data are important, and what
aren’t.
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Engagement: Involved Outcome -> Involved Goal and Outcome
The second shift comes in moving from merely being involved in the outcome to being
involved in the goal setting as well. Just as the Competent practitioner will have an
emotional investment in a good outcome, the Proficient practitioner will have an emotional
investment in a good outcome and good selection of goals.
Since you’re intuiting what your goal is, you’re more invested in whether or not that was the
right goal. It affects you more personally when it appears that you chose the right or wrong
thing to focus on. You can’t blame the rules or maxims anymore since it was your own
intuition that led to selecting that goal.
There’s only one last piece now to reach Expertise. Not just intuitively knowing and being
invested in what your goal should be, but also in what you should do about it.
The Expert Stage

The Expert operates entirely by intuition. He or she knows what their goal should be, what
to do about it, and what should happen as a result. They’re emotionally involved and
invested in the whole process, and since they’re running on intuition, they might have a
hard time explaining why they do things to non-experts.
For example:
The expert driver can feel they’re going too fast and knows how much to brake in
response.
The expert chess player can recognize 100,000+ positions and make the best move
in response without more than a few seconds of thought.
The expert photographer knows how to position subjects and adjust camera
variables without articulating why those are the best decisions.
The expert language learner can speak fluidly as if a native, they don’t need to think
in their native language at all.
At this point, they’ve reached the final stage in each of the four criteria of expertise:
Context: Situational
They know what’s important and what isn’t, and can identify all the relevant pieces of the
skill whether those are universal variables (car speed, piece value) or situational ones (road
conditions, king position).
Perspective: Intuitive
The expert knows what’s important and what isn’t and what they should focus on entirely
intuitively. They don’t need to choose what to focus on and don’t need rules for it, they just
know what’s important for setting their goals and devising a method.
Decision Making: Intuitive
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Whereas the first four levels of expertise still relied on analytical decision making by
consciously deciding what the best course of action is, the expert intuitively knows what
they should do and does it. They don’t need to explain the reasons, they can recognize it
as they can recognize the face of a friend.
Engagement: Involved Goals, Choices, and Outcomes

Because the whole process is intuitive, the expert is emotionally invested in the outcomes
of each part of the process. They emotionally feel the rightness or wrongness of their
intuitions at the goal, action, and result stages, and can use that feedback to improve their
intuitive decision making.
This can also be summarized in a nice chart, based on the one provided in the paper:
Assessing Your Skill Level

Now that we have a complete understanding of the model, it’s easier to assess our own
skill level based on the defining characteristics of each threshold.
One thing to remember is that people are not evenly distributed throughout the skill levels.
Though there isn’t any perfect scientific distribution that we can cite, Hunt emphasizes that
most people are advanced beginners, following a distribution roughly like this:
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Before you assume that you’re an expert, remember that you’re probably an advanced
beginner. Hunt points out that many programmers and other knowledge workers never
advance past the Advanced Beginner stage primarily because they never accept
emotional consequences for their decisions. If you don’t look first inside yourself to
assess your intuition around goals and actions, and instead choose to look for more
recipes, you are not proficient or an expert.
To put it in an easy flow chart:
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What I’d recommend, again, is that even if you think you’re proficient or an expert, assume
you’re an advanced beginner. This keeps with the concept of Shoshin or “Beginner’s
Mind.” If you assume you’re an expert then learning stops, and it’s better to assume you’re
more of a novice and that there’s more to learn than to assume you already know
everything.
Now, that said, here is how you would move up from one stage to the next.
How to Go from Novice to Expert

Based on the model as we’ve outlined it so far, we can create a guided method of learning
to help us more towards expertise.
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It’s worth saying first, though, that ultimately it all boils down to deliberate practice as
described by Anders Ericsson in Peak. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, most of the
idea of deliberate practice can be boiled down to:
1. Deliberate practice requires a teacher or method of feedback that can provide

practice activities designed to help a student improve his or her performance.
2. Practice must be done near maximal effort where you’re constantly being taken out
of your comfort zone. It shouldn’t be light or “fun.”
3. The practice must be well defined with specific goals and not aimed at “overall
improvement.”
4. You must give the practice your full attention. No autopilot.
5. You need feedback and constant little improvements, modifying efforts in response to
feedback.
6. You must be focusing on building and improving specific skills by focusing on
aspects of those skills and improving them.
But by understanding the Dreyfus model, we can focus on which parts of the skill to apply
our deliberate practice towards.
Going from Zero to Novice

At this stage focus on collecting recipes. You should be reading books, blogs, listening to
speeches, taking classes, whatever will give you a large repertoire of recipes as fast as
possible. But you can’t just read them, you have to apply them. Try following along with
them, doing whatever is being talked about, and not just reading.
If you only read or hear about the recipes but don’t do them yourselfit is impossible to
move beyond novice. The next stage requires a contextual understanding of different
situations and the only way you develop that context is through practice.
To become a novice and get started in a skill, focus on collecting recipes.
Going from Novice to Advanced Beginner

Now that you’ve collected a large database of recipes and started applying them, you
should begin to develop some contextual understanding of when to use which recipes.
Start looking for more maxims and applying them to your practice, and seeing if they make
sense to you. Try breaking away from the clear recipes you have, trying to change things in
them, and seeing what happens. Make your own versions of the recipes by piecing
together different recipes and looking up help as you need it.
The only way you graduate from novice is by breaking away from fixed recipes. You
need to try improvising, combining recipes, and letting yourself make mistakes. More
importantly, when something goes wrong, start looking for how to solve it without
blaming the recipe. You won’t have the personal involvement yet, but you can start
learning to troubleshoot by combining different sources of knowledge instead of relying on
singular recipes.
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To become an Advanced Beginner, break away from fixed recipes and start combining
them with maxims into new projects.
Going from Advanced Beginner to Competent

At this point you should have a large repertoire of recipes and maxims that you can apply,
but not a lot of clarity around what is important in deciding which ones to use. You might
get overwhelmed by decisions easily, and as a result, revert to simply following a recipe
and hoping you get lucky.
Now you need to start trying to figure out what data and information is important and what
isn’t. This can be hard to do on your own, which is why the Advanced Beginner to
Competent stage is benefited greatly by a mentor who can provide rules and guidelines on
what information to focus on. Without a mentor, you’ll need to find guidelines and rules
online or in books to help you, or through trial and error, develop them on your own.
One method for doing this might be to deliberately restrict yourself in a situation to not
using all of your available recipes. Maybe you force yourself to write without any adjectives,
or draw using only pencil, or play with only your pawns and king. By deliberately limiting
what data you can focus on, you’ll develop a more intuitive understanding of what is
and isn’t relevant in novel situations.
With this deliberate limiting should come more joy and despair when you succeed or fail.
You’re no longer following clearly defined recipes, you’re improvising more, and that means
you need to accept the emotional stress of doing so. Don’t resist this emotional burden.
If you revert to blaming recipes or teachers for your failures, you will never develop the
intuitive understanding of what to do and what not to do that’s necessary for competence,
proficiency, and expertise.
To become Competent, deliberately limit what information you can consider in order to
develop a more intuitive understanding of what is and isn’t important.
Going from Competent to Proficient

At this point you’re emotionally invested in the outcomes and you’re starting to develop an
understanding of what inputs are important, but you haven’t completely internalized what
data you need to focus on. There’s still a choice being made about what to focus on, it’s not
intuitive.
This is where tactics start to get hazy. It’s difficult to practice making something intuitive, so
you need to keep employing deliberate practice around what to focus on and set as your
goal and assess the outcomes in order to reach proficiency. As you get better at picking
what data and goals to focus on, you will slowly develop a more intuitive understanding of
which decisions will do well and which ones won’t and you’ll move from competent to
proficient.
It will be an emergent shift. You won’t be able to do it as deliberately as you did the last
three, rather, you’ll wake up one day and realize you know what to focus on. You’ll look at a
chess board and know what your goal should be. You’ll look at a setting and know what
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variables to focus on with your photo. You’ll look at a site and know which marketing tactics
will work well for it.
To become Proficient, keep practicing and collecting more experience until your chosen
perspective becomes intuitive. Until you have a sense of what to focus on and what goals
to set instead of having to choose it deliberately.
Going from Proficient to Expert

Finally, to reach expertise, you need to not only intuit what to focus on but also how to do
it. Everything must feel completely intuitive like recognizing the faces of your family or
navigating the streets around where you grew up. In most cases, you won’t be able to
explain what you’re doing to non-experts. You’re going by feel and subconscious reason
instead of conscious deciding and choosing.
To reach this stage, it again comes back to deliberate practice. You must keep
experimenting and practicing and limiting yourself in order to see how different goals you
intuitively set lead to different outcomes until you can intuitively set the process as well.
Practice following your instincts and seeing where they lead, and allow yourself to feel good
or bad about the outcomes in order to learn the most from the experience. You have to let
yourself be emotionally involved in the whole process in order to develop expertise.
The move from proficient to expert will take the longest, so be patient with it. Keep
practicing, keep experimenting, and with time, you’ll develop the intuition you need.
Your Roadmap for Skill Development

Now that you understand the five levels of expertise, what defines them, and how to move
up in them, you can develop a clear roadmap for improving any skill you want to become
an expert at.
1. Assess your skill level using the criteria and flow chart provided.
2. Figure out what you need to do to reach the next level: get more recipes? Limit your
inputs? Practice improvising? Consult the relevant section.
3. Keep employing deliberate practice to move from Competent to Proficient to Expert.
Don’t get stuck at Advanced Beginner as most people do, keep challenging yourself
and letting yourself be emotionally invested in the outcomes to keep progressing.
Best of luck, and don’t forget to enjoy the process.
masterclass:

How to Profit from Chaos: Lessons from Antifragile by Nassim Taleb
The End of School and Building a Valuable Skillset with Zak Slayback
Reframing the Way You Learn and Becoming a MetaLearner with Nasos
12/13
Papadopoulos
13/13
Learning Through Layers of Abstraction
nateliason.com/learning-through-abstraction
Nat Eliason December 20, 2016
There are two types of skills: binary and artistic.
A binary skill is clear and finite. You either know it, or you don’t know it. You either know
how to change the oil in your car, or you do not.
An artistic skill is infinite. You could not know how to do the skill, but you can never know
“how to do it” in its entirety. The idea that someone knows “how to write,” seems silly. It
either says far too little (she can put words on paper) or it says far too much (she couldn’t
get any better at writing).
Artistic skills need their own markers of competence. He can designvery quickly. She
writes with great concision. Or, they need to be pegged to some accomplishment that
implies a level of competence. He sold a company, she built an iPhone app, he published a
book.
If we were to graph out how someone learns a binary skill, it’d be roughly like this:
But for the artistic skills, it’s an ever growing curve:
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Part of this is because artistic skills have so many layers to them. They aren’t really finite
skills, they’re an amalgamation of many microskills and your ability to combine them
creatively.
This is why goals like “learn to paint,” “learn to write,” “learn to code,” are somewhat silly.
They imply a binary “know / don’t know” like in the oil changing case when in reality those
artistic metaskills are made up of dozens of underlying microskills. It’s not really that
they’ve been getting good at that one thing over time, it’s that they’ve combined a bunch of
microskills that make it look like there’s a nice curve to their development.
The method of addition is important, though. They aren’t simply grabbing skills at random,
they’re reaching a certain level of competence, then layering additional microskills on top of
that to become better at their craft. They know “how to write” every step of the way, but
each additional microskill or improvement to a microskill allows them to write better.
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Where we fail in learning these artistic metaskills is when we think we can combine a bunch
of microskills, the ones that would normally get layered on later, in any order. That we can
skip the curve of the graph, and start downloading microskills without the experience that
shows us why we need them.
Imagine learning to play soccer by starting with foot angles, or learning design by going
through a long list of popular hex codes one by one. Neither foot angles nor popular hex
codes are useful information without first having played a few games of soccer or having
tried to design a few things, though. Without some experience to tie these microskills or bits
of information to, the knowledge can’t be used effectively and is unlikely to be remembered.
I doubt that when you first tried to learn soccer or another sport they started you on the
minutia, but this is how we’re taught many subjects in school and college. And while it’s
great for learning the timeline of what happened during the Battle of the Bulge, it’s not great
for developing metaskills, and the bad habit of skipping the meta for the micro sticks with
us and makes it difficult to teach ourselves other skills we want to learn later in life.
The better method for developing artistic metaskills like ones we’ve been discussing is to
learn through layers of abstraction.
What do we mean by “abstraction?” Here, it simply means taking the complex parts of a
skill and removing them or consolidating them until the skill can be more easily managed.
The term is typically used in programming to refer to how much control vs. ease a language
gives you, but we can use it for understanding just about any artistic skill.
Take publishing this article, for example. It’s highly abstracted in that I don’t have to
manage the distribution, printing, database, code, and many other aspects. But it’s not as
abstracted as, say, a Medium blog post, since I retain control over the design, formatting,
analytics, and other elements. A highly abstracted version of a skill gives you less control
but is much easier to pick up, a less abstracted version requires more of the metaskills but
also rewards you with more control.
At the utmost abstracted part of a skill, you can do the whole thing without too much
difficulty, but also without too much control. It gives you an easy start, but you quickly run
into the boundaries of your environment. As you move through the layers of abstraction,
getting closer to the total complexity of the art, it becomes more difficult and more nuanced
but you also gain more control and freedom of expression.
Returning to our examples from before, what the hex code memorizer and foot angle
studier did wrong was that they started at too low of a layer of abstraction. If we were to
imagine skill mastery as a sort of pyramid, they came in around the middle and tried to work
their way across.
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The more effective method is to start at a reasonably abstracted level of the skill, and then
to work your way downwards based on your interests and what else you want to do with it.
For the soccer player, that would mean starting with just playing some games of soccer:
Later, maybe they realize that their kicks aren’t going exactly where they would like to, so
then they start looking at foot angles:
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For the designer, they could start with trying to design the homepage of their budding
portfolio. But when they realize their colors don’t look quite right, they hop over to
colourlovers and try to expand their repertoire. Then they get interested in learning CSS
and SCSS, landing page design, and keep bouncing around the pyramid steadily getting
deeper and into more complex topics, moving back up when they need to fill in some
knowledge gap:
At what point did he “become a designer?” When does he put it on his LinkedIn? It’s
completely arbitrary, but the desire for a nice binary linear path from “don’t know to design”
to “know design” tricks us into making the mistake of trying to enter the middle of the
pyramid.
I think this is why so many students get turned off from programming in high school or
college. They try to take a course in it (or, are forced to at my alma matter), and instead of
the course having them quickly build something to get them excited about the potential, it
has them learning about Big O notation and calculating Fibonacci numbers in the terminal.
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You can go from knowing nothing about a highly-abstracted programming language like
Ruby on Rails to building simple web apps in a couple hours, but for some reason, school
starts you at the bottom of the pyramid and then gets confused about why you don’t come
to class.
Part of this is probably because the instructor has forgotten what it was like to not know
anything about the topic, or to not be excited by it. They can’t comprehend that that anyone
wouldn’t enjoy their steamy late nights hunched over a sorting algorithm.
To be on the receiving end, it’s like visiting a classy restaurant where your foodie friend
force feeds you caviar, and then deciding that you don’t like fine dining as you gag up fish
eggs in the bathroom. People at the bottom of the pyramid don’t remember what the top
was like, and people at the top can’t comprehend the fascinations of people at the bottom.
The same problem happens in learning music, focusing on scales before playing a song
you’re interested in.
It happens in language, learning grammar rules before a basic conversation.
I’m fairly sure that if there were college courses on sex, the first few weeks would be spent
on the intricate details of the labia minora instead of, you know, actually having sex.
This isn’t to say that these details are unimportant. Only that they’re useless information
until you understand more abstracted parts of the skill. Worse, starting with these lower
level aspects can lead you to lose interest in the skill, get frustrated and burn out, think
you’re “bad at it,” or waste a ton of time on microskills you’ll have to relearn later.
In Practice
To develop any of these skills, it’s best to start at the highest reasonable layer of
abstraction and work your way down. Find a point where you get to use and experience a
large part of the skill, and then get into the minutia as you become more interested and
want to improve certain parts of it.
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School and traditional education resources don’t do a good job of this, so you’ll have to
filter for what’s starting you out at the right level. This is itself a skill you’ll have to develop.
In the beginning, you want something extremely broad and not too complex, and then only
dive deeper once you have that initial exposure and some degree of comfort.
There isn’t a great way to find these resources right now, but you could ask people who
have taught themselves something what was most helpful in giving them that start. The
people who stuck with teaching themselves an artistic skill likely had a broad, exciting initial
exposure, and that’s what you want as well.
But it also requires an ongoing awareness. When you’re trying to learn something and find
yourself studying minutia without any clear sense of how it fits into the bigger picture, you’ll
know it’s time to refocus.
masterclass.

Learning Spanish (and more) in One Month with Connor Grooms
A Simple Exercise to Discover What Skills You Should Learn
The Article MVP: How to Test Business Ideas Fast, Free, and Solo
Don’t Focus On Local Maxima
7/7
Decomplication: How to Find Simple Solutions to “Hard”
Problems
nateliason.com/decomplication
Nat Eliason August 2, 2016
This article is long and will make you think. I recommend saving it to pocket and reading it
in a comfy chair with a cup of earl grey tea.
How do you lose weight?
If we were to plug that question into Google, we’d be barraged by millions of pages
explaining tactics for weight loss. Foods to eat, foods to avoid, when to eat, how to eat,
what speed to eat at, where to eat, who to eat with, what kind of utensils to use, what pills
to take, what exercise to do, what procedures to do, what plans to follow, what coaches to
hire, and that list will barely get us past the first 10 results.
What if we asked: “how do you manage your finances?”
Down the rabbit hole again. What to save money on, where to save money, how to coupon,
what to invest in, where to live, how to live, where to work, what kind of car to get, how to
do your groceries, what countries to live in, what to spend money on, what credit cards to
get, what banks to join, and again we’re likely not past the first page.
The amount of information available for both of these problems would seem to indicate that
they’re complicated. There are tons of variables you need to manipulate in order to get it
right, and if you don’t understand each variable, then you won’t hit your goal. You won’t
lose weight, you won’t save money, you won’t be productive, you won’t start a business,
and you won’t solve any other popular problem either. These problems are complex and
you need a monumental amount of information to get them right.
Bullshit.
The core solutions to many problems, maybe most problems, are extremely simple. In one
paragraph each, you can explain how to lose weight, how to gain muscle, how to save
money, how to be productive, how to sleep better, how to grow a website, and just about
any other popular problem. The finishing touches near perfection aren’t so simple, but the
effective amount for the vast majority of our purposes? Certainly.
But, we don’t want to hear this. Through a combination of psychological biases, willpower
depletion, and effective marketing, we’ve begun to believe that the simple things are
difficult and complex and that we need swaths of information and expertise to solve them.
We’ve created and been sucked into a world of artificial complexity – one where topics
are made more complex than they need to be in order to appeal to our biases and
frustrations, and to help companies make more money.
But here’s the good news.
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Once you recognize this world of artificial complexity, you can turn any problem back into its
simple solution through decomplication. Weight loss, strength gain, productivity, skill
enhancement, sleep, they’re all incredibly simple once you decomplicate them.
We’ll get to how to do that soon, but first, why does artificial complexity exist in the first
place?
Why and How We Create Artificial Complexity

Artificial complexity occurs when a commonly encountered problem has a simple solution,
but that solution is made more complex to appeal to the solver’s lack of willpower, past
failures, or to benefit the interests of a third party (usually a company selling something).
Let’s take sleep as an example.
Getting a good night’s sleep is important. If you don’t do it regularly, you’re going to die
much sooner than you need to, which will make me and, presumably, many of your friends
sad.
But how do you get a good night’s sleep?
The market for sleep aids is on track to reach $76.7 billion dollars by the end of the decade,
from special mattresses and pillows to tech, supplements, sound machines, and anything
else that can help you get that full night’s rest.
At first blush, this isn’t that surprising. Almost everyone uses some sort of sleep aid,
whether that’s a sleep tracking app, white noise machine, memory foam pillow, or eye
mask. But when you dig in, do you really need, in a biological sense, a fancy iPhone sleep
tracker, Valerian Root supplement, “delta wave inducing” music, and cup of chamomile tea
to sleep well?
No, of course not. All you need is 8 hours with minimal stimulation or interruption (i.e. no
light, sounds, movements, discomforts, etc.).
So why is there such a big industry around sleep?
As humans, we’re not good at making tradeoffs. We’re tired, but we also want to sleep less
than 8 hours. We want to be thin, but we also want to eat Oreos. We want to save money,
but we also want to go out drinking.
The solution to not being tired is extremely simple: sleep 8 hours with minimal stimulation
and don’t take too many stimulants. But we don’t want that to be the answer. We want to
throw back our venti lattes and watch late night TV in bed and live an 18-20 hour day, so
we look for magical sleep aids, stimulants, and other silver bullets to compress our
comatose period from 8 hours to 6 or 4.
This is where complexity starts to seep in. Since we don’t want to get the full 8 hours, don’t
want to give up our coffee, and don’t want to get the screens out of the bedroom, we look
for more complex answers. Our desire to have our cake and eat it too makes us look for
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methods to get both at once, adding significant complexity to what is, at root, a simple
biological process.
And lucky for us, there is an emerging $76.7 billion dollar industry willing to help us in our
search for complex silver bullets.
This cycle plays out again and again in almost every area of our modern lives. We become
frustrated by what should be simple problems, we look for more complex solutions to
address our frustrations, and then we buy things that promise to make that complex
problem easy again.
This cycle can be broken, but to do it, we need to better understand the three forces that
create artificial complexity.
Three Forces that Create Artificial Complexity

Artificial complexity follows a predictable cycle.
1. Problems start by having a simple solution that’s easy to execute, or a simple solution
that’s hard to execute.
2. Our frustration with following through on the simple solution causes us to challenge
or ditch it, leading us to imagine more complex solutions.
3. We buy things that promise to address the complexity and make it easy again.
Before moving on to each force, though, I need to make an important terminological

distinction to avoid any confusion.
Simple here means straightforward and containing few steps or moving pieces. Running a
marathon is simple because you just run, but it is not easy.
Easy here means requiring little effort or willpower to follow through on. Taking Hydroxycut
is easy, but Hydroxycut is not a simple solution to weight loss. If you don’t believe me, look
at its ingredients.
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From those definitions, their opposites, “complex” and “hard” should be obvious. Your job
as you continue reading is to not assume ease when I say something is simple, and to not
assume simplicity when I say something is easy.
On to the three forces.
Force 1: Failure and Challenge

Nothing becomes artificially complex without first becoming a problem. If I dumped you in a
wilderness lodge with all of your necessities provided and with no technology, work, or
meetings, you would sleep perfectly well. With time, you would also end up in good shape,
not be stressed, and never even begin to have many of the “problems” that plague modern
humans.
But if I pull you out of that wilderness utopia and return you to the modern world, the easy
things aren’t so easy any more. You’ll struggle to sleep enough, struggle to eat well,
struggle to exercise.
You know that you need to sleep 8 hours, but it’s getting harder and harder to fit it into your
schedule. You’ll start sleeping poorly, a laughable problem to anyone outside of modernity,
but a problem nonetheless. With this challenge, you’ve started down the path of artificial
complexity by going from simple and easy, to simple and hard.
This isn’t to say that sleeping in modern society is secretly easy to do. It isn’t, if you don’t
completely control your environment, but we have to recognize that at root sleeping is a
very simple and easy thing. It’s our environments that make it difficult, not some aspect of
sleep.
It’s worth noting, too, that not everything starts out as easy to do. Growing a popular
website is simple, but hard to do from the get go. It’s never easy to do. It still goes through
the “failure and challenge” process, but that process moves it deeper into the “hard to do”
box instead of from easy to hard.
If a problem is physiological, philosophical, psychological, otherwise human or “old,”

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though, it’s likely that the solution can be distilled to being simple, and even easy if you
were removed from modern society.
Force 2: Cognitive Dissonance

Once you’ve gone from “this is easy” to “this is hard,” or “this is hard” to “this is impossible,”
artificial complexity begins to kick in.
The process for losing weight is simple, but doing it is difficult when faced with all of the
junk food we have available to us. When that difficulty leads to failure, cognitive
dissonance kicks in, and our desire to not feel responsible for that failure causes us to seek
out alternative explanations.
We first create artificial complexity in our minds to explain our failures or shortcomings. It’s
not that your diet sucks, you don’t exercise, you open yourself up to distractions, or that
you’re not setting aside 8 hours a night, it’s that you haven’t found the right trick yet.
If you accept that the solution is simple (which it truly is), then you have no one to blame for
failure but yourself. But, if you can convince yourself that the solution is complex, well, then
you just haven’t found the right trick yet. Fuck eating healthy, let’s all do coolsculpting and
take Hydroxycut!
With sleep, this second force is our desire to not do the hard work of cutting our day down
to 16 hours. We know that we’re tired when we only sleep 6 hours, so how do we solve it?
We could adjust our schedules so that we get a full 8 hours (simple), but that’s hard and we
don’t want to do it. Instead, we look for supplements, tools, tactics, tricks, and whatever
else we can find to make up for those 2 hours (complex).
For now, we’ve only made the problem worse. It’s still hard, because we don’t know
what tricks and tactics to use. Our cognitive dissonance has taken the simple but hard to do
solution, and turned it into a complex solution that’s equally hard to do.
Luckily, we aren’t stuck in this box for long.
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Force 3: Money and Marketing
Businesses thrive on artificial complexity. Recognizing the human desire for a complex
solution to a simple problem is a fantastic way to make money, and has driven the absurd
wealth in industries like fitness, productivity, and entrepreneurship (that is, telling people
how to be entrepreneurs).
In many cases, if someone is selling something (product, training, course, etc), it benefits
them to make the problem their product solves seem more complex than it is, while also
making their solution easy, so that you feel like you need to buy what they’re selling. Your
mind is stuck in the box of “this is hard and extremely complex,” and they move you to “this
is complex, but thankfully I can pay someone to make it easy.”
Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing. A good personal trainer can take the complex
world of fitness, explain its simplicity, and then teach you how to keep working out on your
own. But there are 10 times as many bad trainers who will inject artificial complexity into
fitness to keep you paying them and buying their products. It’s the latter you need to watch
out for.
This deception is especially common when a company has a mediocre product. If the
product can’t sell itself, the job of marketers, salespeople, or product designers is to create
artificial complexity and aggressively push the consumer into making a purchase.
Our cognitive dissonances takes problems that are simple but hard and makes them
complex and hard. Marketing and products take our belief that something is hard and
complex, and convinces us that, with their solution, it can be easy and complex.
For sleep, our frustrations move us from believing it’s simple and hard to complex and hard.
Once we’re there, all companies and entrepreneurs need to do is provide an easy solution
to what appears to be a complex problem. And, voilà, $76.7 billion.
No one makes money by saying “hey just sleep 8 hours with minimal stimulation,” even
though that’s the best solution. They make money by convincing you that you don’t need
just any sleep mask, you need their sleep mask, because you have no idea how
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complicated and nuanced the world of sleep mask purchasing truly is (but don’t worry,
here’s a list of “10 things you didn’t know about choosing a sleep mask”).
By recognizing these three forces, we can see how simple problems quickly get turned
hard, then complex, then made easy again, so long as you buy into someone’s complex
solution.
Most people end the cycle here. They hit a problem, make it complex in their heads, then
buy into someone’s “easy” solution to the artificial complexity.
But we don’t have to. Instead, we can decomplicate the problem, and return it to a simple
solution.
Decomplication: How to Undo Artificial Complexity

Artificial complexity is bad. It’ll make you spend money and time on solutions you don’t
need, cause you to waste hours reading and hunting for the “perfect answer,” and leave
you strung out and depressed not getting the results you want from solutions you shouldn’t
have been trying in the first place.
Not all problems can be reduced to being simple and easy, but anything that people
commonly encounter can at least be reduced to being simple and hard. Losing weight is
simple and hard, sleeping well is simple and maybe hard depending on your situation,
being productive is simple with variable difficulty.
But the only way we can bring these challenges back to the simple side of the graph is
through decomplication. Not simplification, which involves taking something truly complex
and conveying a simpler version of it, but decomplication, undoing the complication that’s
unnecessarily been added to it.
Unfortunately, this is not easy to do. It requires two steps:
1. Realistically assessing the complexity of the problem, by exposing how it may have
been made artificially complex.
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2. Realistically assessing the difficulty of the problem, by figuring out how you may have
convinced yourself of artificial difficulty.
It’s only once you’ve gone through these two steps and decomplicated the problem that you
can easily see the simple solution.
Realistically Assessing Complexity

The first step in putting any problem back in its correct box is to assess the true complexity
of it. Some problems, like rocket science, are truly complex. You’ll never get them into the
simple category.
But for most of the problems we encounter in daily life, we can decomplicate them by
exposing how they were turned artificially complex. The best way to do that is to ask good
questions about the problem, in order to assess if there may be factors that are making it
look more complex than it needs to be.
Question 1: “Does anyone profit from this being complex?”
The first place to look when assessing complexity is if anyone makes money or has built
their business on making something seem complex. And more importantly, are you
listening to this person on how complex it is?
For example, health and fitness magazines make money by making health and fitness
seem complex. Losing weight is simple, but they make a lot more money by making you
think you need to follow their diet, supplement regimen, exercise routine, latest list of 10
superfoods, or whatever else they’re selling.
Conversely, no one makes money from quantum physics being complex. You don’t see
people selling 10 week quantum physics bootcamps (yours at 50% off for a limited time).
That’s a legitimately complex field.
If the problem you’re trying to solve has been monetized through complexity, then odds are
that there’s a simple solution hidden deep down.
Question 2: “Do I secretly know the simple solution?”
In many cases of artificial complexity, we secretly know what the simple solution is, but we
desperately want there to be some other, easier, more complex answer.
Most smokers know the solution to their smoking habit is to stop smoking. Fat people know
the solution is to eat better and less. Weak people know the solution is to exercise.
Unproductive people know the solution is to get to work.
But these simple solutions are hard, and we don’t want hard. We want easy. So we claw at
the easy, complex, and frequently expensive solutions, hoping desperately that one of them
will save us from having to do the hard work of quitting smoking, eating well, working out, or
focusing.
It’s difficult, but we need to train our ability to honestly assess whether we’re creating
complexity despite knowing the answer is simple.
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Question 3: “Am I assigning value to complexity?”
Part of why artificial complexity thrives is that we treat complex things as more valuable.
We want a crazy complicated workout routine because we believe it must be more
complicated to work. If a trainer told you to go to the gym just once a week, do five sets of
five deadlifts, and then leave, you’d probably (wrongly) fire them.
We’ve been sold complexity our entire lives, and that’s made us undervalue the simple. As
a result of the “monetization through complexity” problem, we no longer trust that simple
solutions could be valid.
To get to the root of a problem’s solution, you need to honestly ask yourself if you’re
seeking out complexity simply because you trust complexity more than you trust simplicity.
Question 4: “Is this something I’ve failed at?”
Failing can be the first step towards artificial complexity. When something doesn’t go our
way, or when we put in effort and don’t get the results we want, we tell ourselves a story of
complexity to explain the shortcoming, even though the failure more likely came from
randomness, lying to ourselves, or not trying hard enough.
If you failed at losing weight, getting strong, being productive, sleeping better, managing
your money, or any other artificial-complexity-prone area in the past, and now think it’s
complex, now you know why you believe that.
By running through these four questions, you’ll get an idea of how artificial complexity may
have seeped into the problem you’re trying to solve. If you said “yes” to any of them, there’s
a good chance that the problem you’re contemplating is simpler than you think it is.
Realistically Assessing Difficulty

Difficulty is significantly less objective than complexity. Eating well is simple for everyone,
but it’s not necessarily easy for everyone.
If you earn a good amount of money and live in a major city with access to Instacart, a
nutritionist, and a chef, it’s very easy to eat well. Living in the middle of nowhere Arkansas
with a minimum wage income, not so easy.
That said, you can still ask a few good guiding questions to see if something is truly difficult,
or artificially difficult.
Question 1: “Do I control the variables that make this seem difficult?”
If you think sleeping well is difficult, but you go out drinking every night until 2am, then it’s
not actually difficult. You’re making other choices that cause it to be difficult, but you want
to have your cake and eat it too.
Or, maybe you think that it’s difficult to not snack on things that are bad for you, but you
keep buying snacks when you go to the grocery store. Not snacking is easy if you don’t
have the option, but you’ve made it difficult by putting the option in front of you.
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Question 2: “Am I treating this as difficult as an excuse for inaction, or to prevent
cognitive dissonance?”
Even if you acknowledge that, say, eating well is not complex, you might tell yourself “yeah
but it’s harrrrrd” as you bite into your fifth OREO.
In this situation you don’t want to admit to yourself that it’s easy, since that would mean
there is little excuse for eating the OREO. The cognitive dissonance from admitting that you
might be neglecting something good for you is painful, and it’s easier to imagine it being
difficult.
Question 3: “Have I failed at this before?”
Past failures can create artificial difficulty just as they can create artificial complexity. If you
failed at something in the past, you might have written it off as “too hard” and kept that
mentality towards it ever since.
Worse, you might have developed the belief that it isn’t possible at all, telling yourself the
story that you’re “not someone who sleeps well,” or that you’re “meant to be fat.”
If you can start bringing these questions into your life when you run into problems that you
think are hard or complex, odds are, you’ll start to discover much simpler solutions.
Finding the Simple Answers: A Priori Reasoning

After you’ve gone through this questioning process, you could be left wondering “what is
the simple solution, though?”
While it’s easy to recognize that most health information online is purely artificial
complexity, some of it must be relevant, right?
Unfortunately, the more artificially complex a field has become, the harder it is to find the
simple answers. Worse, you can end up thinking you’ve found the simple answer, be
completely wrong, and have to go through the cycle again later.
The solution is a priori reasoning, or as it’s commonly referred to, “reasoning from first
principles.” A priori reasoning is when you take premises, rules, axioms, fundamental
truths, mental models, and other principles that are inarguable, or very certain truths, and
reason out a solution based on logical deduction. It requires building conclusions off of
what you know to be true, instead of relying on opinions or assumptions.
Here are some examples of how we might use a priori reasoning to find simple solutions to
common problems, particularly ones discussed in this article.
Losing weight
People without access to food get very skinny. If I eat less, I will lose weight.
Building muscle
10/13
The body responds to stress by making itself stronger for the next time that stressor
appears, which is why vaccines work. If I lift weights close to my point of failure, I’ll get
stronger.
Networking
Famous people tend to hang out with other famous people, or people as accomplished in
tangential fields. If I want to get to know someone I respect, then I should do something that
puts me on a level where I could be friends with them.
Productivity
The goal of productivity is to get more done, and the biggest reason you don’t get things
done is that you’re doing other things. If I remove the ability to do other things, I’ll do the
thing I’m trying to be productive on.
Search Engine Optimization
Google has an amazing team of data scientists working on its search engine, and the goal
of the search engine is to return the best answers possible to questions. If I want to rank on
Google, my primary goal should be to answer questions really, really well.
Sleep
Removed from modern society, sleep is not a problem. If I can create a sleep environment
as if I wasn’t in modernity, I should sleep fine.
Personal Finance
Debt and money problems happen when you spend more than you make. If I create
systems to spend less than I make, I’ll be fine.
Now, maybe you read these solutions and went “well yeah, duh,” and that’s the point.
Cognitively, we know these problems have easy solutions, but we look for harder ones in
reaction to forces 1 and 2.
You also could have looked at them and said “okay, I buy that, but I need information on
how to do the next step.” Not necessarily. We can use the same type of reasoning to figure
most of the pragmatic next steps out, too.
Sleep
1. If I create a sleep environment as if I wasn’t in modernity, I’ll sleep fine.

2. Therefore, I should sleep somewhere quiet, dark, undisturbed, and until I wake up
naturally.
3. Therefore, I should dampen noise in my room, get a white noise machine, blackout
my shades, turn off phone notifications, cover any lights, and have a comfy bed.
Did you need a book on sleep to figure that out? No, you could have figured it outa priori.
Two Laws for Complexity

11/13
There are certainly topics of knowledge that are complex: particle physics, epistemology,
organic chemistry, but are there practical problems we run into daily that are truly complex?
I now believe that the answer is no. I can’t find any solvable problems that could be
reasonably experienced by a person in modern society that have truly complex solutions.
Complexity is reserved for rocket science, not for challenges we encounter on a day to day
basis.
Despite that underlying simplicity, it’s the problems the greatest number of people
experience that tend to have the most artificial complexity. Everyone has some trouble with
sleep, weight management, feeling fulfilled, staying productive, and you’ll notice that those
kinds of topics have the most artificial complexity.
Which brings us to the simplicity of this concept. Two simple mental models you can put in
your pocket and take with you into this world of artificial complexity.
The Law of Artificial Complexity: As the number of people experiencing a problem

increases, so will the artificial complexity of the solution.
The law of artificial complexity tells us that as more people experience a problem, more
artificial complexity will be added to the solution. The most common problems have the
most artificial complexity added to them, since these common problems provide the most
business opportunities, and have the most people struggling with them.
Some of these problems are ones that you may have never even thought you had, but then
started to believe you had simply because you stumbled across artificial complexity based
marketing.
And once we recognize the law of artificial complexity, we can take its converse, and create
a Law of Decomplication:
The Law of Decomplication: The more people that are experiencing a problem, the
simpler the solution should be.
12/13
Common human problems have simple solutions. Our errors in judging complexity come
when we treat daily human problems as tail end knowledge work problems, believing
tweaking our diets to be as complex as building a Falcon 9 rocket.
It’s on us to recognize when we’re being over-influenced by artificial complexity, to go

through the decomplication process, and then to use our a priori reasoning to arrive at the
better, simpler, solution.

Option not Obligation: How to Beat the Sunk Cost Fallacy
38 More Projects till You Die: The Opportunity Cost of Focus
Escaping Boring Jobs to Jump Rope and Look Good Naked with Zen Dude Fitness
Making an Easy 2 Million, Personal Investing for 20 Somethings
What Life do You Want?
13/13
Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool: Summary,
Notes, and Lessons
nateliason.com/lessons/peak-anders-ericsson-robert-pool
Rating: 10/10
Finished: 6/22/2016
More Info: Found on Amazon
Related: Talent Code, Art of Learning, 4-Hour Chef, Mastery,

Deep Work
Get next week’s and all 200+ book notes.
High Level Thoughts:

This is the best book on mastering a skill that I’ve found. Anders is the real deal, doing
most of the research that other books on this topic are based on. If you only read one
book on mastering your craft, read this one.
Second, if you still believe there’s such a thing as talent, you also need to read this book.
It’s been disproven in countless studies now, with Anders leading most of it, and the sooner
you stop thinking talent exists the sooner you can become a master.
Lessons:
Perfect pitch can be trained if you get the kids early enough. By exposing them to tones
and challenging them to match them before age 4, they can develop perfect pitch for the
rest of their life. Even adults can learn some of this, though there is some brain plasticity at
that young age that makes it easier.
The central message: The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time
leads to improvement. Nothing else. There is no such thing as natural talent or
prodigies. Anders spends most of the book explaining what “the right sort of practice” is,
as well as why talent doesn’t exist. But it comes back to this central message, that anyone
can improve, and that it takes time. The only shortcut is practicing the right way. If you don’t
buy the “no talent” thing, please buy the book, he has a whole chapter on it.
A common learning obstacle: If you reach a skill level that feels “satisfactory” to you, you
stop improving, and even get worse with time. Just playing tennis for fun with your friends
won’t get you much better, since you’re not pushing yourself. The more “automated” your
performance has become, the less you’re learning.
Two types of practice: naive practice and purposeful practice:
1/5
Naive practice in a nutshell: I just played it. I just swung the bat and tried to hit the
ball. I just listened to the numbers and tried to remember them. I just read the math
problems and tried to solve them. This is how most people “practice” but it’s
ineffective.
Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals. Without such a goal, there is no
way to judge whether the practice session has been a success.
Components of purposeful practice:
Putting a bunch of baby steps together to hit a long term goal, having a plan
Feedback, you have to know whether you are doing something right and if not, what
mistakes you’re making
Getting outside of your comfort zone, feeling uncomfortable. If you never push
beyond your comfort zone you’ll never improve.
A way to monitor your progress
Maintaining motivation
Other rules of purposeful practice:
You won’t improve much without giving the task your full attention (see Deep Work)
Without feedback— either from yourself or from outside observers— you cannot
figure out what you need to improve on or how close you are to achieving your goals.
The best way to get past any barrier is to come at it from another angle, which is
where coaches can help. Think about dropping weight or changing exercises to get through
weight lifting plateaus.
Slowing down the speed to get further remembering cards

Speeding up to see how far you can get, allowing mistakes
Other ways to change it up to try to fill in the gaps of knowledge, or provide
motivation
Keep changing things to keep learning. Go faster, farther, over new terrain, if you do the
same run every day then you’re not improving.
We only learn until we feel like we’ve hit a “good enough” point. As soon as we feel like
we’re good enough (subconsciously or consciously) we stop improving, even with
continued repetition.
Mental Representations
Your skill in anything is based on the number and quality of “mental representations” you
have for the skill. For example, chess players improve most by studying and challenging
themselves with expert matches. They build mental representations of others’ games,
which help them improve much more than simply playing more games.
“The main thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is that their years of practice
have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental
representations, which in turn make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition,
2/5
problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular
specialties.”
The main purpose of deliberate practice is to develop effective mental representations,

and, as we will discuss shortly, mental representations in turn play a key role in deliberate
practice.
… to write well, develop a mental representation ahead of time to guide your efforts, then
monitor and evaluate your efforts and be ready to modify that representation as necessary.
The Gold Standard: Deliberate Practice

Deliberate practice is even better than purposeful practice.
Principles of Deliberate Practice:
1. The field must be well developed, the best performers must be clearly far superior to
people just entering the field. If there’s no competition to indicate skill, then it’s hard
for there to be deliberate practice because the differences of the best are less clear.
2. Deliberate practice requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to
help a student improve his or her performance.
3. Near maximal effort, constantly being taken out of your comfort zone by a teacher or
coach. Not “fun”
4. Well defined, specific goals, not aimed at “overall improvement.”
5. Full attention and conscious action, no autopilot.
6. Feedback and constant little improvements, modifying efforts in response to
feedback
7. Building and modifying mental representations
8. Focusing on building and improving specific skills by focusing on aspects of those
skills and improving them
This is the basic blueprint for getting better in any pursuit: get as close to deliberate
practice as you can. If you’re in a field where deliberate practice is an option, you should
take that option. If not, apply the principles of deliberate practice as much as possible.
Deliberate practice for fields without deliberate training options:
1. Identify the expert performers

2. Figure out what they do that makes them so good. Figure out what they do that’s
different, and the training methods that helped them get there. (See 4-Hour Chef,
Interviewing)
3. Come up with training techniques that allow you to do it, too.
The 10,000 hour rule misses a lot. Performing is not deliberate practice, and doesn’t help
you get much better. The # of hours you need to put in is relative to the other people you’re
competing with, in a new field you can become a “master” in 20 hours. For chess it might
be more like 40,000.
Deliberate Practice on the Job
3/5
Two myths of performance improvement:
Our abilities are limited by pre-determined genetic characteristics

If you do something for long enough you’re bound to get better at it
All it takes to improve is effort
Skill is more useful than knowledge, it’s what you’re able to do, not what you know, that
sets you apart.
School is, unfortunately, based around knowledge. This is why it’s usually useless. It is
much easier to present knowledge to a large group of people than it is to set up conditions
under which individuals can develop skills through practice.
We should focus on how do we teach the relevant skill, instead of how do we present the
relevant knowledge.
Deliberate Practice in Daily Life

For anyone who wants to improve at anything, here is a basic framework.
Find a good teacher
Private instruction is ideal, since they can best point out what you specifically need to
improve and work on.
Know when you can’t gain anything else from them, though, and move on (see Mastery).
Engagement (Deep Work)
If your mind is wandering or you’re relaxed and having fun, you probably aren’t improving.
Whatever you’re doing, focus on it. Don’t engage in mindless repetition.
What if you don’t have a teacher?
Ben Franklin method for improving writing
1. Find a writer you respect

2. Break their writing up into the pieces you want to improve. If you want to improve
sentence structure, then write down the ideas of the sentences and save them for
later. Once you’ve forgotten the exact wording, try to recreate the sentences on your
own from the ideas, and then compare your creations with the originals to see what
makes theirs better.
3. Identify the pieces that are making yours less strong, then create exercises to
improve those elements. So Franklin realized his vocabulary wasn’t as strong as it
could be in the moment, so he did poetry to become more creative with his word
choices.
4. Did the same thing with order, taking pieces and putting them on note cards, then
jumbling them up and trying to put them back in order and comparing.
You need to find a way to push yourself out of your comfort zone.
4/5
Use repetition to figure out where your weaknesses are and focus on getting better in those
areas, trying different methods to improve until you find something that works.
To effectively practice a skill without a teacher, it helps to keep in mind three Fs:
Focus. Feedback. Fix it. Break the skill down into components that you can do repeatedly
and analyze effectively, determine your weaknesses, and figure out ways to address them.
Getting past plateaus
The best way to move past any plateau is to challenge your brain and body in a new way.
Figure out the components of the skill that are holding you back, and find a way to push
yourself more on those specific elements. Design a practice technique focused on
improving that specific weakness.
Maintaining motivation
To keep working on something, you need to keep the reasons to continue high, and the
reasons to quit low.
To increase focus and decrease demotivation, limit practice sessions to 1 hour. If you want
to practice more, take a break in between sessions.
Create a group working on the same thing so you can all motivate each other to keep
improving.
5/5
Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society
http://bst.sagepub.com/
The Five-Stage Model of Adult Skill Acquisition

Stuart E. Dreyfus
Bulletin of Science Technology & Society 2004 24: 177
DOI: 10.1177/0270467604264992
The online version of this article can be found at:

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10.1177/0270467604264992
Dreyfus / ADULT SKILL ACQUISITION
BULLETIN OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY / June 2004
The Five-Stage Model of Adult Skill Acquisition
Stuart E. Dreyfus
University of California, Berkeley
The following is a summary of the author’s five- ing of the context in which that information makes
stage model of adult skill acquisition, developed in sense.
collaboration with Hubert L. Dreyfus. An earlier ver-
sion of this article appeared in chapter 1 of Mind Over Stage 2: Advanced Beginner
Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Exper-
tise in the Era of the Computer (1986, Free Press, New As the novice gains experience actually coping with
York). real situations and begins to develop an understanding
of the relevant context, he or she begins to note, or an
Keywords: skill acquisition; learning; intuitive ex- instructor points out, perspicuous examples of mean-
pertise; five-stage model ingful additional aspects of the situation or domain.
After seeing a sufficient number of examples, the stu-
Stage 1: Novice dent learns to recognize these new aspects. Instruc-
tional maxims can then refer to these new situational
Normally, the instruction process begins with the aspects, recognized on the basis of experience, as well
instructor decomposing the task environment into as to the objectively defined nonsituational features
context-free features that the beginner can recognize recognizable by the novice.
without the desired skill. The beginner is then given The advanced beginner driver uses (situational)
rules for determining actions on the basis of these fea- engine sounds as well as (nonsituational) speed in de-
tures, just like a computer following a program. ciding when to shift. He or she learns the following
The student automobile driver learns to recognize maxim: Shift up when the motor sounds like it is rac-
such domain-independent features as speed (indicated ing and down when it sounds like it is straining. En-
by the speedometer) and is given rules such as shift to gine sounds cannot be adequately captured by a list of
2nd gear when the speedometer needle points to 10. features, so features cannot take the place of a few
The novice chess player learns a numerical value for choice examples in learning the relevant distinctions.
each type of piece, regardless of its position, and learns With experience, the chess beginner learns to rec-
the following rule: Always exchange if the total value ognize overextended positions and how to avoid them.
of pieces captured exceeds the value of pieces lost. The Similarly, he or she begins to recognize such situa-
player also learns to seek center control when no tional aspects of positions as a weakened king’s side or
advantageous exchanges can be found and is given a a strong pawn structure, despite the lack of precise and
rule defining center squares and one for calculating situation-free definitions. The player can then follow
extent of control. maxims such as the following: Attack a weakened
But merely following rules will produce poor per- king’s side. Unlike a rule, a maxim requires that one
formance in the real world. A car stalls if one shifts too already have some understanding of the domain to
soon on a hill or when the car is heavily loaded; a chess which the maxim applies (Polanyi, 1958). Still, at this
player who always exchanges to gain points is sure to stage, learning can be carried on in a detached, analytic
be the victim of a sacrifice by the opponent who gives frame of mind, as the student follows instructions and
up valuable pieces to gain a tactical advantage. The is given examples.
student needs not only the facts but also an understand-
Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Vol. 24, No. 3, June 2004, 177-181
DOI: 10.1177/0270467604264992
Copyright  2004 Sage Publications

178 BULLETIN OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY / June 2004
Stage 3: Competence gether, or step on the brake, and precisely when to per-
form any of these actions. The driver is relieved if he or
With more experience, the number of potentially she gets through the curve without mishap and is
relevant elements and procedures that the learner is shaken if he or she begins to go into a skid.
able to recognize and follow becomes overwhelming. The Class A chess player, here classed as compe-
At this point, because a sense of what is important in tent, may decide after studying a position that the
any particular situation is missing, performance opponent has weakened his or her king’s defenses so
becomes nerve-wracking and exhausting, and the stu- that an attack against the king is a viable goal. If the
dent might well wonder how anybody ever masters the player chooses to attack, he or she ignores weak-
skill. nesses in his or her own position created by the attack,
To cope with this overload, and to achieve compe- as well as the loss of pieces not essential to the attack.
tence, people learn, through instruction or experience, Pieces defending the enemy king become salient.
to devise a plan or choose a perspective that then deter- Because pieces not involved in the attack are being
mines those elements of the situation or domain that lost, the timing of the attach is critical. If the competent
must be treated as important and those that can be player attacks too soon or too late, his or her pieces will
ignored. As students learn to restrict themselves to have been lost in vain, and he or she will almost surely
only a few of the vast number of possibly relevant fea- lose the game. Successful attacks induce euphoria,
tures and aspects, understanding and decision making whereas mistakes are felt in the pit of the stomach.
becomes easier. If we were disembodied beings, pure minds free of
Naturally, to avoid mistakes, the competent per- our messy emotions, our responses to our successes
former seeks rules and reasoning procedures to decide and failures would lack this seriousness and excite-
which plan or perspective to adopt. But such rules are ment. Like a computer, we would have goals and suc-
not as easy to come by as are the rules and maxims ceed or fail to achieve them but, as John Haugeland
given beginners in manuals and lectures. Indeed, in once said of chess machines that have been pro-
any skill domain, the performer encounters a vast grammed to win, they are good at attaining their goal,
number of situations differing from each other in sub- but when it comes to winning, they do not give a damn.
tle ways. There are, in fact, more situations than can be For embodied, emotional beings like us, however, suc-
named or precisely defined, so no one can prepare for cess and failure do matter. So the learner is naturally
the learner a list of types of possible situations and frightened, elated, disappointed, or discouraged by the
what to do or look for in each. Students, therefore, results of his or her choice of perspective. And, as the
must decide for themselves in each situation what plan competent student becomes more and more emotion-
or perspective to adopt without being sure that it will ally involved in the task, it becomes increasingly diffi-
turn out to be appropriate. cult to draw back and adopt the detached maxim-fol-
Given this uncertainty, coping becomes frightening lowing stance of the advanced beginner.
rather than merely exhausting. Prior to this stage, if the But why let learning be infected with all that emo-
rules do not work, the performer, rather than feeling tional stress? Have not we in the West, since the Stoics,
remorse for his or her mistakes, can rationalize that he and especially since Descartes, learned that to make
or she had not been given adequate rules. But because progress, we must master our emotions and be as
at this stage the result depends on the learner’s choice detached and objective as possible? Would not rational
of perspective, the learner feels responsible for his or motivation, objective detachment, honest evaluation,
her choice. Often, the choice leads to confusion and and hard work be the best way to acquire expertise?
failure. But sometimes, things work out well, and the Although it might seem that involvement could
competent student then experiences a kind of elation only interfere with detached rule testing, and so would
unknown to the beginner. inevitably lead to irrational decisions and inhibit fur-
A competent driver, leaving the freeway on an off- ther skill development, in fact, just the opposite seems
ramp curve, learns to pay attention to the speed of the to be the case. Patricia Benner has studied student
car not to whether to shift gears. After taking into nurses at each stage of skill acquisition. She finds that,
account speed, surface condition, criticality of time, unless the trainee stays emotionally involved and
and so forth, the competent driver may decide he or she accepts the joy of a job well done, as well as the re-
is going too fast. The driver then has to decide whether morse of mistakes, he or she will not develop further
to let up on the accelerator, remove his or her foot alto- and will eventually burn out trying to keep track of all

Dreyfus / ADULT SKILL ACQUISITION 179
the features and aspects, rules and maxims that mod- ciples, will gradually be replaced by situational dis-
ern medicine requires. In the cases of nurses at least, criminations. Proficiency seems to develop if, and
resistance to involvement and risk leads to stagnation only if, experience is assimilated in this embodied,
and, ultimately, to boredom and regression (Benner, atheoretical way.
1984). As usual, this can be seen most clearly in cases of
In general, if one seeks the safety of rules, one will action. As the performer acquires the ability to dis-
not get beyond competence. On the other hand, experi- criminate among a variety of situations, each entered
encing deeply felt rewards or remorse seems to be nec- into with involvement, plans are evoked, and certain
essary for the performer to learn from examples with- aspects stand out as important without the learner
out rules. standing back and choosing those plans or deciding to
One might object that this account has the role of adopt that perspective. When the goal is simply obvi-
involvement reversed: that the more the beginner is ous, rather than the winner of a complex competition,
emotionally committed to learning the better, whereas there is less doubt as to whether what one is trying to
an expert could be, and, indeed, often should be, accomplish is appropriate.
coldly detached and rational in his or her practice. This At this stage, the involved, experienced performer
is no doubt true, but the beginner’s job is to follow the sees goals and salient aspects but not what to do to
rules and gain experience, and it is merely a question achieve these goals. This is inevitable because there
of motivation whether he or she is involved. Further- are far fewer ways of seeing what is going on than
more, the novice is not emotionally involved in choos- there are ways of reacting. The proficient performer
ing an action, even if he or she is involved in its out- simply has not yet had enough experience with the out-
come. Only at the level of competence is there an comes of the wide variety of possible responses to
emotional investment in the choice of the perspective each of the situations he or she can now discriminate
leading to an action. Then, emotional involvement among to react automatically. Thus, the proficient per-
seems to play an essential role in switching over from former, after spontaneously seeing the point and the
what one might roughly think of as a left-hemisphere important aspects of the current situation, must still
analytic approach to a right-hemisphere holistic one. decide what to do. And to decide, he or she must fall
Of course, not just any emotional reaction, such as back on detached rule and maxim following.
enthusiasm or fear of making a fool of oneself or the The proficient driver, approaching a curve on a
exultation of victory, would do. What matters is taking rainy day, may feel in the seat of one's pants that he or
responsibility for one’s successful and unsuccessful she is going dangerously fast. He or she must then
choices, even brooding over them—not just feeling decide whether to apply the brakes or merely to reduce
good or bad about winning or losing, but replaying pressure by some specific amount on the accelerator.
one’s performance in one’s mind step by step or move Valuable time may be lost while making a decision,
by move. The point, however, is not to analyze one’s but the proficient driver is certainly more likely to
mistakes and insights but just to let them sink in. Expe- negotiate the curve safely than the competent driver
rience shows that only then will one become an expert. who spends additional time considering the speed,
angle of bank, and felt gravitational forces to decide
Stage 4: Proficiency whether the car’s speed is excessive.
The proficient chess player, who is classed a master,
As the competent performer becomes more and can recognize almost immediately a large repertoire of
more emotionally involved in a task, it becomes types of positions. He or she then deliberates to deter-
increasingly difficult for him or her to draw back and mine the move that will best achieve his or her goal.
adopt the detached, rule-following stance of the begin- One may know, for example, that he or she should
ner. If the detached stance of the novice and advanced attack, but he or she must calculate how best to do so.
beginner is replaced by involvement, and the learner
accepts the anxiety of choice, he or she is set for further Stage 5: Expertise
skill advancement.
Then, the resulting positive and negative emotional The proficient performer, immersed in the world of
experiences will strengthen successful perspectives his or her skillful activity, sees what needs to be done
and inhibit unsuccessful ones, and the performer’s but decides how to do it. The expert not only sees what
theory of the skill, as represented by rules and prin- needs to be achieved; thanks to his or her vast reper-

180 BULLETIN OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY / June 2004
toire of situational discriminations, he or she also sees faces, even though each face will never exactly match
immediately how to achieve this goal. Thus, the ability the same face seen previously, and politicians can rec-
to make more subtle and refined discriminations is ognize thousands of faces, just as Julio Kaplan can rec-
what distinguishes the expert from the proficient per- ognize thousands of chess positions similar to ones
former. Among many situations, all seen as similar previously encountered.
with respect to plan or perspective, the expert has That amateur and expert chess players use different
learned to distinguish those situations requiring one parts of the brain has been confirmed by recent MRI
reaction from those demanding another. That is, with research. The researchers report the following:
enough experience in a variety of situations, all seen
from the same perspective but requiring different tacti- We use a new technique of magnetic imaging to
cal decisions, the brain of the expert gradually decom- compare focal bursts of γ-band activity in ama-
poses this class of situations into subclasses, each of teur and professional chess players during
which requires a specific response. This allows the matches. We find that this activity is most evi-
immediate intuitive situational response that is char- dent in the medial temporal lobe in amateur play-
acteristic of expertise. ers, which is consistent with the interpretation
The expert driver not only feels in the seat of his or that their mental acuity is focused on analyzing
her pants when speed is the issue but also knows how unusual new moves during the game. In contrast,
to perform the appropriate action without calculating highly skilled chess grandmasters have more γ-
and comparing alternatives. On the off-ramp, his or her bursts in the frontal and parietal cortices, indicat-
foot simply lifts off the accelerator and applies the ing that they are retrieving chunks from
appropriate pressure to the brake. What must be done, expert memory by recruiting circuits outside the
simply is done. medial temporal lobe. (Amidzic, Riehle, Fehr,
The chess grandmaster experiences a compelling Weinbruch, & Elbert, 2001, p. 603))
sense of the issue and the best move. Excellent chess
players can play at the rate of 5 to 10 seconds a move It should be noted that the assumption that experts
and even faster without any serious degradation in per- “are retrieving chunk’s [i.e., representations of typical
formance. At this speed, they must depend almost chess positions] from memory” is in no way supported
entirely on intuition and hardly at all on analysis and by this research. What the research does suggest, how-
comparison of alternatives. It has been estimated that ever, is the researcher’s weaker claim that
an expert chess player can distinguish roughly
100,000 types of positions. For much expert perfor- these marked differences in the distribution of
mance, the number of classes of descriminable situa- focal brain activity during chess playing point to
tions, built up on the basis of experience, must be differences in the mechanisms of brain process-
comparatively large. ing and functional brain organization between
A few years ago, we performed an experiment in grandmasters and amateurs. (Amidzic, Riehle,
which an international master, Julio Kaplan, was re- Fehr, Weinbruch, & Elbert, 2001, p. 603)
quired to add numbers presented to him audibly at the
rate of about one number per second as rapidly as he What is going on in the brain in these different cases
could while playing 5-second-a-move chess against a is not shown by this data, but phenomenological de-
slightly weaker but master level player. Even with his scription shows that a beginner calculates using rules
analytical mind completely occupied by adding num- and facts just like a heuristically programmed com-
bers, Kaplan more than held his own against the master puter, but that with talent and a great deal of involved
in a series of games. Deprived of the time necessary to experience, the beginner develops into an expert who
see problems or construct plans, Kaplan still produced intuitively sees what to do without recourse to rules.
fluid and coordinated play. The tradition has given an accurate description of the
Kaplan’s performance seems somewhat less amaz- beginner and of the expert facing an unfamiliar situa-
ing when one realizes that a chess position is as mean- tion, but normally an expert does not calculate. He or
ingful, interesting, and important to a professional she does not solve problems. He or she does not even
chess player as a face in a receiving line is to a profes- think. He or she just does what normally works and, of
sional politician. Almost anyone could add numbers course, it normally works.
and simultaneously recognize and respond to familiar

Dreyfus / ADULT SKILL ACQUISITION 181
Table 1. Five Stages of Skill Acquisition

Skill Level Components Perspective Decision Commitment
1. Novice Context free None Analytic Detached

2. Advanced beginner Context free and situational None Analytic Detached
3. Competent Context free and situational Chosen Analytic Detached understanding and deciding;
involved outcome
4. Proficient Context free and situational Experienced Analytic Involved understanding; detached
deciding
5. Expert Context free and situational Experienced Intuitive Involved
Note: Components: This refers to the elements of the situation that the learner is able to perceive. These can be context free and pertaining
to general aspects of the skill or situational, which only relate to the specific situation that the learner is meeting. Perspective: As the learner
begins to be able to recognize almost innumerable components, he or she must choose which one to focus on. He or she is then taking a per-
spective. Decision: The learner is making a decision on how to act in the situation he or she is in. This can be based on analytic reasoning or an
intuitive decision based on experience and holistic discrimination of the particular situation. Commitment: This describes the degree to
which the learner is immersed in the learning situation when it comes to understanding, deciding, and the outcome of the situation—action
pairing.
The skill model can is summarized in the table Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical
above. philosophy. Boston: Routledge Kegan Paul.
Stuart E. Dreyfus, an applied mathematician, is professor

References
emeritus in the Department of Industrial Engineering and
Amidzic, O., Riehle, H. J., Fehr, T., Weinbruch, C., & Elbert, T.
Operations Research of the University of California, Berke-
(2001). Patterns of focal γ-bursts in chess players: Grand- ley. He coauthored the book, Mind Over Machine with his
masters call on regions of the brain not used so much by less brother Hubert L. Dreyfus and has authored or coauthored
skilled amateurs. Nature, 412. three books on dynamic programming, a mathematical opti-
Benner, P. (1984). From novice to expert: Excellence and power in mization technique. Much of his research concerns the use,
clinical nursing practice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. and the limitations, of mathematics and computers to aid or
replace human decision making.

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NAT ELIASON

1. How to build a self-perpetuating motivation machine

Nat Eliason October 16, 2017

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

When you’re not motivated, no amount of SMART goals or Pomodoros or screaming

LessWrong gives us a more helpful equation:

Getting motivated then requires you to do some combination of:

Getting Motivated to Start a Project

Increasing Your Reasons to Start a Project

Increasing the Value of Starting a Project

Increasing Your Expectancy of Succeeding at a New Project

“I’m not good at teaching myself new things.”

Decreasing Your Reasons to Delay a Project

Use a Commitment Device

Commitment devices usually fall into one of three categories:

Getting Motivated to Start a Project Recap

Staying Motivated During a Project

Increasing Your Reasons to Keep Going

Maintaining Your Sense of Expectancy in the Project

Maintaining Your Sense of Value in the Project

“Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration

Set Clear Follow-on Goals

Optimize your sleep (8 hours, dark, regular wake up time, etc.)

You know the drill.

Building Your Motivation Machine

First, figure out what you need to do:

If you need the motivation to start:

1. Clearly define an exciting, high-level value to starting the project

If you need the motivation to continue:

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Nat Eliason October 30, 2017

“It is better to know how to learn than to know.” –Dr. Seuss

The way we’re taught to learn:

The way you really learn:

The Sandbox Method for Self-Education

Step 1: Build Your Sandbox

This sandbox should be:

1. Low cost or free: so you don’t delay in starting

Programming: Accounts on Github, Heroku, and StackExchange for building

Blogs and Online Resources

And Take Notes!

Step 3: Implement and Practice

Some examples of naive practice would be:

Playing a competitive game like Go casually with a friend.

Practicing purposefully within your sandbox requires that you:

Getting feedback will be the last part of our self-education system.

Step 4: Get Feedback

Continue the Self-Education Loop

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Nat Eliason July 3, 2017

In the late 1970s, Anders Ericsson devised a very boring experiment.

Until he made a breakthrough.

What is Deliberate Practice?

Naive vs. Purposeful vs. Deliberate Practice

This might include:

Contrasted to Naive Practice, Purposeful Practice has a few key characteristics:

These goals could sound like:

Purposeful Practice is Focused: Whereas you might be distracted in naive practice,

To make it deliberate, you need two more variables.

Deliberate Practice is in a Well-Defined Field. Deliberate practice requires the field be

Ericsson makes the distinction a little clearer:

1. Identify the expert performers in your field

Putting it All Together: A Deliberate Practice Roadmap

Before Starting: Find a Teacher or Substitute Teacher