Embark on a transformative journey towards mastery with Scott H. Young’s insightful book, “Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery.” This powerful guide offers a roadmap to unlocking your full potential and achieving excellence in any domain.
Dive into this comprehensive summary and review to discover the key insights and practical strategies that will propel you towards mastery in your chosen field.
Table of Contents
Genres
Personal Development, Self-Help, Skill Acquisition, Learning, Productivity, Goal Setting, Success, Psychology, Career Development, Personal Growth, Motivation, Inspiration, Career Success
In “Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery,” Scott H. Young presents a framework for acquiring skills and achieving mastery in any area of life. The book is divided into 12 maxims, each offering practical advice and insights to help readers navigate the path to expertise.
Young emphasizes the importance of deliberate practice, setting clear goals, and embracing discomfort as essential components of growth. He highlights the value of feedback, both from others and through self-reflection, in refining one’s skills and overcoming obstacles.
The book explores the role of mindset, encouraging readers to cultivate a growth mindset and embrace challenges as opportunities for learning. Young also delves into the significance of focused attention, effective learning strategies, and the power of perseverance in the face of setbacks.
Throughout the book, Young draws upon research from psychology, neuroscience, and real-life examples to support his maxims. He provides actionable exercises and prompts to help readers apply the principles to their own lives and embark on a journey of continuous improvement.
Review
“Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery” is a invaluable resource for anyone seeking to unlock their full potential and achieve mastery in their chosen field. Scott H. Young’s writing is clear, engaging, and packed with practical insights that can be immediately applied to one’s life.
The book’s strength lies in its comprehensive approach to skill acquisition and personal development. Young’s 12 maxims cover a wide range of topics, from deliberate practice and goal setting to mindset and perseverance. Each maxim is supported by research and real-life examples, making the concepts relatable and actionable.
One of the standout features of the book is Young’s emphasis on embracing discomfort and pushing beyond one’s comfort zone. He reminds readers that growth occurs outside of their comfort zone and encourages them to seek out challenges that stretch their abilities.
While the book offers a wealth of valuable insights, some readers may find certain maxims more applicable to their specific goals than others. However, the overall framework and principles presented in the book are universally relevant and can be adapted to various contexts.
“Get Better at Anything” is a must-read for anyone committed to personal growth and skill development. Whether you’re a professional seeking to excel in your career or an individual pursuing a passion, this book provides a roadmap to help you achieve mastery and unlock your full potential.
Introduction: Three keys to unlocking peak performance
Get Better at Anything (2024) identifies three key factors for effective learning: observing others, practicing extensively, and receiving reliable feedback. Drawing on research and real-life examples, it provides valuable insights for anyone looking to improve their skills.
There’s no limit to what you can learn, from quantum physics to backgammon, to Hungarian or silversmithing. Even close-up magic and tap dancing are within your reach! The important thing is not what you learn, but how you learn it.
Whatever the skill is that you want to acquire, you’ll learn it quicker and better if you understand the learning process itself. This summary lays out three key learning steps that are crucial for acquiring and perfecting any new skill: seeing how the experts do it, doing it for yourself, and seeking feedback to improve your performance. Once you’ve grasped how these steps influence learning outcomes, you’ll be able to leverage them on your own learning journey.
So, ready to skill up on skilling up? Then let’s get started.
Want to perform better? See, do, and seek feedback.
If you’ve ever played the classic video game Tetris, you’ll know the aim is to manipulate colorful shapes composed of four square blocks into horizontal lines, winning points for each line you complete. What you might not know is that Tetris can tell us something profound about how we are wired to learn and improve skills.
Tetris was developed in 1984 by a Soviet computer scientist called Alexey Pajitnov. Passed along from one floppy disk to another, it reached enormous popularity in the Soviet Union and, eventually, around the world. For two decades, avid players tried to reach 999,999 points, the top score possible in the game. In 2009, after years of dedicated practice, a player called Harry Hong became the first person in 25 years to achieve the maximum score. In 2020, Joseph Saelee, achieved the maximum score 12 times over the course of a single Tetris tournament. Another 40 players at that same tournament also achieved the maximum score at least once.
So, what happened? Between 2009 and 2020, how did we get so much better at Tetris?
Well, three fundamental things shifted.
First, the advent of YouTube made it easy for top Tetris players to share their record-breaking performances. Before online video-sharing, top Tetris players submitted record-breaking results to a video-game record database called Twin Galaxies. Twin Galaxies would then post players’ top scores online. On YouTube players could directly upload videos of their world record performances. Twin Galaxies only ever posted game results; on YouTube actual footage of the full match was available. This meant other players could see how these champions were playing, as well as what their final results were. Through livestreams, top players were sharing their tactics, hacks, and even their hand movement techniques with an interconnected group of enthusiastic Tetris players around the world.
Second, as the audience for live streamed video game performances grew, top players were incentivized to practice, as they streamed more and more content of themselves playing the game. In other words: these expert players racked up a lot of hours of gameplay.
Third, the proliferation of video footage as well as online forums devoted to the game led to the creation of an informal database of specialized Tetris knowledge – a database that even the top players themselves benefited from. For example, many champion players didn’t know it was possible to execute a maneuver known as a T-spin, where the T-shaped tetris block is rotated, until this knowledge was shared online. Now, even newbie players are aware of this strategy.
These three factors map neatly onto what we’re going to call the three keys to getting better at anything: see, do, and seek feedback. Let’s break them down:
First, we learn better when we see what the experts do. Tetris players rapidly improved their performance when they were easily able to see how expert-level players were approaching the game.
Next, we need to do the thing we want to get better at, over and over again, in order to improve. As champion tetris players live streamed their games, they accumulated hours upon hours of practice.
And finally, we improve our performance through incorporating feedback. YouTube comments sections and online Tetris forums functioned as feedback channels. Players used this feedback to adopt new techniques and styles of play, iterating and improving their performance.
In the next three sections we’ll take a deep dive into these three keys for improving performance, uncovering detailed strategies for seeing, for doing, and for seeking feedback.
See: Exploit the power of imitation
Let’s do a little experiment. We’re going to give you a sequence of letters. Don’t write them down, just see if you can remember them. After they’re presented, close your eyes and try to repeat the letters in order. Ready? Here goes:
N U H F L B S A I
Okay, your turn:
How did you do? Was it harder than you thought?
Let’s try again, with one simple tweak. Instead of giving you all the letters at once, we’re going to rearrange them and present them in three more manageable chunks:
FBI NHL USA
Okay, your turn:
That was easier, right?
See, humans have an amazing capacity to remember things. But our working memory has finite cognitive powers. Think of memory as a filing cabinet, where all kinds of important information is stored. Now think of working memory as a desk. There’s only enough room on the desk for a few papers at a time. When new information lands on the desk, it has to travel to the filing cabinet where it can be stored permanently. This process becomes a lot easier if those papers can be organized into folders when they’re still on the desk. That’s why ordering those random letters into easily recognizable acronyms made them so much easier to remember: they’ve been filed into manageable folders. The brain can do this for us by identifying categories or patterns across a range of information.
In the 1980s, the psychologist John Sweller was running an experiment designed to test student problem-solving abilities. He assigned students a series of math problems that each followed the same basic rule. But while the students were able to solve the problems with relative ease, Sweller noticed something concerning: after completing the series, very few students discovered the rule connecting them.
How was it possible these students had solved every problem without uncovering the underlying method? Sweller theorized that, in the learning process, working memory could only bear a limited cognitive load before it stopped being able to absorb information. Where students were focused on solving a problem, working towards this goal used up most of their cognitive load, leaving them with no capacity to generalize the rule for solving them – they simply weren’t identifying those patterns that the brain uses to move data from working memory to memory.
Sweller then ran a second experiment. He gave one group of students a set of algebra problems to solve, using conventional discovery-based learning practices. Discovery learning, by the way, is where students work things out for themselves and it’s widely believed to be the most effective form of learning.
Sweller gave the second group a set of worked examples, with step by step instructions for reaching the solution, for the same problems. After each group had finished, he then gave both groups an entirely new set of problems.
No-one in the group that learned through doing was able to complete the new problems, while 75% of the students that learned through copying were able to complete the new problems.
Does this mean learning through copying is more effective than discovery learning? Well, yes and no. It would seem that in the early stage of learning a new skill, copying can be even more effective than trying to do something for yourself. Later on in your learning journey, however, pivoting to discovery based learning will let you deepen your skills and understanding. To come back to the desk-filing-cabinet simile, learning something new is like staring down at a desk covered in random bits of paper. Copying from an expert lets you see how all this new, overwhelming information can be sorted into folders.
So, here are four ways in which you can integrate copying into your own learning journey:
First, seek out worked examples. Look for resources that show solutions, not just problems, These will help you assimilate helpful patterns, fast.
Second, reorganize confusing materials. Streamline learning materials so you’re not wasting your cognitive load trying to comprehend them: even something as simple as writing plain english definitions next to key terms will eliminate cognitive friction from your learning process.
Third, use the power of pretraining. Before tackling a new skill, try and break it down into components, then try and perfect each component separately.
And fourth, introduce complexity slowly. The more expert you become, the more complexity your working memory will be able to hold at one time. So start simple, then build in complexity gradually.
Do: leverage productivity to achieve breakthroughs
Leonardo da Vinci and Pablo Picasso are both recognized as artistic geniuses, yet the two men had very different modes of working. While each painted their share of masterpieces – like da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ or Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ – da Vinci was far from prolific, finishing less than 24 paintings in his lifetime. Picasso, on the other hand, finished around 13,000 (yes, really, 13,000) original paintings. Which creative model should you emulate if you want to achieve greatness?
According to the data, creatives, scholars, and entrepreneurs who operate like Picasso are far more likely to find success than those who work like da Vinci. Quantity matters more than quality. Or, more accurately, quantity begets quality.
Price’s law, originated by the physicist Derek J. de Solla Price, finds that half the academic output of a field of scholars will be produced by a number roughly the square root of the total: so in a field of 100 researchers, ten will be responsible for half the output. Studies of scientists and neurosurgeons have independently shown that the most highly cited papers are written by the most prolific authors.
Why does productivity play such an important factor in creative success?
Well, though we like to think of creativity as spontaneous, it’s actually just like any other form of expertise. The more you practice it, the better you get. The psychologist John Hayes studied 76 composers and found that they practiced composition for, on average, ten years before producing any famous work. He repeated this study with painters who he found needed an average of six years concentrated creative practice before they produced any famous work.
Does this mean you should adopt the work habits of prolific inventor Thomas Edison, who spent weeks at a time in his laboratory in order to patent over 1000 inventions? Fortunately, there are simpler ways to maximize your creative output without giving up work-life balance. Here are three strategies:
First, adopt an assembly line mentality. You can’t control the random ways in which inspiration strikes. But there are probably components of your creative work that can be siloed and automated. A scientist, for example, can streamline her processes for writing grants and preparing papers for publication, freeing up more time for deep, creative thinking.
Second, let ideas ripen. Unripe ideas are often missing components. A novelist may have a great character in mind, for example, but no plot. Pursuing unripe ideas like this is time consuming. Wait until ideas are fully fleshed out before you try and put them into action. You’ll save time and maximize your productivity.
Third, spend less time on non-creative work. Did you know Nobel laureates frequently report being less productive after they win the prize? That’s because their workdays get eaten up by the media commitments and public appearances that come in the wake of winning a Nobel. Being creative often requires you to set boundaries around non-creative commitments. Try blocking out calendar time that’s devoted solely to creative work, and refusing obligations unconnected to your creative aims.
Feedback: learn how to unlearn
Tiger Woods had just won his first masters by twelve strokes – which is a lot – when he did something almost unheard of. He decided to change the way he swung his golf club. For years, the conventional wisdom among pro golfers was that every player had a ‘natural’ swing that could be enhanced but not completely rebuilt. But Woods’ natural swing relied on a corkscrewing hip motion that, if not corrected midswing, hampered his precision.
After eighteen months of grueling retraining, Woods hit the pro circuit again. A year later, he posted eight tournament wins, and went on to become the youngest golfer to win a Career Grand Slam. Woods has gone on to make major changes to his swing three more times.
Woods shows us the importance of using feedback to improve performance. More than this, he illustrates how an elite performer doesn’t just continuously learn through feedback, but actually uses feedback to unlearn skills and strategies that have been successful in the past.
Why should you unlearn? For one thing, unlearning stops skills from becoming habits. Like Woods did with his golf swing, unpacking habitual skills is the best way to continue refining and improving.
For another, unlearning helps you avoid falling into the trap of functional fixedness. That’s a term coined by the psychologist Karl Duncker, and it describes how perceiving an object in one way can prevent you from imagining other potential uses for it. In a famous experiment he gave one group some empty matchboxes, some tacks, and some candles, and asked participants to mount the candles on a wall. They fixed the boxes to the wall with the tacks, so the boxes acted as shelves for the candles. A second group were given matchboxes filled with tacks and candles. They had the same equipment, yet participants in the second group didn’t figure out how to fix the candles to the wall. Because the matchboxes were filled, they could only perceive them as containers, not as potential shelves.Learning to see things one way can actually stop you from perceiving their full potential.
Unlearning requires you to confront flaws in your understanding and your skillset. It can feel uncomfortable, and often entails a period of poor performance before any improvement becomes apparent. It is also the most effective way to ensure that, once you have reached an elite level of expertise, you stay at that elite level. Here are three ways to start unlearning:
First, impose new constraints to combat old habits. When you’ve habitually performed a skill one way for years, it becomes cognitively ingrained – your brain won’t let you try it a new way. Placing constraints on how you do something – for example, challenging yourself to write an essay without any adverbs, or paint a picture without using the color red – helps you force your brain to approach things differently.
Second, find a coach. Unlearning requires you to perform a skill and monitor your performance at the same time. That takes up a lot of mental bandwidth. Finding a coach who can monitor your performance for you and suggest adjustments based on real-time feedback allows you to focus solely on your performance.
Third, don’t rebuild, renovate. Unlearning skills doesn’t always require you to start from scratch. If your skills are built on a solid foundation, aim to augment your performance rather than overhauling it completely.
Conclusion
The main takeaway of this summary to Get Better at Anything by Scott Young is that the most effective way to skill up is through seeing what the experts do, practicing in the right conditions, and continuously seeking feedback that allows you to adjust and improve your skill set. So, simply put: seeing, doing, and seeking feedback.
By following these three essential steps, you’ll be able to master any new skill, regardless of what it is.