Experts worst teachers

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Progress in skill development should involve making tasks easier and manageable in the beginning to motivate practice. Seeking out challenges and pushing oneself becomes crucial after a certain level of skill attainment. Although it may seem logical to learn from experts, research shows that experts can often be poor teachers. As skills become more automatic, experts struggle to articulate their strategies clearly, making it challenging for learners to grasp the underlying principles of the skill.

Life revolves around learning—in school, at our jobs, even in the things we do for fun. But we often don’t progress in any of these areas at the rate we’d like. Consequently, and unfortunately, we often give up our pursuits prematurely or resign ourselves to always being mediocre in our classes, career, and hobbies.

Scott Young has some tips on how you can avoid this fate, level up in whatever you do, and enjoy the satisfaction of skill improvement. Scott is a writer, programmer, and entrepreneur, and the author of Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery. Today on the show, Scott shares the three key factors in helping us learn. He explains how copying others is an underrated technique in becoming a genius, why, contrary to the sentiments of motivational memes, we learn more from success than mistakes, why experts often aren’t good teachers and tactics for drawing out their best advice, why you may need to get worse before you get better, and more.