Mastering Learning: Balancing Theory and Practice in Skill Acquisition
Overview
In this insightful coaching session, Edgar Cabrera discusses the importance of balancing theory and practice in learning new skills, particularly in software engineering. He emphasizes the need for a structured approach to practice, the significance of interleaving techniques, and the advantages of physical note-taking over digital methods for effective learning.
Key Points
- Theory vs. Practice: Edgar highlights the critical relationship between theoretical knowledge and practical application. He suggests a 1:5 ratio of practice to theory to avoid cognitive overload and ensure mastery. For more on effective learning strategies, check out 9 Evidence-Based Tips to Learn Anything Faster.
- Pacing Your Learning: It’s essential to find a pace that allows for adequate practice without rushing through theoretical concepts. Understanding a technique theoretically does not equate to being able to apply it effectively. This concept is further explored in Mastering Knowledge: The Feynman Learning Technique Explained.
- Interleaving Techniques: Mixing different skills and techniques during practice can enhance learning. Edgar advises against mastering one skill before moving to the next, as this can lead to inefficiency and learning debt. For a deeper dive into effective learning methods, see Mastering Skill Acquisition: Avoiding Theory Overload for Effective Learning.
- Physical vs. Digital Note-Taking: Edgar discusses the benefits of physical note-taking over digital methods, citing research that suggests physical notes enhance retention and understanding due to the cognitive effort involved in writing by hand. This aligns with strategies discussed in Mastering Your Reading Strategy: A Comprehensive Guide to Analytical Reading.
- Cognitive Load Management: He stresses the importance of managing cognitive load by ensuring that the effort required to learn a new technique aligns with the expected outcomes.
Conclusion
Edgar concludes by encouraging learners to challenge themselves appropriately and to use tools like Obsidian effectively, understanding their strengths and limitations in the learning process.
FAQs
-
What is the ideal ratio of practice to theory in learning?
The recommended ratio is 1:5, meaning for every unit of theory, there should be five units of practice. -
How can I effectively balance theory and practice?
Focus on understanding a concept theoretically, then practice it before moving on to the next topic. Avoid rushing through material. -
What is interleaving in learning?
Interleaving involves mixing different skills or topics during practice to enhance retention and understanding. -
Is physical note-taking better than digital note-taking?
Research suggests that physical note-taking can be more effective due to the cognitive effort involved, which aids retention. -
How can I manage cognitive load while learning?
Ensure that the effort required to learn a new technique is manageable and aligns with the expected outcomes to avoid feeling overwhelmed. -
What tools can I use for effective note-taking?
While digital tools like Obsidian are useful for reference, physical note-taking is often more effective for primary encoding of information. -
How can I avoid learning debt?
Focus on mastering concepts through practice before moving on to new material, ensuring a solid understanding of each skill.
you're constantly challenging yourself from different angles and different context the way that I think about it is
you're borrowing time from your future in order to become a master at this you have to be able to mix it and
match it anyway thank you so much for your time and I have learned a lot and I have a lot to think about now every
couple of months I find some members in our IC can study program who are active and supportive in our community and I
offer them some 30 minute free coaching sessions some of you do seem to really like my coaching sty content so I've
decided to record some of these and post them on YouTube before we jump in I'd appreciate if you give this video a like
and if you're interested in joining the full program yourself then you can check out iin study.com there's a link in the
description my name is Edgar cabera I'm from Mexico studying software engineer it's in the University of Las that's
about it I'm in ER I'm in second H second year of the career and I'm still I'm about halfway
through the career awesome and what's the main I suppose things that you would like me to help
you with yeah I think one of the things that I have seen a lot of focus and it's like I think it's very important it's
about the relationship between practice and what you learn in the course so what I want to learn is do I need to always
like during every single lecture or every single video do you always have to immediately go and practice those stuff
before advancing into any other stuff of the course or can I like I have this in mind and then I can continue like a few
lectures from their course and then practice like everything in bulk having the consideration that I need to keep
that relationship like one to five between theory and practice so whenever you learn any new technique or any new
skill you just what you're trying to do is prevent yourself from having overload so there always needs to be this Theory
practice balance right yeah so you you can technically go at any Pace that you want M it it just depends on the density
of the theory and your ability to convert that into practice MH and usually what I find is that the amount
that you'd need to know to understand how to use any new technique or any new learning strategy if we think about the
total amount that you can know about a certain technique um and if you know 100% of this technique that means that
you can do it perfectly accurately then the amount that you can know about a technique based purely on just a
theoretical understanding without any real experience or practice using it there's usually no more than 25% like at
a maximum this this is why I often say there's a 1 to five ratio at least because sometimes it's very it's it's
much lower sometimes it's only 2 or 3% this is really obvious when we think about other skills like you could
understand how to do go rock climbing yeah but the amount of actual practice You' need to not you know fall off and
die is much much more um and so this is the same thing here is that the amount of theory depends on the difficulty of
the technique and then it depends on how um how much of it that you've understood but the tricky part and this is the
reason why I usually tell people to be very conservative and just like learn one thing and practice practice practice
practice is because this is a relatively small percentage so what that means is someone that you know has you know
really really understands the theory of very deeply before practice at most they're going to understand like 25% of
it but if you understand less of it maybe you understand 10% less and maybe that means that you only understand 15%
now that doesn't seem like a very big difference 25% versus 15% but relative to how much You' need to know it's a big
difference right because the amount of practice that you need here this is now 1 to four in this situation whereas in
here here it's closer to like one to you know like seven to be able to do it which means that you need like almost
double the amount of practice to be able to gain the Mastery there so the other issue is that when you have skills and
techniques applied in the real world and the real world settings with like multiple curriculums and pressures and
you know assessments and things like that there are other variables that are then added on so let's say now we've got
two different techniques that are added on at the same time well now we have to try to practice two separate techniques
and understand the cause and effect relationship between the technique and the impact that it's having and then
even at just two techniques that can become you know quite challenging so one of the things that I would normally as a
rule recommend is first of all to just play it safe yeah because there's really nothing worse than wasting time on going
too fast yeah yeah which is counterintuitive but the second thing is that you can try to do more and try to
move a little bit faster but when you're doing the technique be really really attentive to two things the first is how
much concentration and mental effort does it take for me to just be able to do the technique not even thinking about
doing it correctly just doing it and then the second thing is how effective am I finding the technique and is that
aligned with how effective I'm told it's meant to be when I teach people techniques I'm I'm pretty clear about
how effective it's meant to be some of them are going to be like amazing some of them it's like it improves a little
bit so if I've said something improves a little bit and you try it and it's easy to use and it's improved it a little bit
and the amount of effort you need to spend to do the technique is is very low that's something that we call Germain
load was a complicated topic but if that happens then you can move on to add the new the next technique and if you add
the next technique and you now think okay it's still pretty easy then you can move on to the next one it gets harder
though because as you add more and more techniques the whole system also needs to function so you might be able to do
each individual technique very well but when you try to do all three simultaneously it might get much much
harder so what that would mean is you need to just slow down there but if you use a technique and you think okay I'm
getting the result that I'm told I should get but the amount of effort and concentration I need to be able to pull
it off is very high then you should not because as soon as you add another technique on it's going to be harder or
you think it's very easy to do it but I'm not getting the result that I'm that I'm meant to be getting that's even
worse because it means you're not even doing it right so the effort is not there because we're not doing the right
thing it's kind of like saying hey I think going to the gym and working out is really easy I don't spend any effort
at all lifting weights and then you see what they're doing and all they're doing is going inside and looking at
themselves in the mirror so it's like they're not even doing the right process yeah so that's usually what I look for
if I see that someone is using a new technique they're finding that it's relatively easy and getting the effect
that they're meant to be getting then they should be ready to move on and then when they add a new technique on then we
look again the whole system isn't working one of the things also that you have to be really really mindful is that
when we are building the techniques we have to build them like we're building the foundations of a house like they are
stacking and building on top of each other a lot of the time what will happen is that people will start using a
technique they'll be fine at it this is fine they're work they're using it very well mhm and then they'll add another
technique on and they're like okay that's fine they're using it well and then they'll come to add on a new
technique and because it's too hard to use all three at the same time they stopped using this one and now they're
using this one and then they add another one on and then you know this this one kind of forc through and eventually what
happens is that you know everything will sort of topple and it becomes a mess and the system is broken down and then they
start running into really fundamental issues really common example here would be like the really getting into the
mapping process and nonlinear not taking and they're doing that and doing that and doing that and they forgotten
completely about doing space retrieval yeah right so so it's it's kind of like a long answer to to your question but
did that answer it no no yeah yeah totally because I have like that um because when I started like H seeing
stuff through the course and through your YouTube channel and H because I already have like some notion on how
Lear happens and how to learn new skills and stuff because I I really like I really enjoy the process of acquiring
new stuff to do like being able to be the better version of myself so I have always failed in that process in the
process of practicing enough because I get so passionate about the topic that I just need to learn more and learn more
and learn more and if you do it just for the because you just like the topic and you are just interested about it I think
that that's okay but if you want to apply it you really need to practice it before going to the next thing because
it has happened to me for example with coding because when I started before I started ER going to University like in
high school and stuff I saw a lot of YouTube videos about coding and then when I tried to do it I realized that I
couldn't retrieve anything about what I have supposedly learned so it's just a something that I knew had a problem with
with retrieving stuff to actually apply it um but I didn't exactly know how to do it like how to patch that hole Yeah
another thing that I'll add on to that I just thought of when you were explaining is that you you have to make sure that
you challenge yourself properly before assessing that you're able to do it correctly and this is the idea of
interleaving right is that it's not enough just to say okay I can do it well in the simple direct method of practice
or execution that I've learned coding is actually really good example of this is that it's really really possible and
actually frankly very easy because there's so many courses and things out there that just teach you about coding
it's very easy to learn like a lot of theory about lots of different functions and then you can follow everything step
by step okay I've learned about this function okay can I write that line of code yes okay can I turn that into
something else yes all right like let's move on to the next one let's introduce some more variables can I like declare a
variable yes okay can I call the variable yes can I use it in a function yes and then you can continue to do that
you're able to do it simply and simply but until you actually step outside and say okay well let's try to use all of
these together in a different context outside of how I learned it am I able to manipulate and use this information in a
different way and still retain that level of Competency and this is the this is the way that it has to be trained you
take a piece of theory you practice it you can do it simply sometimes you can do it in this in one go sometimes it
takes a little bit more after after you do that you can add on the next thing you add on the next thing and then you
try to use it and then you try to mix it and then you try and can you still do it okay now you add on the next one so
you're constantly mixing and interleaving and challenging yourself from different angles and different
context with each new thing that you add on and the way that I think about it is you're borrowing time from your future
to do this like in order to become a master at this you have to do all of this anyway
you have to be able to mix it and match it anyway usually what people will do is they'll try to get a Mastery of the
things step by step first and then they'll try to mix it together to get the Mastery but by doing that they're
suffering because they're now operating at a lower efficiency right now so they're they're going to struggle with
actually being able to learn it properly right now because of the fact that their memory is not going to be as strong and
they're going to forget things and now they have to spend more time learning it and relearning I call this learning debt
right and so instead if we just use the time we were going to to spend anyway and we do it now then we can gain that
Mastery so that by the time we are at the bottom and we're actually properly done we also have a very very high level
of Mastery it also is much less stressful in curriculums or in an exam because when you get to the time of an
exam you know you're basically ready to sit the exam straight away there's nothing more that has to happen but you
know people generally tend to want to go fast and just cover as much stuff as possible and so yeah yeah I'm actually
like really guilty about that because see out of these YouTube videos that that is like learn JavaScript or learn
go or learn X language in five hours so in your head you think I just need to get through this course and then I'm
Gonna Know It And then I try to do something with the language and can't remember anything yeah when you have
finished like a semester of University and then the the the finals are coming up and then you realize that because of
trying to like free up time free of time by going as fast as possible you just have like yeah like you said you have
just stolen yourself from being able to actually learn properly from the beginning and it's less stressful if you
can do like this Tiny Steps From the Beginning than trying to recompile everything at once the other stuff that
I wanted to um ask about is I usually use obsidian obsidian is like the place where I have my most notes I first tried
to do settle casting I couldn't retrieve anything I because I had so many notes and because settle casting like didn't
work for me in the fact that my brain couldn't like remember what exact combination of words I use to retrieve a
note or something there is a plugin in obsidian where you can do mind PS so it's like this kind of nonlinear note
taking I think that the question is do you think there is like a connection between like the physical way of not
taking being like better or being like Superior in any way than having this like Digital Way of nonlinear note
taking that's a good question and something that I've experimented with a lot and I've read the research on and
the in the research space there isn't a definitive answer um if there is more of a conclusion it does lean more towards
doing it physically yeah but the reason that physical tends to be better is not necessarily because there's anything
wrong with digital it's probably because the tools that are designed are not cognitively optimizing enough so there
are some advantages with being able to do things physically and and I you know like the
way that I do it is like essentially a hybrid right you know using a a tablet and so it's it's digital but it's
freehand and the reason that I still despite having spent so many hours trying a different like room or
obsidian or like you know Lucid chart or many other different types of um nonlinear kind of mapping softwares and
I get emails literally every day from mindmapping software people that want to sponsor me in a video and I say no to
all of them because of the fact that I don't think there's actually a software that really does this well at the moment
here are some of the advantages that you get with freehand that you I just don't see happening with the digital the first
thing with digital it's too easy to just create relationships and just space and just like put things down and the fact
that there's no barrier means that the information is prioritized and processed less and I
think this is the same thing as to why we saw that research said that handwritten notes are better than typed
notes because with typed notes what what was found was that you tend to write more when you're typing which means that
there's less processing going on and so we know that longer word count is associated with poor performance when it
comes to note taking and I think it's same sort of thing is that yes you can create a relationship yes you can tag
the information and yes technically it's organized but it's organized in the software doesn't mean that it's actually
organized in your brain because the software do so much of the heavy lifting for you so that's the first thing is
that it's just too easy and it doesn't Force the prioritization the second thing is that a big big part in fact
probably 80 to 90% of the learning process when you're learning new information is just hypothesizing
structures rewriting them and like redoing it and trying to make that make that fit yeah it's not as easy to do
that when you're committing it to a software because often when you're creating the note actually creates the
record of it and so it's hard to actually then just delete it and when you create it there's like a certain
minimum amount you have to invest to creating that so it's harder to create sort of the scratch Pad experience where
you're just like committing revising dele leading moving uh and that sort of thing the third thing is that there are
many more ways of representing information uh freehand then there is usually buy software and if it is
possible a software there's so many clicks that it takes to be able to do that so for example like if I wanted to
if I wanted to like make some notes that we're saying like okay here's a line of text here and then this sort of thing is
related to this one here okay I could say I could then say that let's say that there is another thing here and another
thing here and another thing here and another thing here right so if this was an app probably the only way that this
can be done is like this boom boom and then maybe like boom boom boom okay maybe maybe like this and then this is
how it would end up looking yeah but this is completely different to for example something like this right yeah
yeah yeah so like this is just a single example and there's so many other combinations that we can we can create
from this that that if we just create it as a binary is there a relationship or not or not then
it it's just everything just becomes a line but when we think what is the characteristic the quality the
importance the um the weight the the spacing of that relationship in relation to everything else then it opens up a
lot of other things um and then the final benefit is that it's much easier to do visual anchoring which is to
visually make a certain concept appear more important and and have maybe imagery involved in it to actually
create like a little memory Landmark that our brain is going to find easier to to hold on to so for example I could
have like a right so now that becomes a visual you know landmark and if this was I don't know what this concept is but if
it's related to some plant and Mountain you know like that would be then yeah so for me I think freehand is still the way
to go I don't I maybe one day software will catch up to be able to do do this we're actually thinking about creating a
software ourselves because um there's lots of room for improvement um but at the moment I don't think it does a good
job I think obsidian is a really good app for second brain management yeah but second brain management is is used as a
reference tool it's a reference software it's not for primary encoding and so it's a completely
different way but you could have multiple you could have maps that are stored within obsidian and then Maps
could be Rel ated to other Maps as a conceptual Network that would work fine but the primary encoding I don't
think I would I I personally would not put it on obsidian and and I don't yeah yeah no I have like before everything
doing or like taking seriously like trying to learn as best as I can I I do try to like I have been using this Oben
as a prar in coding but I don't think I use it in a way that most people use it because like uh after watching a lot of
videos a lot of your videos actually and seeing the course I think that the best way like simplify a ton of information
like the ton of research that is into learning I think that you just need to be try to maximize your cognitive
resources to it with a less amount of of effort so that you can encode everything properly that you don't need to revise
things more often and that you don't get exhausted about doing the process people think about doing mind maps on obsidian
think people think about putting their mind maps on obsidian but you can also think about putting obsidian in your map
so for example you can have like a node coming out across here and you can just literally say like hash like yeah you
know like whatever the tag is and then all the detailed information like all the code stimets that might be related
to that particular function that's related there and so you've got this as a reference and then you've got obsidian
just purely as a second brain yeah so if we understand clearly what apps not just obsidian but like apps like obsidian are
really useful for but then where its limitations are then we can use it to its full effect but it's just like any
tool really when you try to make it do something that it's not the best for you will suffer for it thank you so much for
your time and you have helpful thank you for coming on and asking your questions I hope hope that helped yeah a lot
actually I have learned a lot and I have a lot to think about now [Music]
Heads up!
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