Old Dog, New Tricks

Changing who you are is impossible without changing what you know.

We’ve all been learning since the day we came into this world, gathering information from everything around us, and using it to try new things. All our behaviours started out as a new piece of knowledge, something we learned and decided was a good thing for us to do.

In our early years, we enjoy learning and actively seek out as many new things as possible, constantly changing and loving it that way.

But then something terrible happens. We go through decades of rigid schooling to learn how to be functioning adults, with set curriculums that suit some students much more than others. For the unlucky ones that don’t fit the mould, the joy of learning gets crushed out of them little by little.

Some manage to escape this fate, thriving in the restrictive environment of mainstream education, but far too many of us don’t. And so we turn our backs on the most precious skill in the world, the most powerful tool there is to change our lives for the better.

We stop learning.

Since you’re reading this book, I can safely assume you understand how big of a mistake this is. Learning is the engine of change, the vital first step that leads to new thoughts and behaviours, which leads to a new you, which ultimately leads to a whole new life.

I was a bright little kid who loved to read. I spent most of my primary school years in a Steiner (Waldorf) School, an alternative education system that focuses on imagination and creativity to help kids enjoy learning. Our classrooms looked like a rainbow had exploded all over the walls, they were so densely decorated with our paintings and drawings. Even our school books were colourful, and our lessons were designed around storytelling and practical play.

It was an amazing place to learn, and I’m grateful my parents sent me there.

But the tides were about to take a dark turn.

When I started high school, I was still a sweet little bookworm, who wouldn’t have hurt a fly. But I had just entered one of the roughest schools in my area.

If it was possible to find the exact opposite of my peaceful Steiner School, this was it.

Fights, thefts, and bullying were normal. Most students didn’t want to learn, and most teachers didn’t want to teach. The lowest kids in the pecking order were the ones who did well in class.

So, in an unsurprising turn of events, I stopped trying to learn. Actually it was worse than that. I started to hate learning.

My priority for the next six years was to avoid getting my ass kicked, and to try to carve out some semblance of popularity for myself. Doing well in class dropped off my to-do list entirely.

It took me a few years, but I did manage to gain some popularity, mainly by developing a good sense of humour. My friends and I were accepted as the funny ones, and so avoided the worst of the bullying.

But my curiosity for learning had been well and truly crushed, and I wouldn’t find it again until almost a decade later. Even though I managed to get a university degree, I never enjoyed the process. I pushed myself through the assessments and exams, always caring more about what was happening in my personal life than how well I was doing in class.

When I think about how much progress I’ve made in my life since I rekindled my love for learning, I genuinely feel a little sick thinking about all those years I spent avoiding it. How different my life would have been, how much further I could have gone, and how much more I would have enjoyed myself along the way. This is what I gave up alongside learning. To call it a regret would be the understatement of my life.

As I approached the end of my twenties, having spent my entire young adult life resistant to learning, a global event was about to set me on a course that would change my life all over again, one that has led directly to this book you’re reading now.

Gateway Skills

The COVID-19 pandemic changed the world, and it did the exact same thing to me.

I was living in London at the time, which is about as fast paced as life gets. There’s always something to do, something new to see, new food to eat, alcohol to drink, shows to see, and people to catch up with. As the old saying goes, “if you’re bored of London, you’re bored of life.” It’s an endless sprawl of entangled streets where you can find whatever it is you’re looking for, and everything you’re not as well. And then all of a sudden it wasn’t.

The pandemic shut down the city on and off for nearly 2 years. Almost overnight, I ended up with a huge amount of spare time, more than I’d had since my university days. And I didn’t know what to do with it.

My fear was that I’d end up binge watching TV shows day after day waiting for the lockdown to end. Perhaps a younger version of me wouldn’t have minded, but getting older has a way of making time feel more urgent.

I decided I wanted to learn a new skill. It shocked me to realise, but this would be the first new skill I’d deliberately taught myself since I was a kid.

Maybe it was the surrealism of the lockdowns, how they made it feel like the world was turned upside down. Or perhaps I was just having a bit of a life crisis, like the vast majority of us that year. Whatever it was, I decided that I needed to learn something I’d always thought would be impossible for me to be good at. Something I truly sucked at doing and always assumed I would.

That something was drawing.

In my mind, drawing was a skill you were born with. Some people had it, most people didn’t, and a few unlucky people were so hopelessly bad at it they could barely scratch out a stick figure. I thought I fell squarely into that last category.

But I had time to kill, a pandemic to forget, and a strange desire to get an answer once and for all. Was it really impossible for me to learn how to draw?

Hundreds of hours of YouTube videos later, plus a few art theory books to boot, and I was drawing what I’d describe as passable pieces of art. Portraits, figures, scenes, and even animals. Not only was I drawing better and better all the time, I was having more and more fun doing it.

As it turns out, drawing is like any other skill out there. You study the theory, learn the methods of people much better than you, and then all you have to do is put in the time practising.

This may not seem that revolutionary to you, but to me, it was like waking up again after all those years, back to being the excited little kid who loved learning and trying new things.

It was my gateway skill, the one that opened the door to new possibilities. If I was this wrong about what my limits were with drawing, what else have I been wrong about? What other self-imposed limitations could I break?

Once that door was opened, there was no going back. The next skill on my ‘impossible to learn’ list was coding. I dived into it with the same enthusiasm as drawing and learned how to build full websites and mobile apps from scratch, and even took a job with a tech startup building their community of users.

I started reading books I never would have dared attempt, seeking out notoriously difficult topics like quantum physics and cellular biology, starting with the basics and working my way up to the more complex and current theories.

I started seeing everything as just another skill, something I could learn about, practice, and eventually get good at.

It didn’t take long until I turned my attention to something I’d been trying to master for as long as I could remember. For the first time in my life, I saw it for what it really was.

Confidence is just another skill.

And it was finally within my reach.

This book is about the journey I took to get there. But it’s also a crucial piece of the puzzle, a piece you’ll have to add into your own journey, in your own way, before you reach the finish line.

But we’ll save that conversation until the end.

The Real Way we Learn

Forget rote learning. I doubt I even need to say that because rote learning is so easily forgotten that you probably won’t remember reading that sentence in a few moments.

Rote learning is one of the most impractical things, and yet we’re all convinced it works perfectly. We repeat something boring over and over and over again, slowly and painfully engraving it into our minds.

I can’t sit here and tell you it doesn’t work at all, because it kinda does, the same way walking across Europe “works” to get you from Paris to Moscow. It’s just not the best way to do it.

The truth is we can learn so much better with our imagination. We remember things so much more effectively if we’ve learned it through stories and associations, things that we can easily visualise in our minds.

The deeper we think about something, the easier it’ll be to remember.^{Note 1} You can read about something over and over and over again, but if you aren’t thinking deeply about it, visualising it, contextualising it, and creating associations to other similar ideas, you’re going to struggle to remember it later.

When Josh Foer was asked to remember the exact order of a deck of cards as fast as possible while competing in the 2006 US Memory Championships, he did it in 1 minute and 40 seconds, and he didn’t spend any of that time thinking about numbers, suits, or cards at all.

Instead, he imagined walking around his childhood home filled with the most bizarre scenes imaginable, including The Incredible Hulk riding a stationary bike wearing giant loopy earrings, a tiny jockey jumping out of a plane using an umbrella as a parachute, and himself moonwalking with Einstein.^{Note 2}

This is how people compete in competitions like the World Memory Championships. They don’t try to remember the boring set of cards in front of them. They turn those cards into an interesting and elaborate story in their minds, creating unique images for each one and placing them around a familiar environment in a process known as elaborative encoding.^{Note 3}

So making things as exciting as possible and mixing up the way the information is presented is going to go a long way in helping you remember.

When I’m trying to teach myself something new, I start by finding the most exciting and creative resources available, things like interesting videos, graphics, or stories to help me lay the foundations and begin painting a picture in my mind. This stuff is almost always over simplified, but at this stage that’s exactly what I want.

Once I can understand the topic at this basic level, and clearly imagine how it works, I can move on to more detailed and, quite frankly, boring resources. But instead of being lost in the details, I can start adding them to the mental model I’ve already built in my mind. The extra pieces are much easier to fit into place when I’ve already got a clear picture of the overall process.

This strategy opened the door to topics in science and technology that I never thought I’d be able to understand. I’m no expert, but I have enough working knowledge to finally appreciate these fascinating topics, and I build on that knowledge every day.

But this sort of approach is only helpful when it comes to learning new information. Learning new habits and behaviours is an entirely different thing.

Hacking our Habits

Luckily, humans are habit learning machines. We take a very long time to grow up, but the amount of information we cram into our brains while we’re doing it is extraordinary.

We learn how to move our bodies, and use it to interact with everything around us. We learn language, and how to talk to other people. We learn the complex rules of whatever family and culture we’re born into. We learn about the planet we live on, how it is now, and how it used to be. And we learn countless amounts of useless facts, usually related to pop culture and the entertainment industry.

But most importantly, we learn what’s good for us, and what’s not.

But how do we know this? What makes us so sure that some things are good, and other things bad?

We have a remarkably simple strategy. We use two types of teachers, and they’re the only teachers we’ve ever had. Everything you’ve ever learned in your entire life, you learned from them.

They are punishment and reward, also known as positive and negative incentives.

Let’s start from the beginning. Infants crawl, waddle, and roll around their world, interacting with as many things as they can get their hands on. A tasty meal, interesting toys, and cuddles from mum, all reward the child for experiencing them. They feel good, therefore, they are good.

When they touch something hot, eat something bad, or get yelled at by mum, they are punished. Physical and emotional pain teach the infant what not to do.

A distinction between right and wrong starts here, before we’re even old enough to remember it.

Our punishments and rewards become more complex as we age.

Good grades, verbal praise from parents, and popularity are the types of rewards we value during our teen years. Common punishments at this age tend to be focused on what others think about us. Disappointing our parents, or being shunned by our peers are severe punishments for a developing adult, especially if they can’t understand why.

And this is the root of the problem.

Punishment and reward are great teachers, but only for simple lessons. Hurting yourself is bad, therefore, don’t hurt yourself… simple.

But the more complex the lesson, the easier it is for the teacher to make a mistake.

As we develop more complicated relationships and life goals, things that are ultimately good for us may punish us for doing them, and vice versa. The reason for this is pretty clear. Our teachers haven’t been able to keep up with the modern world.

Being alive today means you have to learn the most difficult lessons in all of history. Our relationships are more complex. Our cultures, more diverse. Even choosing the right career for long term security is becoming impossible.

But our teachers still see the world the way it used to be, when we first started learning from them, countless generations ago. When pain was bad, food was good, people were important, and being alive was the height of success.

So mistakes get made. We’re rewarded for things we probably shouldn’t be, like eating sugary foods, being liked by everyone, and having lots of money to buy expensive things. It’s also common to be punished for doing the right thing. Restricting our diet, confronting people who treat us poorly, or choosing a job we actually enjoy over one that pays well, are all things that can make us feel like we’re doing something wrong… But we’re not, we’re just making a complex choice based on the increasingly complex world we live in.

Being rewarded for the wrong things, and punished for the right ones is the cause of a lot of our problems, even if we don’t know it.

It makes us confused about what we should and shouldn’t do, which damages us in one fundamental way… It gives us bad habits.

We want to listen to our teachers. We want to trust they know what’s best for us. We want things to be as simple as they used to be, when right was right simply because it felt right.

But that world is gone. Long gone.

Substance abuse, laziness, impulsive buying, people pleasing, and every other destructive habit out there can be traced back to a failed lesson, a punishment given for no good reason, or a reward for doing something wrong.

This is a big enough problem on its own, but it gets even worse when we pass these habits on to others. Parents punish when there’s no actual lesson to be learned, or fail to reward when there is, all because they’re confused about what makes something right or wrong.

Okay, this clearly isn’t ideal, so what do we do about it?

It’s time to admit we’ve graduated from basic education, and need to take a more active role in our learning. We can’t get rid of punishments and rewards, and we shouldn’t even if we could. We need them to teach us valuable lessons about the simple things in life, especially when we’re young. But as we get older, we need to take charge. We can still listen to them occasionally, but we should run most of the classes ourselves.

We can do this by choosing our own punishments and rewards as we see fit.

If you know something will be painful to go through but still the right thing to do, be sure to reward yourself graciously for the effort. Shower yourself in praise, treat yourself to something special, or simply bask in the satisfaction of your own achievement.

Similarly, if you know something is wrong but likely to feel oh so very good, add a punishment to the process to remind yourself of the lesson you actually want to learn. Give yourself a stern talking to, or take away something valuable. A simple but effective strategy is to put £5 in a locked savings account every time you do the thing you’re trying to stop. Bonus points if you use this money later on to reward yourself for doing something right.

Too many of us struggle every day trying to do the right thing because we get rewarded so much more for doing the wrong one.

We live in the most complex world there’s ever been. The price we have to pay is accepting more responsibility over our lives.

Punishment and reward have gotten us far, but they need our help to correct the mistakes they’re making.

We’re officially ready to graduate from school and enter the world of higher education, where we decide the lessons we want to learn.

And whether we succeed or fail, is up to us.