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I was recently listening to a great podcast about the life of Alexander Hamilton on “How To Take Over the World”. I encourage you to listen the full show yourself, but one piece that stuck out to me was a section about the three ways that Hamilton learned.

From the show:

If you can learn in all three of those ways, so that is book learning, experience, and from other people, they have this kind of synergistic effect, where if you’re just doing one of them you just aren’t gonna learn as fast.

When you can do all three together, I’m learning books, like I’m learning the textbook way to do it, I’m actually getting my hands dirty and getting experience, and I’m learning from people who have done it before. When you combine all three of those, that is the way to supercharge your learning and learn to do anything really fast.

Hamilton was widely regarded as being very intelligent and he worked hard to learn from all three angles:

• Book learning
• Life experience
• Learning from others

It’s the first and third that have always stood out to me. While it’s fantastic to be able to learn from your experience, if you can learn from others (either via books or directly) and save the pain of having to experience it yourself, that’s even better.

If you have a chance, I highly recommend listening to the full episode.

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I often struggle with a bit of imposter syndrome (“a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their skills, talents or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud“), as do many people. It can feel like a bad thing, but I find that it has quite a bit of power.

I see a few ways that it can be beneficial:

• As I shared a few years ago, it can help us to keep working on our skills. If you know you can be better, you’re more likely to keep pushing forward. It’s the opposite (the Dunning-Krueger Effect) that can slow us down.
• It makes you more willing to receive feedback. Along the lines of the previous point, if you already think you’ve got things down, you’re unlikely to listen very closely to advice. However, if you’re feeling a bit imposter-ish, advice can be exactly what you seek.

Imposter syndrome and doubts can certainly spiral into a bad place, so I’m not suggesting you should beat yourself up all the time. However, knowing your limits and seeking to expand them is often a great place to push.

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I do a lot of things to try to remember the things that I read and watch. Using a book as an example, I might write some blog posts about it, maybe share it on a podcast, and see quotes in my Readwise reviews. Even then, if I reread the book a few years later, tons of it will feel like brand new information.

This idea was brought up to me again (because I forgot that I forgot about it) in a recent episode of the Founders podcast. The episode was focused on Steve Jobs (and it was excellent; listen here), where the host David Senra shared this thought:

“Go back and reread the books that you’ve read before years ago and it’s amazing.”

This is even more astounding coming from someone like David, who studies books far deeper than I do. The fact that someone with his study process can go back and learn more from books in the future means that all of us can.

The problem is in the first “forget” in the statement he shared. When I think of a book, I feel like I remember it pretty well! I have my quotes, I’ve talked to folks, and I get it. The problem is that I don’t know what I’m forgetting, because I forgot about those sections.

It’s like I talked about a few weeks ago with “Repeat versus fresh content” and my constant tweaking to find the right balance. I always want to consume new content, but there is a lot of gold in the stuff that I’ve read in the past — even if I’ve forgotten about it.

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As you may know, I’m writing on here every day to try to help myself. I share these learnings in the hope that they’re of benefit to you as well, but they’re largely to help me unpack new ideas and concepts that I learn about.

A recent episode of Adam Grant’s “ReThinking” podcast with guest Rebecca Solnit had some fascinating insights. When talking about writing, Rebecca said this:

“I’ve always hated the advice of “Write what you know”, which puts a fence around people.”

The advice she shared came from the angle of writing content for others, like a book. If and when I decide to write a book, it will be filled with things that I know. For now, though, not being focused on “what I know” is a wonderful thing for this blog.

There are certainly times when I write about what I know, but I try to largely use this as a place to share things that I don’t really know. Sometimes the act of writing will help me get to an answer, but often that “answer” is just one possible solution. Your comments and feedback (whether here, on social media, or via email) are always welcome, because I often learn quite a bit more from those.

The topics I share tend to be somewhat open to interpretation (like this one), so even when I “know” the topic it can still be eye-opening for me to hear other perspectives.

I’ll write what I know, I’ll write what I don’t know, and I’m hopeful you’ll reach out to me when my thought on the topic doesn’t line up with yours so that we can all get a little bit better.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

One of the new apps that I’ve added to my morning routine is a very simple one called “LineByLine” (I say “app”, but I think it’s just that website – no mobile app).

While Anki is fantastic for learning atomic pieces of data (countries, names, facts, etc), it’s not great for memorizing long pieces of text, and that’s where LineByLine comes in. If you want to remember a short speech, a poem, or some other bit of text, LineByLine helps walk you through it.

Suppose, for example, that you wanted to memorize the US Pledge of Allegiance. We’d start by pasting it in, paying careful attention to line breaks, as those are treated as separate chunks of text. I’d do it something like this:

Now, when I go to review it, it’ll start by just showing me what’s there with just a few letters missing, like this:

Over time, it removes more and more from each section:

Eventually, it just walks you through with blank lines. If you make any mistakes, just let it know and it’ll help you work on that section.

Use cases

To be fair, I’m not using it for very much yet. So far I’m learning the Preamble of the Constitution (“We the People of the United States…“), the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident…“) and George’s great story from Seinfeld (“The sea was angry that day, my friends…“). The last one is silly, but why not?

The app is free to use, but only remembers you on a single machine. If you want to sync across computers, it’s a grand total of $5, one-time, and you’re good for life. Quite a deal!

If you have something that you need to memorize, check out LineByLine.

What will you put in there to start to memorize?

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Years of experience can be beneficial, but it often depends on what was in those years. As I shared last year, experience isn’t the same as practice. For example, most people have decades of experience typing on a computer, but only those that specifically practice at improving will get any better at it.

In his book “7 Strategies for Wealth and Happiness“, author Jim Rohn shares this same point by saying:

“The “guy” says, “I’ve got ten years’ experience. I don’t know why I’m not doing better.” What he hasn’t realized is that he doesn’t have ten years’ experience. What he has is one year’s experience repeated ten times. He hasn’t made a single improvement, a single innovation in nine years!”

That said, sometimes simple experiences can help a bit. While I try to specifically practice the skills that matter most, experience can matter in some situations. For example, while my experience in driving everyday has only made me a minimally better driver over the last 32 years, my experience in diagnosing WordPress or DNS issues is valuable simply due to the time I’ve put in. In those cases, the number of issues that can arise are almost limitless, so experiencing more of them over the years helps me to be able to more quickly diagnose new issues that clients might bring to us.

For your core work, is experience valuable or does it require specific practice to improve?

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I love being challenged by new ideas. I’ll certainly defend my point of view on any given subject, but I try to remain open to other possibilities. As Daniel Kahneman has said, it can be a great to be proven wrong because then you are “less wrong that you were before“.

On a recent episode of the 2Bobs podcast, Blair Enns got into this idea a bit as well when talking about finding information that is outside of our filter bubble. He said:

“I think because many of us, maybe even most of us, seek to ingest the information to cement our own biases instead of ingesting information that challenges our ideas, challenges our thinking.”

It’s a balancing act that I often struggle with. I want to dig deeper into the things I believe so that I can more soundly understand and defend them, but that’s not far off from the bias of a closed mind.

Having people around that don’t agree with everything that I believe is a great thing, provided that the conversations can remain civil. Those that think differently than I do but are caring and empathic people are some of my very favorites to spend time with.

Do you do anything in particular to avoid simply cementing your own biases?