Brian Johnson explains interleaving and spaced repetition, two learning techniques that work by varying practice and spacing it out over time. He cites Dan Coyle on repetition's power and describes his book Activate Your Heroic Potential as densely structured microchapters inspired by The War of Art and War and Peace.
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Arete 1 degree micro chapter from my new book Activate youe Heroic Potential 451 Ideas, any one of which I hope can significantly help you optimize your life. Activate your Heroic potential. We're still going through the first 11 micro chapters in the first objective today we're going to talk about learning 101, interleaving and spaced repetition. As a professional philosopher for the last 15 years I've distilled over 500 of the absolute best books on ancient wisdom and modern science into what I call philosopher's notes. I've also created over 50 hour long master classes in which I distill the best ideas from those great books to help you optimize every facet of your life. In the Heroic app, we have classes on everything from Purpose 101, Productivity 101 and Confidence 101 to Nutrition 101, Sleep 101 and Love 101. We also have a class on Learning 101 in which I share the best ideas from some of the best books on learning, including Make It Stick, A Mind for Numbers and How we Learn. In that class we talk about a concept scientists call interleaving. The basic idea is simple. If you want to learn something, you're better off varying your practice rather than grooving one identical rep after another. For example, they've done research on baseball players. If you throw someone 15 curveballs in a row, then 15 fastballs, they'll feel like they're doing really well. But they won't actually be improving the skills they need for an actual game when they know, when they won't know what's coming. Scientists call that the fluency illusion, and it's actually one of the greatest threats to effective learning, the interleaving approach. A random assortment of fastballs and curveballs that keeps the batter constantly guessing and thereby developing the actual skills he or she will need come game time. Of course, that doesn't always feel as good as the easier, more common approach when you know what's coming. But alas, that's where the learning occurs. And that's one of the things I had in mind as I mapped out how to best deliver these 451 potentially life changing ideas. As you'll see, we're going to deliberately interleave different themes within the chapters in our seven objectives. We're also going to focus on another key aspect of learning 101 called spaced repetition. The basic idea with that is exactly what it sounds like. We want to create a little space between our deliberate repetition of the stuff we really want to make stick. And speaking of repetition, here's how Dan Coyle puts it in the Little Book of Talent. I quote Dan Coyle Repetition has a bad reputation. We tend to think of it as dull and uninspiring. But this perception is titanically wrong. Repetition is the single most powerful lever we have to improve skills because it uses the built in mechanism for making the wires of our brains faster and more accurate. Interweaving and and spaced repetition. They do a hero good. P.S. you know what else helps us master a concept? Explaining it to someone else. If you feel so inspired, share what you're learning as you go. P.P.S. i created this book with two other books in mind. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Now Pressfield is one of my all time favorite writers. His incredibly inspiring and equally practical prose is an inspiration. It's very much how I love to write. You can read one of the potentially life changing micro chapters in his nonfiction books in a minute or three. And that's exactly what I had in mind as I created this book. Yet in addition to creating a super readable open the book up to any page and potentially change your life in a few minutes kind of book, I also wanted to make sure the book had a density and a gravitas to it. And of course I'm committed to doing everything I can to deliver on Phil's promise from the foreword of the book and the top of the COVID in which he boldly says this book will change your life. Plus, we received thousands of notes from our heroic community about why they were excited about this book, which were remarkably humbling and inspiring. I wanted to do my best to create a book worthy of comments like this. And I quote some members from our community and they said, one of whom said, Brian is one of the great philosophers of our time. If this book is the distillation of his life's work, then it will be worth its weight in gold. Slightly awkward to read that out loud, but there you go. Another member said, humanity's greatest wisdom for living a prosperous life condensed into one book. How could anyone not be excited to buy this? Someone else said this book will be a classic handbook such as 7 Habits and how to Win Friends, Timeless Principles. And finally someone said this will be the best book in modern history for personal development. Period. End quote. No pressure, no diamonds. Right, let's go now. As I stepped back and felt into what the book needed to be to have a shot at delivering on those very high expectations. I realized that I wanted to create a book that is basically the war of Art and War and Peace. Pithy microchapters plus a dense brick of a book. Now you can start from the first page and systematically work your way through the seven objectives with the interleaving and spaced repetition. Or you can open up to any page and hopefully get inspired by one of the 451 ideas in a minute or three. Choose your own adventure Hero. Let's go. I hope you enjoyed that Arete plus one degree from my new book Arete Activate your heroic potential. The book will be shipped on November 14, right before Black Friday in time to make it the perfect holiday gift perhaps. I wanted to let you know that we have some special giveaways if you think you might like to pre order the book, and even more goodies if you think you might want to give the book away this holiday season. Here's the deal. Pre order one copy and get a free advanced reader copy of the ebook today. Preorder three copies and and get a free advance copy of the ebook and the audiobook and a limited edition Arete Coin that we'll send to you. Pre order 10 copies of the book. Bless you. And get all of that plus an autographed advanced Hardcover reader copy sent to you immediately inside the fancy Arete VIP box, which is packed with other goodies including this Arete T shirt, a Heroic t shirt, and 10 free annual heroic memberships for your gift recipients. You'd be able to give them a book and a year's worth of Heroic for free. If you pre order 25 copies. You'll get all that plus a free ticket to our launch event party in Austin, November 10th through 12th. And you'll get a personal voice memo. Thank you. And a high five from me if you're feeling inspired to order over 50 copies of the book. We've been blessed to have a lot of CEOs and corporations do that. We'll give you a huge discount. Just let us know all of this. You can learn more about at Heroic U.S. book. Heroic U.S. book. Of course you can order the book on Amazon. Barnes and Noble. Independent bookstores will be everywhere you can buy a book, Hudson's Airport stores, et cetera. And let us know of course when you've done that and purchased a copy or three or ten or more if you feel inspired to do so at Heroic Us Book. I appreciate you and I hope you love the book. I'm super excited about it, super proud of it. And I hope it helps you and your families transform your lives.
