The 4 things it takes to be an expert

▀▀▀

Melton, R. S. (1952). A comparison of clinical and actuarial methods of prediction with an assessment of the relative accuracy of different clinicians. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Minnesota.

▀▀▀

▀▀▀
Written by Derek Muller and Petr Lebedev
Animation by Ivy Tello and Fabio Albertelli
Filmed by Derek Muller and Raquel Nuno
Additional video/photos supplied by Getty Images
Produced by Derek Muller, Petr Lebedev, and Emily Zhang

[ONAROccasionallyNeedsARestart]

I recently had a MASSIVE argument with my university because they repeatedly did not provide any feedback to essays or exams. Just a mark and that's it. I backed my perspective with a ton of academic works on education, that I doubt any of them ever read.

I'm going to show them this video. Because university courses that don't provide feedback are virtually useless.

[lucascarman]

Getting comfortable is the part that always kills me. I learn very quickly but once I get something down fairly well, I stop challenging myself and just rest on that success.

[boumbastik]

"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field." (Niels Bohr)

[krf]

Become an expert:
1. Repeated Attempts with Feedback
2. Valid Environment
3. Timely Feedback
4. Don't Get Too Comfortable

Build Long term memory:
1. Valid Environment
2. Many Repetitions
3. Timely Feedback
4. Deliberate Practice

[SwapravaNath]

"we should be wary of experts who don't have repeated experience with feedback" perfectly nailed it.

[razvanuscatu]

" To become an expert, you need to practice for thousands of hours in the uncomfortable zone, attempting the things you can't do quite yet ". This is powerful. It encapsulates the main ideas so beautifully. I am grateful for finding this video and thank you for sharing it with us.

[HersonJVillatoro]

Typing and sales are two places I relate to with the pattern recognition.

When I first learned to type a certain way, I just kept my fingers on the same letters and would think my way through typing the next letter. I’ve noticed over the years that I’ve been typing this way that there’s many words that I type nearly instantaneously. 6 letter words that I type instantly, or 10 letter words that I type in two groups, the first 5, then the next 5 letters.

Similar to sales, at first it was chaos for me interacting with many people of many ages and many cultures and many backgrounds, but all in the same industry. Over a number of cold calls I noticed categories of people, some people answer the phone really fast, some people answer the phone very monotone, some are very positive, some are very casual, some very professional. And I started to notice that if I respond to those categories in certain ways, it helps me get closer to converting the person into a client. I noticed categories of objections and categories of roles that influence the client.

I don’t think of it so much as becoming an expert as sales, I think of it more as I’m playing a puzzle game book when I’m making sales calls. Every person is like a sudoku puzzle that I’m trying to fill up, the more puzzles I do (people I talk to), the more patterns I notice and the better I become at noticing those patterns and closing those patterns when I encounter them

[khabuda]

The pattern recognition became very clear to me when I learned Morse code. The human brain takes 50 milliseconds to process and understand a sound. People regularly send and receive Morse code at 30 words per minute, which puts the dit character and the gap between all characters at 40 milliseconds. So you literally have to process sounds faster than the brain can recognize them. Over time you start to hear whole words in the code rather than individual letters, but you still have to decode call signs character by character. You basically cache the sounds in your brain without processing them, and once the whole set of characters passes, your brain is able to turn it into an idea and add it to the stack of previous ideas while your ears are already caching the next set of characters.

[IndrajitRajtilak]

The four things are
1. Valid environment (chess is valid, roulette is random)
2. Many repetitions (predicting election results is hard as they are rare events with low repetitions vs. tennis shots)
3. Timely feedback (anesthesiologist gets instant feedback vs. radiologist gets delayed feedback)
4. Deliberate practice (practice at the edge of your comfort zone, identify weakness and work on it)

[pkersoul]

the hardest thing is deciding WHAT to be an expert at ...

[CSSLN]

The last part hit so hard for me, my grandpa is a very good musician, and he didn’t study music but his brother offered him a job as a pianist when he only knew the basics but he needed to provide for a family of 5 children so he took the job he played piano and organ every day for many for many hours, he told me that he didn’t like playing the piano but the few times I have heard him he plays extremely good and knows about a ton of stuff that not even my mother knew about, like when he was in my home studio he started patching my synth and started jamming and my mom was like you know how to used that? And he was like: yeah, and I hate it! I’m not sure what made him hate music that much he eventually bought a building and started renting apartments and sold all his instruments, but still getting out of his comfort zone made him a great musician

[AlienScientist]

04:56 1. Repeated Attempts with feedback
06:52 2. Valid Environment
11:23 3. Timely Feedback
13:46 4. Don't get too comfortable

[samehismail]

5:00 repeated attempts with feedback
6:47 valid environment
11:23 timely feedback
13:50 don't get too comfortable

[BlowoutSoonStalker]

The section on "Deliberate Practice" is the difference between practicing within a domain for 10, 000 hours and doing the same hour 10, 000 times. I was really happy to see this acknowledged in the video because I feel like this is understated often when people discuss what it takes to gain a high degree of competence in a specific field.

[mzdanziger]

One of the BEST videos I've ever watched on your channel. Extremely eye opening. Stuff that you feel and you know but you don't know how to prove or explain them

[alisancakl]

4:03 - Definition of the expertise
5:00 - Repeated attemps with feedback
6:46 - Valid environment
11:21 - Timely feedback
13:50 - Don't get too comfortable

[AWildRaito]

I like how people are saying how well the video was made or how great the video is when this was dropped LITERAL SECONDS AGO.

[anildhage]

Man. You just clarified a concept which I was struggling to understand for years. Literally years. You definitely deserve validation for your work. A big thanks to you.

[iefyfzo]

I rarely comment on YouTube videos, but this might just be one of the best I've ever seen. I would say that it affirms your status as an expert communicator. So well done, thank you for sharing your insight

[Eleven]

It would be interesting to have a deep dive video on deliberate practice - what constitutes it, how to engage in it proactively, etc.