Normally when I talk about learning quickly, I’m using speed as a synonym for efficiency. Use more effective methods and you’ll learn more in less time. All else being equal, that means you’re learning faster.

Today, however, I want to consider a different meaning for speed: how quickly should you try to do things in order to improve performance.

One way to imagine this is to look at something like chess. Chess can be played at different speed levels: you could play tournament-length games, which take hours. You could play blitz, which has only a few minutes, or bullet chess where moves are counted in seconds.

If your goal were to improve at chess, which kind should you make your core practice?

Speed and Transfer

The first thing to consider is that often what we think of as a single skill is actually different skills when viewed from different timeframes.

Consider solving a math problem. You can painstakingly calculate an exact answer. Or you can ballpark it using some guessing. While the two skills are related, they are, strictly speaking, different mental abilities.

The research on transfer shows that when we train skills, they tend to be learned quite narrowly. So tons of time learning to do back-of-the-envelope calculations may not improve your calculating skills as much as you’d expect. This also works in the opposite direction as you may be able to get the “right” answer, but without a quick guess that’s in the ballpark.

I experienced this firsthand when working on my portrait drawing project.

My initial thought was that drawing faces well came from “guessing” the relative positions of facial features, lines and shapes. Thus if I simply did more and more quick practice, my guesses would get increasingly accurate and I’d draw realistic pictures. Speed, then, made sense.

The result was that I got better at drawing portraits, but only weakly better at doing quick sketches. The skills I enhanced mostly worked when I had at least an hour to draw, not sixty seconds. If I wanted to get better at the sixty-second sketches, I’d probably need to master different techniques.

The lesson here is that the timeframe you need to perform a skill within often constrains the methods you can use to master it. The way you solve a problem in ten seconds is often, cognitively speaking, quite different from the way you solve it in an hour.

原创 Scott Young SCOTTHYOUNG