Unusual chess experiment reveals surprising secret about learning
So there’s a great book called Peak by Anders Ericsson about how to achieve peak performance in whatever you do.
Anders Ericsson was an esteemed psychologist who spent his entire career studying elite performers, from top athletes to grandmaster chess players and master musicians.
And he distilled all the commonalities between the world’s top experts and created a scientific theory for how to become great at your craft.
Anyway, there’s a mind-blowing lesson in the book about learning.
That is: there’s no such thing as “general” learning.
In other words, getting good at one skill doesn’t mean it will “transfer” over to other related skills.
Let me explain…
It’s an age-old myth that if you learn a lot in one area, it’ll transfer over to other areas of your life, and benefit you generally.
Hence the focus in most schools on teaching “general knowledge” that will give students a “well-rounded foundation” for anything else they learn in life.
Except… according to modern science, unfortunately the brain doesn’t work that way.
As Anders Ericsson says in the book…
“There is no such thing as developing a general skill. You don’t train your memory; you train your memory for strings of digits or for collections of words or for people’s faces. You don’t train to become an athlete; you train to become a gymnast or a sprinter or a marathoner or a swimmer or a basketball player. You don’t train to become a doctor; you train to become a diagnostician or a pathologist or a neurosurgeon. Of course, some people do become overall memory experts or athletes in a number of sports or doctors with a general set of skills, but they do so by training in a number of different areas.”
He gives the example of chess grandmasters.
One remarkable skill that chess grandmasters have is the ability to instantly memorize a board and the configuration of all the pieces.
So if you let a chess grandmaster glance at a chessboard for just a couple seconds, they can instantly memorize the position of all the pieces and perfectly recall them later.
Seems like they must have “photographic memory,” right? Like they’d be great at memorizing everything?
Turns out, this isn’t the case.
These chess prodigies, with their almost superhuman ability to instantly memorize positions on the chessboard…
Have completely NORMAL memory in everything else.
In other words, their “photographic memory” ONLY applies to chess, and nothing else.
Strange huh?
Researchers wanted to figure out WHY this was.
So they did an interesting experiment…
They rearranged the pieces on the chessboard, except in a completely illogical order.
So instead of the chess pieces being in positions that follow the normal rules of chess…
They jumbled them in illogical order. Pawns starting on the king’s square, both bishops on the same color, etc.
And then they asked these chess grandmasters to memorize them.
Turns out, when the chess pieces are placed in illogical order that doesn’t follow the normal rules of a chess game…
Their superhuman memorization ability DISAPPEARS.
And they aren’t any better than anyone else at memorizing the board.
So the finding concluded that the reason these chess pros had such incredible “photographic memories” on the chess board wasn’t because they naturally had superior memory skills.
But because they had trained their brains to become expert pattern-recognition machines in the specific skill of chess.
Put the pieces in a random, jumbled order that doesn’t follow the patterns of an ordinary chess game…
And their memory goes back to baseline.
Anyway, as it turns out, this doesn’t just apply to memory.
It applies to EVERY skill in life.
Learning is very domain-specific.
Case in point, when Michael Jordan, (who is obviously considered the greatest basketball player of all time) switched from basketball to baseball, he was a mediocre baseball player.
Funny how that works, right?
You could be the greatest athlete in the world at your particular sport. But if you switch to another sport, you’ll be a total noob. Your training doesn’t carry over.
“That’s fascinating Beau,” I hear you say, “But how does this apply to ME in MY life?”
Excellent question, Finneus! I was just getting to that.
You see, if you want to get better at your craft, it’s very important that you choose a very SPECIFIC and narrow skill you want to improve, and laser-focus on that.
So if you’re a copywriter, you don’t get better at “copywriting” in general.
You get better at writing direct-response sales pages for cold traffic. Or cold emails. Or brand-building “infotainment” copy, like Yours Truly.
And while there might be more “transferability” between these things than there is between basketball and baseball, for example…
It’s still important to understand that there’s no such thing as “general” learning, and that skill in one area doesn’t transfer well to other skills.
So if you’re currently doing client work writing for cold traffic, for example, but your goal is to eventually build your own brand and sell your own products to a warm and engaged email list (as is my goal)…
Then the best way to do that is by learning that SPECIFIC skill. Rather than learning to write any random kind of copy and hoping it’ll transfer over.
Because you could be a master at converting cold traffic, for example, but still be a total n00b at brand-building, lead gen, infotainment, etc.
So make sure what you’re studying (and practicing) now is the same thing you want to be doing throughout your career.
Because the specific skills you acquire won’t transfer over to other things as much as you might hope.
-Beau D. Schultz
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