Explosive Skill Acquisition

If you’re going to learn a new skill or change in some way, going hard at it for a short intensive period beats spreading a gentler effort across months or years.

I’m on day 29 of Inkhaven, where we committed to writing a blog post a day for a month. It has been great; one of the best periods of “self-development” I’ve been in. I’ve progressed far more at the skill of putting my thoughts on the internet than some counterfactual where I wrote twice a month for a year.

The quintessential example of explosive skill acquisition is foreign language learning. It’s standard advice that if you really want to speak Spanish, you should do a language immersion—travel to Mexico and only speak Spanish while there—rather than practicing with apps and textbooks for an hour a week. I’d bet that the person who spent two months hanging around Tijuana - or who immersed themselves in spanish media and telenovellas for a few months, is going to be better at Spanish than the person who has a million Duolingo points.

Why explosive acquisition works

Several reasons compound together:

Overlapping forgetting curves. If you practice a skill, the clock starts ticking before you forget what you learned. You go to a dance class every week, and by the time you’re back you’ll probably have forgotten a fair bit of what you went over last time.

To get good at something, you often need to chain skills on top of each other—building foundation until you reach the next level where the skills become mutually reinforcing. Explosive periods layer learning close enough together that you can actually chain them and build up, rather than repeatedly relearning the basics.

Richness of context. Explosive acquisition periods are ones where your world is dominated by the skill, and often you get varied practice. If you’re in Mexico to learn Spanish, you encounter the language in its full richness—tied to real situations, real triggers, real use cases -- where the different contexts reinforce each other and give you hooks to remember its use.

Discontinuous practice opportunities. Compressing the learning period means you get the benefits of competence earlier. This matters more than people realize, because opportunities to use and grow a skill are discontinuous. For example you need a baseline level of skill to be able to enjoy dancing with a wide array of partners, you need to know enough Spanish to actually have conversations that make you want to continue. Getting to good enough means you unlock more practice opportunities and the positive feedback loops where the skill sustains itself.

Self-signaling. It’s costly to commit to an intensive period. That cost signals—to yourself—a level of commitment that rallies more of you toward the goal. Signing up for the Mexico trip makes you a person who is learning Spanish. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here, but it seems like you then start to notice more opportunities to do the thing and be that person. Like Paul Graham’s The Top Idea in Your Mind:

Everyone who’s worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There’s a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I’m increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control it indirectly.

I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That’s the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they’re allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it.

When you’re in an intensive period, the skill becomes your top idea.

Quantity: Most obviously, intensive periods of practice mean you simply practice more. For the last five years I’ve written my newsletter once a month; in total that’s sixty posts. By the end of this month I will have written thirty posts. Practicing guitar 30 minutes a day, three times a week, for a year gives you about 78 hours. A two-week intensive where you’re playing 6 hours a day gets you 84 hours. Doing more of the thing will make you better at it.

Why we don’t do this more

If explosive acquisition is so effective, why doesn’t everyone do it? A few reasons:

It’s intense. Having the entire period be about the activity prevents you from shying away from contact with the world and the feedback you’re getting about who you are and how good you actually are. That sucks. It’s quite nice to engage in fantasy and ego protection.

Explore/Exploit Tradeoffs. If you’re making a period of time all about one thing, you’re foreclosing other options. This is a real cost. It’s reasonable to wonder whether you should spend a week on knitting or programming, or whether to master French pastries or British ones. But it’s easy to let this uncertainty become permanent—to keep “exploring options” forever and never reach the decision point where you commit to one and go deep.

Confusing building mode with maintenance mode. I remember Derek from More Plates More Dates talking about time investment with bodybuilding, and work needed to build new muscle is very different from the work needed to maintain it. You might need ten hours in the gym weekly when actively trying to add muscle, versus two or three hours to persist. Skills work similarly. People spread out the “building” effort so thin that they never actually build—they just do maintenance-level work on a foundation that was never constructed.

Blame the schools. In the formative skill acquisition period of our lives, the structure of school focuses on continuity and discipline and many spread-out efforts. You are in fact explicitly discouraged from cramming before tests. Which, fair, but I think cramming is a natural expression of how people want work—single-threading attention instead of trying to run parallel learning processes.

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I often think about ordinary incompetence, the way in which, as Gwern says: “Incompetence is the norm; most people who engage in a task (even when incentivized for performance or engaging in it for countless hours) may still be making basic errors which could be remedied with coaching or deliberate practice.” Dan Luu describes it in 95%-ile isn’t that good:

Personally, in every activity I’ve participated in where it’s possible to get a rough percentile ranking, people who are 95%-ile constantly make mistakes that seem like they should be easy to observe and correct.

At 90%-ile and 95%-ile ranks in Overwatch, the vast majority of players will pretty much constantly make basic game losing mistakes. These are simple mistakes like standing next to the objective instead of on top of the objective while the match timer runs out, turning a probable victory into a certain defeat.

I find this terrifying, that I might be incompetent in many ways, and that if I had a little more awareness, a little more “oomph” I could be much better. I expect that explosive periods of skill acquisition can go a long way toward remedying this.¹

This is part of my explanation for why change gets harder as you get older. Yes, neuroplasticity and crystallized intelligence, sure—but also you end up with more obligations and more parts of your life you can’t drop to go off and explode. I took two weeks off to do this writing retreat, and have been juggling work the rest of the time. This has been challenging. Lots of people can’t make that tradeoff.

But, tragically, tradeoffs are real, and nobody can do everything. If you’re going to take the effort to try and change—which, as a humble descendant of the Californian Human Potential movement, I think is one of the joys of life—it behooves you to be strategic. Explosive acquisition works as a natural decision heuristic: if it’s not worth going off and exploding for, maybe it’s not worth the scattered effort either.

1. But not all the way! Feedback and reflection are important, and I can imagine that there are ways to explode that wouldn’t have those loops built in. For instance, Dan Luu’s scrub player who dedicates weeks, ten hours a day to playing overwatch, but never watches their tapes and gets feedback. I think you are likely to get more implicit feedback from the world if you are doing a skill a lot continuously, and have more opportunity to notice how to improve, but it’s not guaranteed.