Make It Stick: Innovative and Effective Techniques for Learning

Are you frustrated with being unable to recall some of the incredible material you learn from books, articles, and podcasts?

Fortunately, you can use some of these effective learning techniques from experts to make sure you actually remember all these learnings and can put them into action!

Peter C. Brown, the author of Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, wrote his books with experts of Psychology Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel. Make it Stick draws on recent scientific discoveries to clarify our misunderstanding of how to learn effectively. The good news is, their recommendations will make learning less repetitive and more effective! 

The Three Biggest Ideas from Make it Stick

Peter broke down the three biggest ideas from his book:

1. Making the learning easy and clear does NOT help it stick.

2. The trick to making it stick is to challenge your brain to wrestle with the material.

3. Our intuition will lead us astray towards repetition and the ineffective exercise of short-term memory.

The common notion is that we must get information INTO the brain, but the real benefit is when you get information OUT of the brain: That is done by what he refers to as ‘wrestling’ with the material. This includes activities like:

• Retrieving the material from memory

• Connecting the new material with preexisting knowledge

• Trying to explain it to someone else

“One of the great things of being a human being is: The brain is wired to wrestle with this stuff once you’ve engaged it in the problem.” – Peter C. Brown on The Science of Success

Mixed (Not Mass) Training

Peter illustrates these ineffective methods through analogy: To practice a putt 20 times in succession focuses on short-term memory and does not improve your ability to recall the training in the future: This is called ‘Mass Practice’, where you perform a simple task repetitively. Alternatively, he suggests a method of learning that he calls ‘Mixed Training’. This is a method where you dedicate your focus of working-memory to one task, but frequently switch between a few tasks.

Sticking to the previous analogy, with Mixed Training you would alternate between various types of shots and putts under different conditions, then force yourself to recall the necessary putt in the middle of a series. Your brain creates different connections when it’s required to recall the information, these embed it deeper in your memory, similar to how your brain subconsciously contemplates information in your sleep. But this is not limited to mental training, it works the same with physical training as well! 

Spaced Training, Mental Models, and the Hippocampus

“Letting your brain wrestle with it, coming back—that added effort of remembering—and then building on that remembering with another effort. It is a desirable difficulty—a spaced kind of practice.” – Peter C. Brown on The Science of Success

Besides Mixed Training, Spaced Training is another potent technique for learning. It consists of spacing out your study periods in gradually more distant intervals to help combat forgetfulness. Spaced Training can be illustrated by the Leitner System, where correctly answered flashcards are placed in boxes that are studied less frequently and incorrectly answered cards are returned to the first box to refresh your memory.

By understanding a little bit about how our brain’s hippocampus works, we can make more sense of how these methods of learning work so effectively. The hippocampus serves as the birthplace of memory, where it exists temporarily as a ‘memory trace’ unless our brain makes gaps between it and preexisting information. These gaps manifest through the connection of neurons, thoroughly embedding the knowledge into your brain. So, how do we promote the creation of these connections?

Wrestling with the material is a general representation of your desired strategy, but a specific strategy is working with pneumonic devices, such as a Memory Palace. These devices help create mental models to organize and further comprehend knowledge. A Memory Palace is a memory technique where you visualize a room and associate aspects of the room to the information you’re trying to recall. Then when you need to recall the information, you simply ‘walk’ through your Memory Palace until you approach the aspect associated with the desired piece of information and – boom! – there it is.

“Building these mental models—adding more knowledge to them, understanding how they relate—opens the world to other learning.” – Peter C. Brown on The Science of Success

Forgetting: Humans’ Universal Pastime

 “Forgetting is the human condition. That’s why you’ve got to find a way to interrupt the forgetting. This idea of retrieving from memory—that’s a way to tie the knot, to keep that memory. Anything that you want to be able recall later, periodically, HAS to be recalled from memory.” – Peter C. Brown on The Science of Success

Unfortunately, forgetfulness is a necessary condition of the brain and it is here to stay. In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, pioneered the ‘Forgetting Curve’. This is a graph which represents the exponentially increasing difficulty of retrieving a memory as the time after exposure to the information increases. It illustrates how we lose roughly 70% of the information immediately, then the remaining 30% gradually. This graph was instrumental in the development of the Leitner System, eight decades later.

Peter recalls a story:

“I thought of—for some reason—a child putting cranberries on a thread and going to hang them on the tree, then discovering that they were falling off the other end of the thread—because there was no knot! If every cranberry is some kind of learning you want to hang on to—it’s like a string of pearls—you need a knot every one of them. You need to practice each of those periodically.” Peter C. Brown on The Science of Success

 He then jokes that we’re all losing our cranberries eventually!

The Benefit Is Not in Leaving, It’s in Returning

 Peter tells us about one of his favorite studies involving a simple shift in the training protocol for microsurgeons. The initial training involved watching a training video, then performing a relevant simulation, four times in one day. But in this study, half of the doctors participating went through the training over four weeks, with one training video and its respective simulation done on the same day. A month after completing this training, all the doctors were tested and those who spaced their training out performed far better than those who did all the training in one day.

Peter then refers to Dr. Carol Dweck and her theory of the growth mindset. He discusses how this theory has shown that your intellectual abilities aren’t fixed and limited by your genes. To a large degree, they can be increased by intentionally building mental models to form connections and increase the wiring in the brain. You don’t interpret the difficulty as failure or that you aren’t getting it, you carry on forward and alter your strategy slightly.

An Inspirational End and Some Homework

“If you interpret the difficulty as: I’m not getting it—I don’t have what it takes. That’s too bad! You could say: I’m not getting it YET!” - Peter C. Brown on The Science of Success

Peter recommends checking out his book, Make it Stick, because it offers all of the available research and it’s laid out with examples in a reader-friendly manner. He asks that you inquire of your own life where you’ve had challenges while learning with ragged and random strategies but ended up surprising yourself with your own success. Then he suggests the Science of Learning and ends with a recommendation of new tools to create flashcards and quizzes on your phone in order to memorize things.

How To Ask Great Questions on a Podcast

The ability to ask good questions is one of the most valuable tools in life. Not only do great questions lead to great podcast content but they also allow you to learn more completely from another’s experience.

The best questions to ask will depend on what the format of your show is. However, I’ve always shared these few pieces of advice to those we consult with at The Science of Success to help them keep things interesting.

Do Your Research Prior

This should go without saying but if someone is taking the time to come on your show, especially someone highly sought after, do your research ahead of time. What I mean by this is take the time to search their recent projects and interviews.

This allows you to pick up on topics and points that they typically hit during interviews. This can be a great way to decide what you want to hit on, and what you want to miss or gloss over. Say your guest told a story on a previous interview and after the story you had a follow up that the interviewer missed. Note the story, mention it in your interview then present your question.

This research allows you to get a feel for what they will want to talk about but more importantly also allows you to find something original to ask that has not been asked before and makes your content original and potentially newsworthy.

Ask Questions You Actually Care About

Remember to ask questions that you actually are interested in hearing the answer to. This does not mean you should ignore the central theme or project they are looking to push. (If they’re on your show you should be interested…right?) But find a way to put your spin, humor, thoughts, or insights into the phrasing or positioning of the questions.

Always stay engaged in the conversation. Nothing is worse than speaking to someone who you can tell is just waiting for their turn to speak. Likewise, most can tell when you are already planning your next question and have checked out during their answer.

Staying more engaged will come with experience as well. If you’re not comfortable on the mic yet it might be harder to stay present but shaping the questions in a way that reflects your interests or personality will lead to a conversational interview.

Go Beyond The Surface

When someone comes out with a new book, makes the news, or starts a new project that is getting a lot of attention, they’re most likely being interviewed A LOT. It’s no fault of theirs but often people fall into routines and tend to give the same answers and stories in each interview they do. This makes things easier on them and ensures consistency in their message.

But oftentimes does not lead to anything original that gives listeners a reason to listen to you over others.

Think beyond the surface. So your TED talk on X topic has gotten over 5 million views? — Let them go over the content in their TED talk — Then don’t be afraid to dig. What was it that you saw in your life or in the world that made you think this was necessary to research? Why do you love X topic so much, how were you introduced to it? What does it mean to you? Who showed you X topic?

All these example questions go beyond what someone can typically find with a google search.

For Example. We interviewed Kamal Ravikant on The Science of Successregarding his latest book Rebirth. He told us about the book and some of the lessons in it but then Matt asked him “Why Spain? Why a pilgrimage?” and the answer we got is not only gold but is something you could never find in a search…

You want the truth? I was in Italy visiting a friend from college, and we were at this beautiful Italian woman’s house and we were very drunk on grappa that her grandmother made, and I was trying to impress her, and she told me about this pilgrimage and I said I would walk it. So I came up with the idea when I was really, really drunk trying to impress a beautiful Italian woman. The next day when I woke up I was like, “Well that was interesting, but it seems cool. Let me just go do it for a few days.” So I went off and I did it, and ended up doing the whole thing. But the whole thing started off being drunk trying to impress a woman, which was pretty much where all a lot of great male stories start. — Kamal Ravikant on The Science of Success.

So now we know the funny and completely original story of how Kamal decided to take his pilgrimage and ultimately experience the source material for his best selling book.

Original stories and thoughts behind the creation are magic. Not just the whatyou did or created, but the WHY.

Don’t Be Afraid To Push and Dig

Not everyone likes to go off script. Sometimes you have to push someone a little more in order to get great information out of someone.

NOTE: BE RESPECTFUL. ALWAYS.

However, don’t be afraid to push someone to open up a little but. Using The Mirroring Technique can be a great way to get someone to divulge more information without even having to directly ask. It goes something like this…

Person 1: To get someone to tip their hand and clarify, simply repeat the last three to five keywords in their sentence.

Person 2: You repeat the last keywords?

Person 1: Yeah, pretty crazy right? What that does is it causes me to explain my point again from a different angle, revealing more information that could be extremely valuable and also it helps you decipher my true desired outcomes and motivations.

• Chris Voss on The Science of Success

See there? Person 1 gave more information and Person 2 never even had to ask directly.

Sometimes however you have to ask directly and a great way to push for more information is to ask about the surrounding emotions behind an action, a project, or story. “How did that make you feel?” “What was your biggest takeaway from that?”

Storytelling Wins…Always

Whenever possible, tee up a story. Stories stick with people. If I simply explain something to you, it’s easily forgotten. If I can picture it in my head and play it out as if it were a movie. I’ll remember it.

Utilize Storytelling!

If you enjoyed this…

I study strategies for evidence based growth. Drop your email here to get my weekly “Mindset Monday” email! I’d also love to talk podcasting with anyone who wants to get out there and have their voice be heard!!