Skill Inflation

(Note: This is an AI-assisted teaser for my prior manual writing. If you like it and want to read more details about this topic/perspective, then check out my 100% manually-written blog and books!)

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Watching 10 videos on how to perform a skill – how to solve an equation, how to play an instrument, anything – can really convince you that you’ve understood the process.

But that feeling is often artificial.
The illusion is shattered when you actually try to do it yourself and realize you can’t.

Watching creates familiarity.
Doing creates skill.
These are not the same thing.

Watching can show you what you need to practice.
That’s good, because you need to be practicing the right things.

But it’s the actual practice – you practicing, not you watching somebody else – that imbues the skill into you.
That’s how you turn the feeling of understanding into real understanding.

Here are the 100% manually-written long-forms that this teaser is distilled from, if you want to dive deeper:

• Comfortable Fluency in Consuming Information is Not a Proxy For Actual Learning
• When Does the Learning Happen?

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