Most of us type every day. This adds up to several thousand hours of practice. But your typing speed remains the same — 40 words per minute with a 92% accuracy level. That’s because your learning curve has plateaued. [1]

A learning curve is a simple diagram with two axes, time at the bottom and mastery to the left. Your typing learning curve for example forms an S. You start slowly, have a period of intense learning, and then you plateau.

The steeper the learning curve, the faster you are learning.

Learning curves have two critical phases: a) Will you learn enough to reach the plateau (the gray line) and b) will you keep learning once you’ve passed the plateau.

Illustration by Emil Wallner

The first phase is learning the 20% that gives 80% of the result. Think: biking without training wheels or typing at 40 wpm. The second phase is the 80% of effort required to achieve the final 20% of the result. It took you a couple of months to learn the skill of typing at 40 words per minute. If you want to reach Stella Pajunas’ world record, 214 wpm with a 100% accuracy, you need another five to ten years of expert level practicing.

To create a steep learning curve you need to balance the relationship between challenge and skill, know as flow.

“One of the psychological triggers is the challenge/skills ratio. Our attention is most engaged when there’s a very specific relationship between the difficulty of a task and our ability to perform that task. If the challenge is too great, fear swamps the system. If the challenge is too easy, we stop paying attention. Flow appears near the emotional midpoint between boredom and anxiety, in what scientists call the “flow channel” — the spot where the task is hard enough to make us stretch; not hard enough to make us snap.

In flow, the brain releases norepinephrine, dopamine, endorphins, anandamide, and serotonin. All five affect performance.” [2]

These are the three conditions psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi outlined to reach flow:

1. One must be involved in an activity with a clear set of goals and progress. This adds direction and structure to the task.[3] 2. The task at hand must have clear and immediate feedback. This helps the person negotiate any changing demands and allows them to adjust their performance to maintain the flow state.[3] 3. One must have a good balance between the perceived challenges of the task at hand and their own perceived skills. One must have confidence in one’s ability to complete the task at hand. [3]

Achieving a state of flow requires the right mindset. You need to develop an almost pathological relationship to challenge, otherwise you slip onto the plateau. On paper you gain “X years of experience”, but in reality you aren’t learning.

Your mindset relates to the way you judge yourself and others. After researching this topic Carol Dweck discovered a spectrum of two personalities: people who labelled either themselves or their effort. People who focused on their efforts were the ones who escaped the plateau. [4]

There are two takeaways from this:

Make a habit of not labelling yourself smart/stupid and instead critique your effort, Treat others the same way.

[5] Another key ingredient for flow is motivation. If you expect to receive a high reward for your action, your motivation will be high. But if the reward is delayed, you lose motivation. Flow is also dependent on how impulsive you are: Your social media habits/dopamine addictions, and how you utilize your willpower.

Avoid learning things that have a diffused and delayed value, in areas where you’re not sure that you can reach the goal. That scenario invites the drudgery of procrastination. Instead, optimize your learning experience for motivation. Have a clear goal in mind, cut out all but the essentials, and find the easiest way to achieve the goal.

If you don’t optimize your learning experience you risk a learning curve that looks like a side view of a spoon on a kitchen table. You will start learning something, lose motivation then quit. After a couple of weeks you will lose that knowledge. This is common when using MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course). In general, 17/20 MOOC experiences have spoon-shaped learning curves.[6]

The final element is willpower, which affects how impulsive you are. There is no research-based approach to building willpower, except from having a stable glucose level. It comes down to two things: a healthy lifestyle and low dependence on willpower. Strip your life of unnecessary decisions. [7]

When applied to your day-to-day living, this means having a daily schedule, a simple to-do list, and automated daily decisions, e.g. food and clothing.

In learning, it means absence of a need to create a new learning path, comparing the content, figuring out how to structure your information, and creating the memes/analogies required to remember information. Doing all of this yourself drains willpower, and it gets even worse if you are not an expert in the area, since you don’t have a reference point. Having that said, if there is no information available you have no alternative but to do it yourself.

These are the basics. Next week I’ll go into detail on how to structure your learning once you have reached the plateau; looking at the best research and analogies of how world-class people practice. If you want early access to it, you can sign up to our weekly digest.

Let’s sum it up: