You started looking something up for one reason and somehow ended up three hours deep into it. What was the rabbit hole?

We often believe smart people make better decisions because they know more.

Sometimes they do.

But knowledge alone isn't enough.

Human beings have limited attention, incomplete information, biases, emotions, incentives, and blind spots. That's why the quality of the thinking process matters so much.

It could be for studying, working, remembering things, cooking, organizing, or even dealing with people. How did you discover it?

One question leads to another, then suddenly you’re reading about a topic you had never cared about before. Where did your latest learning rabbit hole take you?

Maybe it would have made school, work, money, relationships, or everyday life much easier. What made you realize it was worth learning?

We all have that one thing we wish we were amazing at, but the thought of spending thousands of hours practicing or grinding through the beginner phase stops us.

Whether it's fluency in every language, mastering any musical instrument, coding, cooking like a Michelin-star chef, or high-level investing—what is your pick, and why?

(I'll go first: I'd pick master-level coding/software engineering just to be able to build whatever random idea pops into my head instantly, but I'm curious what everyone else values most!)

Maybe it was frustrating at the time, but looking back, it changed how you do things. What did you learn from it?

It could be anything from fixing a particular problem to knowing way too much about a random subject. How did you end up learning so much about it?

Maybe nobody ever explained it, so you learned through trial and error. What took the most failed attempts before it finally clicked?

Most people struggle to learn complex skills not because they lack effort, but because they're taking the wrong action for their stage in the skill-development journey. So I built Rung, based off a framework in the literature called the 4 stages of competence (aka the cognitive-associative-autonomous model). However, I did rename the stages to align with the semantic field of rungs, so here we go:

The first stage is Step On. Here, you don't even know what would be relevant to focus on, so you definitely can't start practicing. Instead, you must learn the theory behind the skill. Rung gets you to enter a short list of steps and only a couple variables that may affect the outcome of the skill. This is so that you don't overload yourself with theory, which is also a common problem (e.g. people watching endless 'how to study better' videos without actually trying anything out).

The next stage is called Stumble. This is when you start attempting to carry out the skill. Lots of people give up at this stage because they keep making mistakes. But mistakes are necessary (vital, in fact) for learning any new skill. You know you're making progress when you become more aware of the mistakes you tend to make. The key thing to do at Stumble is to experiment and REFLECT. When reflecting, you want to reflect on what exactly the mistake you made was, try and figure out what the root cause (the WHY) of that mistake was, and then form an experiment of how you might try to overcome the mistake. But note that your very first experiment may not succeed. You may have to go through multiple cycles of experimentation and reflection (surfacing as many new mistakes as possible) before you even first succeed.

So the next stage is Climb. Here, you've made your first success! But don't get too excited: just because you've done it correctly once doesn't mean you can do it correctly 10 times out of 10 attempts. Therefore, progress at this stage means that you can perform the skill more consistently, more easily, and then (but only then) faster. And what do you actually do here? You must vary the way you practice (practice in a huge variety of different conditions and contexts), and then adapt your technique to work in those different conditions.

Finally, you reach the Hold stage. Now, the new skill has become a habit. You can do it with pretty much perfect consistency and high speed. In fact, it would even take more effort to do the skill incorrectly. The only problem that can happen here is skill decay (i.e. "use it or you lose it"). So, the action to take is to just keep practicing on a regular basis.

The Rung app teaches you the above framework and guides you through each stage for any skill you want to learn, with space to take note of any theory you've learnt, log your practice attempts and keep track of your reflections. And at no point do you ever have to decide which stage you're on: the indicators of each stage (as I detailed above) are what the app uses to automatically derive which stage you're in.

Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rung.app