Today we're going to be talking about learning, competence, and mastery. Specifically, we're going to cover a particular view of learning that I don't think is right.

This view is that some subjects or areas or pursuits are easy to learn and others are hard to learn.

I've found that if you believe this and you really invest a lot of energy into it, it's going to stop you from starting new things and completing the projects or the areas of learning that you're working on right now. It will create a negative self-fulfilling prophecy that will stop you in your tracks.

I'm a bit of a learning freak. I've learned instruments, coding, science, and other subjects by myself.

And what I've found is that most people have a certain view of learning that has some truth to it but also makes them unable to learn and makes them idealize the learning process. When they look at me and the things I've learned, they wonder how I can do it, how I can be innately amazing at learning, and how I can learn difficult things.

Basically their belief is that certain things are easy to learn and other things are hard to learn, innately. for example, they think Chinese is really difficult to learn compared to French, or maths is really difficult to learn compared to psychology, or medicine is really difficult to learn compared to political science. We have this idea of things that are innately difficult and things that are innately easier.

Now there is some truth to that. There is some truth that some skills and fields are easier to pick up than others. But what we're missing here is that the key is not how difficult something is, or on average how many hours it takes to learn it.

Having learned many fields to quite high degrees, what I've found is that the key is really just immersion. It's immersion, it's exposure, it's persistence, it's not "what am I putting my time into?", it's not "this thing is more difficult than the other thing".

It's that no matter what you're doing, as long as you expose yourself to it, and you persist with it, you put in the hours, you've got the right techniques, you're pushing through your limiting beliefs, you continue through the obstacles that you encounter, and you're trying your best to develop skills and competence in that area, you'll eventually break through.

Whether you think it's really easy to learn or really difficult to learn, whether you think you're capable or not right now of doing it, the key is hours of exposure, hours of time put in, it's your training and the effort. This is what counts.

Now, we can look at a specific example, like Chinese and French for example. An ex-pat friend I know is a good case study for this, because he loves learning. He's a language enthusiast, STEM graduate, avid reader, and runs a spiritual group where he lives. He has studied Chinese to a good level, but has never studied French.

If you look at official data for how long it takes for someone to reach general fluency in Chinese and the same for French, you're going to see that the average times are very different. It may even be four or five times longer for Chinese.

So we might say that this proves that Chinese is more difficult. But to me the difference in hours is not a measure of difficulty, it's really just a measure of exposure time.

It requires more hours of exposure because it's more foreign to us. If you're a native English speaker, learning French isn't such a big jump. As soon as you read French you can already understand certain things. With Chinese, at the start you can't understand a single thing. It's just a completely new system.

With Chinese you need a lot more exposure, you need to get used to it, you need to practice more. As my friend tells me, even to just get the basics it takes a while.

But I want you to take on the principle that this isn't because it's inherently more difficult, it's just because of hours of time. We'll pick up on this in Part 2.