Speaker 1: Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning,
Speaker 1: This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
Speaker 1: tip is to ask experts for stories, not advice. People
Speaker 1: often can't articulate exactly how they do what they do,
Speaker 1: but they can tell you what they did, and often
Speaker 1: that is more helpful. Today's tip, like a few others
Speaker 1: this week, comes from Scott H. Young's new book, Get
Speaker 1: Better at Anything. This book shares strategies for how people
Speaker 1: actually learn and improve. Young notes that one of the
Speaker 1: best ways to figure out what experts know is to
Speaker 1: talk with them. But not every expert is a natural
Speaker 1: or even a particularly skilled teacher, have a lot of
Speaker 1: difficulty reporting on their own cognitive processes. They skip steps
Speaker 1: in the retelling because it seems obvious to them. But
Speaker 1: the nature of being an expert is that what seems
Speaker 1: obvious to you may not be obvious to everyone else.
Speaker 1: One way around this is not to ask for advice.
Speaker 1: Ask for advice and you might get a sermon. Young
Speaker 1: rites when what you want to hear is the knowledge
Speaker 1: they think is too obvious to be worth mentioning. So
Speaker 1: instead ask for stories. Ask an expert to recount a
Speaker 1: particularly challenging incident. Telling stories focuses on the concrete details
Speaker 1: of when decisions occurred, how they were made, and what
Speaker 1: the consequences were in ways that asking for generic advice
Speaker 1: or routines often omits. Young says. Young SIGs that a
Speaker 1: good protocol is to act like a journalist preparing for
Speaker 1: a story, focus on gathering facts, establishing a timeline, and
Speaker 1: walking through the decisions step by step. This provides the
Speaker 1: raw material for asking follow up questions to investigate why
Speaker 1: the expert made certain choices. A focus on the facts
Speaker 1: tends to highlight details of a story that may be
Speaker 1: obscured when simply asking for the broader lessons from the experience.
Speaker 1: The good news is that people in general like to
Speaker 1: tell stories, especially when prompted. If you get a chance
Speaker 1: to talk with an expert and you happen to know
Speaker 1: that person was involved in something particularly significant, ask for
Speaker 1: that story. They probably like to tell it. Tell me
Speaker 1: how you planned that recovery mission, or landed that plane,
Speaker 1: or did that tricky surgery, or made that scientific discuss
Speaker 1: what was happening that day, who was with you, what
Speaker 1: did you guys do first? And so on. The person
Speaker 1: may not be able to explain in the abstract what
Speaker 1: to do in a tough situation, but they know what
Speaker 1: they did in a tough situation, and often that can
Speaker 1: be helpful in its own right. In the meantime, this
Speaker 1: is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making the
Speaker 1: most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
Speaker 1: If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach
Speaker 1: me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast
Speaker 1: is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia,
Speaker 1: please visit iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows.