What Hyperlearners Do

Reflecting on your decisions and pursuits can be a little cringeworthy sometimes:

• Like that time when I told myself I was going to become an economist for the Reserve Bank of Australia
• Or when I found an old scrapbook with a decade-old goal I wrote down to reach a certain salary: I still haven't attained it and I have no idea why that even mattered to me!
• Once, I convinced a few MIT professors that I was going to be able to improve the teaching experience of their course, and then went on to figure out that it wasn't going to be that easy to do that

Many of these excursions don't feature at all in my current life anymore, so it's easy for me to forget about these and just laugh at my younger naïve self from time to time.

Upon thinking deeper about this, I'm actually really proud of these experiments. But first, a brief detour.

I first noticed something in some of the younger people I'd manage or mentor. Sometimes, I'd be lucky to work with star achievers: smart, diligent, and would reliably get the job done. Then, you'd also occasionally come across people who made it clear how they got there: they wouldn't be afraid to ask dumb questions, they were introspective and self-aware, and willing to poke outside of their comfort zone and learn from their experiments. When working with the former group, I was happy to have a capable and trusted pair of hands to help out. But when working with the latter (I'll call them hyperlearners), I was inspired to grab a seat on their rocketship - I had no doubt that they were going to outpace me sooner or later!

I realized that these hyperlearners did a few things differently than others:

1. They weren't afraid to try new things
2. They got feedback from taking small, bounded risks
3. They learned from it

This is deceptively simple. Deceptive enough that most people think they're already doing this. "I ask for feedback all the time!"

That's important, but there are people who will do that in a very confined space: often, the one they feel most comfortable in. At some point, you'll start seeing diminishing returns from this, unless you are in a heavily apprenticed career path as you'll soon have more competency in your space than many others around you.

The critical point is to try new things.

A relevant concept from decision science: if a prediction falls outside the range of the training data, it's not likely to be a very good prediction. If you're trying to learn faster, you're much better off adding data points in areas where you've rarely ventured, than in a cluster where you've already got hundreds of data points.

That's exactly what I'd observe in the hyperlearners I worked with. They would simultaneously excite and grimace when they got the opportunity to take on something out of their comfort zone. Like anyone would, they would have doubts about whether they could do it. But they'd put that voice to quiet and try it anyway. When they'd inevitably figure it out, you could see the most satisfying reward in the glint of their eyes: knowing that they could now do that specific thing, and most importantly, it was yet more evidence that they could add many more skills to their repertoire if they wished to.

Even if that was it, that should be enough reason and reward to try new things. But sometimes these experiments create large payoffs too.

While I cringed at the experiments I mentioned earlier, my life would be very different if I hadn't taken some of these other experiments:

• I had only heard of management consulting weeks before I found out about an upcoming case competition, hosted by Kearney. Despite, not knowing much about it, I applied anyway, got in, won the competition, and then went on to spend the formative years of my career at Kearney.
• I met my wife by showing up to a party where I only knew one other person. I am an introvert, and I could have easily stayed home that night.
• I booked flights to San Francisco for a long weekend without any pre-arranged meetings or knowing many people in the city. I made a bunch of cold reach outs, got rejected a bunch, and met some cool people. That was the first time I set foot in a Culture Amp office, and a year later, it happened that they were looking for someone just like me back in Australia, and this meeting was how I got introduced.

It's important not to confuse this as a glorification of risk taking. Being afraid of trying new things is not really about taking risk. All of the experiments I've listed here have the characteristics of a Dhando bet: "heads, I win; tails, I don't lose much!"

I think what feels risky about trying new things is more about the risk of emotional loss than financial loss. If I was more concerned about looking silly for not knowing anyone at a party, I'd have never met my future wife. If I was more concerned about getting rebuffed by people who thought I was a waste of time, I'd have never had the opportunity to learn enough about the high-growth tech start up world to know if it could be interesting to me.

I'm actually surprised that the current mental model of a superlearner is usually about the type of person who reads a lot of books. While I love books, and admire those who can read way more books than the average person, I don't think there is a substitute for learning by doing, so I'm going to call those who constantly try new things hyperlearners.

To recap, hyperlearners are consistently creating compounding growth for themselves by:

• Seeking to fill blind spots where they can continue to ride steep learning curves
• Taking advantage of occasional windfalls when they discover step-change leaps

These are the raw ingredients for consistent compounding growth (exponential growth). They create the curves that look like Buffett's net worth (and in 2020, coronavirus case charts). People who practice this as a lifelong strategy outpace those who don't.