The Protégé Effect (Newsletter 07)

“Learn it. Do it. Teach it.”

That's become a mantra of mine over the last few weeks, and it's how I'm learning faster than ever in my adult life.

Music production, video editing, graphic design, motion graphics and building a “personal brand” are all on my plate. And I'm excited about learning them all.

In last week's letter, we discussed project-based learning (the “do it”).

In this week's letter, we'll discuss the Protégé Effect (the “teach it”).

The Protégé Effect: the concept that we learn more effectively when we teach or explain what we’re learning to others.

Want to internalize concepts with greater clarity and understanding? Would it help your music, art, work, and life? This is the best method I've come across.

The Protégé Effect

Protégé: a person under the care or training of someone influential, especially for the furthering of his or her career.

Etymology: French, from protéger “to protect”.

Yes, another term derived from the French (see my newsletter on the Amateur’s Mindset).

On the topic of music production, teach others (especially beginners) the fundamentals, technical and creative aspects, or even walk them through how you produced a certain song.

This will help tremendously in internalizing your knowledge surrounding music production.

You will:

• learn to organize your thoughts and ideas in a way that allows for clear communication.
• develop stronger learning strategies for your “students” that you can then apply to your own learning.
• make connections with other human beings.
• gain a second “project” (in addition to your music production efforts) that you can tie your learning to.
• potentially earn an income from your efforts as a tutor, educator or “synthesizer” (I’ll explain my strategy with this point later in the letter).

Beyond music production, well, you can apply it to just about anything!

The Inherent Nature Of Learning And Teaching

Teaching and learning are natural cognitive abilities for humans. Our complex minds are wired for processing information and applying that information in the environment.

As with many psychological and physiological processes, the relationship between teaching and learning is bidirectional.

In other words, how we learn influences how we teach (we cannot teach what we haven’t learned ourselves). At the same time, how we teach influences how we learn (as we’ll come to find out).

Much of what we learn comes from the teachings of others. This is the case with traditional student-teacher relationships, our parents, our peers, the books we read, the videos we watch, etc. We've evolved by learning from those who have come before us.

The other way we learn is through experimentation.

Both are important, and I encourage you to teach what you’ve learned through both.

The Philosophy Of The Protégé Effect

“If you can’t explain it simply you don’t understand it well enough.” — Albert Einstein 

Here are some points worth considering:

• What we read/hear, we forget
• What we see, we remember
• What we do, we know (Project-Based Learning)
• What we teach, we internalize (Protégé Effect)

I added that last point to the Chinese proverb, “I hear, and I forget. I see, and I remember. I do, and I understand.”

The concept is that when you're teaching, you naturally focus more closely on the material, which helps you uncover any gaps in your own knowledge. This increased attention and engagement with the content promotes more efficient and holistic learning.

The Psychology Of The Protégé Effect

The cool thing about the Protégé Effect is that it comes into play whether we’re actually teaching or if we’re simply pretending to teach, or even preparing to teach.

Regardless of whether we teach, pretend to teach or prepare to teach, these practices lead to:

• Increased metacognitive processing.
• Increased use of effective learning strategies.
• Increased motivation to learn.
• Increased feeling of competence and autonomy.
• Increased accountability for learning.

Sure, it helps to have “students” to teach to—it’s a win-win when you can impart your knowledge to others who want to learn. However, it’s not entirely necessary to take advantage of the Protégé Effect.

The added benefits of actually teaching people (who want to learn what you’re teaching) are:

• you get feedback on how well the information is being taught.
• you gain a better understanding of problems with the subject material beyond those of your own.

Let's break down those main benefits, shall we?

Increased Metacognitive Processing

Metacognition is the practice of being aware of our own thinking or “thinking about thinking”.

This style of self-reflection allows us to create meaning from what we learn. Our brains are designed for processing information but it’s the meaning we give to that information that makes us human.

Learning with the intention of teaching is a simple way to give the learning material meaning.

Reflective on how you'll present the information causes you to think about how you think about the material. Indeed, this is very “meta”.

Increased metacognitive ability helps us achieve our goals, think more clearly, make better decisions, and solve problems more effectively (source).

Increased Use Of Effective Learning Strategies

If you plan on teaching material, you'll have to understand it better than the student(s), at a minimum. It also helps to have a deadline for teaching to feel some sort of pressure to learn.

Both of these factors help us naturally employ more effective learning strategies. We need to be more effective in order to become better teachers.

A few effective learning strategies I've employed are:

• Spacing: space out the times spent learning a topic. For example, studying for 1 hour every day of the week rather than 7 hours on one day of the week.
• Multiple topics: learn 3-4 topics per season (a season of life can be as short or long as you need it to be). I'm not talking about multitasking here and trying to learn each topic simultaneously. Rather, I like learning multiple things over the same course of time so that I can better connect the dots between what I'm learning in each topic. For example, I'm learning 4 different Adobe programs at once, and there are a ton of similarities between them that I can make connections with.
• Information retrieval: commit information to memory and then find it. Teaching others and answering questions makes this process easy (even more so than taking standardized tests, in my opinion).
• Dual coding: combine verbal and visual representations of the information. Use written and spoken words to describe concepts, and create diagrams, images, animations, or physical models to help enhance your teaching.
• Concrete examples: examples are invaluable learning assets. Certain applications of principles will resonate more than others. It's good to connect concepts to as many concrete examples as possible.
• Elaboration: exploring the questions of “how” and “why” (which are likely to be posed by students) to gain a deeper understanding of the subject.

Increased Feeling Of Competence

We're all playing a status game, whether we're conscious of it or not. Even creating an identity around not caring about status, is, itself, a status game.

By viewing yourself as a teacher of a subject rather than a student of a subject, you can subconsciously (and consciously) enhance self-esteem.

The feeling of competence comes from knowing that you must understand the subject if you are to teach it.

Increased Accountability For Learning

I'm adding this in on Friday morning only a few hours before I send this letter out.

This benefit popped into my head as I was getting ready for the day. Teaching what we're learning on a defined schedule (like a weekly newsletter) makes us accountable for actually learning what it is we're teaching.

Of course, it's important to not rush through things—this is about improving our ability to learn. But accountability to do what we've set out to do is pretty much always a good thing, so I decided to add this point.

A Story Of Mine With The Protégé Effect

This is pretty meta, but I’m practicing the Protégé Effect by writing about the Protégé Effect right now.

Learning about this phenomenon brought me back to high school, where I benefitted greatly (albeit unconsciously) from it.

Humble brag time: I graduated high school with an average of 95% without ever studying or doing homework outside of class, even though I didn’t hang around with the smartest kids.

Looking back, this was possible through practicing the Protégé Effect incidentally. I’d start the year off well and grasp the concepts being taught. Then, as we got into work sessions, I’d effectively tutor my friends using humour and a different approach from the teacher. I got ahead quickly and stayed ahead by internalizing the knowledge as I taught.

However, this stopped abruptly in university. I quickly fell behind in engineering school and as I struggled to keep up with the learning material, I wasn’t able to teach it to anyone else. I barely scraped by (and had to retake a course over the summer in order to graduate) and I can’t even remember the vast majority of information I was taught.

Fast forward to today, where I act consciously with the Protégé Effect and use it intentionally in my newsletters, website, YouTube, and other social media

The Protégé Effect And The “Synthesizer” Business Model

One major benefit of the Protégé Effect in today’s world is that we can actually earn a living by practicing it.

We all learn and teach in our own unique ways. Different teachers resonate with different students, and the lines between these roles are most often blurred.

With the internet, it's possible to learn just about anything and to teach just about anything. If you can build an audience by doing so, there are also a plethora of options available for monetization.

The synthesizer is one of my favourite instruments. It's also a term used for online creators who synthesize information from various sources, put their unique spin on it, and share it with the world (and make a living doing so).

This isn't unlike the arts or life in general.

“Steal like an artist” means to find inspiration in your favourite ideas and to make them your own. Everything that'sever been created by humans has been influenced, in part, by what was created before.

An example of such a business is mynewmicrophone.com. I started this website in 2018 and it earns me passive income (and had been earning a full-time income for several years). All I really did was take an entrepreneurial approach to teaching what I was learning about microphones, headphones and other audio technology.

For you, this could mean starting a YouTube channel or your own website. It could be adding educational content to your current social media profiles. It could be writing ebooks or even physical books and building a readership for them.

I’ll be open about my new business strategy.

I’m of the opinion that if you have the ability to earn a lot of money, you should take it and use it to make the world a better place. I don’t believe we’re any more pious, noble or spiritual for being broke. If money is the modern resource for survival, then why not earn it creatively?

From that viewpoint, my goal is to effectively synthesize the information I research, connect the dots on my end, and share what I learn with a growing audience. Attention goes hand-in-hand with earning potential in the modern economy, so if I can build an audience, I can then monetize it. Courses are the obvious choice, but there are an incredible number of opportunities for income online—perhaps I’ll make a course about all of that in the future.

Of course, I have to teach things in a way that makes them interesting to you. I have to deliver value in exchange for attention (and ultimately money).

I’m passionate about art and creativity (namely music production) and am deeply curious about the topics of psychology, physical and mental health, and entrepreneurship.

I’m happy to share what I learn in the topics (and beyond) in a way that helps you achieve your creative goals, and that is the foundation of my business.

You can check out my ebooks and courses on music production here!

I spend the first 2 hours or so of each morning (before the sun comes up and my family is still asleep) researching and writing.

As a writer, I gravitate toward the Feynman technique: a specific method of the Protégé Effect where the goal is to “write an explanation of a subject in a way that a child could understand.”

This forces me to make connections to simpler topics for the sake of analogies. It also forces me to return to the subject matter that I can’t explain simply in order to gain a better understanding.

This, of course, is a guiding technique rather than a hard science. Like any skill, I sometimes do it well and other times do it poorly. It's often much easier to write about concrete techniques I've used for years than abstract concepts I'm on the verge of learning.

Practical Steps For Using The Protégé Effects

Here are 3 ways to put the Protégé Effect into practice:

• Learn the material as if you’re going to teach it to others.
• Pretend that you’re teaching the material to someone.
• Teach the material to other people in reality.

Put it into practice yourself, especially if you have peers who are also interested in music production and creativity. You can even tell me about what you’re learning by replying to this newsletter!

• Teach the fundamentals to your peers and those starting out in your subjects of interest to deepen your knowledge.
• Explain the procedures of your workplace to new employees to internalize them yourself.
• Teach what you learn about concepts you’re curious about and the connections you make between subjects to your friends, family, and readership (if you choose to create a readership)—this is what I’m doing right now.

Here Are Some Prompts To Consider:

I’m a big fan of writing things down, so I’d suggest completing the following prompts by writing them, though you can choose to do them however you’d like

Planning strategies: planning before you learn and/or before you teach what you’ve learned.

Complete these written prompts:

• “I predict…”
• “A question I need an answer to is…”
• “My goal with this topic is…”
• “A problem that puzzles me is…”
• “The way to solve this problem is…”
• “I’m choosing this strategy because…”

Monitoring strategies: checking the learning/teaching process to ensure the material is being learned.

Complete these written prompts:

• At the end of a section, ask yourself if you understood what was taught.
• At the end of a section, present the information as if you were teaching it.
• After completing a task, reflect on what you did correctly or incorrectly based on your knowledge.
• Write down other thoughts and questions you have about the material or process.

Evaluation strategies: connecting the dots to what you already know and considering how the big (and small) ideas can be used in the real world.

Complete these written prompts:

• What is the big idea?
• What are the smaller ideas?
• How can I use this big idea in the real world?
• How does this big idea tie into what I already know of the world?
• What are the tactics involved and how can they be used elsewhere?

When Teaching, Use These Techniques To Your Advantage

• Write (and speak) at a 6th-grade level: this forces your writing to be succinct and reduces jargon as much as possible (though this is not always possible).
  • Use shorter sentences.
  • Write with an active voice.
• Use diagrams and drawings: “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Humans are visual beings—about 83% of the information our brains take in is through the sense of sight (source). Diagrams and drawings help us visualize concepts, so use them in your teaching/learning.
• Make analogies: when learning something new, it's important to connect the dots to what we already know. The use of analogies helps tremendously with this.
• Tell stories: we all love stories, whether we're conscious of this fact or not. Storytelling keeps learners engaged and helps give added meaning to the information as it's woven throughout the story.

These strategies will help your learning as much, or more, than your “students”.

So I encourage you to learn with the intention of teaching, prepare to teach and, if possible, actually teach people. Teaching can take place in the real world or online.

Be conscious of how your approach to learning the nuances of a subject changes when you task yourself with teaching.

Take advantage of the Protégé Effect, and let me know what you come to find out!

‘Til next week,

-Art