Harry Potter and the Secret to Learning

We've Been Doing it Wrong

Before you read today’s post, pre-order your copy of Crypto Confidential! It’s a super fun, fast-paced adventure / thriller through the last cryptocurrency mania, and truly the best writing I’ve ever done. Even if you have no interest in crypto, you’ll find it’s an extremely entertaining story you don’t want to miss.

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If I stopped you on the street and asked you to name a spell from the world of Harry Potter, I bet you could do it.

Maybe you remember the swish and flick of Wingardium Leviosa.

Or perhaps the disarming Expeliarmus.

Or the illuminating Lumos.

Most people could spout off a few of them. And they could also tell you what a hippogryff, dementor, and muggle are too.

But here’s the crazy part (if the highly-tactical information supercomplex we’re immersed in every day is to be taken seriously):

At no point did you read a listicle on the 10 Stupendous Spells You Need to Learn… TODAY!

Nor did you read an anthology on the Various Beasts of Greater Hogwarts, or a best selling pop-nonfiction book on The Power of Magic.

You learned it all through immersing yourself in a fun story set in a strange world, and you learned it all completely effortlessly.

No spaced repetition system, no note taking, no checklist of takeaways at the end of each chapter. It just naturally installed itself in your brain.

The more I think about how incredible this is, the more I become convinced of two things:

Most of us are wasting time learning the wrong way.

And two…

The best way to teach something is to wrap it in ONE exciting story.

This was why I was convinced I needed to make Crypto Confidential as fun and exciting as possible to read.

A Crypto 101 or What is DeFi book would be dull. But if I could tell a thrilling story that snuck the knowledge in along the way, that might teach people something they remember. And it would have much more commercial appeal, too.

That’s why I love hearing from people that they “couldn’t put it down” or “read it in a day.” If a book about financial technology can grip people like a novel, that’s when it has the opportunity to be really educate.

But I digress. The first key insight from this idea is:

We’re Wasting Time Learning the Wrong Way

Imagine I wiped your memory of Harry Potter and asked you to get a rough idea of the Wizarding World for a quiz where you had to recite some spells, creatures, terminology, and so on.

There would be roughly two paths you could take:

One is the information-maxing hyper-efficient download approach. Basically, go to the Harry Potter wiki and start studying. Get a base understanding from the summaries, make note cards of everything, drill it, come up with practice questions, and so on.

Another path would be to read the books. Maybe read them a few times depending on how long you have to study.

If two people took these two approaches, who do you think would do better on the quiz? Honestly, I’m not sure, I could see either one of them doing better. Though the person who read the books certainly had a lot more fun studying.

But now a better question. One year later, completely out of the blue, someone gives you the quiz again. No time to study for it. Now which of the two people do better on the quiz?

It would almost certainly be the person who read the books, not the person who “studied.” And if you don’t believe me, just look through your bookshelf and ask yourself how much you remember from the pop-nonfiction books you read vs the novels you read. The stories stick better.

And the temptation here is to say: “Sure, you can remember a magical world better than a marketing textbook, but you can’t take the marketing textbook and turn it into something that memorable.”

But I disagree. Many of the most impactful nonfiction books actually do an excellent job of this.

First there are the obvious examples: biographies and histories. You’ll often learn much more about business from a book like Steve Jobs or The Fish that Ate The Whale than from Entrepreneurship for Dummies.

But even a more tactical book can do a good job of this. A classic example is The Goal which teaches The Theory of Constraints through a novel. Or The Game which teaches pick-up artistry through a story of Neil Strauss’s time in the industry.

Or more subtly, The Four-Hour Workweek remains one of the best books on lifestyle business entrepreneurship because it’s infused with Tim’s life story and his adventures. There’s one main thread to follow through the book that ties it together.

If you want to learn more about a big, complex idea like entrepreneurship (or a magical fantasy world), the best way to do it is through a story that ties many aspects of it together.

The story is going to stick in your head and be easier to recall later. Plus the story will touch on many of the subtler elements that might get stripped out when you try to distill it to a checklist of action items.

It’s really really really tempting to go for the super actionable, ten-step guide, but you’re going to forget about it as soon as you read it. If you’re fixing your sink, sure, get the guide. But for anything bigger, look for the story.

Even if the story feels like it’s less tactical, less direct, it will end up being more useful because you’ll remember the lessons better.

Teaching With One Big Story

When you want to teach something, try to find ONE story to tie the lessons together. And ideally, use a story from your life. You’ll know the details better and it will resonate with readers more.

Most people understand this power of stories, but then they use it in a less effective way: by telling five or ten or twenty different little stories over the course of a book to get different ideas across.

While this is sometimes the best option you have available, it’s usually less effective than one big story because it’s too hard for the reader to hold 20 different stories in their head.

The characters, settings, motivations, struggles etc aren’t related so none of it sticks. But if you have one character in one world with one big motivation solving 20 different problems it can stick much better.

The same can go for your blog or your newsletter. Instead of trying to find stories from history for everything, use stories from your life.

As people read more of them they’ll fit together into a broader story about you, and they’ll have some of the initial prep for any new story done because they already know you and your motivations and interests and curiosities.

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Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to pre-order your copy of Crypto Confidential if you haven’t already.