We Do Actually Use Less Than 10% Of Our Brain, According To Research

Author Note: I became obsessed with learning when I was 16 and spent hundreds of dollars on books every month. Fast-forward 25 years, and I:

• Have read thousands of books and academic studies in dozens of fields

• Have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on courses, masterminds, conferences, and one-on-one coaching

• Devote the majority of my time to curiosity-based learning

When I look back, I am struck by this wise quote from Steve Jobs:

"You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something -- your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”
—Steve Jobs

My learning journey has given me unique dots, which have connected into a unique mosaic and belief system I couldn’t have planned for and haven’t seen written about.

This article summarizes my journey and the biggest, life-changing takeaway. I hope you enjoy!

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The 10% brain “myth” states that humans only use a fraction of their brain’s potential.

This 130-year-old idea is thought to date back to the 1890s Reserve Energy Theory of Harvard psychologists William James and Boris Sidis. For example, in a 1907 article, James writes:

“Most of us feel as if we lived habitually with a sort of cloud weighing on us, below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.”
—William James

The concept gained momentum in the 1920s self-help movement. An ad in the 1929 World Almanac even stated:

"There is NO LIMIT to what the human brain can accomplish. Scientists and psychologists tell us we use only about TEN PERCENT of our brain power."

Fast forward to today.

Even though neuroscience has debunked the scientific version of the myth, the mythological version has lived on through popular movies and books.

For example, two of my favorite recent movies, Limitless and Lucy, build on the 10% myth:

And so do some of my favorite sci-fi books:

Furthermore, many non-fiction books have suggested other mechanisms for unlocking our giant dormant potential using pathways like specific parts of the brain (subconscious mind), our dreams (manifestation), our thoughts (thinking big), and our beliefs (placebo effect).

For whatever reason, the idea that we contain more potential than we can imagine and that we just need to find the right key to unlock it feels deeply true. It is almost as if our brains want to believe the 10% myth, and we will latch on to any story or theory that resonates with it.

The feeling reminds me of the following quote:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

It is almost like we are wired to yearn for the vast and endless sees of our hidden potential just as surely as we are driven to survive or reproduce.

More recently, a spate of research and personal experience has pushed me to reconsider the 10% myth, but in two unexpected ways:

• According to AI research, .01 % of our brains are used, rather than 10% (read on for how I derived this number).

• Rather than measuring the potential based on the percentage of our brain that is active in the moment, I calculate it by our potential intelligence based on the number of synapses in our brain (more on this as well).

Before I dive into the research I uncovered, it’s worthwhile to understand my own learning and growth journey since it sets the context…

My 25-Year Journey To Tap Into My Own Potential (Thousands Of Books, Hundreds Of Thousands Of Dollars)

When I was 16, I fell in love with learning and personal growth. Addicted is a better word.

I read every book I could get my hands on. Books on everything from architecture, tennis, web design, graphic design, typography and business to meditation, biography, yoga, dancing, and spirituality.

I spent hundreds of dollars to satisfy my curiosity. This money came from reinvesting the proceeds of a web development business that Cal Newport and I started.

One of my favorite purchases was from October 24, 1999, when I was 17. One of my unrealized high school goals was to get a girlfriend. I was painfully shy. So somehow I came to the conclusion that if I learned how to dance I would become the center of attention at dances and girls would want me. So, I bought videos on freestyle dancing, hip-hop dancing, and party dancing…

After school, before my mom got home, I would practice alone without any witnesses except my dogs, who gave me confused looks as I tried to follow along. Unfortunately, I never learned how to dance, nor did I get a girlfriend in high school.

Here’s a sampling of some of my other Amazon receipts from 1999: 

In college, I started going to seminars across the country, and I cultivated dozens of mentors. For example, I went to a 10-day silent meditation retreat as well as spirituality conferences, entrepreneurship conferences, creativity symposiums, social impact conferences, and many more. In addition, I started journaling for an hour per day when I was 18—a habit I keep up to today. 

While reading did open my eyes to the world, I started feeling like I wasn’t getting as much from it in my 20s. Then I got humbled…

Four Learning Wake-Up Calls That Changed My Life

In my 20s, I had a few wake-up calls that made me realize that I wasn’t nearly as effective with my learning as I could be...

Wake-Up Call #1

First, I became exposed to entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel’s famous question…

What's the one thing you know that no one else does?

When I honestly asked myself this question, I realized that I didn’t know that much different because many of the books I read were bestsellers that many others read.

Wake-Up Call #2

Another time, while a close friend was visiting me from Europe and looking at my bookshelves, he commented…

“These are all self-help books. Don’t you get bored from reading the same book over and over?”

As soon as he said it, I realized he was right. His comment made me realize that there wasn’t nearly as much diversity in my learning as I thought there was.

Wake-Up Call #3

My final wake-up call was reading Nassim Taleb’s Fooled By Randomness.

In the book, Taleb reveals how a lot of success in any industry can simply be explained by random luck. For example, if billions of people flip a quarter over and over, you’re naturally going to have a small percentage who beat the odds and get heads 100 times in a row. From the outside, it may look like these people are skilled at flipping coins. But, in reality, it’s just statistics.

This made me realize that a lot of outlier success stories could be explained primarily by luck, not skill. But, this wouldn’t stop the individuals from writing books about how smart they were.

Therefore, Taleb’s book made me realize that I needed to be much more deliberate about who I learned from.

Wake-Up Call #4

My final wake-up call came in my late 30s when I started pushing up against the limits of cognitive book learning. There were problems in my life that new learning wasn’t solving, and I felt myself getting bored, because learning yet another new mental model wasn’t moving the needle.

Around this time, I was fortunate enough to be coached one-on-one by Annie Lalla, Eben Pagan, and Anand Rao. All three introduced me to emotional regulation, somatic therapies, and energy work. Previously, I had written off these fields as very woo-woo. But, when I was guided through them, I noticed profound shifts in my life. More on these in another article.

Bottom Line:

Before the wake-up calls, a lot of my learning was fake learning. It made me feel like I was learning without actually making a concrete difference in my life. This realization inspired me to go from treating learning like just a hobby and to treating it more like a professional. This meant:

• Studying learning how to learn

• Learning about mental models

• Learning how to grow developmentally (see integrative complexity and dialectical thinking)

• Learn from innovator and investor outliers with incredible skill (eg, Jeff Bezos, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Leonardo da Vinci, Ray Dalio, Frederick Taylor, and Warren Buffett),

• Moving from reading just books and articles to academic studies in many applied fields (e.g., AI, psychology, economics, network science, neuroscience, learning sciences, systems theory, etc).

• Moving from an hour per day of learning to adopting a learning lifestyle where learning and growth was baked into every part of my day.

• Exploring more modalities beyond cognitive learning like somatic, emotional, and energetic skills through one-on-one coaching.

My big realization was this…

I’m going to spend tens of thousands of hours in my life learning. If I can learn how to learn better and more, I can make dramatically more progress and get more results from that time. Even learning 10% better per year will compound dramatically over decades.

This journey has led me to several fascinating studies and personal experiences that have pushed me to reconsider the 10% brain myth…

8 Mind-Blowing Studies And Experiences That Undeniably Prove That We Are Only Using A Fraction Of Our Brain

Image Credit: Gaping Void

Below are the most interesting dots from my journey that combine to reveal a bigger picture of human potential and the opportunity to tap into that potential more:

• Dot #1: According To AI Research, we should invest millions of years into our learning based on the size of our brain

• Dot #2: The End Of History Illusion shows that we drastically underestimate our own evolution throughout life.

• Dot #3: The field of adult development shows that adults evolve more than we thought.

• Dot #4: The Law Of Increasing Learning shows that the minimal dose of learning required to succeed is growing.

• Dot #5: Knowledge is getting outdated faster, which means we need to learn more to stay where we are.

• Dot #6: The Law Of Requisite Variety shows that as the world changes faster, we should devote more time to learning.

• Dot #7: For the first time, we live in a world that really rewards intelligence.

• Dot #8: As we learn more about learning, we gain the ability to rewire our ‘source code’

Let’s break down each of these dots…

Dot #1: According To AI Research, we should invest millions of years into our learning based on the size of our brain

Video Clip Source: Carl Shulman on Dwarkesh Patel Podcast

AI is a fascinating lens through which to understand human intelligence because many of its key features (e.g., neural nets, modularity, hierarchy, reinforcement learning, etc.) are inspired by the design of the human brain. Therefore, much of what we learn from AI is relevant to humans.

A 2022 paper from Google’s AI division found that there is actually a golden ratio for the optimal amount of data given the number of parameters / compute of an AI model. This ratio is known as the Chinchilla Scaling Law:

Source: Study

Applying this same ratio to the number of synapses in the human brain, AI researcher Carl Shulman suggests (see clip above) that the optimal amount of time we should invest in learning is millions of years. Said differently, if we theoretically lived forever and focused on learning, we could still keep evolving our intelligence and wisdom for millions of years. If you turn things into simple math and assume that the average person lives for 100 years and we theoretically could keep growing until one million years, then we’re only using .01% of our brain’s potential.

On the surface, this finding doesn’t seem that relevant because we only live for decades. But this finding is profound when you think about it at a deeper level. It challenges the idea that we stop rapidly developing when we turn 18 and become an adult. It suggests that even the oldest adults are still like children when it comes to their consciousness. It also suggests that we should continue to invest in our own learning and growth throughout our lives because we can still grow from it in surprisingly large ways.

Furthermore, in the future, if there are people who live for thousands of years or even millions, they will look back on our level of consciousness today like we look back at our grade school years. And, if you believe the most accurate living futurist and a Director of Engineering at Google Ray Kurzweil, then we might reach take-off velocity for human longevity this decade, and you might get to experience this ourselves:

Joe Rogan Experience #2117 - Ray Kurzweil

Dot #2: The End Of History Illusion (coined by Harvard researcher) shows that we drastically underestimate our own evolution throughout life

The End Of History Illusion changed my life.

So much so that I consider it one of the top mental models worth learning.

This 2014 TED video clip is the most concise overview of it.

Source: Daniel Gilbert TED Talk

Breakdown

We humans drastically UNDERestimate how much we change throughout our adult life. And we do so on several levels:

• Values

• Personality

• Hobbies

• Friend

• Developmental complexity

• Preferences (art, leisure)

Most of us think that our personal rate of change falls off a cliff when we become an adult. Or when we get married. Or when we have kids. Or when we reach other milestones.

It doesn't.

We keep evolving in large and surprising ways into our 60s, 70s, and beyond. And we can evolve even faster when we center our life around personal growth.

Despite this reality, we keep on underestimating how much we'll change when we look forward.

This bias matters because it challenges the basic premise of long-term goal-setting and decision-making...

The Problem With Long-Term Goals

When we change drastically every decade, then long-term goals can stifle our growth rather than help it.

For example, just as we would take a 10-year-old's goal to own all the Legos in the world with a grain of salt, we should do the same for people’s goals in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and beyond.

When a 10-year-old says they want to achieve something, we don't encourage them to give up everything else for the next decade.

We don't encourage them to sacrifice everything for long-term goals because...

1. We know their preferences will change dramatically in the future

2. If they over-focus on that one goal, they'll burn out

3. We want to leave space for them to fully develop in surprising ways they can’t predict in advance

Therefore, we encourage the 10-year-old to continue their passion now, but we don't push them to make a long-term commitment.

I'd make the case that the same logic should apply to adults as well.

Personal Takeaway

I was a goals acolyte for the first 15 years of my career. I set them, recited them, printed them, reviewed them, and shared them. I turned my long-term goals into medium-term goals into short-term goals into today’s tasks.

In other words, I orchestrated what I did and who I did it with based primarily on goals.

While goals did help me, they also hindered me in ways that took me years to notice:

• I constantly felt behind where I felt I should be

• I disciplined myself to the point of burnout

• I dismissed anything that wasn’t directly related to my goals

• What actually happened was unexpected anyway

• The achievement of many goals felt empty

Understanding the End Of History Illusion has helped me surrender the illusory certainty that goals provide in return for:

• Allowing myself to fully experience whatever happens as it happens (rather than just valuing the ending)

• Giving myself the freedom to do things that make me come alive now
  (regardless of the goal payoff)

As a result of these changes, several surprising things have happened:

1. A deep aliveness has emerged inside of me that wasn't there previously

2. My focus increased as I became more clear on what makes me come alive

3. My business has grown

4. I've grown more

Dot #3: The Field Of Adult Development (pioneered by a Harvard researcher) shows that adults evolve more than we thought

Next, we have the lifetime work of Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan and his peers in the field of adult development. To put their work in context, you should know that in the 1930s, psychologist Jean Piaget identified four universal stages of cognitive development in humans:

Piaget’s work suggested that adolescents reached a final stage, which they remained in throughout adulthood. Thus, it was thought that their level of development plateaued:

This understanding was later turned on its head by the adult development field, where longitudinal studies showed that, similar to children, adults go through a series of universal and predictable phases, as shown in the model below created by Robert Kegan…

Source: Robert Kegan

The final stage of Kegan’s model, which only 1% of the population reaches, is called the Self-Transforming Mind. What’s fascinating about this stage is that one develops the ability to hold conflicting, contradictory, and paradoxical ideologies, thoughts, and values simultaneously. At this stage, we’re no longer prisoners of our identity. Instead, we can fluidly explore the subtleties and complexities of multiple ways of experiencing reality.

In my favorite clip of my favorite Robert Kegan video, he makes the case that humans' longer lifespans mean that more and more people get to experience higher levels of adult development. Then, he makes the case that as we expand our lifespans even more, we will gain the wisdom to solve world problems that we aren’t able to solve today.

Source: RSA

Dot #4: The Law Of Increasing Learning shows that the dose of learning required to succeed is growing

This fascinating New York Times video changed the way I think about career success:

Credit: New York Times

It shows the world records in the men’s 100-meter sprint between 1896 and 2012.

Notice anything interesting?

There’s almost a straight line of improvement over time.

Now, if you have any curiosity about how the world works, you have to ask yourself,

“What’s going on here? What does this say about how greatness is achieved?”

In an article, I make the case that what we’re seeing here is a pattern that happens across almost all fields and industries: The amount one needs to learn to be great increases exponentially as fields mature.

This happens because the body of knowledge required for greatness in a maturing field grows through a predictable set of stages…

1. Trial & Error. In new fields, people bumble around, trying to figure things out.

2. Best Practices. Over time, best practices emerge. To get a quick start, competitors first copy the best practices of the top performers.

3. Smart Experimentation. Once people hit the edge of the best practice frontier, they then focus on smart experimentation.

4. New Best Practices. Most of these experiments fail, but the ones that succeed become best practices and are copied by others. Thus, the body of knowledge that one must master in order to be great increases.

5. Respond To Creative Destruction. Occasionally, completely new paradigms arise where large bundles of old best practices become obsolete, and early adopters opportunistically create a bundle of new practices that create a new paradigm. Many great tech entrepreneurs have been able to succeed at a young age by devoting years of deliberate learning to a new field before anybody else.

Ultimately, the process repeats itself.

The history of running backs this up. Throughout the period when world records were improving, so too were the training paradigms: from intensity training to interval training to a focus on endurance. Each generation built upon the previous generation’s lessons and built new paradigms for training, technique, equipment, and health. Or, as Isaac Newton eloquently said:

If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.
—Isaac Newton

Running is a microcosm of what’s happening in the work world as knowledge explodes (social media content is doubling every year, digital information is increasing tenfold every five years, academic research is doubling every nine years). This explosion creates exponentially more “best practices” for us to build upon if we want to be great.

This observation is backed up by lots of data. According to Our World In Data, the average person in developed societies has been spending 10x time learning in formal settings over the last two centuries...

Source: Our World In Data: Global Rise Of Education

The same holds true for informal learning outside of traditional institutions, which accounts for 70 to 90 percent of all learning. Podcasts, videos, articles, games, and digital courses allow people to learn almost anything online for free.

Dot #5: Knowledge is getting outdated faster, which means we need to learn more to stay where we are

We must also learn more because our existing knowledge is becoming obsolete at a faster and faster rate. One academic study, for example, found that the decay rate in the accuracy of clinical knowledge about cirrhosis and hepatitis was 45 years. In other words, if you’re talking to a 70-year-old liver specialist who hasn’t updated his skills, you have a 50% chance of getting outdated information. Engineering degrees went from a half-life of 35 years in 1930 to about 10 years in 1960.

Because knowledge becomes outdated more quickly, we need to become more vigilant about unlearning as well, or else we risk captaining a leaky boat.

Dot #6: The Law Of Requisite Variety shows that as the world evolves faster, we should devote more time to learning

Ashy’s Law Of Requisite Variety is as important to managers as Einstein’s Law Of Relativity to physicists.
—Anthony Stafford Beer (Researcher)

We all know that the rate at which the world is changing is growing exponentially.

As a result of this change, more companies face disruption, and more individuals face parts of their jobs being automated.

Given this, I became fascinated by a new question:

"What makes or breaks a system in any quickly changing environment? Whether an individual human, an ant colony, a Poplar tree, or an organization of people?"

And according to systems theory, there is one underlying answer: The Law Of Requisite Variety. At its most basic level, this law says:

“If a system is to be stable, the number of states of its control mechanism must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled.”
—W. Ross Ashby

In less technical terms…

• As change happens in our environment,

• In order to thrive,

• We need to first notice the change.

• Then, we need to understand that change.

• Then, we need to mount a customized response to adapt.

• Finally, to adapt quickly, it is helpful to have a variety of tools on standby.

The visual below captures the essence of the law:

Original Image Credit: Norman and Bar-Yam (2018)

• The blue image shows a recognition of the environmental shift and a customized response to that shift.

• The yellow image shows an understanding that the environment has shifted but a misunderstanding of what that shift is. The response to the shift is ineffective.

• The red images show a complete lack of recognition that the environment has changed. Therefore, there is no response, and we could be blind-sided by changes in the environment.

The law ultimately shows the importance of creating an accurate mental model of our environment:

“Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system.”
—Roger C. Conant and W. Ross Ashby (Good regulator theorom)

Dot #7: For the first time, we finally live in a world that really rewards intelligence

Up until very recently, having a bigger, more intelligent brain wasn’t a big advantage…

In the Paleolithic era, the reason more intelligence wasn’t fully rewarded came down to energy.

“Approximately 75% of deaths were caused by infection, including diarrheal diseases that resulted in dehydration and starvation.”
—Three Stages of Health Encounters Over 8,000 Human Generations and How They Inform Future Public Health (Study)

In short, using less energy helped people survive famines. And the brain is an energy hog. Thus a larger brain would mean that people would starve more quickly during a famine. If anything, you’d prefer to spend excess energy on a better immune system to fend off infection.

In the industrial era, the reason more intelligence wasn’t fully rewarded came down to manual work.

For example, in the early 1900s, most people were employed in manual work. Therefore, to succeed on an assembly line, it was better to have stronger muscles than a bigger brain.

At the beginning of the knowledge economy, the reason more intelligence wasn’t fully rewarded was because most knowledge work was routine work.

Routine knowledge work doesn’t require as much intelligence because you are doing the same thing over and over. According to the US Census Bureau, most knowledge work jobs until the mid-1990s were routine.

In the AI knowledge economy, more and more work will be high-level work that AI cannot do.

AI is automated knowledge work at an unprecedented rate. Over time, people with higher and more unique levels of skill will be most rewarded.

Bottom line:

It is only in the last 20 years that most jobs have reached four milestones at the same time:

• Most people don’t have to worry about starvation.

• Most jobs are white-collar jobs.

• Most white-collar jobs are nonroutine jobs.

• More white-collar, nonroutine jobs are higher level.

Said differently, for the first time ever, we live in a world where our limits are defined by our wisdom, imagination, and intelligence.

Dot #8: As we learn more about learning, we gain the ability to rewire our ‘source code’

At times over the last 25 years, I’ve wondered if investing all of this time into learning was a waste of time on a career/wisdom level and more of a hobby than an investment. But rather than transformation slowing down as I get older, it feels like it speeds up as I invest more time.

At first, I thought I was just imagining things, but now I have a better understanding of the mechanisms:

• More time in the growth zone. As I learn to regulate my emotions, I spend more time in a growth zone rather than a burnout or comfort zone. Thus, I gain the ability to learn from experiences that were previously overwhelming or traumatic. I write about this more in Successful People All Have This One Experience, According To Research.

  

• More knowledge transfer. As I learn across fields, I see new, emergent patterns and see how connected everything is. This makes it easy to transfer knowledge from any area of my life to any other area. For example, I spend 10+ hours a week playing pickleball, and I get many of my biggest life lessons from it. I write about this more in How Elon Musk Learns Faster And Better Than Everyone Else.
  

• Less cognitive traps. As I learn about cognitive biases, I avoid mental traps that used to slow me down for years. For example, most of us fall prey to the confirmation bias, one of the most common cognitive biases. We go through reality, looking for evidence to confirm our beliefs. Realizing this, I built a habit of looking for disconfirming evidence, which challenged my most fundamental beliefs. This drastically increased my learning rate. The most comprehensive list of cognitive biases to watch out for comes from Buster Benson.
  

• Understand how the mind creates reality. As I understand how the mind creates my reality, I gain the ability to alter deeper and deeper levels of my own source code. For example, when I’m feeling stressed, I observe the structure of the images I’m creating in my head that actually produce the stress. When I alter the images, I alter my state and beliefs. I first became aware of this ability in the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). More recently, I learned how to put it into practice at a deeper level with Anand Rao.
  

• More inspiration to grow. As I learn more, I realize more of what I don’t know. This creates feelings of humility and wonder. These give me inspiration to keep growing and make me feel like a kid in the candy store. As the saying from Ralph Sockman goes, “The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.”
  

• Holding more of the world inside of me. As I gain the ability to hold more of the world’s complexity inside of me, I am able to hold more things that I once resisted. This includes things that once seemed uncomfortable, contradictory, bad, random, confusing, unrelated, or boring. As I can hold more of the bigger picture, I am struck more and more by the world’s beauty and hidden intelligence. I write about this in Studies Show That People Who Have High “Integrative Complexity” Are More Likely To Be Successful.
  

• Less unconscious resistance. As I gain the ability to experience more areas of life without resistance, I realize that a large part of learning is emotional, not cognitive. Having a subtle resistance to a skill can cause you to inappropriately diminish the value of that skill. As a result, you will have holes in your knowledge, which will sabotage your success and growth.
  

• Cycles and other patterns of evolution become apparent. As I explore deeper into human and cosmological history while simultaneously studying futurism, I think on much grander time scales, which gives me a different perspective on our present time. Everything is contextualized in a larger process of the universe evolving. This present moment and everything it contains is just one phase in something much larger.
  

• Ability to grow more consciously. As I go through more identity shifts more quickly, I notice more of the patterns of developmental change, and can navigate them better and more quickly. My identity shifts from being one thing that is like a noun to being more like a verb. And it shifts from being singular to being plural. And it shifts from being fixed to more contextual. Thus, I gain the ability to consciously evolve my identity, which then ripples out into other parts of my life.
  

• Deeper understanding of how learning works. As I’ve spent more time studying and learning how to learn, I naturally get better at it. I write about this on my Five Hour Rule mini-site.
  

• Adopting a learning lifestyle. Over time, my lens on life has shifted from productivity to growth. Thus, I’ve become better able to notice learning opportunities in every moment.

Bottom line:

As we grow more, we don’t grow more slowly. In fact, it can actually be the opposite if we are deliberate about growth. As we grow more, we gain new abilities, which allow us to grow faster and more holistically. Furthermore, as we grow more, we uncover more hidden and surprising levels of growth.

And standing where I am today, I still feel like there are many untapped opportunities to accelerate the growth process even further.

Summary

In this article, we connected eight dots:

• Dot #1: We should invest millions of years into learning based on the size of our brain, according to research

• Dot #2: The End Of History Illusion shows that we drastically underestimate our own evolution throughout life

• Dot #3: The field of adult development shows that adults evolve more than we thought

• Dot #4: The Law Of Increasing Learning shows that the minimal dose of learning required to succeed is growing

• Dot #5: Knowledge is getting outdated faster, which means we need to learn more to stay where we are

• Dot #6: The Law Of Requisite Variety shows that as the world changes faster, we should devote more time to learning

• Dot #7: For the first time, we live in a world that really rewards intelligence

• Dot #8: As we learn more about learning, we gain the ability to rewire our ‘source code’

When we combine these dots together, we see a bigger picture…

Conclusion: Learning complacency is the smoking of the 21st century

When it comes to AI, we have a growth mindset. Historic amounts of resources and talent are streaming into the field based on the belief that we can create Artificial Superintelligence (ASI).

When it comes to humans, we have a fixed mindset. There are shockingly few resources and attention going toward how we can use AI now to accelerate human potential in all of its forms to levels we can’t even imagine today.

In other words, while we can collectively envision and build ASI that is years away, we don’t seem to be willing or able to do the same for Human Superintelligence (HSI).

And, if ASI is truly around the corner, then we need HSI now, for it is the largest challenge and opportunity humanity has ever faced.

As Albert Einstein once said, “You cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it.” And we clearly need a higher level of thinking than we currently have on a collective level. Therefore, Human Superintelligence is a placeholder idea for human potential more broadly.

To live into our full potential, we need to rethink our lifelong learning systems and values. Just as we have minimum recommended dosages of vitamins, steps per day, and minutes of aerobic exercise for maintaining physical health, we need to be rigorous about the minimum dose of deliberate learning that will maintain our economic health and inner vitality. The long-term effects of intellectual complacency are just as insidious as the long-term effects of not exercising, eating well, or sleeping enough. Not learning at least 5 hours per week (the 5-hour rule) is the smoking of the 21st century and this article is the warning label.

Reflection Questions

• How much time are you currently spending on deliberate learning per week?

• What is the optimal number you would like to work toward?

• How can you set up your life so that learning is easy, fun, and rewarding?