Many people stick to the same routines, the same narrow set of methods, they apply to learning everything. As a result, there are a lot of things they struggle to learn because they don’t know the best way to do so. Copying exemplars, running tests, and pushing to extremes are all ways to push outside your ingrained habits and try out something

Second, the act of experimenting also lies in the process of trying out your learning methods. Try out different approaches, and use the ones that work best for you.

However, for many areas of creative or professional skills, another, more accessible, path is to combine two skills that don’t necessarily overlap to bring about a distinct advantage that those who specialize in only one of those skills do not have. For instance, you might be an engineer who becomes really good at public speaking.

The challenge of learning in the end is that you think you already know what to do. It’s this latter difficulty that causes us to rerun old routines and old ways of solving problems that are encouraged through habit, not always because the old way is actually best. A powerful technique for pushing out of those grooves of routine is by introducing

You can apply this same process to your experiments in learning by trying two different approaches and varying only a single condition to see what the impact is. By applying two different approaches side by side, you can often quickly get information not only about what works best but about which methods are better suited to your personal style.

he also spent a lot of time copying drawings and paintings he liked by other artists.

good strategy to take is to pick a resource (maybe a book, class, or method of learning) and apply it rigorously for a predetermined period of time.

It’s important, however, that your impulse to experiment be matched with a drive to do the necessary work. Although van Gogh tried many different approaches when he first started teaching himself to draw and paint, he also produced an enormous quantity of work based on each of those methods.

As creativity becomes valuable, experimentation becomes essential.