I'm Paul Muldoon, a poet who over the past several years has had the good fortune to record hours of conversations with one of the world's greatest songwriters, Sir Paul McCartney. The result is our new

podcast McCartney A Life in Lyrics. Listen to McCartney A Life in L lyrics on the I-Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of I Heart Radio.

Good morning.

This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast Podcast.

Today's tip is to be careful about learning from experience.

Everyone learns from experience, but different environments affect whether these lessons are helpful or not.

Today's tip comes from Before Breakfast producer Lowell Burlante's new podcast, Prodigy.

This podcast covers the science of skill acquisition.

As Lowell tells us, people automatically learn through experience.

We just can't avoid it.

We're tuned to picking up information we are exposed to.

So what information are we exposed to?

Psychologist Robin Hogarth has come up with a taxonomy of learning environments.

These environments are either kind or wicked.

A kind environment is one where feedback is immediate and obvious.

The rules don't change and the boundaries are well defined.

Sports like golf or skill games like chess are examples.

When you hit a golf ball, you can see exactly where it lands.

A pawn always does what a pawn is supposed to do.

In kind learning environments time spent practicing correlates directly with how you improve.

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