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Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is to ask experts for stories, not advice.

People often can't articulate exactly how they do what they do, but they can tell you what they did.

And often, that is more helpful. Today's tip, like a few others this week, comes from

Scott H. Young's new book, Get Better at Anything. This book shares strategies for how people

actually learn and improve. Young notes that one of the best ways to figure out what experts know is to talk with them.

But not every expert is a natural or even a particularly skilled teacher.

People have a lot of difficulty reporting on their own cognitive processes.

They skip steps in the retellingelling because it seems obvious to them.

But the nature of being an expert is that what seems obvious to you may not be obvious to everyone else.

One way around this is not to ask for advice. Ask for advice and you might get a sermon,

Young writes, when what you want to hear is the knowledge they think is too obvious to be worth

mentioning. So instead, ask for stories. Ask an expert to recount a particularly challenging incident. Telling

stories focuses on the concrete details of when decisions occurred, how they were made, and what the

consequences were, in ways that asking for generic advice or routines often omits, Young says.

Young suggests that a good protocol is to act like a journalist, preparing for a story,

focus on gathering facts, establishing a timeline, and walking through the decisions step by step.

This provides the raw material for asking follow-up questions to investigate why the expert made certain choices.

A focus on the facts tends to highlight details of a story that may be obscured when simply asking for the broader lessons from the

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