## The Science of Setting & Achieving Goals
### Metadata
* Author: [[Huberman Lab]]
* Full Title: The Science of Setting & Achieving Goals
* Category: #podcasts
* URL: <https://share.snipd.com/episode/4400f121-2139-4246-9308-97235cd630d8>
### Highlights
* The 15% Rule
Transcript:
Speaker 1
There's a recent paper that was published in a great journal, nature communications. This is a paper a last author jonathan cohen. And the paper is entitled the 85 % rule for optimal rning. This paper we will make available by a link in the show note captions. But basically, what this paper shows is that when trying to learn something new, you want to make the difficulty of what you're trying to learn such that you're getting things right about 85 % of the time that you're making errors about 15 % of the time. And the reason i like this paper is it really points specifically to some protocols that we can implement. Because people always say, ok, you want to set a high goal. You want to try and achieve something that's really lofty, but you don't want to make the goal so lofty that you don't make any progress at all. Other people say, you really want to start with really small goals and make things verye incremental. Only set out to do things that you know you can accomplish, and t that will feedback on your self esteem and all these positive feedback loops, and then you know, layer by layer, layer by layer, you'll eventually get where you want to go. Ilt turns out that neither is true. You need to set the level of difficulty such that you're making errors about 15 % of the time. And i want to emphasize about 15 % of the time, because there's no way to figure pro calls for sport or language or math or anything else where you're going to have exactly 15 % errors. So anyway, this paper, the ighty five % rule for optima learning. Again, we will supply the link. But it really points to the idea of making things pretty hard, but not so hard that you're failing every attempt, or even half of the attempts. Failing about 15 % of the time seems optimal for learning. Hopefully that information will be useful to any of you that are trying to learn something. Hopefully it will also be useful to those of you that are teaching kids or other adults. If you're teaching, keep in mind that you want to keep the students reaching for higher and higher levels of proficiency in whatever that isha you're teaching, and that 15 % of the time they should be failing. If it gets to 20 %, that's probably ok. If they start failing about half the time, then probably what they're trying to learn is too difficult for them at that pointn course, this is going to be controlled by all sorts of external factors, like whether or not they slept well the night before, whether not you slept well the night before, in your being clearr in your instructions to them, et cetera. But i think the 15 % rule, as we may call it, is a good metric to aim for, and it can serve both students and teachers. In other words, it can serve both those teaching and those that are learning. ([Time 0:05:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8a842fcd-d0cf-4e59-bb84-f2f5a8f9b05e))
# The Science of Setting & Achieving Goals
## Metadata
- Author: [[Huberman Lab]]
- Full Title: The Science of Setting & Achieving Goals
- Category: #podcasts
- URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/4400f121-2139-4246-9308-97235cd630d8
## Highlights
- The 15% Rule
Key takeaways:
- Learning should be made difficult but not so difficult that students are failing every attempt.
- Teachers should aim to keep students reaching for higher levels of proficiency.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
There's a recent paper that was published in a great journal, nature communications. This is a paper a last author jonathan cohen. And the paper is entitled the 85 % rule for optimal rning. This paper we will make available by a link in the show note captions. But basically, what this paper shows is that when trying to learn something new, you want to make the difficulty of what you're trying to learn such that you're getting things right about 85 % of the time that you're making errors about 15 % of the time. And the reason i like this paper is it really points specifically to some protocols that we can implement. Because people always say, ok, you want to set a high goal. You want to try and achieve something that's really lofty, but you don't want to make the goal so lofty that you don't make any progress at all. Other people say, you really want to start with really small goals and make things verye incremental. Only set out to do things that you know you can accomplish, and t that will feedback on your self esteem and all these positive feedback loops, and then you know, layer by layer, layer by layer, you'll eventually get where you want to go. Ilt turns out that neither is true. You need to set the level of difficulty such that you're making errors about 15 % of the time. And i want to emphasize about 15 % of the time, because there's no way to figure pro calls for sport or language or math or anything else where you're going to have exactly 15 % errors. So anyway, this paper, the ighty five % rule for optima learning. Again, we will supply the link. But it really points to the idea of making things pretty hard, but not so hard that you're failing every attempt, or even half of the attempts. Failing about 15 % of the time seems optimal for learning. Hopefully that information will be useful to any of you that are trying to learn something. Hopefully it will also be useful to those of you that are teaching kids or other adults. If you're teaching, keep in mind that you want to keep the students reaching for higher and higher levels of proficiency in whatever that isha you're teaching, and that 15 % of the time they should be failing. If it gets to 20 %, that's probably ok. If they start failing about half the time, then probably what they're trying to learn is too difficult for them at that pointn course, this is going to be controlled by all sorts of external factors, like whether or not they slept well the night before, whether not you slept well the night before, in your being clearr in your instructions to them, et cetera. But i think the 15 % rule, as we may call it, is a good metric to aim for, and it can serve both students and teachers. In other words, it can serve both those teaching and those that are learning. ([Time 0:05:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8a842fcd-d0cf-4e59-bb84-f2f5a8f9b05e))