2396: [Part 1] Use Schema Learning to Be More Persuasive by Tyler Tervooren

This is Optimal Living Daily Episode 2396. Use Schema Learning to be more persuasive. Part 1 by Tyler Dvorin of Riskology.co and I'm Justin Molick. Today I have a bit of a longer post on the read the first half today and then finish the rest for you tomorrow.

So with that, let's get right to Part 1 and start optimizing your life. Use Schema Learning to be more persuasive. Part 1 by Tyler Dvorin of Riskology.co. When I go to a baseball game, I can eat six, maybe seven hot dogs.

I love hot dogs more than anything on Earth. This is the opening line from Mr. Oregon, my high school economics teacher. We're learning the law of diminishing returns.

He goes on to explain how, though his love for brats runs deeper than human understanding, he starts to get tired of them after a while. Sure, each of those first three dogs makes him happier and happier. Eventually though, the next one isn't quite as tasty as the last. After about six hot dogs, Mr.

Oregon hardly cares about hot dogs at all. Admittedly a strange comparison. Also an effective way to share a complex idea with a bunch of apathetic high schoolers. The law of diminishing returns put simply describes how you can't achieve endless efficiency in any system.

More workers on a construction project won't always make it finish faster. Speeding up an assembly line won't guarantee you more widgets in an hour. As a 17 year old student, I didn't care about construction projects or assembly lines. I didn't care about hot dogs either, but I was intimately familiar with them.

I knew if I ate too many, I wouldn't like them as much, and Mr. Oregon knew that's all I needed to understand to get to the lesson. He compared something I already understood to something I didn't, and suddenly I understood it too. It's called Schema Learning, and it's a well-documented educational tool.

You're probably not an economics teacher. What you are though is someone with important ideas that need to be communicated effectively. You want to educate people. You want to lead them to make smart decisions.

So it's critical you understand how to communicate your ideas using Schema Learning, because there's no better tool to not only educate someone quickly, but also persuade them to make smart decisions and accept good advice. The simple science of schemas. Let's play a quick game. Say the word cat out loud.

Now say the next word that immediately comes to mind after cat. Do this two or three more times. Here's what I came up with, strangers maybe. Cat, cheetah, police, detention.

We've just done an exercise in free association. Each word is in some way connected, at least in your brain, to the one before it. I said cheetah because it's a type of cat. I said police because cheetahs run fast, and police are who I'll deal with if I drive too fast.

Police can put you in jail, and that reminds me of my time in lockup, aka detention, in school. Your brain builds all kinds of literal and abstract connections between the things you know and understand. There's no single way from one part of your brain to another. The more distinct pieces of knowledge you have, the more opportunities you have to make connections to new ones.

Those connection opportunities are what allow you to learn new concepts faster and recall them easier. This is the basis of Schema Learning. It's why making the comparison between eating hot dogs at a baseball game and factory workers on an assembly line makes perfect sense instead of sounding crazy. When you're sharing something new with someone, the more potential connections you can make to something they already know, the better shot they'll have ever For example, you could teach geometry by relating it to how you'll fit furniture in a living room, or how to fix your smartphone by comparing it to troubleshooting a computer, or economics by eating hot dogs naturally.

If you want to teach people something complex, lead them through a difficult problem, or win them over to your way of thinking, there are some smart ways to implement Schema Learning to help you do just that. Making ideas stick with schemas. Honorsing Schema Learning isn't just for the traditional teacher, it's useful in many scenarios in your life. You can use it to explain how something works to someone who doesn't understand, or peer teaching, convey an important message to people who need to hear it for public speaking or leadership, or get someone to understand and accept your point of view or persuasion.

The uses for Schema Learning are many, and it's been heavily studied. Here are the top four strategies I repeatedly bumped into when reviewing the research around how to best harness the power of schemas. Number one, make it personal. I once tried to explain WordPress to an older friend by comparing it to Microsoft Word, but for the internet.

It wasn't a great comparison in the first place, but it really didn't work when I learned the guy had never used a word before. I failed at teaching because I wrongly assumed what my student already knew. Not everyone knows the same things, so finding schemas that work for most people is critical. When you tap into a concept they're deeply familiar with, learning becomes nearly automatic.

How do you discover what someone already knows? Well, a little sleuthing is in order. When you have something important to share, be ready with several different schemas. Pull your audience to find what they're already familiar with and build from there.

When I asked my friend, what do you do when you want to write something you want others to read? He said, I type it out and have my son send it to the newspaper. Whoa, I immediately adjusted my schema to fit that. Number two, hear that on tomorrow's episode.

You just listened to part one of the post titled, Use Schema Learning to Be More Persuasive by Tyler Dvorin of Rescology.co. What supplements to take, hours of sleep, what my diet should focus on. Superpower finally takes the guessing out of it. One simple lab test covers over 100 biomarkers and their app gives you a complete picture of your heart, liver, hormones, metabolism, even environmental toxins.

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This one's a bit different than the typical post I narrate, but a great one I think and a nice reminder. Of course, we're only halfway through at this point, that the law of diminishing returns was touched on at the beginning of this post. And this is a bit of a tangent since that's not the point of this article, but it reminds me of one of my favorite books. Probably my favorite money book of all time is called Your Money or Your Life, and they have a great example of the dollar having diminishing returns.

Back when the book was written, the claim was, and this was through research, that after around $75,000 annually, the dollar has diminishing returns, actually. And that doesn't mean that one extra dollar is bad after $75,000 of income, but one extra dollar after that $75,000 amount doesn't bring as much happiness or value as the one dollar before it. And the next dollar after that offers even less value, less and less value for each extra dollar until at some point, the curve actually starts to reverse and go down, meaning that the dollar actually brings more problems and less value, negative value, than it does increase value or happiness, which is an interesting phenomenon. And most of us probably won't reach that stage where the dollar actually becomes negative towards our happiness.

Maybe some of us will, but definitely a large amount of us will reach the stage where the dollar starts to diminish, which again, it's just passed at $75,000 or to adjust for inflation after the book was written, maybe like $100,000, maybe a bit more. It's important to remember because often we get stuck chasing the next dollar or the next raise, and we don't even know why, like what we'd actually do with that money. And that's also a good exercise I encourage too, to simply question what you would do with $100,000 more, $200,000 more. Really think about it, and the why behind it might lead to some revelations.

We're going to continue this post tomorrow, so I'll leave it there for today. Thank you for being here and listening every day, including the weekends, and we'll finish up this one tomorrow, where you're optimal life. Oh, wait.