What’s the best way to learn or to teach something new? A few recent studies suggest some surprising twists on the received wisdom. Speakers, teachers, and leaders take note.

First, and perhaps most intriguing, comes a study that explains something that has long mystified me. In a couple of very high-octane areas—world-class athletics and Nobel Prizes—the winners have a very high percentage of people with an unexpected background: They didn’t start their specialty at an early age. The athletes and scientists who did something else first, and came to their field at a relatively later age, often outpaced those who began early and stayed within their fields.

How could this be? What the study found was that mere repetition is not the best way to improve at something. Better is to mix it up—try different approaches, different techniques, even different philosophies. This is particularly well studied in musical performance, where whole books of technique........

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