Artists have been using references to train their skill for centuries. But the art of the reference is actually an immensely powerful study tool across virtually all hands-on disciplines.

Art

I’ll start with talking about art, the most obvious application, and get more abstract as we go. Artists usually take either a photograph or a piece of art made by an established artist and try to recreate it from scratch by hand. This has several benefits. First, it helps you learn proportions — proportions are arguably the most important concept to learn for a beginner artist. The second is to learn heuristics from those who came before you — the prettiest way to draw an eye, for example, or the way to set indent lines in clothing. Do this enough and eventually you build the muscle memory to draw good. Keep this in mind — it will be a recurring theme later on.

Music

References are not traditionally as popular in music, but its value is almost one-to-one that of art. Take music that you like listening to — uncover its basic structure, such as beats per minute, key scale, chord progressions, etc. Then, get in a music production software — whether it be FL Studio or Garageband — and try to remake it from scratch. In this process, learn the bits and bobs of what makes music sound good to you.

Game Development

In game development, its almost a universal rule that the first game you make should just be a simple copy of an already existing game. This, of course, follows the reference model exactly. Not only that, but it follows the philosophy of the reference approach to learning — start with the greats, and they’ll teach you what works and what doesn’t by osmosis.

Web Pages

This is another one that’s pretty straightforward. If you want to learn web design, try to make an existing website. If you go on Youtube right now you’ll find plenty of tutorials that say “Create Netflix in React from scratch!” or something similar, and just as you’d expect they’re following this reference style of learning.

Language

You might think learning a language via references might be weird, but in reality it’s the only way we learn language! All language exercises are inherently translational — you have a sentence, and you need to convert it into a way that makes sense for you. The foreign sentence is the reference, and you’re work is the translation you’ve done. Even processes like comprehensible input, which discourage you from literally translating into your native language, still follow this reference rule — you’re still using the foreign words as reference, seeing how they work in terms of their vocabulary and grammar, and converting it into something you understand.

Writing

I once read an anecdote that a famous writer (I believe Kurt Vonnegut, but don’t quote me on that) rewrote The Great Gatsby from scratch so that he could know “what writing a great novel felt like”. That anecdote is, to be honest, the number one inspiration for writing this post. Before this I only really saw references as an art thing, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that me saving all those examples of good prose or story tropes over the years really was just collecting references, and that I would be able to dissect them, find out why they were good, and convert them into a new and original work.

Design

Another easy one for you. Design can mean a lot of things in this case — album covers, infographics, flyers, websites (again) — just find good examples, remake them by hand, and in that process find out what they’re doing that makes their designs look so good. I won’t lie, I need to get back into this myself!

Investing

This is another one that seems strange but the more you think about it the more you realize it is practically industry standard. As is classic high-finance fashion, they prefer the more complicated term “portfolio replication” to reference, but it’s all the same thing. Retail investors can piggyback on experts using something called 13F filings, statements of portfolio holdings that some investing managers must use. By looking at these 13F filings over time, as well as holding them yourself, you can reverse engineer the strategies these managers are using, as well as tweak them to your own personal benefit.

Mathematics

As I realized more and more of the learning world was based in references, I wanted to challenge myself with a topic that was farther out there. STEM felt like it might be an exception, as it was the exact opposite of the more liberal arts-oriented topics we’ve gone over so far, and the idea of using references felt a tad odd in this case. But as I thought on it, I realized that even in STEM — more specifically mathematics — this was once again the standard of learning!

In mathematics, reference learning is instead referred to as “proof learning”, in which one must take a well-established law and try to “prove” the law from scratch. This is deemed the recommended way to learn mathematics by many professors, as — just like with our other reference models — it allows you to see into the mind of great mathematicians and find out how they were thinking and the logic they were using when they discovered the great mathematical laws of our time.

Personal Goals and Systems

I had originally meant to write my “reference model approach to goal setting” article before this one, but it looks like the Publishing Gods have deemed it to be the other way around, so I suppose you can treat this as a bit of a teaser. I’ve found that the best way to make personal, long-term goals for yourself is to 1) find a group of people you admire, 2) find which traits of those people you admire specifically, and 3) make a long-term plan that allows you to obtain those traits. I’ll give more detail into that next week, so look forward to it!