Chapter 1: Roger v.s. Tiger

  • Tiger Woods: The typical story, a prodigy who started practicing since early age, and via deliberate practice, built his craft and became a world class expert.
  • Roger Federer: He played multiple sports, and it was not until later that he decided to drop soccer and focus on Tennis. He went through a “sampling period”, and was not really like Tiger Woods.

The concept of “kind environment” and “wicked environment”:

  • Kind Learning Environment: are environments where deliberate practices are relatively easy. The rules are clear, the feedback is precise and fast, and one can figure out the patterns and pattern matching with a lot of deliberate practice. Think of Golf, Chess, and musical pursuits.
  • Wicked Learning Environment: are environments where the rules are not as straightforward, they are not well-defined, the feedback is unclear and non-deterministic. Think of many other fields like Business. These are areas where “experience does not necessarily translate to expertise”.

The distinction between “Strategy” and “Tactics”: even in the kind environments, it has been shown that computers are very good at thriving and learning patterns in the kind environment. What does this mean for human beings? Typically, we are much better at strategic level thinking. It has been shown that by combining human strategic planning + computer’s pattern recognition, human + machine can perform better.

Chapter 4: Learning Fast and Slow

Main thesis: To master a subject, rote memorization and procedure learning will yield short term results, but have long-term negative consequences. The learned skill eventually “fade out”. It leads to misleading false-confidence. It’s important to not use hints, leverage recalling, interleaving (instead of block-learning) to enhance learning.

Here are a few things that enhance learning:

  • Desirable Difficulty: Just the right-level of difficulty can induce durable learning. If you are doing too well in the short-run, you are not learning in the long-run. Repetition is less important than struggles.
  • Generation Effect: Fast and easy learning is the problem. American students get too many hints, which induced learners to learn procedures, not concepts. They don’t benefit from generation effect: the idea that even if you are not reaching the right conclusion, participating and struggling through the process enhances longer term learning. Oftentimes, when the answer is wildly wrong, the experience can enhance the right learnings.
  • Spacing: Deliberately non-practicing. Space between learnings enhances understanding. Short-term rehearsal only has a short-term effect.
  • Making Connection Questions: encourage “deep learning”, where students understand the concepts better.
  • Interleaving: Unlike block practice, where the same procedure is applied to multiple similar problems, interleaving tries to combine different problems that require different techniques together (mix practice), and is much more effective. Interleaving helps learners to find the right strategy for the problem.

A lot of these techniques make short-term learning more challenging, and students typically perform worse. However, all these skills help long-term learnings. Learning deeply means learning slowly, it’s about matching existing scheme to new problems and new context, this is called “far transfer”, and the hallmark of learning.

Chapter 5: Thinking Outside Experience

This chapter is about the benefit of thinking outside of the box, which makes sense, but it doesn’t explain how to do it.

  • A great way to think outside of the box is to recognize the difference between shallow similarity and deep/structural similarity. One way to do this is through Analogical Reasoning, one of the most powerful abilities of human being.
  • The story of the cancer patient and using radiology from different directions. “Have you saved the patient yet”. He mentioned two other stories with similar structural similarity, and the rate at which people solve the problem increases.
  • Most of us are not like Kepler; we tend to focus on the implementations and details, rather than identifying the structural similarity. That makes sense, but it only states that pattern recognition is a very important ability. It is not prescriptive on how to acquire that ability.
  • Ambiguous sorting task: Sort cards by groups. Most of the people sort things by if they are the same domain, but few can group cards by structural similarity.
  • Lab meetings: Those labs that use analogy to identify structural similarity are better off and have better ideas and solutions.

Chapter 6: The Trouble With Too Much Grit

Van Gogh’s story is about how he optimizes match quality, in the game of multi-arm bandit problem.

  • Match Quality: The degree to which someone’s work matches who they are. Sampling is extremely important to help individuals to improve their match quality between who they are and what their works are. Persistence and sunk cost fallacy can prevent people from exploring new paths.
  • Education: A lot of higher education nudges students to specialize as early as possible, which decreases match quality. It’s like deciding at 16 that you should marry your high school sweetheart. The whole cadet story of how many people are dropping out of the military, and identified that it’s a “match quality” problem. Eventually, they solve the problem by talent based branching, to help people to switch to their own career path.
  • Multi-arm Bandit Problem: High information has rewards in itself, even though it’s risky. Knowing when to quit is a key advantage = knowing when to switch is an important skill (I think this is what the author meant by “the trouble with too much grit”).
  • Changing direction and recalibrating is an important skill to have.

Chapter 7: Flirting With Your Possible Selves

The Girl Scout story, the wandering career path. Darwin, Michael Crichton.

  • The Dark Horse Project at Harvard: The Dark Horse Project is a long-term study of how women and men achieve success by harnessing their individuality. Most traditional research on success asks the question, “What is the best way to achieve success?” We are instead asking, “What is the best way for you to achieve success?”
  • The precise self is fleeting: some personalities change over time, others stay relatively stable. There’s a lot of IF-Then phenomenon in personality.
  • We learn who we are only by living, not before. There’s a new industry of personality, and using introspection to figure out what we want to do. However, in reality, we just need to try and experiment, to figure out what we want to do.
    • A year of YES actually helps individuals to expose, reflect, and calibrate who they are
    • Instead of working backward, work on what’s promising at the moment
    • Michelangelo actually didn’t finish 3/5 of his sculptures. He is a master of trying things out
    • Trying things is the answer to finding your talent