- Trust intuition, but verify. - if you have intuition for something, prove it.
- If you think you've defined something, try to also define its opposite.
- It's all a trade-off. There is always a flip side, and looking closely at the trade-offs — in detail, both positive and negative — helps make sure you're evaluating the situation more fully.
- It's less important to know Java, Ruby, .NET, or the iPhone SDK. There's always going to be a new technology or a new version of an existing technology to be learned. The technology itself isn't as important; it's the constant learning that counts.
- Learning isn't done to you; it's something you do.
- Mastering knowledge alone, without experience, isn't effective.
- A random approach, without goals and feedback, tends to give random results
- "...the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting..."
- Set goals. But goals by themselves aren't enough to guarantee your success. Use SMART objectives to meet your goals:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-boxed
- Allocate time for deliberate learning
- Knowledge portfolio major points
- Have a concrete plan. Create goals for the next month, year, five years
- Diversify your attention: books, courses, techniques, etc.
- Make an active, not passive investment a.k.a. Feedback - you want to always evaluate your plan in the cold light of day and realistically judge how it's going
- Invest regularly. You need to make a commitment to invest a minimum amount of time on a regular basis. If you buy stock on a regular basis, sometimes you'll pay too much, and sometimes you'll get a great deal. But over the long-term, these differences smooth out, and in general you end up getting a good bargain.
- Historically, many educators have differentiated three main types of learners: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (a.k.a see, hear, move/touch)
- Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences:
- Kinesthetic: Sports, dancing, do-it-yourself projects, woodworking, crafts, cooking
- Linguistic, Logica: Verbal arguments, storytelling, reading, and writing
- Mathematical, Visua: Math, numbers, sciences, taxonomies, geometry
- Spatial: Using diagrams/plans, sketching, painting, manipulating images
- Musical: Playing music, recognizing sounds, rhythms, patterns, remembering slogans and verses
- Interpersonal: Empathic; senses feelings, intentions, and motivations of others
- Intrapersonal: Self-reflective; works from an understanding of inner feelings, dreams, and relations with others
- Personality Types. Google around and find various online surveys and quizzes so you can identify what sort of learner you are
- Discover how you learn best.
- Form study groups to learn and teach.
- Enhanced Learning Techniques
- Better ways to deliberately read and summarize written material
- Using mind maps to explore and find patterns and relationships
- Learning by teaching
- The technique of studying a book or other printed matter is known as SQ3R
- Survey: Scan the table of contents and chapter summaries for an overview
- Question: Note any questions you have
- Read: Read in its entirety
- Recite: Summarize, take notes, and put in your own words
- Review: Reread, expand notes, and discuss with colleagues
- Read deliberately.
- Test-Driven Learning
- Reading the same material over and over, or studying the same notes over and over, doesn't help you remember the material. Instead of studying, try esting. Repeatedly testing yourself by trying to recall the material over and over works much better.
- Take notes with both R-mode and L-mode.
- Writing documentation for documentation's sake is a waste of time.
- Write on: documenting is more important than documentation.
- Hand-drawing the cards emphasizes R-mode processes
- The active creation of the notes/cards helps prepare the mind for the later activity
- Visualizing the sequences and maneuvers can help "groove" the mind
- Learn by Teaching
- Talk to the duck
- See it. Do it. Teach it.
- Build to learn, not learn to build.
- Fail efficiently with better feedback.
- Groove your neural pathways for success.
- Play in order to learn
- A flight attendant gave preflight speech in rhymes. Because it was fun, the presentation was much more effective. Fun is OK.
- Play more in order to learn more.
- When faced with a sticky problem, there are a couple of classic approaches you'll probably take.
- First, can you break the problem down into smaller, more manageable parts
- The other very popular approach to take is to look for any similar problems you may have solved previously. Is this problem like some other?
- You need to unlearn just as much as you need to learn. Learn from similarities; unlearn from differences.
- Debugging is a part of life—not just software. Lawyers have to debug the law, mechanics debug cars, and psychiatrists debug us.
- "Errors benefit us because they lead us to study what happened, to understand what went wrong, and, through understanding, to fix it."
- "I don't know" is a good start, but don't let it end there.
- Explore, invent, and apply in your environment—safely.
- Things you need in order to experient:
- Freedom to experiment
- Ability to backtrack to a stable state
- Reproduce any work product as of any time
- Ability to demonstrate progress
- Learn About the Inner Game. The tennis experiment with the old lady
- We learn best by discovery, not instruction.
- Cultivate Situational Feedback
- See without judging and then act.Fight the urge to rush to judgment or to a potential fix prematurely. Be fully aware of how the system is behaving, and only then decide what part of that is "wrong" before moving on to devise a solution
- Deadlines panic the mind. "... you are the least creative when you feel time pressure. Not only are you less creative when battling the clock, but there's a sort of after effect: a time pressure "hangover"." What's worse, you're shutting out most of the R-mode entirely: it's the L-mode that handles time. When you perceive time as being critical, the R-mode can't get a chance to work at all.
- Give yourself permission to fail; it's the path to success.
- The story of a bass instructor. Many of his very talented students would simply freeze up in the spotlight and not perform at their best. He explain that the judges weren't ready yet. They were still working on paperwork from the last candidate. The microphones weren't even on. So go head, he'd say, and just run through the piece once as a warm-up. Of course, he was lying through his teeth. The students performed excellently. They were free to. They were explicitly given permission to fail.
- Legendary jazz guitarist Pat Metheny takes this idea one step further and offers this advice: "Always be the worst guy in every band you're in. If you're the best guy there, you need to be in a different band. And I think that works for almost everything that's out there as well."
- We are natural mimics.
- Groove your mind for success.
- Ruby programmers might work in something like C++ for a while. C++ makes a very effective mental equivalent to heavy ankle weights; after working in C++, more dynamic languages then feel a whole lot easier by comparison. :-)
- Increasing focus and attention
- "... a navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb aircraft at 140mph on a pitching carrier deck at night more safely than the average teenager can cut a bagel.". The teenager's mind is easily distracted, and that doesn't seem to be one of those things that gets any better as you age.
- Managing your knowledge
- Optimizing your current context
- Learn to pay attention.
- "... training in meditation could improve a subject's ability to pay attention throughout the day"
- How to meditate
- Find a quiet spot, free from distraction or interruption. This might be the hardest part.
- Sit in a comfortable, alert posture, with a straight back. Let your body hang off your spine like a rag doll. Take a moment to become aware of any tension that you might be holding in your body and let it go.
- Close your eyes, and focus your awareness on your breath — that small point where the air enters your body and where it exits.
- Be aware of the rhythm of your breath, the length and qualities of the inhale, the brief pause at the top of the cycle, the qualities of the exhale, and the brief pause at the bottom. Don't try to change it; just be aware of it.
- Keep your mind focused on the breath. Do not use words. Do not verbalize the breath or any thoughts you have. Do not begin a conversation with yourself. This is the other hard part.
- You may find yourself thinking about some topic or carrying on a conversation with yourself. Whenever your attention wanders off, just let those thoughts go and gently bring your focus back to the breath.
- Even if your mind is wandering often, the exercise of noticing that you have wandered and bringing yourself back each time is helpful.
- The benefits of meditation have been widely studied. Recently, researchers showed that even children—middle-school students — could benefit. Students who participated in a one-year study were found to have an increased state of restful alertness; improvement in skills indicative of emotional intelligence (self-control, selfreflection/awareness, and flexibility in emotional response); and improvement in academic performance.
- Defocus to Focus
- In fact, the situation is quite the opposite: you need to let go of the problem with your conscious mind and let the problem sit in the marinade of thought for a while.
- Procrastination vs. Marinating
- Rule of Three: if you can't think of three ways a plan can go wrong or think of three different solutions to a problem, then you haven't thought it through enough. (sidenotes: omne trium perfectum, three is the smallest number of elements you need to create a pattern or break a pattern)
- Make thinking time.
- Just as you want to go from R-mode to L-mode to productize learning, you want to work with knowledge in a more deliberate way.
- Albert Einstein was once asked how many feet there were in a mile and replied that he wouldn't fill his brain with things that could easily be looked up. That's what reference books are for; that's an efficient use of resources.
- Use a wiki as a text-based mind map. Use a wiki to manage information and knowledge. (sidenote: Notion app)
- Context Switching: our brains just aren't wired to support context switching very well.
- Multitasking takes a heavy toll on productivity. One study found that in general, multitasking can cost you 20 to 40 percent of your productivity.
- It takes twenty minutes to reload context. Unlike computers, our brains don't have a "save stack" or "reload stack" operation. Instead, you have to drag all the bits of memory back in, sort of one-by-one. That means that if you are deep into a task (such as debugging) and then get interrupted, it can take you an average of twenty minutes to get back into it. Twenty minutes. Consider how many interruptions you may get in a given day; if each interruption requires twenty minutes for you to recover, a good portion of your day is just plain wasted. This could explain why programmers in general hate to be interrupted—especially by nonprogrammers. (todo: sent to wife)
- Scientists agree that trying to focus on several things at once means you'll do poorly at each of them.
- If you constantly interrupt your task to check email or respond to an IM text message, your effective IQ drops ten points. By comparison, smoking a marijuana joint drops your IQ a mere four points. Whatever you do, please don't do both.
- Avoiding Distractions: spartan user interface.
- Organize and Process Tasks Efficiently
- Manage Interruptions Deliberately
- Establish rules of engagement to manage interruptions. I've heard from teams who have created email-free afternoons or entire days: no email, no phone calls, no interruptions. The developers involved said these were the most productive, happiest times of the week.
- Don't answer if you're busy. Call them back when you are ready so you don't lose all the context you've laboriously assembled.
- Do you know what Alt-Tab (or Command-Tab on Mac) is called? It's a context switch. And as we've seen, context switching kills productivity.
- Use multiple monitors to avoid context switching.
- So, what does it take to stay sharp? The biggest thing is selfawareness—remembering that you need to deliberately work at staying sharp. Left to our own devices, our default settings aren't ideal for programming and knowledge work.
- If nothing else, remember to do these three things:
- Learn to quiet your chattering L-mode.
- Deliberately work with and add to thoughts in progress, even if they aren't "done" yet.
- Be aware of just how expensive context switching can be, and avoid it in all its myriad forms.
- In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few. Always keep a "beginner's" mind. Ask "what if?" You want to emulate a child's insatiable curiosity, full of wonder and amazement. Maybe this new language is really cool. Or maybe this other, newer language is. Maybe I can learn something from this cool object-oriented operating system, even if I never intend to use it.
- Self-awareness is key to becoming an expert—and beyond—but it falls prey to the "old-habit-neuralhighway" problem.
- Grab the wheel. You can't steer on autopilot