Range

"He was engaging in 'deliberate practice,' the only kind that counts in the now-ubiquitous ten-thousand-hours rule to expertise." (5) "Reams of work on expertise development shows that elite athletes spend more time in highly technical, deliberate practice each week than those who plateau at lower levels" (5)

This is the classic story. Tiger has the Mamba Mentality.

Takeaway: "The response, in every field, to a ballooning library of human knowledge and an interconnected world has been to exalt increasingly narrow focus." (6)

Powerful similar example: Great Britain significantly improved its performance in the Summer Olympics by creating pipelines for athletes to try new sports they've never played via sampling period. Simple.

"They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area." (7)

Takeaway: this story is far more common; "later specializers make up for the head start by finding work that better fit their skills and personalities" (9)

People often encode previous experience and career pivots as "liabilities" rather than "unique advantages" (10)

"It relies on one very important, and very unspoken assumption: that chess and golf are representative examples of the activities that matter to you." (18)

"In those domains, which involved human behavior and where patterns did not clearly repeat, repetition did not cause learning. Chess, golf, and firefighting are exceptions not the rule." (20) He drills into this a little further: "in wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may or may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate or both." (21)

Humans who are hardwired, effectively, to succeed in tasks like golf and chess become incredibly capable pattern recognizers

Many successful classical musicians grew up in contexts where they didn't have the privilege to devoutly learn one instrument from experts but rather had to be scrappy: learning anything musical when they had the chance.

Another example was a successful pianist who was born cross-eyed making it hard for him to learn musical notation → learned via imitation (71). This brings a more creating and experimental approach to learning.

Musician and surgeon Charles Limb "saw brain areas associated with focused attention, inhibition, and self-censoring turned down when the musicians were creating. 'It's almost as if the brain turned off its own ability to criticize itself." (75)

"Computational thinking" (50) in a modern, flexible world where we use different levels of abstraction to attack different kinds of problems

Similar to overfitting in ML; "pretending the world is like golf and chess is comforting" (35)

"Excessive hint-giving...bolsters immediate performance, but undermines progress in the long run...Socrates was apparently on to something when he forced his pupils to generate answers rather than bestowing them. It requires the learner to intentionally sacrifice current performance for future benefit." (85)

This is particularly true when our generated answers are wrong

"Struggling to retrieve information primes the brain for subsequent learning, even when the retrieval itself is unsuccessful. The struggle is real, and really useful." (88)

"Short-term rehearsal gave purely short-term benefits...Repetition, it turned out, was less important than struggle." (89)

"It is difficult to accept that the best learning road is slow, and that doing poorly now is essential for better performance later." (90)

"teachers and students must avoid interpreting current performance as learning." (92)

"students who learned in blocks—all examples of a particular type of problem at once—performed a lot worse come test time than students who studied the exact same problems but all mixed up." (95) This means the brain can't just go into procedural mode.

"Whether the task is mental or physical, interleaving improves the ability to match the right strategy to a problem." (96)

"Kind learning environments experts choose a strategy and then evaluate; experts in less repetitive environments evaluate and then choose." (96)

Similar to dropout in machine learning, "desirable difficulties like making connections and interleaving make knowledge flexible, useful for problems that never appeared in training." (96)

Can result in "intellectual archipelagos" (278)

The majority of their successes leveraged lateral thinking, combining old tech in new ways

For example, there can be a difference between "chain of command" and "chain of communication" → dynamism in incentives → act in the "best" way not necessarily the "expected" way

In the 2008 financial crisis, each lending market was considered independently by regulators since there were no cultural cross-pressures → failed to look at systemic issues (279)

Cures for many diseases (like HIV) have come from radically different domains of research

"Around 90 percent of major infrastructure projects worldwide go over budget (by an average of 28 percent) in part because mangers focus on the details of their project and become overly optimistic." (110)

Understanding causal and deeper structures requires often more distant analogies than understanding superficial links

Biologically, we are bound to change as we age: "Adults tend to become more agreeable, more conscientious, more emotionally stable, and less neurotic with age, but less open to experience. In middle age, adults grow more consistent and cautious and less curious, open-minded, and inventive. The changes have well-known impacts, like the fact that adults generally become less likely to commit violent crimes with age, and more able to create stable relationships." (157)

Context principle: our nature influences how we respond to situations, but different situations can alter our very natures

"Be a flirt with your possible selves." "Test-and-learn...not plan-and-implement." (163)

One response: dilettantes "can push forward by looking back; they can excavate old knowledge but wield it in a new way" (189)

Another: there is a difference between producers and experts. Producers link things and build on top of very deep but abstracted knowledge sources. Experts create API's for building off of their work. This ability to build on abstracted knowledge bases should improve over time.

The more time experts spend on upping scientific literacy in one domain, the more likely they hold dogmatic views around it

"Beneath complexity, hedgehogs tend to see simple, deterministic rules of cause and effect framed by their area of expertise, like repeating patterns on a chessboard." However "most cause-and-effect relationships are probabilistic, not deterministic." (229)

Overlearning: firefighters struggle in cases where they have to run—"when a firefighter is told to drop is firefighting tools, he is told to forget he is a firefighter." (247) Navy seamen often forget to remove steel-toed shoes when abandoning ship. "Normally reliable organizations that clung to trusty methods, even when they are led to bewildering decisions." (247) "Behavior has become so automatic that they no long even recognize it as a situation-specific tool." (248)

As an example: "Some people might start memorizing root words for the National Spelling Bee and then realize it is not how they want to spend their learning time. That could be a problem of grit, or it could be a decision made in response to match quality information that could not have been gleaned without giving it a try." (135)

"We fail...when we stick with tasks we don't have the guts to quit" (136)

"I worked in labs during and after college and realized that I was not the type of person who wanted to spend my entire life learning one or two things new to the world, but rather the type who wanted constantly to learn things new to me and share them." (142)

"finding a goal with a high match quality in the first place is the greater challenge, and persistence for the sake of persistence can get in the way" (143)

"humans are bedeviled by the 'sunk cost fallacy'" (143)

For Phil Knight of Nike, "his main goal for his nascent shoe company was the fail fast enough that he could apply what he was learning to his next venture. He made one short-term pivot after another, applying the lessons as he went." (155)

Michelangelo "constantly changed his mind and altered his sculptural plans as he worked. He left three-fifths of his sculptures unfinished, each time moving on to something more promising." (164)