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February 8 - March 12, 2024
Recent evidence underscores the importance of conditions for learning. To master a new concept in math, science, or a foreign language, it typically takes seven or eight practice sessions.
Aspiration is the person you hope to become. The question is not how much money you earn, how many fancy titles you land, or how many awards you accumulate. Those status symbols are poor proxies for progress. What counts is not how hard you work but how much you grow.
The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.
Character is often confused with personality, but they’re not the same. Personality is your predisposition—your basic instincts for how to think, feel, and act. Character is your capacity to prioritize your values over your instincts.
The true test of character is whether you manage to stand by those values when the deck is stacked against you. If personality is how you respond on a typical day, character is how you show up on a hard day.
If our cognitive skills are what separate us from animals, our character skills are what elevate us above machines.
Becoming a creature of discomfort can unlock hidden potential in many different types of learning. Summoning the nerve to face discomfort is a character skill—an especially important form of determination.
It takes three kinds of courage: to abandon your tried-and-true methods, to put yourself in the ring before you feel ready, and to make more mistakes than others make attempts.
There’s just one small problem with learning styles. They’re a myth.
“The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is . . . striking and disturbing.”
The way you like to learn is what makes you comfortable, but it isn’t necessarily how you learn best. Sometimes you even learn better in the mode that makes you the most uncomfortable, because you have to work harder at it.
psychologists find that procrastination is not a time management problem—it’s an emotion management problem. When you procrastinate, you’re not avoiding effort. You’re avoiding the unpleasant feelings that the activity stirs up.
learning is not always about finding the right method for you. It’s often about finding the right method for the task.
when it comes to critical thinking, there’s no substitute for reading.
Sure enough, in meta-analyses of dozens of experiments, students and adults were more adept at understanding and speaking a new language over time when they had been taught to produce it rather than only to comprehend it.
Comfort in learning is a paradox. You can’t become truly comfortable with a skill until you’ve practiced it enough to master it. But practicing it before you master it is uncomfortable, so you often avoid it. Accelerating learning requires a second form of courage: being brave enough to use your knowledge as you acquire it.
You don’t have to wait until you’ve acquired an entire library of knowledge to start to communicate. Your mental library expands as you communicate.
third form of courage—not just embracing and seeking discomfort, but amplifying it by being brave enough to make more mistakes.
Effective training programs are intentionally designed to introduce new and unexpected threats.
“One of the biggest mistakes I see language learners make is believing that studying languages is about acquiring knowledge,” Benny notes. “It’s not! Learning a new language is about building a communication skill.”
“The best cure to feeling uncomfortable about making mistakes is to make more mistakes.”
If we wait until we feel ready to take on a new challenge, we might never pursue it all. There may not come a day when we wake up and suddenly feel prepared. We become prepared by taking the leap anyway.
Improving depends not on the quantity of information you seek out, but the quality of the information you take in. Growth is less about how hard you work than how well you learn.
Becker and Woessmann argued that the engine of the Protestant Reformation wasn’t work ethic so much as literacy.
The progress we normally chalk up to working harder may actually be due to working smarter. Cognitive skills aren’t sufficient for learning, but they’re necessary.
Absorptive capacity is the ability to recognize, value, assimilate, and apply new information. It hinges on two key habits. The first is how you acquire information: Do you react to what enters your field of vision, or are you proactive in seeking new knowledge, skills, and perspectives? The second is the goal you’re pursuing when you filter information: Do you focus on feeding your ego or fueling your growth?
Being polite is withholding feedback to make someone feel good today. Being kind is being candid about how they can get better tomorrow. It’s possible to be direct in what you say while being thoughtful about how you deliver it.
It’s easy for people to be critics or cheerleaders. It’s harder to get them to be coaches. A critic sees your weaknesses and attacks your worst self. A cheerleader sees your strengths and celebrates your best self. A coach sees your potential and helps you become a better version of yourself.
Instead of seeking feedback, you’re better off asking for advice. Feedback tends to focus on how well you did last time. Advice shifts attention to how you can do better next time.
not all advice is created equal, and the more suggestions you collect, the more important filtering becomes. How do you know which sources to trust?
key to being a sponge is determining what information to absorb versus what to filter out. It’s a question of which coaches to trust. I like to break trustworthiness down into three components: care, credibility, and familiarity.
Tolerating flaws isn’t just something novices need to do—it’s part of becoming an expert and continuing to gain mastery. The more you grow, the better you know which flaws are acceptable.
The real world is far more ambiguous. Once you leave the predictable, controllable cocoon of academic exams, the desire to find the “correct” answer can backfire.
In their quest for flawless results, research suggests that perfectionists tend to get three things wrong. One: they obsess about details that don’t matter. They’re so busy finding the right solution to tiny problems that they lack the discipline to find the right problems to solve. They can’t see the forest for the trees. Two: they avoid unfamiliar situations and difficult tasks that might lead to failure. That leaves them refining a narrow set of existing skills rather than working to develop new ones. Three: they berate themselves for making mistakes, which makes it harder to learn from
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Extensive evidence shows that it’s having high personal standards, not pursuing perfection, that fuels growth.
The ideal foil for perfectionism is an objective that’s precise and challenging. It focuses your attention on the most important actions and tells you when enough is enough.
Expectations tend to rise with accomplishment. The better you’re performing, the more you demand of yourself and the less you notice incremental gains. Appreciating progress depends on remembering how your past self would see your current achievements.
People judge your potential from your best moments, not your worst. What if you gave yourself the same grace?
success is not so much how close you come to perfection as how much you overcome along the way.
Research indicates that one of the best ways to gauge the value of other people’s judgments is to look for convergence between them. If one person raises a red flag, it might be idiosyncratic. If a dozen people independently have the same issue, it’s more likely to be an objective problem. You have inter-rater reliability.
four key features of scaffolding. One: Scaffolding generally comes from other people.
Two: Scaffolding is tailored to the obstacle in your path.
Three: Scaffolding comes at a pivotal point in time.
Four: Scaffolding is temporary.
But the best way to unlock hidden potential isn’t to suffer through the daily grind. It’s to transform the daily grind into a source of daily joy. It’s not a coincidence that in music, the term for practice is play.
Elite musicians are rarely driven by obsessive compulsion. They’re usually fueled by what psychologists call harmonious passion. Harmonious passion is taking joy in a process rather than feeling pressure to achieve an outcome.
Deliberate play is a structured activity that’s designed to make skill development enjoyable. It blends elements of deliberate practice and free play.
In deliberate play, you actually redesign the task itself to make it both motivating and developmental.
One of the most frustrating parts of honing a skill is getting stuck. Instead of continuing to improve, you start to stagnate.
A rut is not a sign that you’ve tanked. A plateau is not a cue that you’ve peaked. They’re signals that it may be time to turn around and find a new route.
