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In an age when the pace of change is ever increasing, I’ve become convinced that dramatic career changes and attitudes of lifelong learning—both inside and outside of university settings—are a vital creative force. Yet the power of that force often goes unnoticed by society.
What I learned in one career often enabled me to be creatively successful in the next phase of my life. And often, it was seemingly useless information from a previous career that became a powerful foundation for the next.
A “mindshift” is a deep change in life that occurs thanks to learning. That’s what this book is about. We’ll see how people who change themselves through learning—and who bring prior seemingly obsolete or extraneous knowledge with them—have enabled our world to grow in fantastically creative and uplifting ways.
Different societal and personal situations place varying obstacles—some insurmountable—on learning new skillsets and on changing careers. But the good news is that worldwide, we’re moving into a new era, in which training and perspectives that were once available only to the fortunate few are becoming available to many—with smaller personal and financial costs than ever before. This is not to say that a mindshift is easy. It’s usually not. But the barriers have been lowered—in many cases and for many populations.
There’s good evidence that our abilities to be successful in any given area aren’t at all fixed. Stanford researcher Carol Dweck’s “growth mind-set” centers around the idea that a positive attitude about our ability to change can help produce that change.
We’ll also meet a new group of learners—“super-MOOCers”—who use online learning to shape their lives in inspiring ways.
However, he was well aware that one of his strengths—one he had built through years of practice in music—was the simple skill of persisting at difficult tasks. If he could practice for all of those hours to get into Juilliard, well, there was no reason he couldn’t learn this new material. It would just take hard work and focus.
One of the hardest parts was well-meaning friends and family who tried to discourage me.
I found that it wasn’t enough to understand something once. I had to practice, just like I had on the guitar. I met with professors and asked questions in class. In high school, I never went for extra help because I was in denial that I was struggling with the material. I thought only the “slow” kids went for extra help. I realized, though, that I had to put my pride aside. The goal was to do well on the test, not look like a genius all the time.
By using the Pomodoro technique and frequently testing myself, I am already seeing improvements.
Francesco Cirillo
Learning something new sometimes means stepping back to novice level. But it can be a thrilling adventure!
Surprisingly often, capturing your thoughts and putting them onto paper can help you discover what you really think and help you take more effective action. Grab a piece of paper, or better yet, a notebook you can use for this book, jot a header of “Broaden your passion,” and then describe your answers to the above questions—whether your answers result in a couple of sentences or several pages.
Claudia was desperate, and she meant business. She told herself that she had no choice but to take her life into her own hands, since medicine and therapy weren’t making life bearable. She was going to experiment with whatever she could—self-help books, teachers, coaches, cognitive neuroscience, and sheer common sense.
For older individuals, walking briskly for 75 minutes a week seems to have the same positive influence on cognition as walking for 225 minutes a week.
Rewiring her brain had to be a continual daily process.
Are you inadvertently in a self-reinforcing cycle where it feels more comfortable to just continue as you are—though it leaves you dissatisfied?
tuhuya
People funneling through the traditional academic degree system often don’t realize how important computers can be, not to mention the mathematical thinking that underlies their operation. They don’t see this, that is, until they start job hunting and understand the skills they’re missing.
You can find a way to go beyond. And you can often get started—or even complete an entire career transition—by reinventing yourself through the constantly updated world of online materials.
Becoming an expert in something new, whatever the subject, means building small chunks of knowledge using day-by-day practice and repetition. Gradually, these small chunks can then be knit together into mastery.
When we learn something and then go to sleep, new synapses—vital neural connections that help us grasp and master new subjects—begin to form.4 The triangles in the picture point toward those connections, formed overnight.
However, only so many connections can form in a single night of sleep. This is why it’s important to space learning out day by day. Additional days of practice allow for more—and stronger—neural pathways to develop.
Moments of insight, which arise from new synaptic connections, can fade away—the connections withering—if they are not repeated soon after the original connections are formed.
Practice and repeat little chunks of learning over the course of several days. This will create the neural patterns that underlie your gradually growing expertise. The more difficult the little chunks are to learn, and the more deeply you learn them, the more rapidly your expertise will grow.
But one thing is clear—some cultures and subcultures, for better or for worse, cling more closely to past legacies. This can make it difficult for useful new ideas to scamper through the minefield of propriety and into public use.
Thomas Kuhn.
The first group was young people—those who had yet to be indoctrinated into the standard way of viewing matters. These individuals retained a freshness and independence of thought.
There was a second group of people—people who were older, but who were as innovative as young people—people who had switched disciplines or careers.
Old or young, you may feel like you have a childlike incompetence when you are switching disciplines. This is typical. But keep in mind that the feelings of incompetence will gradually pass—and the power you possess by virtue of your willingness to change will be invaluable.
Rory Sutherland—we
Codecademy,
I’ve found chunking—grasping and practicing key mental techniques until I know them like a song—to be the missing link in my search for true ownership of whatever it is that I’m learning. Giving myself a preview of the lesson, key concepts, and summary primes my brain for what is ahead and is like a set of support rails that frame my study sessions. Learning a new concept and then closing my eyes and recalling what I have just learned leaves me with no hiding place. I can’t fake it anymore. If I’ve truly grasped it, I’ll be able to recall it. If not, I go again.
“best version of you”
“The past is the past. You can’t change that. What you can control is your attitude on the next shot. The only thing in the world that matters right now is the next shot.”
expertise in a new area. What is a good tiny chunk for you to practice with over several days? Give it a try and notice how it grows easier to call to mind! If you’d like, note your improvement day by day with a sentence or two on your papers or in your notebook.
Tanja de Bie, a project coordinator at Leiden University in the Netherlands, calls people like this “second chancers.” She should know. She’s one of them.
Types known as “trolls” and “haters” enjoy creating problems in online communities. They take great glee in posting deliberately incendiary materials (“flame baiting”) and in harassing and hounding others. They are also adept at creating false identities (“sock puppets”) who chime in to make it seem that many are supportive of their views. Trolls can gain genuine supporters as well—often by representing themselves as misunderstood victims while praising more empathetic, kindly online users in private chats. “Haters,” on the other hand, are just that—they can rant on spitefully while remaining
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This means that academics—including many of the busy, world-class experts who are invited to teach massive open online courses—can suffer from curious blind spots. (We all have blind spots, and highly intelligent professors are no exception.)
One of her first bits of advice to them? Don’t feed the trolls. In other words, don’t respond to inflammatory messages meant to provoke. And if the comments are really bad, eliminate them before they spread bad vibes through the community.
Hobbies often bring valuable mental flexibility and insight. If you’re lucky, these insights can spill over and enhance your job. But even if they don’t, your brain can be getting a workout.
Kim discovered that the data-heavy IT field loves “people persons” like her, who can connect the dots between systems and the variety of individuals who use and are affected by those systems. Kim says: “I have become a self-proclaimed data geek who is able to incorporate my people skills by teaching others about how the system works, in a way everyone can understand.”
Those with broad experience in the working world often observe that being forced to leave a job makes people far happier with the new job than the old—no matter how impossible this might initially seem.
I keep seeing all these things that are so wrong, that other people seem to think are so great. I must be dumb. I must be a bad person.”
Sometimes creativity can leave you feeling out of step with those around you. Millions around the world have experienced this “marching to the beat of a different drum” feeling, so if you have periods in your life when these feelings are particularly pronounced, it’s nice to know you are not alone.
How is it that people veer off track in their lives?3 McCord’s work with the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study would provide unexpected answers
The program was flat-out detrimental—this
One day, while working on a business start-up called Radical Social Entrepreneurs in New York, he received an e-mail from a man named Giancarlo Ibárgüen—the president of Guatemala’s prestigious Universidad Francisco Marroquín.11 Giancarlo invited Zach to visit and explore the possibility of collaborating on a number of projects. At age twenty-five, Zach took charge of the Michael Polanyi College within the university and created a radical, profitable experimental program in liberal arts studies. In this program, students design their own degrees.
“It’s harder to do interesting things or have interesting ideas as an entrepreneur if you have exactly the same body of experiences and knowledge as everyone else,” Zach says.
Many highly successful entrepreneurs, Zach notes, are not intellectual at all. Because they are not intellectual, they receive intense feedback from reality—not from theories. In point of fact, they sometimes don’t have the training—or the working memory—for highly abstract and sophisticated intellectual theories.
