“The marginal gains approach is not just about mechanistic iteration. You need judgment and creativity to determine how to find solutions to what the data is telling you, but those judgments, in turn, are tested as part of the next optimization loop. Creativity not guided by a feedback mechanism is little more than white noise. Success is a complex interplay between creativity and measurement, the two operating together, the two sides of the optimization loop.”
― Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do
― Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do
“the most powerful engine of progress is to be found deep within the culture of the industry. It is an attitude that is easy to state, but whose wider application could revolutionize our attitude to progress: instead of denying failure, or spinning it, aviation learns from failure.”
― Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do
― Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do
“Marginal gains is not about making small changes and hoping they fly. Rather, it is about breaking down a big problem into small parts in order to rigorously establish what works and what doesn’t. Ultimately the approach emerges from a basic property of empirical evidence: to find out if something is working, you must isolate its effect. Controlled experimentation is inherently “marginal” in character.”
― Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do
― Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do
“The reason is not difficult to see: if we drop out when we hit problems, progress is scuppered, no matter how talented we are. If we interpret difficulties as indictments of who we are, rather than as pathways to progress, we will run a mile from failure. Grit, then, is strongly related to the Growth Mindset; it is about the way we conceptualise success and failure.”
― Black Box Thinking: Growth Mindset and the Secrets of High Performance
― Black Box Thinking: Growth Mindset and the Secrets of High Performance
“Success is not just dependent on before-the-event reasoning, it is also about after-the-trigger adaptation.”
― Black Box Thinking: Growth Mindset and the Secrets of High Performance
― Black Box Thinking: Growth Mindset and the Secrets of High Performance
Tim’s 2025 Year in Books
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