Learning

The challenge for us is that no amount of studying or open-mindedness can genuinely recreate the power of fear and uncertainty.

Studying history makes you feel like you understand something. But until you’ve lived through it and personally felt its consequences, you may not understand it enough to change your behavior.

Some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.

History is mostly the study of surprising events. But it is often used by investors and economics as an unassailable guide to the future.

Understanding reasons is an important factor in learning. To learn, remember, organize, and use ideas, we must understand the “why” and “how.” There’s no use memorizing what we don’t understand. If we don’t understand the meaning of an idea, we don’t use it. What we don’t use, we forget. We also need to be motivated to learn. And we can’t be motivated if we don’t understand why we need to learn something. We need to see its practical use.

Understanding is about the ability of seeing patterns — how ideas and things relate and hang together. Knowledge that can be used in a variety of situations.

Our brains favor the concrete and practical over the abstract and theoretical. We are special good at remembering images and spatial information. We therefore learn better if the use of ideas and patterns are illustrated through pictures and simple, clear and vivid real-life stories. Stories on what works and what doesn’t increase our ability to retain what we’ve learned.

This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it’s psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

But it also shrinks perspective. Because knowledge is so accessible and communication so instantaneous, there is a lack of training in its significance. Policymakers are forever tempted to wait for a case to arise before dealing with it; manipulation replaces reflection as the principal policy tool. But the dilemmas of foreign policy are not only — or perhaps even primarily — the by-product of contemporary events; rather they are the end product of the historical process that shaped them. Modern decision-making is overwhelmed not only by contemporary facts but by the immediate echo which overwhelms perspective. Instant punditry and the egalitarian conception that any view is as valid as any other combine with a cascade of immediate symptoms to crush a sense of perspective.

Is it true that “he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” and that it is the most highly organized beings that suffer most? Yes; but but it is also true that the growth of knowledge increases joy as well as sorrow, and that the subtlest delights, as well as the keenest pains, are reserved for the developed soul. Voltaire rightly preferred the Brahmin’s “unhappy” wisdom to the blissful ignorance of the peasant woman; we wish to experience life keenly and deeply, even at the cost of pain; we wish to venture into its innermost secrets, even at the cost of disillusionment. Virgil, who had tasted every pleasure, and knew the luxuries of imperial favor, at last “tired of everything except the joy of understanding.” When the senses cease to satisfy, it is something to have won access, however arduously, to comradeship with those artists, poets and philosophers whom only the mature mind can comprehend. Wisdom is a bitter-sweet delight, deepened by the very discords that enter into its harmony.

Knowledge is the beginning of practice; doing is the completion of knowing.

History is littered with good ideas taken too far, which are indistinguishable from bad ideas. The wisdom in having room for error is acknowledging that uncertainty, randomness, and chance — “unknown” — are an ever-present part of life. The only way to deal with them is by increasing the gap between what you think will happen and what can happen while still leaving you capable of fighting another day.

Half the difficulty of learning anything comes in grasping the principles upon which it is based. Knowing a specialized trick — like the coin construction for heads — will not get you very far. But when you master a principle, you take a stride in seven-league boots. I have attempted to explain the principles of practical drawing in this book. However, you will not really master them until you can apply them to your own problems.

To solve this problem, the mind creates maps of reality in order to understand it, because the only way we can process the complexity is through abstraction. But frequently, we don’t understand our maps or their limits. In fact, we are so reliant on abstraction that we will frequently use an incorrect model simply because we feel any model is preferable to no model.

You do not understand a model, map, or reduction unless you understand and respect its limitations.

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates believed that all learning was a form of remembering. Socrates posited that the soul, immortal in its essence, knew everything before it was born anew as an infant. However, at the point of birth all previous knowledge was forgotten and had to be recalled through the experiences of life.

Deng had struck themes that were to become his trademark. China was a poor country, he had said, in need of scientific exchanges and learning from advanced countries such as Australia — the sort of admission China’s leaders had never made heretofore. Deng advised the Australian visitors to look at the backward side of China in their travels and not only at its achievements, another unprecedented comment for a Chinese leader.

In all artistic fields, from painting to writing to music to architecture, students study the works of the masters. (In fact, artists who claim to be “self-taught” usually mean that they learned purely from examples.) Much has been written about the failure of software engineering schools to provide examples of great works, expecting students to somehow derive style from first principles. Since software design isn’t yet recognized as an artistic field in the first place, its situation is even worse — the very concept of a gallery of software designs will seem absurd to most people. But a corpus is crucial for the development of any artistic field. Outstanding designs must be recognized, collected, and explicated.

Consider it not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates, but as an ennobling intimacy with great men. Consider it not as the preparation of the individual to “make a living,” but as the development of every potential capacity in him for the comprehension, control, and appreciation of his world. Above all, consider it, in its fullest definition, as the technique of transmitting as completely as possible, to as many as possible, that technological, intellectual, moral, and artistic heritage through which the race forms the growing individual and makes him human. Education is the reason why we behave like human beings. We are hardly born human; we are born ridiculous and malodorous animals; we become human, we have humanity thrust upon us through the hundred channels whereby the past pours down into the present that mental and cultural inheritance whose preservation, accumulation, and transmission place humankind today, with all its defectives and illiterates, on a higher plane than any generation has ever reached before.

Now, unlike the Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Assyrians, these noblemen weren’t interested in preserving the ways of their ancestors. Their many raids and battles with foreign peoples had opened their eyes to new ideas and taught them to relish variety and change. And it was at this point, and in this part of the world, that history began to progress at a much greater speed, because people no longer believed that the old ways were best. From now on, things were constantly changing. And this is why, nowadays, when we find even a fragment of pottery - in Greece, or anywhere else in Europe - we can say: ‘this dates from roughly this or that period.’ Because a hundred years later a pot like that would have gone out of fashion, and nobody would have wanted it.

We cannot live without the cultural knowledge that enables each new generation to re-create its society’s way of life. Naive animals dropped into a new environment can often work out for themselves how to find food and survive. By contrast, humans mostly have to learn from others how to make a living by digging for edible food, cooking, fashioning tools, building houses, making boats, irrigating farmland, taming horses, making clothes, and so on. Without the learned skills passed down to us by previous generations, we are in trouble. With them, we dominate the planet.

To understand the present and anticipate the future, one must know enough of the past, enough to have a sense of the history of a people. One must appreciate not merely what took place, but, more especially, why it took place and in that particular way. This is true of individuals, as it is for nations. The personal experience of a person determines whether he likes or hates certain things, welcomes them or fears them when they recur. So it is with nations: it is the collective memory of a people, the composite learning from past events which led to successes or disasters that makes a people welcome or fear new events, because they recognize parts in new events which have similarities with past experience. Young people learn best from personal experience. The lessons their elders have learned at great pain and expense can add to the knowledge of the young and help them to cope with problems and dangers they had not faced before; but such learning, second hand, is never as vivid, as deep, or as durable as that which was personally experienced.

Even though books and lectures belong to wisdom or knowledge in the DIKW model, they are the authors’ wisdom and lecturers’ knowledge. They are not ours. The best way to transform the information into our knowledge is to interpret something new to us based on what we have learned and share them.

Interpreting helps us organize and digest information. Sharing is not only a contribution to the information age but also our motivation to keep outputting better works.

An expert’s knowledge is organized in a deep, meaningful, and integrated fashion. As a result, an expert can interpret and apply this knowledge fluently. In contrast, as novices, student approach new knowledge as disconnected pieces of information, and often fail to see the connections between information presented in courses.

Novice learners often fail to organize new knowledge effectively, and as a result, struggle to absorb the information, which in turn impacts their learning. When presented with a large amount of information, novice students typically memorize lists of facts and formulas, whereas an expert would organize their knowledge around the core concepts of “big ideas.”

One important way experts’ and novices’ knowledge organizations differ is in the number or density of connections among the concepts, facts, and skills they know.

Experts’ more complex and highly connected knowledge structures permit them to access and use their knowledge more efficiently and effectively. Indeed, research has shown that experts tend to automatically process information in coherent chunks to build larger, more interconnected knowledge structures.

Rather than feeling ashamed of what he didn’t know, he became obsessive about learning. I read like crazy. If you are prepared, I’ve learned, that is where your confidence comes from. And the more you do it, always, the more your confidence grows.

Perception is an active process. Human cognition simplifies an enormous range of stimuli into understandable units. The myriad colors, shapes, textures, sounds, and movements that confront us from moment to moment would be overwhelming and incomprehensible if the brain didn’t structure the so-called sense data into coherent objects and patterns. The brain actively breaks down and combines sensory input. It merges what we see with what we know to build a coherent understanding of the world. Building on memory and experience, the brain fills in gaps and filters out extraneous data.

The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”

An expert player can understand a complex position at a glance, but it takes years to develop that level of ability. Studies of chess masters have shown that at least 10K hours of dedicated practice (about 6 years of playing chess 5 hours a day) are required to attain the highest levels of performance. During those hours of intense concentration, a serious chess player becomes familiar with thousands of configurations, each consisting of an arrangement of related pieces that can threaten or defend each other.

Learning high-level chess can be compared to learning to read. A first grader works hard at recognizing individual letters and assembling them into syllables and words, but a good adult reader perceives entire clauses. An expert reader has also acquired the ability to assemble familiar elements in a new pattern and can quickly “recognize” and correctly pronounce a word that she has never seen before. In chess, recurrent patterns of interacting pieces play the role of letters, and a chess position is a long word or a sentence.

2 basic conditions for acquiring a skill:

An environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable
An opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice

The first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.

Most of the time, a person sits down at her personal computer not to create, but to read, observe, study, explore, make cognitive connections, and ultimately come to an understanding. This person is not seeking to make her mark upon the world, but to rearrange her own neurons. The computer becomes a medium for asking questions, making comparisons, and drawing conclusions — that is, for learning.

Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty. It’s not something you do just to advance in life. Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty. As a corollary to that proposition which is very important, it means that you are hooked for lifetime learning. And without lifetime learning, you people are not going to do very well. You are not going to get very far in life based on what you already know. You’re going to advance in life by what you learn after you leave here.

I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

But the cooks rarely consulted cookbooks. How ddi they all seem to know how to cook anything the chef could imagine?

I felt like I’d never catch up. I could hardly imagine the day would come when I’d be able to recognize all the spices in the kitchen’s unlabeled jars. I could barely tell cumin and fennel seeds apart, so the thought of getting to a point where I could ever appreciate the nuanced differences between boillabaisse and cacciuco (2 Mediterranean seafood stews that appeared to be identical) seemed downright impossible.

As I improved, I began to detect the nuances that distinguish good food from great. I started to discern individual components in a dish, understanding when the pasta water and not the sauce needed more salt, or when an herb salsa needed more vinegar to balance a rich, sweet lamb stew. I started to see some basic patterns in the seemingly impenetrable maze of daily-changing, seasonal menus.

“If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my axe.” I tell my students that they should not rush and should prepare. What should they prepare for? The foundational skills. With the advancement in technology, many of us can now cover our weakness using digital tools. But that’s like building a sand castle. You might reach a certain height, but you will not be able to go beyond that. I wish for the students to build up on their traditional skills and reserve on using digital tools the younger they are. And I emphasize that studying the subject matter while understanding them accurately is more important than just drawing a lot.

Find someone with a growth mindset and tell her that she’s terrible at something. She’ll become instantly inquisitive. At no point will she become offended by your criticism, and in fact she’ll probably thank you.

If you do the same thing with someone with a fixed mindset, he’ll get instantly defensive, questioning both the validity of your assessment and the importance of that skill in the first place. You won’t get thanked and you may even get some not-so-constructive criticism in return.

What would your advice be for people who are just starting out in this field? Remember that nothing is magic. Even though it seems like you’re woking at the top of a stack of impenetrable abstractions, they’re made by people (who were probably rushed, or drunk, or both). Learn how they work, then figure out how to minimize your dependence on them.

Maybe to get good at math (and programming) you actually need to put in the work, and true learning is born from the effort and confusion you go through before enlightenment.

The best advice I can give to anyone who doesn’t know a subject is just to start reading. At first you won’t understand fuckall, but after a few months things will start to snap together in your head. I know it’s hard considering most of us have this idea that to learn a subject we need to start at some sort of beginning but in reality there’s no beginning or end of any subject. So just dive in and keep reading until it makes sense.

To succeed at that, you need to actively encourage experimentation. It will lead to small-f failures, but you can’t punish that. Quite the opposite: failure that comes from planned, methodical testing is simply how you learn.

We don’t like thinking that someone is better than us. Or that we have a lot left to learn. We want to be done. We want to be ready. We’re busy and overburdened. For this reason, updating your appraisal of your talents in a downward direction is one of the most difficult things to do in life — but it is almost always a component of mastery. The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better. Studious self-assessment is the antidote.

Invest first in education. In reality, the only real asset you have is your mind, the most powerful tool we have dominion over.

Understanding is a process whereby one is able to use concepts to model an object. Understanding is a relation between the knower and an object of understanding.

One understands the weather if one is able to predict and / or give an explanation of some of its features.

Comprehension is a kind of data compression. Understanding something means being able to figure out a simple set of rules that explains it.

The only things worth learning are the things you learn after you know it all.

People who worry about looking good typically hide what they don’t know and hide their weaknesses, so they never learn how to properly deal with them and these weaknesses remain impediment in the future.

I have never meet a great person who did not earn and learn their greatness. They have weaknesses like everyone else - they have just learned how to deal with them so that they aren’t impediments to getting what they want. In addition, the amounts of knowledge and the capabilities that anyone does not have, and that could be used to make the best possible decisions, are vastly greater than which anyone (no matter how great) could have within them.

Actually, decision making was never quite as easy as rationalists would have us think. Human minds could not handle the complexities that important decisions entailed. Our brains are too limited. At best, we can focus on 8 facts at a time. Our ability to calculate probabilities, especially to combine 2 or more probabilities — essential for most decision making — is low. And the evidence shows that we learn surprisingly slowly. WE make the same mistakes over and over again, adjusting our estimates and expectations at an agonizing crawl, and quite poorly at that.

Moreover, we are all prone to get our emotions get in the way — fear, for one. Since all decisions entail risks, decision making almost inevitably evokes anxiety.

When the visual image replaced the written word as the principal means of understanding the world, the process of learning was transformed from an active to a passive mode, from a participatory act to assimilating predigested data. One learns from books via concepts that relate apparently disparate events to each other and require analytical effort and training. By contrast, pictures teach passively; they evoke impressions which require no act by the viewer, emphasize the mood of the moment, and leave little room for either deductive reasoning or the imagination. Concepts are permanent; impressions are fleeting and in part accidental.

Understanding is about the ability of seeing patterns — how ideas and things relate and hang together. Knowledge that can be used in a variety of situations.

The great man understands the essence of a problem; the ordinary leader grasps only the symptoms. The great man focuses on the relationship of events to each other; the ordinary leader sees only a series of seemingly disconnected events.

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few. Beginner’s mind is a mind that is open, eager to learn, an empty cup. If your mind is open, empty to preconceptions, it is always inquisitive, receptive to whatever arises, and ready to engage.

When the clear water of instruction is poured in, the dirt makes it cloudy. This symbolizes the way we can distort what we hear, interpreting and editing it to fit our preconceived ideas or opinions. Nothing new is actually learned. When we take a lesson, if the instruction matches how we already see things, it is taken as confirmation. Anything new that doesn’t match our opinion is resisted, ignored, or disregarded.

What I have learned I have learned by laborious trial and error, watching a good player do something that looked right to me, stumbling across something that felt right to me experimenting with that something to see if it helped or hindered, adopting it if it helped, refining it sometimes, discarding it if it didn’t help, sometimes discarding it later if it proved undependable in competition, experimenting continually with new ideas and old ideas and all manner of variations until I arrived at a set of fundamentals that appeared to me to be right because they accomplished a very definite purpose, a set of fundamentals which proved to me they were right because they stood up and produced under all kinds of pressure.

Foreign policy is the mastery of nuance; it requires the ability to relate disparate elements into a pattern.

This slow rate of progress, or lack of progress, was due to 2 reasons — to the remarkable absence of important technical improvements and to the failure of capital to accumulate.

Most educators will tell you that 75% of all learning is gained by doing homework.

While knowledge can be learned, wisdom must be acquired. Knowing is having the right words; wisdom is knowing when and how to say them — and when to keep them to yourself.

We all tend to repeat our mistakes, so keep a small notebook of your problems with your golf and what you and your professional do to correct the particular problem. If that particular problem resurfaces, you can refer back to your notebook and correct your problem quicker. If we learn from our mistakes, they are worth making.

That is what learning is all about: assembling and assimilating information in your brain so it learns what your swing needs to look and feel like and how the ball will react when you do it that way. And the best part is that you don’t have to think about it: It happens automatically if your pay attention. As you see more and more shots and store them with your kinesthetic awareness, your brain refines and builds better memories to draw on in the future.

However, none of this happens if you don’t watch and receive the required information in your brain. You must do it in real time, as it happens.

If you can make a habit of holding your finish and retaining the feelings of each shot while watching its flight, then what you see and feel within the first 8 seconds will be correlated in your mind and you will have optimized your process of learning touch for distance.

Golfers who hit shots and turn away in disgust, or drop their shoulders, hunch over, or move in any way, lose the feelings of their swings. Then they can’t correlate what they did with the results.

As I said before, I think it’s best to think of insight as drips of water filling a bucket, rather than any great thunderbolt that might transform your life instantaneously.

Once I have his attention, I ask, “Without looking back, what did that shot just do? Where did that ball go?” Most of the time they can’t tell me. They have learned absolutely nothing, so they have wasted the time it took to get ball and body into position and make the swing. This isn’t practice, because they aren’t learning anything. It’s just exercise.

The only way to achieve this ability is with experience, seeing and feeling how different swings cause different golf-ball behaviors. You can’t learn this by watching someone else hit, from videotapes, or from books. Those can teach you why and what to do and how it is done. But you must make the swings yourself so you can add feel to the swings you’ve observed, giving your mind’s eye the complete correlation between actions and results.

The quest to define and catalog all things, each with its own sharply delineated boundaries, was mistaken, he held. Instead, one should seek to define “This and similar things” and achieve familiarity with the resulting concepts, even if they had “blurred” or “indistinct” edges. Later, in the late 20th century and the early 21st, this thinking informed theories of AI and ML. Such theories posited that AI’s potential lay partly in its ability to scan large data sets to learn types and patterns and then to make sense of reality by identifying networks of similarities and likeness with what the AI already knew. Even if AI would never know something in the way a human mind could, an accumulation of matches with the patterns of reality could approximate and sometimes exceed the performance of human perception and reason.

Speed is partly to blame, as is inundation. For all its many wondrous achievements, digitization has rendered human thought both less contextual and less conceptual. Digital natives do not feel the need, at least not urgently, to develop concepts that, for most of history, have compensated for the limitations of collective memory. They can (and do) ask search engines whatever they want to know, whether trivial, conceptual, or somewhere in between. Search engines, in turn, use AI to respond to their queries. In the process, humans delegate aspects of their thinking to technology. But information is not self-explanatory; it is context-dependent. To be useful — or at least meaningful — it must be understood through the lenses of culture and history.

When information is contextualized, it becomes knowledge. When knowledge compels convictions, it becomes wisdom. Yet the internet inundates users with the opinions of thousands, even millions, of other users, depriving them of the solitude required for sustained reflection that, historically, has led to the development of convictions. As solitude diminishes, so, too, does fortitude — not only to develop convictions but also to be faithful to them, particularly when they require the traversing of novel, and thus often lonely, roads. Only convictions — in combination with wisdom — enable people to access and explore new horizons.

We both came to Google as seasoned business executives who were pretty confident in our intellect and abilities. But over the humbling course of a decade, we came to see the wisdom in John Wooden’s observation that “it’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.” We had a front-row seat as we helped our founders and colleagues create a magnificent company and used it to relearn everything we thought we knew about management.

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” That’s what Einstein claimed.

One of the best, easiest ways to get ahead in a field is to know more about it. The best way to do that is to read. People always say they don’t have the time to read, but what they are really saying is that they aren’t making it a priority to learn as much as they can about their businesses.

In most aspects of life, you need to say something about 20 times before it truly starts to sink in. Say it a few times, people are too busy to even notice. A few more times, they start to become aware of a vague buzzing in their ear. By the time you’ve repeated it 15 to 20 times you may be completely sick of it, but that’s about the time people are starting to get it. So as a leader you want to habitually overcommunicate. “Repetition doesn’t spoil the prayer.”

As you read them, some facts will stick out and stay with you; others may not mean a thing. The only way you’ll ingrain any of them in your game is to see for yourself what works and what doesn’t. In the end, you’ll have to practice for yourself.

I must remind you again, because it is fundamental to this book, that learning by a sense of feel is something quite different to learning by the intellect. Intellectual memory may be of use in learning golf, but it is never paramount. What is paramount is what I have called muscular memory, a memory for the right feeling of a movement which enables the muscles to repeat that movement time after time, without directions from brain or will.

Our brain is a connection machine. This is quite practical: if we eat an unknown fruit and feel sick afterward, we avoid it in future, labelling the plant poisonous or at least unpalatable. This is how knowledge comes to be.

The real point about the Prussian system was not that it was free of errors, but that the general staff carefully studied its past mistakes and readjusted training, organization, and weapons accordingly.

To collect was not simply to accumulate but to generate knowledge and inter-connection between things.

It takes courage to fight biases and oppressive regimes, but it takes even greater courage to admit ignorance and venture into the unknown.

In preparation for this book, I read everything that I could find on the subject — everything from newspaper columns, magazine articles, records of the family courts, the writings of the old philosophers and the new psychologists. In addition, I hired a trained researcher to spend 1.5 years in various libraries reading everything I had missed. We read biographies. We read the life stories of all great leaders from Julius Caesar to Thomas Edison. I recall that we read over 100 biographies of Teddy Roosevelt alone.

Men must be taught as if you taught them not. And things unknown proposed as things forgot.

Michelangelo’s deep knowledge of anatomy enabled him to produce almost tactile effect in his life drawing. He shows that there are no real hollows in the human form, merely dips between the mounds of muscles. This is worth noting by any student drawing from life and will give more conviction to your drawing.

If you want to make your work convincing, look at the created world around you. Don’t view it exclusively through the medium of photography, television or video. Personal experience will lend a power and knowledge to your work that not only informs you as the artist but also the reviewers of your work. This is very apparent when you look at the work of an artist who has actually experienced at first hand the things he draws. It is also pretty clear to the observant viewer when an artist is only working from second-hand sources, because their drawings tend to lack power.

Each fighter, to become great, he said, needs to have someone better that they can learn from, someone lesser who they can teach, and someone equal that they can challenge themselves against.

The purpose of Shamrock’s formula is simple: to get real and continuous feedback about what they know and what they don’t know from every angle. If purges out the ego that puffs us up, the fear that makes us doubt ourselves, and any laziness that might make us want to coast. “False ideas about yourself destroy you. For me, I always stay a student. That’s what martial arts are about, and you have to use that humility as a tool.”

An amateur is defensive. The professional finds learning to be enjoyable; they like being challenged and humbled, and engage in education as an ongoing and endless process.

Correcting our flaws means, first of all, managing the task of actually seeing them. When challenged, we often respond by refusing to accept our flaws exist at all. People accuse us of being “in denial.” Of course we are: we literally can’t see them. When we can see them, they all too often appear not as flaws at all, but as virtues.

Identifying and accepting our flaws, and then changing who we are, means breaking down the very structure of our reality before rebuilding it in a new and improve form. This is not easy. It’s painful and disturbing. We’ll often fight with all we have to resist this kind of profound change. This is why we call those how manage it “heroes.”

Since birth, it’s been in a state of heightened plasticity that has enabled it to build its models. But now it becomes less plastic and harder to change. Most of the peculiarities and mistakes that make us who we are have become incorporated into its models. Our flaws and peculiarities have become who we are. Our minds have been made up.

From being model-builders we become model defenders. Now that the flawed self with its flawed model of the world has been constructed, the brain starts to protect it. When we encounter evidence that it might be wrong, because other people aren’t perceiving the world as we do, we can find it deeply disturbing.

Even in these theoretical pieces, however, Mao insists on the primacy of experience over book-learning, advancing one of his basic positions that “All genuine knowledge originates in experience” and that one must “discover truth through practice and through practice again verify the truth.”

The way I see it, a business education should be as much vocational as academic. Teaching business is like teaching medicine: theory is important, but hands-on practice is essential. Medical students learn from cadavers and hospital rounds; business students learn from case studies - a method pioneered more than a century ago by Harvard Business School that engages students in analyzing complex real-life dilemmas faced by actual companies and executives. Tsinghua’s method of instruction, like too much of China’s educational system, relied on rote learning - lectures, memorization, and written tests - and did not foster innovative, interactive approaches to problem solving. Students needed to know how to work as part of a team - a critical lesson in China, where getting people to work collaboratively can be difficult. At Harvard Business School we weren’t told the “right” or “wrong” answers but were encouraged to think for ourselves and defend our ideas before our peers and our at-times-intimidating professors. This helped hone my analytical skills and confidence, and I believed a similar approach would help Chinese students.

More worrying, the people who most need education to overcome cognitive biases are the least likely to read articles and books designed to be helpful. “For a year, don’t read anything defending your current view.”

Even Xu acknowledged that he had little knowledge of the challenges of fighting in a tropical, wooded mountain environment. They quickly realized that their combat experience in northern China did not apply to the battleground in Vietnam.

Along the way, he established a reputation as an autodidact who, despite having ended his formal education at the age of 17, read every business and management book he could lay his hands on.

It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows.

Knowledge is structured like a tree, with core beliefs forming the trunk and specialized knowledge as leaves.
Reinforcement through repetition is crucial for strengthening knowledge branches.
Adding new knowledge is challenging as it needs to be connected to existing branches.
Falling behind in learning can create a significant gap between existing knowledge and new information.
Expertise can hinder effective explanations due to difficulty understanding the beginner’s branch system.
Effective communication involves understanding and adapting to the audience’s knowledge tree.
Innovation is better received when it strikes a balance between being advanced and acceptable, connecting to familiar knowledge.

Adding new leaves to the tree of knowledge is the primary way we learn, but reinforcement through repetition is essential for strengthening branches.

Effective communication involves understanding the audience’s knowledge tree and adapting the message accordingly.

New knowledge always grows first as leaves. It’s always at the edge of what you know, and it’s flimsy when you first learn it. This is why, early on, when you’re learning something new, you’re not too sure about it.

Trees go from a seed to a small tree within weeks. Impressive. As they grow, however, their growth rate slows down. You can’t double your size every few weeks forever. The older they are, the slower they grow, until they don’t grow at all. They remain fixed in time. Nothing changes.

Knowledge is like that. It grows super fast early on. The bigger its branch structure, the more information it can absorb. But at some point, the structure is too complex, too stiff, too sclerotic, too ankylosed. It doesn’t allow for new data, new learning.

“If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.” Learning is an active process. We learn by doing. So, if you desire to master the principles in this book, do something about them. Apply these rules at every opportunity. If you don’t you will forget them quickly. Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.

Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.

First, you know it. Then, you understand it. Then, you can explain it. Then, you can feel it. Finally, you are it.

Locke also puts a heavy emphasis on the adequacy of our knowledge for our practical purposes: if what seems to be real is real enough to be a reliable source of pleasure and pain, then you can be as certain that it exists as you need to be. For Locke, knowledge is above all a tool for the pursuit of happiness.

Knowledge is not our only guide. Locke argued that many of our actions are governed not by knowledge but by something weaker, namely judgment. Judgment doesn’t give us certainty, but it allows us to hold that a claim is probably true — and in many cases, the probability is high enough that we can treat it as practically certain. What we believe on the testimony of others is always a matter of judgment rather than knowledge.

Japanese Ministry of Education was established in 1871; by the turn of the century it claimed a 100% literary ratio.

I think a lot of entrepreneurs start with a lot of insecurity about what they don’t know. What you want is not to be paralyzed by it, but to harness it — to use that nervous energy to learn and make yourself better. You’ve got to keep your personal learning curve ahead of the company’s growth curve.

As you add to your knowledge of your domain, keep in mind that your objective is not just to amass information. You are building a mental model — a picture of how your domain functions as a system.

A mental model forms the framework on which you hang your growing knowledge of your domain.

A mental model helps you distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information.

Most important, a mental model enables you to project what will happen next.

Creativity is connecting things. Connections become enshrined, narrowed, exhausted, prohibited within a discipline or specialty. Fresh eyes approach a new field with deep curiosity and focused looting — to quarry, make new connections, do whatever it takes, seek the useful and relevant, learn afresh not merely confirm prior views.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

For pre-teens, the key differentiating behaviour is pitifully simple: reading. The children of the educated class read; the children of the less-educated class don’t. Reading opens doors and the children of the elite go through them. School is supposed to fix this problem; children are taught the mechanics of how to read, but this is very different from acquiring a habit of reading.

This is a knowledge-intensive business, not a capital-intensive one.

So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it — perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the new that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race. It is good that the old should resist the young, and that the young should prod the old; out of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classes, comes a creative tensile strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic unity and movement of the whole.

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again. So our finest contemporary achievement is our unprecedented expenditure of wealth and toil in the provision of higher education for all.

Consider education not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor merely the necessary preparation of the individual to earn his keep in the world, but as the transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and aesthetic heritage as fully as possible to as many as possible, for the enlargement of man’s understanding, control, embellishment, and enjoyment of life.

Nothing learned from a book is worth anything until it is used and verified in life; only then does it begin to affect behavior and desire. It is Life that educates, and perhaps love more than anything else in life.

So I make no apology for resorting again to my panacea — extended and expanded education.

The cynic will smile at this old-fashioned, 18th-century trust in education. But what is the alternative? It is a police state. It is a hundred years of internal hatred, social disorder, uncontrollable violence, and urban decay, just when the breakdown of geographical and communicative barriers subjects America to mounting, multiplying challenges by growing states and alien ideas. Do we not owe it to conscience and justice that every person — irrespective of their race — has full and equal opportunity to enter into the promise of American life?

Intellect is the capacity for acquiring and accumulating ideas; intelligence is the ability to use experience — even the experience of others — for the clarification and attainment of one’s end. A man may have a million ideas and yet be a criminal or a fool; it is difficult for an intelligent person to be either.

Therefore I feel that we of this generation give too much time to news about the transient present, too little to the living past. We are choked with news, and starved of history. We know a thousand items about the day or yesterday, we learn the events and troubles and heartbreaks of a hundred peoples, the policies and pretensions of a dozen capitals, the victories and defeats of causes, armies, and athletic teams — but how, without history, can we understand these events, discriminate their significance, sift out the large from the small, see the basic currents underlying surface movements and changes, and foresee the result sufficiently to guard against fatal error or the souring of unreasonable hopes?

A wise man can learn from other men’s experience; a fool cannot learn from his own. History is other men’s experience, in countless number through many centuries.

Often, my students gain a better understanding of what they’re supposed to do by looking in the mirror rather than by watching themselves on videotape.

I learned a long time ago that if you learn from your mistakes, things usually get better. But if you continue to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, things get pretty bad. Reliable feedback is the key to efficient learning. The basic notion is that if you don’t know right from wrong in practice, there is no way you can improve.

And while I don’t want to discourage you, I do want you to appreciate that it’s far easier to improve your putting (or any part of your game) if you have a knowledgeable instructor by your side as you practice. Without a trained set of eyes watching you, it’s up to you to learn what needs to change and what can be left alone. Then, once you know what to work on, you have to work carefully and accurately with feedback. This is usually is the most difficult part of learning to putt better — deciding what to leave alone, what to improve, and how to improve it.

The thing to do, when you don’t know, is not to bluff and not to freeze, but to learn. The way you learn is by experiment — by trial and error, error, error.

This is all for now, but I never stop thinking about this shit. I wake up every day thinking about it and I go to sleep every night thinking about it. I have a lot to share but one thing I’ve learned is that to really teach someone the student needs to ask for help. I always have ideas that I think will help you but I am not fond of talking just for the sake of talking. Talking doesn’t teach anyone anything, listening does and someone will only listen when they want to.

What are some of the ways to become an interesting person?

Keep learning, keep seeking out new experiences.

Big picture: engage in the world with a mindset of curiosity, rather than judgment.

While I can try to explain to you how to do it, show you videos, and suggest different methods for getting started, I could never fully explain how to achieve balance. That you learn only by doing - by allowing your conscious and subconscious mind to figure it out while in motion. With certain jobs, there isn’t any other way to learn than by doing - by putting yourself in the unstable place and then feeling your way.

For most of us, failure comes with baggage - a lot of baggage - that I believe is traced directly back to our days in school. From a very early age, the message is drilled into our heads: Failure is bad; failure means you didn’t study or prepare; failure means you slacked off or - worse! - aren’t smart enough to begin with. Thus, failure is something to be ashamed of. This perception lives on long into adulthood, even in people who have learned to parrot the oft-repeated arguments about the upside of failure. How many articles have you read on that topic alone? And yet, even as they nod their heads in agreement, many readers of those articles still have the emotional reaction that they had as children. They just can’t help it. That early experience of shame is too deep-seated to erase. All the time in my work, I see people resist and reject failure and try mightily to avoid it, because regardless of what we say, mistakes feel embarrassing. There is a visceral reaction to failure: it hurts.

We need to think differently about failure. I’m not the first one to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth. But the way most people interpret this assertion is that mistakes are a necessary evil. Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality). And yet, even when I say that embracing failure is an important part of learning, I also acknowledging this truth is not enough. That’s because failure is painful, and our feelings about this pain tend to screw up our understanding of its worth. To disentangle the goods and the bad parts of failure, we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.

He thinks of failure like learning to ride a bike; it isn’t conceivable that you would learn to do this without making mistakes - without toppling over a few times. “Get a bike that’s as low to the ground as you can find, put on elbow and knee pads so you’re not afraid of falling, and go,” he says. If you apply this mindset to everything new you attempt, you can begin to subvert the negative connotation associated with making mistakes. Say Andrew: “You wouldn’t say to somebody who is first learning to play the guitar, ‘You better think really hard about where you put your fingers on the guitar neck before you strum, because you only get to strum once, and that’s it. And if you get that wrong, we’re going to move on.’ That’s no way to learn, is it?”

Even though people in our offices have heard Andrew say this repeatedly, many still miss the point. They think it means accepting failure with dignity and move on. The better, more subtle interpretation is that failure is a manifestation of learning and exploration. If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it. And, for leaders especially, this strategy - trying to avoid failure by out-thinking it - dooms you to fail. As Andrew puts it, “Moving things forward allows the team you are leading to feel like, ‘Oh, I’m on a boat that is actually going towards land.’ As opposed to having a leader who says, ‘I’m still not sure. I’m going to look at the map a little bit more, and we’re just going to float here, and all of you stop rowing until I figure this out.’ And then weeks go by, and morale plummets, and failure becomes self-fulfilling. People begin to treat the captain with doubt and trepidation. Even if their doubts aren’t fully justified, you’ve become what they see you as because of your inability to move.”

For many, 20 years of experience is really 1 year of experience repeated 20 times.

Our imagination and visual representation of the golf swing is our biggest asset to improvement. I believe that the 1st step to create massive change in a golfer’s technique is to give the concept of change in a clear visual way; with a clear concept the brain can slowly move towards its goal.

In order to become proficient at achieving the correct stance and posture at address, I highly recommend, if not insist, that you use a mirror to check your positioning. Throughout the entire golf learning process, you will find yourself continually misled and betrayed by your swing thoughts and feelings.

This move is best rehearsed in front of a mirror because the feelings can be very deceptive during the initial learning stage.

Space out your studying: Cramming is not an effective way to learn. It’s better to spread out your study sessions over time to allow for better information retention.

Test yourself: Regularly test yourself on the material you’re learning. This will help you identify areas where you need more review and improve your recall.

I said, “What’s the one thing I should do? What’s the one thing that will make me a better player?” Each one of them said the same damn thing. They said, “Go play and watch the best players out there.”

Don’t be afraid of sounding stupid. Again, your question won’t be anything the pro hasn’t heard a million times before.

If you want to change something, first increase your awareness of the way it is.

Besides the general tendency of the ego to resist being told what to do, there are 5 basic ways in which do-instructions engender doubt:

The communication gap between teacher and student. The student doubts that he even intellectually understands what the instructor means. Teachers are notorious for developing their own jargon and assuming that everyone speaks the same language.
The internal communication problem with the student. Intellectually the student may understand, but his body doesn’t. Because the mind understands, the student assumes that he should be able to make his body conform. But unless the body can associate that instruction with an already familiar action, it can’t conform.
The student may understand intellectually and his body may understand, but the action called for is outside his present capability.
In many cases do-instructions given by teachers to students and by students to themselves are just plain incorrect.
Doubt arises when one tries to conform to too many instructions at a time.

My experience is that attending courses helps but not as much as lessons tailored for you. You have written a memo. Somebody runs through it and points out your errors: “You could have said it this way.” “This is an error.” “This can be broken into 2 sentences.” In other words, superiors and peers and even subordinates who spot errors should be encouraged to point them out.

You shouldn’t be upset if you find out that you’re bad at something - you should be happy that you found out, because knowing that and dealing with it will improve your chances of getting what you want.

When learning, there are times in which you are focused and times in which you allow your mind to wander. This unfocused, or diffused, mode is just as valuable as the focused mode in allowing your brain to learn something. So — take breaks, meditate, think about other things, and give yourself plenty of time in both modes.

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

Preview: The student looks at the topic to be learned by glancing over the major headings or the points in the syllabus.
Question: The student formulates questions to be answered following a thorough examination of the topic.
Read: The student reads through related material, focusing on the information that best relates to the question formulated earlier.
Summary: The student summarizes the topic, bringing his or her own understanding of the process.
Test: The student answers the questions drafted earlier, avoiding adding any questions that might distract or change the subject.

Just sit down and start chewing on it.

Don’t think: I should finish this within X days/weeks/years.

Read it sentence by sentence, pausing whenever you encounter anything you do not understand, and then apply all means at your disposal to understand it (including asking others, letting your subconscious do its work, etc.). Do not set any time limits for this, but don’t give up on it either, but whenever you are stuck and wrestling with something say to yourself: this is precisely why I have embarked on this enterprise. It is only when we are stuck that we have a real opportunity to learn something.

I think that it is also important to be willing not to read things sentence by sentence, but to skip results, proofs, sections, … without guilt. I have known graduate students who could not make serious progress because they would not even try to read Section 2 of a paper until they understood every detail in Section 1. This is in some sense admirable, but in another sense it means that you never have a chance to build up an intuition that can be assisted by later rigour, and are forced instead always to build up the rigor first and hope that the intuition comes along with it.

If the paper is really that important, then chances are there are other people who have studied it carefully and have said useful things about it. So start by reading as much commentary as you can get your hands on (and talking to experts, if they are willing to give you their time). This should help you get some sense of the overall structure of the argument. Perhaps some parts are simply computational and there’s not much for you to do other than verify that the argument is formally correct. But there may be parts which are driven by some key ideas that aren’t articulated explicitly in the paper itself, but that have been pointed out by commentators. In these cases, it’s important to know what the guiding ideas are when you’re struggling through the argument.