Archives for July 2024

Introduction: Roger vs. Tiger

• Successful individuals often have a “sampling period” where they explore various activities before specializing: Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period.” 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.
• Highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident – a dangerous combination.
• Learning is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.
• Overspecialization can lead to collective tragedy even when every individual separately takes the most reasonable course of action.
• “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” problem.
• The challenge is balancing breadth and specialization in a world that rewards hyper-specialization

Chapter 1: The Cult of the Head Start

• The bestseller Talent Is Overrated used the Polgar sisters and Tiger Woods as proof that a head start in deliberate practice is the key to success
• When Kahneman probed the judgments of highly trained experts, he often found that experience had not helped at all. Even worse, it frequently bred confidence but not skill.
• Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depending entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.
• In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.
• There is a saying that “chess is 99 percent tactics.” Tactics are short combinations of moves that players use to get an immediate advantage on the board. When players study all those patterns, they are mastering tactics. Bigger – picture planning in chess — how to manage the little battles to win the war — is called strategy. As Susan Polgar has written, “you can get a lot further by being very good in tactics” — that is, knowing a lot of patterns — “and have only a basic understanding of strategy.”
• Rather than struggling to remember the location of every individual pawn, bishop, and rook, the brains of elite players grouped pieces into a smaller number of meaningful chunks based on familiar patterns.
• Because groups twenty patterns meaningful are words easier into chunk remember really sentence familiar can to you much in a. Okay, now try again: Twenty words are really much easier to remember in a meaningful sentence because you can chunk familiar patterns into groups.
• Those are the same twenty pieces of information, but over the course of your life, you’ve learned patterns of words that allow you to instantly make sense of the second arrangement, and to remember it much more easily.
• Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.
• “AI systems are like savants.” They need stable structures and narrow worlds.
• When we know the rules and answers, and they don’t change over time — chess, golf, playing classical music – an argument can be made for savant-like hyperspecialized practice from day one.
• As psychologist and prominent creative researcher Dean Keith Simonton observed, “rather than obsessively focus [ ing] on a narrow topic,” creative achievers tend to have broad interests. “This breadth often supports insights that cannot be attributed to domain-specific expertise alone.”

Chapter 2: How the Wicked World Was Made

• “Even the best universities aren’t developing critical intelligence,” he told me. “They aren’t giving students the tools to analyze the modern world, except in their area of specialization. Their education is too narrow.”
• They (students) must be taught to think before being taught what to think about.
• The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.

Chapter 3: When Less of the Same Is More

• Early, diverse experiences lead to better long-term performance and creativity
• The psychologists highlighted the variety of paths to excellence, but the most common was a sampling period, often lightly structured with some lessons and a breadth of instruments and activities, followed only later by a narrowing of focus, increased structure, and an explosion of practice volume.
• Improv masters and creative individuals benefit from broad, unstructured learning before formal training: they dive in and imitate and improvise first, learn the formal rules later. “At the beginning, your mom didn’t give you a book and said, ‘This is a noun, this is a pronoun, this is a dangling participle,’” Cecchini told me. “You acquired the sound first. And then you acquire the grammar later.”
• Breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.
• In offering advice to parents, psychologist Adam Grant noted that creativity may be difficult to nurture, but it is easy to thwart. He pointed to a study that found an average of six household rules for typical children, compared to one in households with extremely creative children. The parents with creative children made their opinions known after their kids did something they didn’t like, they just did not proscribe it beforehand. Their households were low on prior restraint.
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Chapter 4: Learning, Fast and Slow

• Methods on learning are “using procedures” vs. “making connections”
• “Using procedures” is practicing something that was just learned.
•  “Making connections” connect students to a broader concept, rather than just a procedure. That was more like when the teacher asked students why the formula works or made them try to figure out if it works for absolutely any polygon from a triangle to an octagon.
• Rather than letting students grapple with some confusion, teachers often responded to their solicitations with hints – giving that morphed a making-connections problem into a using-procedures one.
• With excessive hint-giving, it will “produce misleadingly high levels of immediate mastery that will not survive the passage of substantial periods of time.”
• But for learning that is both durable (it sticks) and flexible (it can be applied broadly), fast and easy is precisely the problem.
• The more confident a learner is of their wrong answer, the better the information sticks when they subsequently learn the right answer. Tolerating big mistakes can create the best learning opportunities.
• That structure makes intuitive sense, but it forgoes another important desirable difficulty: “spacing,” or distributed practice. It is what it sounds like – leaving time between practice sessions for the same material.
• Short-term rehearsal gave purely short-term benefits.
• If you are doing too well when you test yourself, the simple antidote is to wait longer before practicing the same material again, so that the test will be more difficult when you do. Frustration is not a sign you are not learning, but ease is.
• In 2007, the U.S. Department of Education published a report by six scientists and an accomplished teacher who were asked to identify learning strategies that truly have scientific backing. Spacing, testing, and using making-connections questions were on the extremely short list. All three impair performance in the short term.
• Whether the task is mental or physical, interleaving improves the ability to match the right strategy to a problem.
• Problem solvers spend mental energy figuring out what type of problem they are facing before matching a strategy to it, rather than jumping in with memorized procedures.
• Learning deeply means learning slowly.
• Knowledge with enduring utility must be very flexible, composed of mental schemes that can be matched to new problems. The virtual naval officers in the air defense simulation and the math students who engaged in interleaved practice were learning to recognize deep structural commonalities in types of problems. They could not rely on the same type of problem repeating, so they had to identify underlying conceptual connections in simulated battle threats, or math problems, that they had never actually seen before. They then matched a strategy to each new problem. When a knowledge structure is so flexible that it can be applied effectively even in new domains or extremely novel situations, it is called “far transfer.”

Chapter 5: Thinking Outside Experience

• “Inside view” – make judgments based narrowly on the details of a particular project that are right in front of us.
• Our natural inclination to take the inside view can be defeated by following analogies to the “outside view.” The outside view probes for deep structural similarities to the current problem in different ones.
• The outside view is deeply counterintuitive because it requires a decision maker to ignore unique surface features of the current project, on which they are the expert, and instead look outside for structurally similar analogies. It requires a mindset switch from narrow to broad.
• Successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it.
• For the best performers, they wrote, problem solving “begins with the typing of the problem.”

Chapter 6: The Trouble with Too Much Grit

• “Match quality” is a term economists use to describe the degree of fit between the work someone does and who they are—their abilities and proclivities.
• If we treated careers more like dating, nobody would settle down so quickly.
• According to Levitt, the study suggested that “admonitions such as ‘winners never quit and quitters never win,’ while well-meaning, may actually be extremely poor advice.”
• Godin argued that “winners” – he generally meant individuals who reach the apex of their domain – quit fast and often when they detect that a plan is not the best fit, and do not feel bad about it.
• The important trick, he said, is staying attuned to whether switching is simply a failure of perseverance, or astute recognition that better matches are available.
• In the wider world of work, finding a goal with high match quality in the first place is the greater challenge, and persistence for the sake of persistence can get in the way.
• The trouble, Godin noted, is that humans are bedeviled by the “sunk cost fallacy.” Having invested time or money in something, we are loath to leave it, because that would mean we have wasted our time or money, even though it is already gone.

Chapter 7: Flirting with Your Possible Selves

• Dark horses were on the hunt for match quality. “They never look around and say, ‘Oh, I’m going to fall behind, these people started earlier and have more than me at a younger age,’” Ogas told me. “They focused on, ‘Here’s who I am at the moment, here are my motivations, here’s what I’ve found I like to do, here’s what I’d like to learn, and here are the opportunities. Which of these is the best match right now? And maybe a year from now I’ll switch because I’ll find something better.’”
• “You have to carry a big basket to bring something home.” She repeats that phrase today, to mean that a mind kept wide open will take something from every new experience.
• Instead of asking whether someone is gritty, we should ask when they are. “If you get someone into a context that suits them,” Ogas said, “they’ll more likely work hard, and it will look like grit from the outside.”
• Ibarra concluded that we maximize match quality throughout life by sampling activities, social groups, contexts, jobs, careers, and then reflecting and adjusting our personal narratives. And repeat.
• Ibarra’s advice is nearly identical to the short-term planning the Dark Horse researchers documented. Rather than expecting an ironclad a priori answer to “Who do I really want to become?” their work indicated that it is better to be a scientist of yourself, asking smaller questions that can actually be tested—”Which among my various possible selves should I start to explore now? How can I do that?” Be a flirt with your possible selves.* Rather than a grand plan, find experiments that can be undertaken quickly. “Test-and-learn,” Ibarra told me, “Not plan-and-implement.”
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Chapter 9: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology

• As with the molecular biology groups Kevin Dunbar studied that used analogical thinking to solve problems, when the going got uncertain, breadth made the difference.
• Taylor and Greve suggested that “individuals are capable of more creative integration of diverse experiences than teams are.” They titled their study Superman or the Fantastic Four? “When seeking innovation in knowledge – based industries,” they wrote, “it is best to find one ‘super’ individual. If no individual with the necessary combination of diverse knowledge is available, one should form a ‘fantastic’ team.”
• Their findings about who these people are should sound familiar by now : “high tolerance for ambiguity” ; “systems thinkers” ; “additional technical knowledge from peripheral domains” ; “repurposing what is already available” ; “adept at using analogous domains for finding inputs to the invention process” ; “ability to connect disparate pieces of information in new ways” ; “synthesizing information from many different sources” ; “they appear to flit among ideas” ; “broad range of interests” ; “they read more (and more broadly) than other technologists and have a wider range of outside interests” ; “need to learn significantly across multiple domains” ; “Serial innovators also need to communicate with various individuals with technical expertise outside of their own domain.”
• Facing uncertain environments and hard problems, breadth of experience is invaluable. Facing easy problems, narrow specialization can be remarkably efficient. The problem is that we often expect the hyperspecialist, because of their expertise in a narrow area, to magically be able to extend their skill to wicked problems. The results can be disastrous.

Chapter 10: Fooled by Expertise

• Narrow-view hedgehogs: “know one big thing,”
• Integrator foxes: “know many little things.”
• Narrow specialists often fail in forecasting and complex problem-solving. “Often if you’re too much of an insider, it’s hard to get good perspective.”
• A hallmark of interactions on the best teams is “active open-mindedness.”
• The best forecasters view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing. Their aim is not to convince their teammates of their own expertise, but to encourage their teammates to help them falsify their own notions.
• 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. Foxes see complexity in what others mistake for simple cause and effect. They understand that most cause-and-effect relationships are probabilistic, not deterministic. There are unknowns, and luck, and even when history apparently repeats, it does not do so precisely. They recognize that they are operating in the very definition of a wicked learning environment, where it can be very hard to learn, from either wins or losses
• An hour of basic training in foxy habits improved accuracy.
• Another aspect of the forecaster training involved ferociously dissecting prediction results in search of lessons, especially for predictions that turned out bad.

Chapter 11: Learning to Drop Your Familiar Tools

• The Mann Gulch tragedy: A wildfire broke out and the Firefighters Crew foreman yelled at the men to drop their tools. Two did so immediately and sprinted over the ridge to safety. Others ran with their tools and were caught by the flames. Thirteen firefighters died.
• Two separate analyses concluded that the crew would have made it out intact had they simply dropped their tools and run from the start.
• “Dropping one’s tools is a proxy for unlearning, for adaptation, for flexibility,” Weick wrote. “It is the very unwillingness of people to drop their tools that turns some of these dramas into tragedies.”
• Rather than adapting to unfamiliar situations, experienced groups became rigid under pressure and “regress to what they know best.” They behaved like a collective hedgehog, bending an unfamiliar situation to a familiar comfort zone, as if trying to will it to become something they actually had experienced before.
• For wildland firefighters, their tools are what they know best. As Maclean succinctly put it, “When a firefighter is told to drop his firefighting tools, he is told to forget he is a firefighter.”
• Dropping familiar tools is particularly difficult for experienced professionals who rely on what Weick called overlearned behavior. That is, they have done the same thing in response to the same challenges over and over until the behavior has become so automatic that they no longer even recognize it as a situation – specific tool.
• It’s often the case in group meetings where the person who made the PowerPoint slides puts data in front of you, and we often just use the data people put in front of us. I would argue we don’t do a good job of saying, ‘Is this the data that we want to make the decision we need to make?’”
• “I told them I expect disagreement with my decisions at the time we’re trying to make decisions, and that’s a sign of organizational health”

Conclusion: Expanding Your Range

• One sentence of advice: Don’t feel behind.
• Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you.
• Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind doesn’t help.
• Finally, remember that there is nothing inherently wrong with specialization.

Afterword to the Paperback Edition

• Parenting Advice: First, I’d like to facilitate a sampling period for my kid — to expose him to a variety of experiences and possibilities. (A 2019 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development [ OECD] report found that children already significantly narrow their ideas of possible careers by age seven.
• ‘Mom, why do we make “What I want to be when I grow up” signs on the first day of school? We should make “Top 5 things I want to learn about this year” signs.’
• Specialization has benefits, she added, “But before specialization comes sampling, the exploration of possibilities that, really, you cannot know anything about until you try them . . .. Don’t confuse the healthy development of a work ethic with the premature commitment to a singular passion.”
• As Woods said in 2000: “To this day, my dad has never asked me to go play golf. I asked him. It’s the child’s desire to play those matters, not the parent’s desire to have the child play.”