Too busy to read?

Perhaps your school allows you to select a foreign language: Do you want to install a software module into your brain that enables you to speak French, or one that enables you to speak Spanish? Do you want to learn to play tennis or chess? Do you want to study to become a chef, a lawyer or a pharmacist?

Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know. The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to your prior knowledge, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later.

Our failures to update from interacting with reality spring primarily from three things: not having the right perspective or vantage point, ego-induced denial, and distance from the consequences of our decisions.

When we encounter new information and want to learn from it, we should force ourselves to do something with the data. It's not enough for your bathroom scale to send daily updates to an app on your phone. If you want to lose weight, force yourself to plot those measurements on graph paper and you'll be more likely to choose a salad over a hamburger at lunch. If you read a book filled with new ideas, force yourself to put it down and explain the concepts to someone sitting next to you and you'll be more likely to apply them in your life. When you find a new piece of information, force yourself to engage with it, to use it in an experiment or describe it to a friend--and then you will start building the mental folders that are at the core of learning.

I've always thought of myself as an 80 percenter. __I like to throw myself passionately into a sport or activity until I reach about an 80 percent proficiency level. To go beyond that requires an obsession and degree of specialization that doesn't appeal to me__. Once I reach that 80 percent level I like to go off and do something totally different; that probably explains the diversity of the Patagonia product line--and why our versatile, multifaceted clothes are the most successful.

Free recall. Wenderoth assigns her students to spend ten minutes at the end of each day sitting with a blank piece of paper on which to write everything they can remember from class. They must sit for ten minutes.

One decision that has made a tremendous difference in the quality of my life is that at an early age I began to link incredible pleasure to learning. I realized that discovering ideas and strategies that could help me to shape human behavior and emotion could give me virtually everything I wanted in my life.

Radical open-mindedness and radical transparency are invaluable for rapid learning and effective change. Learning is the product of a continuous real-time feedback loop in which we make decisions, see their outcomes, and improve our understanding of reality as a result. Being radically open-minded enhances the efficiency of those feedback loops, because it makes what you are doing, and why, so clear to yourself and others that there can't be any misunderstandings.

Learning would be not so much about saving information, like on a hard disk, but about building connections and bridges between pieces of information to circumvent the inhibition mechanism in the right moment. It is about making sure that the right "cues" trigger the right memory, about how we can think strategically to remember the most useful information when we need it.

If we practice learning not as a pure accumulation of knowledge, but as an attempt to build up a latticework of theories and mental models to which information can stick, we enter a virtuous circle where learning facilitates learning.

Only the actual attempt to retrieve information will clearly show us if we have learned something or not.

We learn something not only when we connect it to prior knowledge and try to understand its broader implications (elaboration), but also when we try to retrieve it at different times (spacing) in different contexts (variation), ideally with the help of chance (contextual interference) and with a deliberate effort (retrieval).

Focus and concentration are crucial, I wrote, so shorter training sessions with clearer goals are the best way to develop new skills faster. It is better to train at 100 percent effort for less time than at 70 percent effort for a longer period. Once you find you can no longer focus effectively, end the session. And make sure you get enough sleep so that you can train with maximum concentration.

Practice is the best of all instructors. --PUBLILIUS

While he was reading, had he thought of converting the main points of the text into a series of questions and then later tried to answer them while he was studying? Had he at least rephrased the main ideas in his own words as he read? Had he tried to relate them to what he already knew? Had he looked for examples outside the text?

This ability of Life 2.0 to design its software enables it to be much smarter than Life 1.0. High intelligence requires both lots of hardware (made of atoms) and lots of software (made of bits). The fact that most of our human hardware is added after birth (through growth) is useful, since our ultimate size isn't limited by the width of our mom's birth canal.

levels of processing: Items that are processed at a deeper level, with more active involvement by us, tend to become more strongly encoded in memory. This is why passive learning through textbooks and lectures is not nearly as effective a way to learn new material as is figuring it out for yourself, a method called peer instruction that is being introduced into classrooms with great success

The redesigned physics class at the University of British Columbia offers a road map for redesigning instruction according to deliberate-practice principles: Begin by identifying what students should learn how to do. The objectives should be skills, not knowledge. In figuring out the particular way students should learn a skill, examine how the experts do it. In particular, understand as much as possible about the mental representations that experts use, and teach the skill so as to help students develop similar mental representations. This will involve teaching the skill step by step, with each step designed to keep students out of their comfort zone but not so far out that they cannot master that step. Then give plenty of repetition and feedback; the regular cycle of try, fail, get feedback, try again, and so on is how the students will build their mental representations.

learning: we mean acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily available from memory so you can make sense of future problems and opportunities.

it's easy to feel illiterate in the twenty-first century with the constant pressure to learn, unlearn and relearn. Learning itself is not difficult - each of us has our own learning style that we use on a daily basis as we read instruction manuals, explore new processes, situations and challenges. The real problem starts when you have to unlearn something first. You can become so fixated on what you already know that it can be hard to let go of the old to let in the new. Every day we are being challenged to unlearn what we thought we knew or how we thought things should be done.

We acquire more information through vision than through all the other senses combined.

Learning, thinking and writing should not be about accumulating knowledge, but about becoming a different person with a different way of thinking. This is done by questioning one's own thinking routines in the light of new experiences and facts.

Men are born soft and supple; dead, they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail. --LAO TZU

bad times coupled with good reflections provide some of the best lessons, and not just about business but also about relationships. One has many more supposed friends when one is up than when one is down, because most people like to be with winners and shun losers. True friends are the opposite.

TO ABSORB DATA BETTER: When we encounter new information, we should force ourselves to do something with it. Write yourself a note explaining what you just learned, or figure out a small way to test an idea, or graph a series of data points onto a piece of paper, or force yourself to explain an idea to a friend. Every choice we make in life is an experiment--the trick is getting ourselves to see the data embedded in those decisions, and then to use it somehow so we learn from it.

Learning is deeper and more durable when it's effortful. Learning that's easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.

we also apply two of the primary learning principles in the book: spaced repetition of key ideas, and the interleaving of different but related topics. If learners spread out their study of a topic, returning to it periodically over time, they remember it better. Similarly, if they interleave the study of different topics, they learn each better than if they had studied them one at a time in sequence.

Thus, one of the most important things you can do for your success is to find a good teacher and work with him or her.

Learning from your mistakes and things that cause you pain is invaluable. The greatest lessons can come from the lowest moments in your life.

When understanding is separated from reality, we lose our powers. Understanding must constantly be tested against reality and updated accordingly.

Padmasree Warrior, Cisco's chief technology officer, was asked by The Huffington Post, "What's the most important lesson you've learned from a mistake you've made in the past?" She responded, "I said no to a lot of opportunities when I was just starting out because I thought, 'That's not what my degree is in' or 'I don't know about that domain.' In retrospect, at a certain point it's your ability to learn quickly and contribute quickly that matters. One of the things I tell people these days is that there is no perfect fit when you're looking for the next big thing to do. You have to take opportunities and make an opportunity fit for you, rather than the other way around. The ability to learn is the most important quality a leader can have."13 Virginia Rometty,

If you take a human from a remote tribe where no one has ever heard of a thing called swimming, and you throw him in the ocean, he'll probably panic and drown. Swimming isn't entirely natural to humans. We need to learn it. Luckily, we humans learn to swim fairly easily with a little practice.

It's particularly important to query a prospective teacher about practice exercises. No matter how many sessions a week you have with an instructor, most of your effort will be spent practicing by yourself, doing exercises that your teacher has assigned. You want a teacher who will guide you as much as possible for these sessions, not only telling you what to practice on but what particular aspects you should be paying attention to, what errors you have been making, and how to recognize good performance. Remember: one of the most important things a teacher can do is to help you develop your own mental representations so that you can monitor and correct your own performance.

By observing and learning from successful people you can zoom up the learning curve and more easily achieve your goals.

we now understand that there's no such thing as a predefined ability. The brain is adaptable, and training can create skills -- such as perfect pitch -- that did not exist before. This is a game changer, because learning now becomes a way of creating abilities rather than of bringing people to the point where they can take advantage of their innate ones. In this new world it no longer makes sense to think of people as born with fixed reserves of potential; instead, potential is an expandable vessel, shaped by the various things we do throughout our lives.

"Manipulations such as variation, spacing, introducing contextual interference, and using tests, rather than presentations, as learning events, all share the property that they appear during the learning process to impede learning, but they then often enhance learning as measured by post-training tests of retention and transfer.

Learning everything on your own is costly and slow. You are one person. Learning from the experiences of others is much more productive.

All new learning requires a foundation of prior knowledge. You need to know how to land a twin engine plane on two engines before you can learn to land it on one. To learn trigonometry, you need to remember your algebra and geometry. To learn cabinetmaking, you need to have mastered the properties of wood and composite materials, how to join boards, cut rabbets, rout edges, and miter corners.

The most successful people are always happy to question what they know, always open to contradictions and always ready to unlearn.

Waiting University: Bring something to read with you when you anticipate a painful wait: Airports, doctor's offices, and your state's brutal motor vehicle department. Don't sit there and twiddle your thumbs--learn!

"When you make a mistake say to yourself 'how interesting!' A mistake is an opportunity to learn!"

The need to understand that when learning is hard, you're doing important work. To understand that striving and setbacks, as in any action video game or new BMX bike stunt, are essential if you are to surpass your current level of performance toward true expertise. Making mistakes and correcting them builds the bridges to advanced learning.

Your job is to try to determine what the people in your life are trying to teach you.

The Friday Story In one of Fin's departments, Friday afternoons are for storytelling. They are particularly reserved for stories about experiments and tests that people are doing (see The Cool Wall above). These are not retrospectives. They are perspectives on the future, on what can change for the better. Storytelling involves both the business side and the IT side of the house. The objective is to have four or five people do five-minute pitches on what they are learning. These pitches could be about customers, tools, or solutions. The room should be full. We're talking 100 people or more (or for a smaller company, everybody) before they go off for the weekend. It is not a demo (as in Agile).

Never let formal education get in the way of your learning. --Mark Twain

When you hear something, you will forget it. When you see something, you will remember it. But not until you do something, will you understand it.

In our new age of work, learning is, or should be, a product of group interaction. In an empowered organisation, learning is about the group interacting well to produce good results, then reflecting on its actions as it refines its understanding of the work processes and tools that got it to a good outcome.

The wise man corrects his own errors by observing those of others.

Learning to engage in this way -- consciously developing and refining your skills -- is one of the most powerful ways to improve the effectiveness of your practice.

I believe in the discipline of mastering the best of what other people have figured out. Charlie Munger

Learning is stronger when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and personal.

And finally remember that, whenever possible, the best approach is almost always to work with a good coach or teacher. An effective instructor will understand what must go into a successful training regimen and will be able to modify it as necessary to suit individual students.

What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? "Find an area of expertise." It's so weird when I hear this. Just learn how to learn. Then you can always figure out the next thing that you will need to know.

CONCLUSION TO PART V Throughout Part V, we explored the practices that help create a culture of learning and experimentation in your organization. Learning from incidents, creating shared repositories, and sharing learnings is essential when we work in complex systems, helping to make our work culture more just and our systems safer and more resilient.

if you look back on yourself a year ago and aren't shocked by how stupid you were, you haven't learned much.

The good news is that we now know of simple and practical strategies that anybody can use, at any point in life, to learn better and remember longer: various forms of retrieval practice, such as low-stakes quizzing and self-testing, spacing out practice, interleaving the practice of different but related topics or skills, trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution, distilling the underlying principles or rules that differentiate types of problems, and so on.