Principle: What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn if provided with appropriate conditions of learning.
Paradigm: Potential is not a matter of where you start, but of how far you travel. With the right opportunity and motivation to learn, anyone can build the skills to achieve great things
Practice: To help people reach their potential, they need scaffolding- a more focused, transient form of support that prepares people to direct their own learning and growth. The goal is to shift responsibility to the learner so you can develop your own independent approach to learning.
PART I: SKILLS OF CHARACTER
Principles: personality is your predisposition- your basic instincts for how to think, feel and act. Character is your capacity to prioritize your values over your instincts.
Paradigm: If your personality is how you respond on a typical day, character is how you show up on a hard day.
Practice: When opportunity doesn’t knock, look for ways to build a door- or climb through a window
Chapter 1: Creatures of Discomfort
Principle: The best way to accelerate growth is to embrace, seek and amplify discomfort
Paradigm: Your preference is not fixed, and playing only to your strengths deprives you of the opportunity to improve on your weakness
Paradigm: Sometimes you even learn better in the mode that makes you the most uncomfortable because you have to work harder at it
Practice: Don’t be afraid to try a new style. Instead of focusing on the way you like to learn, embrace the discomfort of matching the method to the task. Remember that at the end of the day, doing is better for remembering information
Paradigm: When you procrastinate, you’re not avoiding effort. You’re avoiding the unpleasant feelings that the activity stirs up. Sooner or later though you realize that you’re also avoiding where you want to go
Principle: Accelerating learning often means being brave enough to use your knowledge as you acquire it
Paradigm: You don’t need to get comfortable before you can practice your skills. Your comfort grows as you practice your skills.
Practice:
- Use it or never gain it at all, put yourself in the ring before you are ready
- Seek discomfort- instead of just striving to learn, aim to feel uncomfortable.
- Set a mistake budget- set a goal for the minimum number of mistakes you want to make per day or per week
Chapter 2 : Human Sponges
Principle: Improving depends not on the quantity of information you seek out, but the quality of the information you take in
Paradigm: Prosperity rises as people become more capable of absorbing new ideas and filtering out old ones
Practice: Absorptive capacity hinges on two things: how you acquire information- do you react to what enters your field of vision, or are you proactive in seeking knowledge, skills, and perspective? The second is the goal you are pursuing when you filter information: do you focus on feeding your ego or fueling your growth?
Practice: Aim to be like sponges, they consistently take the initiative to expand themselves and adapt. It relies on determining what information to absorb versus what to filter out. It’s a question of which coaches to trust. Trustworthiness:
Care- wants what is best for you
Credibility- has relevant expertise
Familiarity- knows you well
Practice:
- Increase your absorptive capacity by seeking out new knowledge, skills and perspectives to fuel your growth not feed your ego
- Ask for advice, not feedback- advice is forward looking- it leads people to coach you. ‘What’s one thing I can do better next time?’
- Figure out which sources to trust using the CCF pointer
- Demonstrate that honesty is the highest expression of loyalty by being forthcoming in what you say and respectful in how you say it
Chapter 3: The Imperfectionists
Principle: the more you grow, the better you know which flaws are acceptable.
Paradigm: Perfectionism is the desire to be impeccable. The goal is zero defects: no faults, no flaws, no failures. Perfectionists tend to get three things wrong
- They obsess about details that don’t matter, they can’t see the forest for the trees.
- They avoid unfamiliar situation and difficult tasks that might lead to failure
- They berate themselves for making mistakes, which makes it harder for them to learn
Paradigm: Wabi sabi is the art of honoring the beauty in imperfection. It is about accepting flaws that are inevitable- and recognizing that they don’t stop something becoming sublime
Principle: Having a high personal standards, not pursuing perfection, that fuels growth
Paradigm: Look for objective that’s precise and challenging. Objectives focus on the most important actions and tells you when enough is enough
Practice: Did you make yourself better today? Did you make someone else better today? If the answer to both is yes, it is a good day
Principle: Expectations tend to rise with accomplishments. The better you’re performing, the more you demand yourself and the less you notice incremental gains.
Paradigm: Appreciating progress depends on remembering how your past self would see your current achievements.
Practice: If you knew 5 years ago what you’d accomplish now, how proud would you have been?
Paradigm: seeking validation is a bottomless pit: craving for status is never satisfied. But if an external assessment serves as a tool for growth, it may be worth using
Paradigm: Excellence is more than just meeting people’s standards and expectations. It is also about living up to your won standards. It’s impossible to please everyone. The question is are youi letting down the right people?
Practice: One of the best ways to gauge the value of other people’s judgement is to look for convergence between them, if a dozen people independently have the same issue, it’s more likely be an objective problem. You have inter rater reliability
Practice: set up a committee of judges to help us with quality control. Ask them for score of your MVP. Ask people to independently rate your work from 0 to 10. Whatever their score is ask them how you can get closer to 10
Practice: If this was the only work people saw of yours, would you be proud of it?
PART II: STRUCTURES FOR MOTIVATION
Principle: Character skills aren’t always enough to travel great distances. Many new skills don’t come with a manual, and steeper hill often requires a lift. You need scaffolding.
Paradigm: Scaffolding generally comes from other people. When our circumstances threaten to overpower us, instead of only looking inward, we can turn outward to mentors, teachers, coaches, role models or peers.
Paradigm: Scaffolding is tailored to the obstacle in your path
Paradigm: Scaffolding comes at a pivotal point in time
Paradigm: Scaffolding is temporary
Chapter 4: Transforming the Daily Grind
Principle: Deliberate practice is particularly valuable for improving skills in predictable tasks with consistent moves- swinging golf club, solving Rubik’s cube or playing violin
Principle: People who are obsessed with their work put in longer hours yet fail to perform any better than their peers. They’re more likely to fall victim to both physical and emotional exhaustion
Principle: Harmonious passion is taking joy in a process rather than feeling pressure to achieve an outcome. You’re no longer practicing under the specter of should.
Paradigm: The question is how to build the scaffolding to bring that passion into practice
Principle: Deliberate play is a structured activity that’s designed to make skill development enjoyable. It blends elements of deliberate practice and free play, deliberate play is fun, but it’s structured for learning and mastery along with recreation. It’s built to break complex tasks into simpler parts so you can hone a specific skill.
Paradigm: Instead counting your hours, you are tracking your improvement
Practice: Deliberate play often involves introducing novelty and variety into practice. That can be in ways you learn, the tools you use, the goals you set, and the people whom you interact. Deliberate play might take the form of a game, a role-play or an improvisational exercise. The scaffolding for deliberate play is often set up by a teacher or coach, but it’s possible to make real strides on your own
Principle: Incorporate breaks into your practice as breaks have three benefits.
(1) Time away from practice helps sustain harmonious passion- 5-10 minutes breaks are enough to reduce fatigue and raise energy, when we work nights and weekends, our interest and enjoyment of our task drop. Schedule a day off
(2) Breaks unlock fresh ideas- taking breaks boosts creativity when you feel a harmonious passion for a task.
(3) breaks deepen learning- breaks improve recall by 10 to 30 percent
Practice:
- Turn the daily grind into a source of daily joy. Design practices around deliberate play. Set up fun skill building challenges
- Compete against yourself- measure progress over time, not against an opponent
- Introduce novelty and variety to your practice
- Take time off to recover
Chapter 5: Getting Unstuck
Principle: A plateau is not a cue that you’ve peaked. They’re signals that it may be time to turn around and find a new route. When you’re stuck, it’s usually because you’re heading in the wrong direction, you’re tracking the wrong path, or you’re running out of fuel
Paradigm: Skills don’t grow at a steady pace. Improving them is like driving up a mountain. As we climb higher and higher, the road gets steeper and steeper, and our gains are smaller and smaller. When we run out of momentum, we start to stall. It’s not enough to step on the gas- our wheels are spinning, but we’ve stopped moving
Paradigm: we see slowing down as losing ground, backing up as giving up, and rerouting as veering off course. We worry that when we step back, we’ll lose our footing altogether. This means we stay exactly where we are- steady but stuck. We need to embrace the discomfort of getting lost
Paradigm. To get moving, all we need is a good compass. A good compass signals when you’re going off course and orients you in a better direction
Paradigm: Experts often gave poor direction for beginners. They’ve come too far to remember what it’s like being in your shoes. It’s called the curse of knowledge: the more you know, the harder it is for you to fathom what it’s like to not know
Secondly, the further you progress toward mastery, the less conscious awareness you often have of the fundamentals. Experts often have an intuitive understanding of a route, but they struggle to articulate all the steps to take.
Third, you may not share the same strengths and weaknesses their hills and valleys aren’t the same as yours
Practice: When you hit a dead end, it might be time to turn around and find a new path
Practice: When working with mentors what you want is to make their implicit knowledge explicit, ask them to retrace their route. The goal is for your guide to drop pins- the key landmarks and turning points from their climbs. You may even want to consider multiple guides
Practice: when you are languishing- feeling a sense of stagnation and emptiness, turn to your side hustles or hobbies. A sense of progress can motivate you. The key is to continually make headway
Chapter 6: Defying Gravity
Principle: Teaching is a surprisingly powerful method of learning
Paradigm: The act of sharing knowledge enhanced the competence of the men doing the teaching
Paradigm: When we encourage others to overcome obstacles (coaching), it can help us find our own motivation
Paradigm: The coach effect captures how we can marshal motivation by offering the encouragement to others that we need for ourselves. By reminding us of the tools we already possess, coaching others raises our expectation of ourselves.
Paradigm: We should listen to the advice we gave to others- it’s usually the advice we need to take for ourselves
Principle: The expectation people hold of us often become self fulfilling prophecies
Paradigm: When others believe in our potential, they give us a ladder. When others underestimate us, it limits our effort and growth
Paradigm: When novice underestimate us usually fires us up
Practice:
- Teach what you want to learn- the best way to learn is to teach it
- When you’re doubting your ability to overcome obstacle, instead of seeking advice, give advice. The advice you give is usually the advice you need to take
- If ignorant naysayers doubt you, take it as a challenge to prove them wrong. And when credible believers are behind you, rise to the occasion and prove them right
- When your faith falters, recall who you’re fighting for. You are stronger when you know that others are counting on us
Chapter 7: Every Child Gets Ahead
Principle: Around the world, evidence shows that whether children get ahead or fall behind depends in part on the cultures created in schools and classrooms. Culture has three elements: practices, values, and underlying assumptions. Practices are the daily routines that reflect and reinforce values. Values are shared principles around what’s important and desirable- what should be rewarded versus what should be punished. Underlying assumptions are deeply held, often taken-for-granted beliefs about how the world works. Our assumptions shape our values, which in turn drie our practices.
Paradigm: Intelligence comes in many forms and every child has the potential to excel. Success isn’t just reserved for the gifted and the talented: the aim is to give all students great teachers and a personalized plan for growth.
Paradigm: The most important lesson to teach children is that learning is fun. The work of a child is to play. Deliberate play is more effective than direct instruction in teaching students some cognitive skills as well as character skills like discipline and determination
Practice: Recognize that intelligence comes in many forms. If students fall behind, to get them up to speed, schools offer early interventions with individual tutoring and extra support. They also focus on developing individual interests of each student- not just promoting their success
Practice: Instead of staying in the same grade and teaching a new student each year, teachers move up a grade with their students. The practice (looping) gave them an opportunity to grow together
Practice: Provide support system early, identifying challenges early and prevent bigger problems from brewing. Starting in the fall of kindergarten, teachers meet with parents to develop individualized learning plans for each student
Practice: Teacher and students have an hour more break time, which gives teachers space to do lesson planning, grading and personal development during regular hours and preventing weekend work
Practice: Give students the freedom to explore and share their individual interests. Kindergarteners only sat at their desks for spelling, writing and math onde day a week. Each lesson was a maximum of 45 minutes followed by 15 minutes of recess
Practice: Cultivating the desire to read nourishes individual interests. If we want our kids to enjoy reading. We need to make books part of their lives. That involves talking about books during meals and car rides, visiting libraries or bookstores, giving books as gifts and letting them see us read. Children pay attention to our attention: where we focus tells them what we prize
Practice: Students who read for fun will like it more. ANd the more they like it, the more they learn and the better they perform on exams
Chapter 8: Mining For Gold
Principle: The best teams had little to do with individual IQ, the best teams have the most team players- people who excel at collaborating with others- the ability to figure out what the group needs and enlisting everyone’s contribution
Paradigm: The best groups were evaluated on a collective outcome. They aligned around a common goal and carved out a unique role for each member. They knew the results depended on everyone’s input, so they shared their knowledge and coached one another on a regular basis. That made it possible for them to become one big sponge- they were able to absorb, filter and adapt information as it emerged and evolved.
Principle: Leaders play an important role in establishing cohesion. They have the authority to turn independent individuals into an interdependent team
Paradigm: We mistake confidence for competence, certainty for credibility and quantity for quality. In many cases, the people with the poorest prosocial skills and the biggest egos end up assuming the mantle- at a great cost to teams and organizations
Practice: Choose leaders who put mission above their ego- and prioritize team cohesion over personal glory
Paradigm: When teams were relatively reactive, waiting for direction from above, extraverts drove the best results. They asserted their visions and motivated teams to follow their lead. But when teams were proactive, bringing many ideas to the table, it was introverts who led them to achieve greater things
Practice: Instead of doing brainstorming where the extroverts run the show, go for brain writing- ask everyone to generate ideas separately. Pool and share them anonymously among group. To preserve independent judgement, each member evaluates them on their own
Principle: Being looked at by leader is enough to encourage people who lack status to speak up
Paradigm: Most organizations are organized like ladders- the person immediately above you is in charge of decisions about your growth. A single no is enough to kill an idea- or even stall a career
Practice: Organize your company like a lattice instead of a ladder. Rather than one path of reporting and responsibility from you to the people above you in the hierarchy, a lattice offers multiple paths to the top
Whenever a person has an idea, they’re granted the freedom to go to a range of senior people. To get the idea off the ground, all you need is one leader who’s willing to sponsor it
Chapter 9: Diamonds in the Rough
Principle: When considering a new hire, we confuse past performance with future potential, we miss out on people whose achievements have involved overcoming major obstacles. We need to consider how far they’ve climbed and how they’ve grown along the way
Paradigm: It is not how long people have done a job. It’s how well they can learn to do a job.
Paradigm: Past performance is only helpful if the new job requires similar skills to the old one
Practice: When evaluating others, beware of mistaking past accomplishments and experience for future potential.
Principle: People at work tend to get promoted to their level of incompetence- they keep advancing based on their success in previous jobs until they get trapped in a new role that’s beyond their abilities
Paradigm: the key indicator of potential isn’t the severity of adversity people encounter- it’s how they react to it
Practice: Account for degree of difficulty- put their performance in context by comparing them to peers in their school, major and neighborhood
Practice: trajectories are a valuable start, but they don’t paint a full picture of potential. To gauge the distance people are capable of traveling on steep slopes, it’s also critical to take a closer look at the skills and abilities they’ve gained so far.
Practice: Instead of interviewing, ask for a work sample. They are the snapshots of the individual skills. Ask them to create real-time work samples: give everyone the same problem to solve in the present. Invite applicants to share what they love and showcase their strengths. Ask if their performance represented them well- if not give them a do over