Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt

My Thoughts

This book is dense. Andy has clearly put a lot of thought and research into it.

Yet, it is very clear and easy to understand.

This feels like a rare combo these days.

Another awesome thing about this books is that each chapter can easily stand on its own, so there is no need to digest this book in one sitting. If you ever feel tired of the infromation and thought populating your head, you can put it down and return later to it. Days, weeks or even months after you’ve put it down.

As the title suggest the book will help you to improve your learning and thinking skills, which are getting important everyday. With the recent developments in AI more and more people will offload their thinking to the machine. That is the biggest mistake that you can make. However good the AI is and will be, the need to think clearly and learn/adapt quickly is crucial to our survival and flourishing.

If you apply learning form this book, you can get ahead of your competition quickly. But know, that this won’t be easy. It will require a lot of planning, effort and dedication.

Learnings

• There are five stated of competency, which would help you on your journey of learning:

  • Stage 1: Novices
  • Stage 2: Advanced Beginners
    • Most people are advanced beginners
  • Stage 3: Competent
  • Stage 4: Profcient
  • Stage 5: Expert
    • Statistically, there aren’t very many experts—probably something on the order of 1 to 5 percent of the population

• when you are a novice you should follow rules, and as you move up the ladder you should start listening to intuition more.

• the best way to learn is to watch and imitate

• once you are and expert, you can’t just stop. you will have to keep practicing to remain up there at the top.

• Expand on the idea of learning with your R-mode and then following with the L-mode.

  • The reason that metaphors help people in the learning process is that it activates the R-mode in your brain.

  • Create creative problems for yourself to help in the learning process. For example, try taking 2 seemingly unrelated terms and finding a connection between them like the author did here:

    For example, cigarette and traffic light might meld into the concept of using a red band on the cigarette as a stop-smoking aid.

    As a side benefit this can help you with humor:

    talent for humor comes from drawing or extending relationships beyond the norm, truly seeing “out of the box.” A quick wit—being able to draw connections between things that aren’t related or to extend an idea past its breaking point—is a skill well worth practicing, honing, and encouraging in your team.

• Exapnd on “Working together is a provably effective way to discover helpful and interesting abstractions.”

• To help verbalize ideas generated by R-mode use image streaming.

• Writing is an even better activity to bring ideas from your subconcsoius to your consvious and on to the paper. This can be any form of writting: blogging, morning journal, dream journal, letter writing (to yourself or someone else) etc. This doesn’t have to be published, that’s not the point here.

• If you have no topic you want to write about but do want to start blogging try Jerry Weinberg’s Fieldstone method

• If you are having a hard problem you can’t seem to solve, try stepping away from your computer and go for a walk. Game changer! Doesn’t have to be a walk, just needs to be distracting and non work related, preferrably not think intensive (stay away from technology! no phones, no tvs!). Cooking a meal, playing with your kids, etc, is the way to go.

• Introduce physical activity into your life, and do it regularly. This will drastically improve your on the job thinking as well as your subconcous thinking. Yoga, meditation, breathing techniques, and martial arts all affect how your brain processes information.

• The key to creativity and problem solving lies in finding different ways of looking at a problem

• Introduce small changes to your routine often. Your brain is tuned to be adaptive and these changes help “update” the wiring and prevent neural ruts.

• Rare things happen way more often then you think. Let’s say any given (rare) event has a probability of 1/1000 to happen on any given day. Now take 1000 such events. Now the probability of any one of those events happning on any given day is 100%.

• When working on a project leave important decisions for later (as much as possible). This makes sense since in the beginning of the project we are most ignorant, but in the end we are experts and can make better decisions.

• Don’t trust your memories too much, especially if they are a deciding factor. Memories changes, there is no way around that. Write things done for that.

• The is an interesting research siggesting that there are 4 generational archetypes which is important becuase the world changes its trajectory when a new generation has a different archetype. The go in cycles, where each generation creates a new generation with an opposing archetypes. Here are the 4 archetypes and their main characteristics:

  • Prophet: Vision, values
  • Nomad: Liberty, survival, honor
  • Hero: Community, affluence
  • Artist: Pluralism, expertise, due process

• When you are dead solid convinced of something, ask yourself why.

• Expectations create reality, or at least color it. If you expect the worst from people, technology, or an organization, then that’s what you’re primed to see.

• When you have a goal (e.g. learn something, build something) having a plan is a huge help to that project.

  • Attending to that project when you have some free time is not going to cut it unfortunately. That means your streak in Duolingo will probably not make you fluent in Spanish. If you want to learn Spanish, come up with a plan and stick to it, otherwise, you are just wasting you time.
  • Keep in mind though. It is no the plan that we are after, but the planning itself. Plans change and that is ok. What matter is that you have scoped the project you want to do and have estimated what it will take.
  • Attend to your project often, on a regular basis. Some sessions will be productive, some won’t and that’s ok too. Ideally you should know what you will be working on during your session. Otherwise you could be easily distracted.

• Various learning techniques can be a huge help, but combining different learning techniques can drastically improve your results. Explore various techniques on your own, but here is a list to get you started:

  • use mind maps to summarize you learning material. this will help you find interesting relationships and connections
  • form a study group to discuss your learnings. hearing other peoples’ ideas can help you with understanding and application
  • use SQ3R for written material
  • use Spaced Repitition (Anki) to test yourself often. Testing is one of the best ways to make sure you retain previously gained knowledge.
  • try to explain the idea you learned to someone else, personally or through a blog post/video tutorial.

• your brain evolved to consume information through experience more than anything else. Sitting and consuming is not going to do much. You have to get out there an get experience learning the skill you want to achieve:

  • learning a language? go and talk to someone
  • learning a programming language? go and build a project with it
  • learning brazilan jiu jutsu? go and train
  • learning to play the guitar? go and play it
  • learning to draw? go and draw
  • learning to cook? go and cook

• another thing that can improve the odds of you sticking to your learning plan is to make it playful. make it fun.

• Give yourself permission to fail; it’s the path to success.

• give yourself some time during the day to think. no phones, no projects, no learning, just thinking. wonderful things happen when you mind is let wild without being distracted.

• Store your ideas in a notebook or a wiki, so that you can come back to it any time. Human do have a tendency to forget.

• Switching context is an underrated way to distract yourself. Try to avoid it as much as possible.

Highlights

Chapter 1 Introduction

Software isn’t designed in an IDE or other tool. It’s imagined and created in our heads

As you grow and adapt, you may need to modify your habits and approaches as well. Nothing in life is ever static; only dead fsh go with the fow

The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition provides a powerful way of looking at how you move beyond beginner-level performance and begin the journey to mastery of a skill

Chapter 2 Journey from Novice to Expert

Experts What do you call an expert software developer? A wizard. We work with magic numbers, things in hex, zombie processes, and mystical incantations such as tar -xzvf plugh.tgz and sudo gem install —includedependencies rails. We can even change our identity to become someone else or transform into the root user—the epitome of supreme power in the Unix world. Wizards make it look effortless. A dash of eye of newt, a little bat-wing dust, some incantations, and poof! The job is done.

It’s often diffcult for experts to explain their actions to a fne level of detail; many of their responses are so well practiced that they become preconscious actions. Their vast experience is mined by of the brain, which makes

It’s often diffcult for experts to explain their actions to a fne level of detail; many of their responses are so well practiced that they become preconscious actions. Their vast experience is mined by of the brain, which makes it hard them to articulate. nonverbal, preconscious areas for us to observe and hard for

Stages In the 1970s, the brothers Dreyfus (Hubert and Stuart) began doing their seminal research on how people attain and master skills. The Dreyfus brothers looked at highly skilled practitioners, including commercial Dreyfus is applicable airline pilots and world-renowned per skill. chess masters. 2 Their research showed that quite a bit changes as you move from novice to expert. You don’t just “know more” or gain skill.Instead, you experience fundamental differences in how you perceive the world, how you approach problem solving, and the mental models you form and use. How you go about acquiring new skills changes. External factors that help your performance—or hinder it—change as well.2. Cited in From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice [Ben01]

The Five Dreyfus Model Stages

• Stage 1: Novices
• Stage 2: Advanced Beginners
  • Most people are advanced beginners
• Stage 3: Competent
• Stage 4: Profcient
• Stage 5: Expert
  • Statistically, there aren’t very many experts—probably something on the order of 1 to 5 percent of the population

Charles Darwin pegged it when he said, “Ignorance more frequently begets confdence than does knowledge.

The converse seems to be true as well; once you truly become an expert, you become painfully aware of just how little you really know.

When you are not very skilled in some area, you are more likely to think you’re actually pretty expert at it.

In one of the Dreyfus studies, the researchers did exactly that. They took Rules ruin experts. seasoned airline pilots and had them draw up a set of rules for the novices, representing their best practices. They did, and the novices were able to improve their performance based on those rules. But then they made the experts follow their own rules. It degraded their measured performance signifcantly

Conversely, we also tend to take novices and throw them in the deep end of the development pool—far over their heads. You might say we’re trying to race sheep, in this case.Again, it’s not an effective way to use novices. They need to be “herded,” that is, given unambiguous direction, quick successes, and so on. Agile development is a very effective tool, but it won’t work on a team composed solely of novices and advanced beginners.

TIP 2 Use rules for novices, intuition for experts.

Also, metacognitive abilities, or the ability of being self-aware, tends to be possible only at the higher skill levels. Unfortunately, this means practitioners at the lower skill levels have a marked tendency to overestimate their own abilities—by as much as 50 percent, as it turns out. According to a study in Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Diffculties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Infated Self-Assessments [KD99], the only path to a more correct self-assessment is to improve the individual’s skill level, which in turn increases metacognitive ability. You may see this referred to as second-order incompetence, not knowing just how much it is that you don’t know. The beginner is confdent despite the odds; the expert will be far more cautious when the going gets weird. Experts will show much more self-doubt

TIP 3 Know what you don’t know

Deliberate practice, according to noted cognitive scientist Dr. K. Anderson Ericsson, requires four conditions: • You need a well-defned task. • The task needs to be appropriately diffcult—challenging but doable. • The environment needs to supply informative feedback that you can act on. • It should also provide opportunities for repetition and correction of errors

TIP 4 Learn by watching and imitating

TIP 5 Keep practicing in order to remain expert

TIP 6 Avoid formal methods if you need creativity, intuition, or inventiveness

Ideally you want a mix of skills on a team: having an all-expert team is fraught with its own diffculties; you need some people to worry about the trees while everyone is pondering the forest

TIP 7 Learn the skill of learning.

Chapter 3 This Is Your Brain

Peripheral vision is much more sensitive to light than your central vision. That’s why if you see isn’t something faint out of the corner of your eye (such as a ship on the horizon or a star), it can disappear if you look at it head-on.

Who’s in Charge Here? You might think that the narrative voice in your head is in control and that the voice is your consciousness, or the real “you.” It is not. In fact, by the time the words are formed in your head, the thought behind them is very old. Some considerable time later those words might actually be formed by your mouth. Not only is there a time delay from the original thought to your awareness of it, but there is no central locus of thought in the brain. Thoughts rise up and compete in clouds, and the winner at any point in time is your consciousness. We’ll look at this in more depth in Section 8.2, Defocus to Focus, on page 225. able but very simple technique to deal with the fact that R-mode is asynchronous.

TIP 8 Capture all ideas to get more of them.

Characteristics Of course, there are quite a few differences between R-mode and L-mode beyond R-mode’s unpredictability. If you’ve ever said, “I’m of two minds about that,” you were probably more literally correct than you thought at the time. You actually have a number of different processing modes in the brain. Each one has unique characteristics that can help you just when you need it most. The fastest processing modes are the muscle-memory sorts of responses that don’t even travel up to the cortex itself. Piano players don’t think about each and every note and chord in a fast passage; there isn’t time. Instead, the muscles involved more or less just tackle the problem on their own without much conscious involvement or direction. Similarly, that instinctive slam on the brakes or quick dodge on the bicycle doesn’t involve any CPU processing—it’s all in the peripherals. Since lightning-fast typing and similar physical skills aren’t of too much interest to us as programmers, I’m not going to talk too much about these non-CPU modes and responses. The cortex, which comes from the Latin word for tree bark, is the outer layer of folded gray matter and is key to conscious thinking.

just because a thought process is nonrational or nonrepeatable doesn’t mean it is unscientifc, irresponsible, or inappropriate in any way.

We want to use R-mode more than we have because the R-mode provides intuition, and that’s something we desperately need in order to become experts. We cannot be expert without it. The Dreyfus model emphasizes the expert’s reliance on tacit knowledge; that’s over here in the R-mode as well. Experts rely on seeing and discriminating patterns; pattern matching is here too.R-mode’s analogic and holistic thinking styles are very valuable

We want to use R-mode more than we have because the R-mode provides intuition, and that’s something we desperately need in order to become experts. We cannot be expert without it. The Dreyfus model emphasizes the expert’s reliance on tacit knowledge; that’s over here in the R-mode as well. Experts rely on seeing and discriminating patterns; pattern matching is here too

In fact, synthesis is such a powerful learning technique that Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab suggested in Don’t Dissect the Frog, Build It that to really learn about a frog, traditional dissection is not the way to go. The better way to learn about a frog is to build one.

TIP 9 Learn by synthesis as well as by analysis

To progress, in order to move on to the next revolution in human development, we need to learn to reintegrate our largely neglected R-mode processing with L-mode

That’s an important point: the iPod says how many songs it holds. The Microsoft-favored parody (and many real competing devices) say how many It’s about the songs, not gigabytes it will hold. Consumers don’t about gigabytes; only we geeks do. Real people want to know how many songs it will hold or how many photos or videos. 12

Note: Im a geek then. From this point on i need to think as if everyone around me are not. People around me care about asthstics more than personalikty. Consider this when bjilding a product.

In fact, additional studies have shown exactly that: positive emotions are essential to learning and creative thinking. Being “happy” broadens your thought processes and brings more of the brain’s hardware online.

If you’re a programmer stuck in a drab cubicle, you will never grow new neurons. On the other hand, in a rich environment with things to learn, observe, and interact with, you will grow plenty of new neurons and new connections between them.

TIP 10 Strive for good design; it really works better

Creativity comes from the selection and assembly of just the right components in just the right presentation to create the work. And selection—knowing what to select and in what context—comes from pattern matching, and that’s a topic to which we’ll keep returning

One of the foremost building architects of the twentieth century, Louis Kahn, offers a useful explanation of the relationship between beauty and design: “Design is not making beauty; beauty emerges from selection, affnities, integration, love. ” Beauty emerges from selection. Kahn explains that beauty emerges from selection. That is, art comes not so much from the act of creation itself but rather from selecting among a near infnite supply of choices.

Make a short list of your favorite software applications and a list of the ones you just despise. How much does aesthetics play a role in your choices? Consider what aspects of your work and home life target L-mode. What aspects of your work and home life target R-mode? Do you feel they are in balance? If not, what will you do differently? Keep a doodle pad on your desk (and in your car, with your laptop, by your bed), and use it. In addition, keep something on your person for 24×7 note taking (which may or may not be paper/pen based).

Try This Make a conscious effort to learn something new primarily by synthesis, instead of analysis. Try creating your next software design away from your keyboard and monitor (and we’ll talk more about this in detail a bit later in the book).

Chapter 4 Get in Your Right Mind

A man should learn to detect and foster that gleam of light which fashes across his mind from within far more than the lustre of the whole frmament without. Yet he dismisses without notice his peculiar thought because it is peculiar. Ralph Waldo Emerson Chapter 4 Get in Your Right Mind In this chapter, we’ll look at a whole bunch of techniques to help bring more mental processing power online for you. Some may be familiar to you, and others will defnitely be more exotic; don’t shy away from the “odd” ones. If you are repelled and don’t want to try something, that’s probably exactly what you should try frst. Emerson points out in the opening epigraph that we tend to dismiss unusual or uncomfortable thoughts—and that’s a bad thing. You might miss out on that million-dollar idea of a lifetime. Instead, you need to pay attention to all that your mind has to offer. Sure, some of what you fnd will be the intellectual equivalent of a Gilligan’s Island rerun, but you may also fnd that one idea that makes all the difference in the world. So, we’re going to look at it all, be it good, bad, or ugly. You probably know what L-mode processing feels like; it’s that little voice in your head that makes L-mode very noticeable. But what does R-mode feel like? You’ll do an exercise that will let you experience a cognitive shift to R-mode, and we’ll see different ways to help engage more R-mode processing. We’ll also look at ways of integrating L-mode and R-mode more effectively, and I’ll show you a variety of techniques to help harvest the fruits of your R-mode’s hidden labor.

If you are repelled and don’t want to try something, that’s probably exactly what you should try frst

TIP 12 Add sensory experience to engage more of your brain.

change your environment regularly, and feed your brain. Any sort of extrasensory involvement is probably helpful, whether it’s a long walk though crunchy leaves with your dog, opening your window and listening to the day’s weather (and actually smelling some fresh air!), or just walking to the break room or down to the gym (the air there is less fresh, but exercise is also very helpful for better brain function)

Side I’ve claimed a number of times that we’re not using our R-mode facilities as well as we might.Well, we’re going to do a little experiment now to prove that and see how to deliberately get into a pure R-mode cognitive state. I’ve given many talks across the United States and Europe based on the material that became this book. One of my favorite bits from the talks is a simple survey question I ask the audience: tell me how well you can draw. The results are always the same. In a crowd of 100 technical types (programmers, testers, and managers), maybe one or two folks claim to be able to draw very well. Maybe another fve to eight or so claim somewhat competent drawing skills but nothing suitable for framing.

This exercise will show you what R-mode feels like. There are only a few rules: Allow thirty to forty minutes of quiet, uninterrupted time. Copy the image shown Figure 11, ​Draw this picture​. Do not reorient the page. Do not name any parts you recognize; just say to yourself up, over, this goes that way a little bit, and so on. It’s very important that you not name any features you think you see—that’s the hard part. Try to just focus on the lines and their relationships. When you’re done, turn the picture right-side up and you might be quite surprised at the result.

He first presented us with a multisensory, experiential context so that we could “get our heads around it,” as it were. Then he followed up with a more traditional, fact-filled lecture. What he did here was create a sort of R-mode to L-mode flow. As it turns out, that’s exactly what you want to do to facilitate learning.

Recipe 13    Lead with R-mode; follow with L-mode.

Working together is a provably effective way to discover helpful and interesting abstractions.

L-mode and R-mode meet in metaphor—in the act of creating analogies. “Metaphor, a common ground for both verbalizations and images, is a way to voyage back and forth between the subconscious and conscious, between right and left hemispheres.”[56] The use of metaphor is a powerful technique to open up creativity.

Recipe 14    Use metaphor as the meeting place between L-mode and R-mode.

One of the Po techniques is random juxtaposition. You take a word from your subject area and combine it with a completely random, unrelated word. For instance, consider the words cigarette and traffic light. The challenge is to form a bisociation from these completely unrelated ideas. For example, cigarette and traffic light might meld into the concept of using a red band on the cigarette as a stop-smoking aid. Use random juxtaposition to create metaphor.

Humor is neither a waste of time nor a harmless diversion; instead, it reflects an important ability necessary for thinking, learning, and creativity. It’s all about connections.

Humor arises from making novel connections across disparate ideas. It may be absurd, but humor is often based on identifying relationships and distorting them. For instance, “My best friend ran away with my wife. I’m sure going to miss him.” You assume the primary relationship is between the man and his wife, but instead it turns out that his relationship with his best friend is more important to him; the skewed connection makes it funny.

In either case, the talent for humor comes from drawing or extending relationships beyond the norm, truly seeing “out of the box.” A quick wit—being able to draw connections between things that aren’t related or to extend an idea past its breaking point—is a skill well worth practicing, honing, and encouraging in your team.

Recipe 15    Cultivate humor to build stronger metaphors.

Make more metaphors. You can do this as part of software design or something more artistic—your own jokes, fables, or songs. If you’re new to creating metaphors, start with something simple: a thesaurus (you know, that thick book that’s sold next to the dictionaries in the bookstore or that “other” window in your online dictionary program). For more in-depth exploration, try playing with WordNet (available for all platforms from http://wordnet.princeton.edu). This gives you not only synonyms but also antonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, and other derivations of various flavors.

his R-mode had retrieved an answer. But since the R-mode is nonverbal, how can it be presented to the L-mode for processing? The R-mode has to throw it over the fence visually, in this case wrapped up in the disturbing—and very memorable—imagery of an outlandish dream. And as it turns out, you have many excellent skills and ideas that are simply not verbalizable. As noted earlier (in Chapter 3, ​This Is Your Brain​), you can recognize thousands of faces, but try to describe even one face—that of a spouse, parent, or child—to any degree of accuracy. You don’t have the words to describe it. That’s because facial recognition (and indeed, most pattern-based recognition) is an R-mode activity.

Let us now take a quick look at two different ways of harvesting some of this R-mode recognition: image streaming and free-form journaling.

In the case of Elias Howe, the answer he was seeking was being presented in the form of a dream. You might experience the same thing once you start paying more attention to the contents of your dreams. Not all dreams “mean something.” Sometimes in a dream “a cigar is just a cigar,” as Sigmund Freud reportedly said. But there are many times when your R-mode is trying to tell you something, something that you want to know.

👆 Image streaming is a technique designed to help harvest R-mode imagery.[62] The basic idea is to deliberately observe mental imagery: pay close attention to it, and work it around in your mind a bit. First, pose a problem to yourself, or ask yourself a question. Then close your eyes, and maybe put your feet up on the desk (this is perfect for doing at work) for about ten minutes or so. For each image that crosses your mind, do the following: Look at the image, and try to see all the details you can. Describe it out loud (really use your voice; it makes a difference). Now you’re sitting with feet up on the desk and talking to yourself. Imagine the image using all five senses (or as many as practical). Use present tense, even if the image was fleeting. By explicitly paying attention to the fleeting image, you’re engaging more pathways and strengthening connections to it. As you try to interpret the image, you’re broadening the search parameters to the R-mode, which may help coalesce related information. At any rate, by paying close attention to those “random” images that flit across your consciousness, you may begin to discover some fresh insights.

Another simple way of harvesting your R-mode’s preconscious treasures is to write. Blogging has enjoyed tremendous popularity in recent years, and probably rightfully so. In previous eras, people wrote letters—sometimes a great many letters.

Letter writing is a great habit. Sometimes the material is relatively dull—what the weather was doing, how the prices at the market were up, how the scullery maid ran off with the stable boy, and so on. But in the detailed minutiae of everyday life were occasional philosophical gems. This sort of free-form journaling has a long pedigree, and those skillful thinkers from days gone by were eventually well regarded as “men of letters” for penning these missives.

Not to be too much of a Luddite, but writing on paper has worked well for many thousands of years. It can be a lot faster to capture ideas on paper first and then transcribe them into your blog editors.

Here are the rules: Write your morning pages first thing in the morning—before your coffee, before the traffic report, before talking to Mr. Showerhead, before packing the kids off to school or letting the dog out. Write at least three pages, long hand. No typing, no computer. Do not censor what you write. Whether it’s brilliant or banal, just let it out. Do not skip a day. It’s OK if you don’t know what to write. One executive taking this program loudly proclaimed that this exercise was a complete waste of time. He defiantly wrote three pages of “I don’t know what to write. Blah blah blah.” And that’s fine. Because after a while, he noticed other stuff started appearing in his morning pages. Marketing plans. Product directions. Solutions. Germs of innovative ideas. He overcame his initial resistance to the idea and found it to be a very effective technique for harvesting thoughts.

Thomas Edison had an interesting twist on this idea. He’d take a nap with a cup full of ball bearings in his hand. He knew that just as he started to drift off into sleep, his subconscious mind would take up the challenge of his problem and provide a solution. As he fell into a deep sleep, he’d drop the ball bearings, and the clatter would wake him up. He’d then write down whatever was on his mind.

Note: I think Dali did something similar.

And then there’s blogging itself. Any chance to write is a good exercise. What do you really think about this topic? What do you actually know about it—not just what you think, but what can you defend? Writing for a public audience is a great way to clarify your own thoughts and beliefs.

👆 But where to start? Unless you’re burning with passion for some particular topic, it can be hard to sit down and just write about something. You might want to try using Jerry Weinberg’s Fieldstone method, described in Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method [Wei06].[64]

A labyrinth is not a puzzle; it’s a tool for meditation. Labyrinths offer a single path—there are no decisions to be made. You walk the path to sort of give the L-mode something to do and free up the R-mode. It’s the same idea as taking a long walk in the woods or a long drive on a straight, lonely stretch of highway, just in a smaller more convenient space. Labyrinths go back thousands of years; you’ll find them today installed in churches, hospitals, cancer treatment centers and hospices, and other places of healing and reflection.

R-mode can be invited, not commanded.

Recipe 16    Step away from the keyboard to solve hard problems.

June Kim tells us the following story: “After beginning martial arts, I recognized that my focus span (the period of time I can keep focusing on something) and control (such as getting focused in a poor environment) has improved. I have been continuously recommending my practice to software developers and other knowledge workers. It’s called Ki-Chun; it has a martial arts aspect as well as tai chi, meditation, and breathing aspects. “I have seen a recognizable difference in a friend of mine who started the practice. In less than a month you could see the difference clearly. He told me that he could more easily concentrate and the quality of his concentration improved.”

Yoga, meditation, breathing techniques, and martial arts all affect how your brain processes information. We are complex systems, and as we saw with systems thinking, that means everything is connected. Even something as simple as breathing in a particular manner can profoundly affect how you think.

source code is read many, many more times than it’s written, so it’s usually worth some effort to help make the code more human-readable.

That catches your attention and, when done regularly, becomes part of a larger pattern that your mind recognizes and latches on to. Reader Dierk Koenig tells us that he deliberately takes the time to “typeset” his code in this way. Novices will start off doing this—it’s an easy rule to follow, after all. But advanced beginners may begin to push back, complaining that spending time on code layout is a waste of time. Proficients and experts will bristle at poor code if it’s harder for them to see the patterns they’re used to seeing, whatever those may be.

The key to creativity and problem solving lies in finding different ways of looking at a problem. Different associations force the R-mode to initiate different searches; new material might now come up.

When faced with a thorny problem, Dave Thomas will often say, “Turn that on its head.” That’s one mental whack: a way to knock you out of your rut to make you look at a problem from a different point of view. For instance, audio engineers use a well-known technique when mixing a recording. To make the sound as good as possible, they first go through and make each instrument sound as bad as possible. Make the saxophone honk abrasively, turn up the fret noise from the guitar, hum from the electric bass, and so on. Now reverse the settings: everything that you emphasized to make things sound bad, turn down or cut out to get to clean, sparkling sound. That simple change of viewpoint, looking at the problem from the other way around, is by itself a very powerful technique. You can use that when debugging: instead of trying to prevent a difficult-to-find bug, try coming up with three to four ways to deliberately cause it. Along the way, you might discover what’s really happening.

Turn the problem around. Recipe 17    Change your viewpoint to solve the problem.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Play is the father of invention. ➤ Roger von Oech

Composers Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt came up with a set of 100 oblique strategies[70] along these same lines. These questions and statements force you to draw analogies and to think more deeply about the problem. They are a great resource to draw on when you get stuck (and are available online, as a Dashboard Widget for Mac and iPhones, text versions for Palm OS, a command-line version for Linux, and so on). Here are some examples: What else is this like? Change nothing and continue consistently. Shut the door and listen from the outside. Your mistake was a hidden intention. I particularly like that last one: perhaps your mistake wasn’t such a mistake after all. Freud would like that one, too.

You want to mix that up and get out of the rut. Use a different hand. Park on the other side. Change the part of your hair. Use a different kind of towel. Start shaving. Stop shaving. Eat earlier or later. These small changes are good for your brain; they help change the wiring and prevent neural ruts. Seriously. Your brain is tuned to be adaptive; if there’s nothing to adapt to, it will get “flabby,” metaphorically speaking.

In addition to adding new phrases to the lexicon, Shakespeare would repurpose certain key words to create a sense of wonder and surprise. For example, he might use a noun to serve as a verb (as in, “he godded me”). This technique, known as a functional shift, causes a sudden peak in brain activity.

New Habits Do morning pages for at least two weeks. Hone a quick wit. Look for connections or analogies between unrelated things. Involve more senses when faced with a tricky problem. What works best for you? Read something different from your usual material, for example, fiction, not science fiction, and so on. Try a different genre of movie, vacation, music, or coffee. Order something you’ve never had at your favorite restaurant. Turn each problem around. What can you learn from the reverse?

Try This Deliberately vary your morning routine or other consistent habit. Hold a design session using Lego blocks or office supplies.[74] Take a class or start a hobby that involves more R-mode processing. Work on it daily. Use the buddy system: have a buddy help keep you motivated, and discuss your progress. Think of a metaphor, or set of metaphors, that would largely describe your current project (it may be helpful to think in terms of something very tangible). Try to come up with a few jokes about it using metaphor or exaggeration. Look at experts you know. What “quirky” habits now make more sense to you? What words can you add to your workplace lexicon?

Chapter 5 Debug Your Mind

We are not rational creatures.

We are not comfortable with doubt and uncertainty—so much so that we’ll go to great lengths to resolve open issues and to remove uncertainty and reach closure. But uncertainty can be a good thing: it leaves your choices open. Forcing premature closure, as in Big Design Up Front (BDUF),[78] cuts off your options and leaves you vulnerable to errors.

Note: As per Sivers, no meed for business plan, you’ll figure it out ol n the job

platonic solids. Named for Plato, these ideal forms supply a sort of universal, commonly understood set of building blocks.

The Web was a classic black swan, an unanticipated development that changed the rules of the game completely.

On a more positive note, you can expect to experience a one-in-a-million miracle about once a month.[82] The black swan cautions us not to discount unobserved or rare phenomena as impossible.

Recipe 18    Watch the outliers: “rarely” doesn’t mean “never.”

you’ll be at your peak of intelligence at the very end of the project and at your most ignorant at the very beginning. So, do you want to make decisions early on? No; you want to defer closure for as long as possible in order to make a better decision later. But that means critical issues may stay unsettled for a long time, which makes many people acutely uncomfortable. Resist the pressure. Know that you will reach a decision, and the matter will be settled, just not today.

For something you don’t know but that has to be known by others, such as a go-live date, you can express it as a “target” date along with an indication of your confidence in the estimate. That is, you might report a target date such as Oct. 1, with a 37 percent chance of making that date. But be careful when reporting a date with an 80 percent probability. Folks may tend to hear that as “nearly certain” without appreciating there’s a 20 percent chance it won’t happen. At least you’re being up front about the inherent uncertainty. Guess with explicit probabilities. But realize that it can be really, really hard for other folks in the organization to be comfortable with these ideas. They are programmed to seek closure at all costs and will try to do so at every turn. Educate them as best you can, but be prepared for resistance.

remember that you don’t remember very well. Memory is unreliable, and old memories will change over time, which just reassures you that your misconceptions and prejudices are valid. Don’t rely exclusively on your memory. The Chinese proverb is correct: the palest ink is better than the best memory.

Recipe 20    Trust ink over memory; every mental read is a write.

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things. ➤ Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

These are broad generalizations. GI generation, 1901—1924 All-American, get-it-done builders Silent generation, 1925—1942 Gray-flannel conformists Boom generation, 1943—1960 Moralistic arbiters Generation X, 1961—1981 Free agents Millennial generation, 1982—2005 Loyal, nonentrepreneurial Homeland generation, 2005—??? Just being born now; half of this generation will have Millennial parents

Kids Today Want to see something really scary? The Beliot Mindset List (on the Web at http://www.beloit.edu/mindset) tracks interesting facts and observations about the cohort entering college in any given year. For instance, as far as the freshman class of 2008 is concerned, MTV has never featured music videos (in case you haven’t been paying attention for the last decade, it focuses on reality TV shows, celebrity gossip, and news). Russia has always had multiple political parties. Stadiums have always been named for corporations. They’ve never “rolled down” a car window (let alone dialed a phone). Johnny Carson has never been on live TV; Pete Rose has never played baseball. The Web has always been around; so has Dilbert.

Each generation’s reaction to the perceived weakness of the immediately preceding generations creates a repeating pattern over time. In this case, the generations after the Millennials will react to their values, and the cycle repeats. That means your generation’s attitudes are somewhat predictable. And so is the next generation’s.

According to researchers Neil Howe and William Strauss,[86] if you look back through American history in the United States and Anglo-American history in Europe all the way back to the Renaissance, you’ll find only four prototypical, generational archetypes. These four types repeat over and over again, in a continuing cycle. For the last twenty or so generations in America since the Pilgrim-laden Mayflower landed here in the 1620s, there was only one exception. Following the Civil War, one generation was so badly damaged that they never took their place in society, and the adjoining generations (especially the older generation) filled in the gap. These generational generalizations[87] help shed basic understanding as why people value the things they do and remind us that not everyone shares your core values or your view of the world. Here are the four generational archetypes and their dominant characteristics: Prophet: Vision, values Nomad: Liberty, survival, honor Hero: Community, affluence Artist: Pluralism, expertise, due process Their research explores how each archetypical generation can create the next: archetypes create opposing archetypes in a typical example of the “generation gap.” But that generation then creates one that opposes it, and so on. Archetypes create opposing archetypes. For the current generations in play, see the archetypes map shown here: Figure 15. Howe/Strauss generational archetypes

Bear that in mind as you passionately argue for or against a topic. Are you making a logical argument, an emotional one, or just a familiar one? Is it the right argument in this particular context? Have you really considered other points of view? Rationality is often in the eye of the beholder, so you want to hedge your bets. Recipe 21    Hedge your bets with diversity.

It’s probably most important to realize this: when other people react differently than you would in a given situation, they aren’t crazy, lazy, or just plain difficult. And neither are you. It doesn’t matter if you think the MBTI categorization is accurate or not: people operate based on different temperament types; it’s almost like with a different operating system, if you will, like Windows vs. Mac or vs. Linux. There are many ways to work out a solution and compromise. The only thing that is certain not to work is to try to change the other person’s temperament to match your own.

You can’t change people. This is important background information to keep in mind when collaborating with others: They may well have a different set of bugs than you do. Recipe 22    Allow for different bugs in different people.

Underneath our surprisingly thin veneer of culture and civilization, we are in fact wired very similarly to the aggressive alpha dog who marks his territory with urine. You can readily observe this behavior on the urban street corner, at the corporate boardroom, at the suburban party, and at the corporate team meeting. It’s just how we are. If you don’t believe me, consider a recent report in the journal Nature[91] about a very modern problem—road rage. In this study, the leading predictor of a tendency for road rage was the amount of personalization on a vehicle: custom paint job, decals, bumper stickers, and so on. Even more amazing, the content of bumper stickers didn’t seem to matter, just the quantity. Five “Save the Whales” stickers could actually prove more dangerous than one “Right to Bear Arms” sticker, for example. Why? We’re marking our territory.

That’s yet another reason why email is so pernicious. In the old days of letter writing, the time it took to write longhand and the built-in delay before sending (awaiting the postal carrier) both allowed the cooler neocortex to intervene and remind you that perhaps this wasn’t such a great idea. But Internet time short-circuits the neocortex and exposes our reptilian responses. It allows you to fully vent your initial visceral reaction, whether it’s in an email, a blog comment, or an IM. Although that fast, violent reaction might be a fine thing when faced with a predator in the jungle, it’s less helpful when trying to collaborate on a project with co-workers, users, or vendors (well, it might help with predatory vendors…).

Recipe 23    Act like you’ve evolved: breathe, don’t hiss. You know what it feels like to have that rush of intense feeling come up—when the boss sends you a snippy email or that rude driver cuts you off to exit without signaling.

Recipe 24    Trust intuition, but verify.

When you are dead solid convinced of something, ask yourself why. You’re sure the boss is out to get you. How do you know? Everybody is using Java for this kind of application. Says who? You’re a great/awful developer. Compared to whom? To help get a bigger picture perspective and test your understanding and mental model, ask yourself something like the following questions:[95] How do you know? How do you know? Says who? How specifically? How does what I’m doing cause you to…? Compared to what or whom? Does it always happen? Can you think of an exception? What would happen if you did (or didn’t)? What stops you from…? Is there anything you can actually measure? Get hard numbers on? Any statistics?[96] What happens when you talk this over with a colleague? How about a colleague who has a very different viewpoint from your own? Do they passively agree? Is that a danger sign? Do they violently oppose the idea? Does that give it credibility? Or not?

Expectations create reality, or at least color it. If you expect the worst from people, technology, or an organization, then that’s what you’re primed to see. Just as with sense tuning (discussed in the paragraph here), you’ll suddenly see a lot of what you expect. Expectations color reality.

Chapter 6 Learn Deliberately

Education comes from the Latin word educare, which literally means “led out,” in the sense of being drawn forth. I find that little tidbit really interesting, because we don’t generally think of education in that sense—of drawing forth something from the learner. Instead, it’s far more common to see education treated as something that’s done to the learner—as something that’s poured in, not drawn out. This model is especially popular in corporate training, with a technique that’s known as sheep dip training.

Ignite Your Own Fire “We must encourage [each other]—once we have grasped the basic points—to interconnecting everything else on our own, to use memory to guide our original thinking, and to accept what someone else says as a starting point, a seed to be nourished and grow. For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling but wood that needs igniting—no more—and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth. “Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbors for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself: that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get to some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his own flame, his own intellect, but is happy to sit entranced by the lecture, and the words trigger only associative thinking and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his mind.” —Plutarch, Greek historian, biographer, and essayist Learning isn’t done to you; it’s something you do. Mastering knowledge alone, without experience, isn’t effective. A random approach, without goals and feedback, tends to give random results.

The “body of knowledge” is demonstrably not the important part. The model you build in your mind, the questions you ask to build that model, and your experiences and practices built up along the way and that you use daily are far more relevant to your performance. They’re the things that develop competence and expertise. Mastery of the knowledge alone isn’t sufficient. A single intense, out-of-context classroom event can only get you started in the right direction, at best. You need continuing goals, you need to get feedback to understand your progress, and you need to approach the whole thing far more deliberately than a once-a-year course in a stuffy classroom.

Recipe 25    Create SMART objectives to reach your goals.

“Setting yourself a goal is the first step. The next step in an action plan is to create small objectives that allow you to achieve something every day or so. The more small objectives you have, the more easily you’ll see where you are in relation to your goal.” —Johanna Rothman

So in addition to looking at goals through a local lens, consider the impact they may have in the larger context of your work and life.

model your knowledge portfolio with the same care as you would manage a financial investment portfolio. Just having a plan is an incredibly effective step toward achieving any goal.

Too often, most of us slip into a kind of default learning schedule: you might take some time to learn a new language when you have a free moment or to look at that new library in your spare time. Unfortunately, relegating learning activities to your “free time” is a recipe for failure.

As you soon discover, you really don’t have any “free” time. Time, like closet space or disk-drive space, will get filled up much too quickly. The expression “to make time for” is a bit of a misnomer; time can’t be created or destroyed. Time can only be allocated. By being deliberate about your learning, by allocating appropriate time, and by using that time wisely, you can be much more efficient in your learning. Time can’t be created or destroyed, only allocated.

And remember what General Eisenhower advised us: the planning is far more important than the plan. The plan will change, as we’ll see next. But getting in tune with your goals is invaluable.

When choosing areas to invest in, you need to make a conscious effort to diversify your attention—don’t have all your eggs in one basket. You want a good mix of languages and environments, techniques, industries, and nontechnical areas (management, public speaking, anthropology, music, art, whatever).

Have key technologies or major players in the world changed since you started? Perhaps it’s time to add a few new elements that you hadn’t considered previously or scrap a few plans that just aren’t working out. You may have to revise your objectives or change your goals in the light of new developments.

You need to make a commitment to invest a minimum amount of time on a regular basis. Create a ritual, if needed. Escape to your home office in the attic or down to the coffee shop that has free wi-fi. Not all your sessions will be equally productive, but by scheduling them regularly, you will win out in the long run. If instead you wait until you have time or wait for the muse, it will never happen.

To help make the most of your investment, plan what to do before you sit down at your appointed time. There’s nothing more frustrating than clearing the calendar, escaping from the daily pressures of job and family, only to sit down in front of a blank screen and wonder what to do next. Get the planning out of the way before you get there so that when you have your time, you can get right to it.

Recipe 26    Plan your investment in learning deliberately.

Recipe 27    Discover how you learn best.

Recipe 28    Form study groups to learn and teach.

Better ways to deliberately read and summarize written material Using mind maps to explore and find patterns and relationships Learning by teaching Any one of these techniques, by itself, can be a great help. Taken together, they can turn you into an efficient learning machine.

technique of studying a book or other printed matter is known as SQ3R; that’s an acronym for the steps you need to take.[106] Survey: Scan the table of contents and chapter summaries for an overview. Question: Note any questions you have. Read: Read in its entirety. Recite: Summarize, take notes, and put in your own words. Review: Reread, expand notes, and discuss with colleagues.

Slow down on the difficult parts, and reread sections as needed if the material isn’t clear.

Invent acronyms to help you remember lists and such. Really play with the information; use your R-mode, synesthetic[107] constructs and more. What would this topic look like as a movie? A cartoon?

Reading the same material over and over, or studying the same notes over and over, doesn’t help you remember the material. Instead of studying, try testing. Repeatedly testing yourself by trying to recall the material over and over works much better.

Note: Aka SRS, Anki

A modern mind map is a sort of two-dimensional, organic, and holistic outline. The rules for making a mind map are loose, but they go something like this: Start with a largish piece of unlined paper. Write the subject title in the center of the page, and draw an enclosing circle around it. For the major subject subheadings, draw lines out from this circle, and add a title to each. Recurse for additional hierarchical nodes. For other individual facts or ideas, draw lines out from the appropriate heading and label them as well. Each node should be connected (no free floaters), and the figure should be hierarchical with a single root, but in general there are few restrictions.

When creating a mind map, avoid filling in the elements in a clockwise manner—that’s just an outline going in circles.

While mind mapping sounds like a very basic, elementary technique, it has some subtle properties. It takes advantage of the way your eye scans and reads a piece of paper. Spatial cueing conveys information to you in a way that linear words or an outline can’t; the addition of color and symbols adds to the richness of the representation. As you go to add a new piece of information, a new thought, or an insight to the mind map, you are faced with the question, where does this belong? You have to evaluate the relationships between ideas, not just the ideas themselves, and that can be a very revealing activity. Emphasize spatial cueing and relationships.

once you’ve learned from this mind map, draw it again on a fresh piece of paper—perhaps fixing some of the placement issues and reflecting what you’ve learned since you started. Redrawing and retrieving the information from memory helps strengthen the connections and may expose additional insights in the process.

Nonspecific, non-goal-oriented “playing” with information is a great way to gain insights and see hidden relationships. This sort of mental noodling is just what the R-mode needs to be effective. But it’s important to not try too hard; that’s the “non-goal-oriented” part. You want to sort of let go a bit and let the answer come to you rather than consciously trying to force it. Just play with it.

Recipe 30    Take notes with both R-mode and L-mode.

Try It Here’s an exercise to try: Take a four-to-five-item bullet list that is of importance to you. Draw a mind map for the items on the list (on paper with pen or pencil). Wait a day. Now spend fifteen to twenty minutes embellishing the drawing. Tart it up. Add thick lines; use color; and add little doodles, pictures, angelic cherubs from a Gothic manuscript in the corners, whatever. Review the mind map a week later. Any surprises?

Mind maps are most effective when you’re not exactly sure what you’ll find.

The next time you’re reading a book (trying SQ3R, perhaps), take notes as you go in the form of a mind map. You’ll have a general idea of the major topics, but as particular details emerge and as you begin to see which items are related to each other and how, the map will fill in, and a picture of your understanding will emerge. Then, when you’re in the review phase of SQ3R, redraw and revise your mind map according to your understanding. You’ll be able to refer to the mind map to refresh your memory in a way that’s much more efficient and revealing than other notes or rescanning the book itself.

Louis Pasteur once said, “Chance favors only the prepared mind,” and functional MRIs and EEG tests are proving him correct. A recent study[114] suggests that mental preparation that involves an inward focus of attention can promote flashes of insight, even if the preparation occurs well in advance of facing any particular problem. Turning your attention inward, as you would do when working with a mind map, sets up some condition in the brain that allows for happy flashes of insight later in the project. So, it might be that documenting is more important than documentation.

Recipe 31    Write on: documenting is more important than documentation.

Screencasts are really useful to convey something dynamic: showing a user how to perform a task using your software or modeling the life cycle of an object through a complicated set of processes. It’s a cheap and cheerful way to have lots of people (or remote people) look over your shoulder to see what you’re talking about.

Recipe 32    See it. Do it. Teach it.

constant retrieval is very effective for learning. Having to “go back to the well” while preparing to teach, and while having to think on your feet to respond to questions, all helps strengthen your neural connections.

Chapter 7 Gain Experience

Your brain is designed such that you need to explore and build mental models on your own. You’re not really designed to passively sit by and try to store received knowledge.

Papert is perhaps the leading expert on using technology to create new ways of learning.[115] He invented the programming language Logo: a “toy” that children could play with and, in the playing, learn deep mathematical concepts. His early work with Logo led to the LEGO Mindstorms robotic toys, named for his hugely influential book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas [Pap93].

As I’m using it here, the first meaning of the word play is similar to what we’ve talked about earlier in the book, in the sense of non-goal-directed exploration.

We’re not really designed to just receive information but rather to explore and build mental models on our own. We need to be able to poke at a problem, to explore it, or to “get used to it” (as we talked about back in ​Engage an R-mode to L-mode Flow​). Playing with a problem doesn’t make the problem any easier, but it gets us closer to how we’re wired to learn.

in real life, there is no curriculum. You’ll make mistakes; it will get messy. But those messes give you exactly the kind of feedback you need.

hard fun: not so hard as to be insurmountable (and so not engaging) but challenging enough to maintain interest and progress at solving the problem domain.

Working with new material or solving a problem in a playful manner makes it more enjoyable, but it also makes it easier to learn. Don’t be afraid of fun.

Recipe 33    Play more in order to learn more.

George Pólya wrote a very influential book on concrete steps to problem solving that covers these and other classic techniques (How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method [PC85]; see the sidebar ​Problem Solving with George Pólya​ for a brief synopsis). Problem Solving with George Pólya To solve a problem, ask yourself these questions: What are the unknown aspects? What do you know? What data do you have? What constraints and what rules apply? Then make a plan, execute it, and review the results. Some of the techniques Pólya suggests might sound familiar: Try to think of a familiar problem having the same or similar unknowns. Draw a picture. Solve a related or simpler problem; drop some constraints or use a subset of the data. Were all the data and constraints used? If not, why not? Try restating the problem. Try working backward from the unknown toward the data.

You need to unlearn just as much as you need to learn. Examples include moving from the horse and buggy to the automobile, from the typewriter to the computer, from procedural programming to object-oriented programming, and from single programs on the desktop to cloud computing. For each of these transitions, the new way was fundamentally different from the old way. And where they were different, you had to let go of the old way.

Recipe 34    Learn from similarities; unlearn from differences.

Papert sums up nicely: “Errors benefit us because they lead us to study what happened, to understand what went wrong, and, through understanding, to fix it.” Perversely enough, failure is critical to success—not just any random failure; you need well-managed failure. You need the support of a good learning environment so you can more easily gain and apply experience from both your failures and your successes. Not all mistakes arise from things you do; others come from things you didn’t do but should have done.

Exploration is “playing” in unfamiliar territory. You need to be able to explore freely in order to learn. But that exploration has to be relatively free from risk; you don’t ever want to be held back because you’re afraid to try something. You need to be able to explore even if you’re not sure where you’re headed. Similarly, you need to be free to invent—comfortable in the knowledge that what you create might not work out. Finally, you need to be able to apply what you’ve learned in your day-to-day practice. An efficient, supportive learning environment should allow you to do three things, safely: explore, invent, and apply.[117]

Recipe 35    Explore, invent, and apply in your environment—safely.

Freedom to experiment Few problems have a single, best solution. You could implement this next feature this way or that way; which do you choose? Both! If time is tight (and when isn’t it?), try at least a prototype each way. That’s experimentation, and you want to encourage it. Consider it part of “design time” when giving an estimate. You also need to make sure this experimentation doesn’t adversely affect anyone else on the team.

Ability to backtrack to a stable state Safety means that when the experiment goes awry, you can go back to the halcyon days of last Tuesday, before you started making those dreadful changes. You want to revert to a previous, known state of your source code and try again. Remember, you want to get it right the last time.

Reproduce any work product as of any time Backtracking to a previous version of the source code isn’t quite enough; you probably need to actually run the program (or work with any derivative work product) as of any point in history. Can you run a version of the program from last year or last month?

Ability to demonstrate progress Finally, you can’t get anywhere without feedback. Did this experiment or that invention work better than the alternatives? How do you know? Is the project progressing? Do more functions work this week than worked last week? Somehow, you need to demonstrate fine-grained progress—to yourself as well as to others.

In software development, it’s pretty simple to set up an infrastructure to address these needs. It’s what we call the Starter Kit: version control, unit testing, and project automation.[118] Version control stores every version of every file you work with. Whether you’re writing source code, articles, songs or poetry, version control acts as a giant Undo button for your work.[119] Newer distributed version control systems such as Git or Mercurial are well-suited to support private experimentation. Unit testing provides you with a fine-grained set of regression tests. You can use unit test results to compare alternatives, and you can use them as a solid indication of progress.[120] In any endeavor, you need objective feedback to measure progress. This is ours. Automation ties it all together and ensures that the trivial mechanics are taken care of in a reliable, repeatable manner.[121] This Starter Kit gives you the advantage of freedom to experiment, with comparatively little risk.

Situational feedback is the primary inner game technique that allows you to learn more efficiently by eliminating any interference. In the tennis example, the subject wasn’t inundated with rules of the game; buried with minutiae of proper grip, footwork, and so on; or forced to learn “dance facts” before dancing. Instead of all those distractions, she was able to concentrate on a very simple feedback loop. Hit the ball like this, and it lands here. Hit the ball like that, and it lands over there. Follow this rhythm. It’s nonverbal learning, for a nonverbal skill, with a tight feedback loop and short feedback gap.

At a certain point (and usually pretty quickly), your brain just fries with the constant barrage of instructions and stops attending. Brain freeze. It’s too much to remember and keep track of all at once. The inner game theory has the solution: instead of issuing a stream of instructions to the student, the idea is to teach the student awareness and to use that awareness to correct their performance. Awareness is an important tool in becoming more than a novice. … Just be aware. This is a key aspect to playing the inner game: don’t focus on correcting individual details, but just be aware. Accept what is as a first step, and just be aware of it. Don’t judge, don’t rush in with a solution, don’t criticize.

Recipe 36    See without judging and then act.

the idea of being fully aware of “what is” before acting to correct it is especially true when debugging. Too often programmers (myself included) seem to jump in to fix an apparent bug without fully evaluating what’s really wrong first. Fight the urge to rush to judgment or to a potential fix prematurely. Be fully aware of how the system is behaving, and only then decide what part of that is “wrong” before moving on to devise a solution. In other words, don’t just do something; stand there. June Kim describes the following technique to help become fully aware. Don’t just do something; stand there.

The inner game ideas focus on feedback to grow expertise. You are training, and then listening to, the inner voice of experience. But that works only if you can listen to the inner voice of experience. Listen, listen, listen. Unfortunately, it isn’t always that easy,

The Inner Game series sums up this idea with the phrase, “Trying fails, awareness cures.” That is, consciously trying generally doesn’t work as well as simple awareness. In fact, trying too hard is a guarantee for failure.

Recipe 37    Give yourself permission to fail; it’s the path to success.

Suppose you’re sitting in the movie theater, watching the big car chase at the climax of the movie. Your pulse is rapid, your breathing shallow, your muscles clenched. But wait, you’re not actually in the car chase. You’re sitting in a comfortable upholstered chair, in the air-conditioning, with a drink and popcorn, watching flickering images projected on a screen. You are not in any danger at all.[129] Yet your body reacts as if you’re in real danger. And it doesn’t have to be a movie; a book would work as well. It doesn’t even have to be happening in the present moment. Remember that really mean bully in grade school or that awful teacher? First love? These are just memories, but the remembering can cause appropriate physical responses. It turns out that your brain isn’t very good at discriminating between input sources. Real-time sensor data, memories of past events, and even imagined circumstances that haven’t happened all result in the same physiological responses (see Figure 21, ​All input is created equal​).

Note: No conclusion but an interesting observation.

Much of perception is based on prediction,[130] and prediction is based on context and past experience, so much so that current, real-time input takes a backseat. Have you ever had the experience of a friend who suddenly made a dramatic difference in their appearance? They grew or shaved a beard or changed hair style or color, and you didn’t notice right away? Or even after a while? Perception is based on prediction. The stereotypical story of the wife’s new hairdo that the husband doesn’t notice really happens: the husband “sees” based on old input. It’s just how your brain works.[131] Since this phenomenon works just as well from remembered experience and imagined experience, you can use it to your advantage.

OK, you’ll need to bear with me here, because this is going to sound suspiciously like faerie dust. But, since the brain is kinda gullible with regards to its input source: imagining success is provably effective in achieving it. You can improve your performance—whether you’re playing a violin, debugging code, or designing a new architecture—by imagining that you’ve already done so successfully.

Legendary jazz guitarist Pat Metheny takes this idea one step further and offers this advice: “Always be the worst guy in every band you’re in. If you’re the best guy there, you need to be in a different band. And I think that works for almost everything that’s out there as well.”[132]

by surrounding yourself with highly skilled people, you will increase your own skill level. Some of that is from observation and application of their practices and approaches. Some of that comes from the fact that you’re conditioning your mind to perform at a higher level. You have a natural mechanism known as mirror neurons that help: watching someone else’s behavior triggers an equivalence for you to do the same.

The Inner Game folks suggest you should pretend you are the expert, the pro, the famous soloist. They observed that simply telling a student to “play like” someone famous in their field was enough to increase the student’s performance.

Recipe 38    Groove your mind for success.

Chapter 8 Manage Focus

Sometimes we use the words information and knowledge interchangeably, but they aren’t the same thing. Information is raw data in a given context. For instance, the fact that Microsoft bought some company for a billion dollars is just information, and there’s no shortage of information these days. Knowledge imparts meaning to that information. You apply your time, attention, and skill to information to produce knowledge. Looking at that particular Microsoft acquisition and knowing how it might change the market, provide new opportunities, and destroy others constitutes knowledge.

If you’re paying attention—really paying attention—you can accomplish marvelous things. Paul Graham, in his book Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age [Gra04], suggests that “a navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb aircraft at 140mph on a pitching carrier deck at night more safely than the average teenager can cut a bagel.”

Recipe 39    Learn to pay attention.

Meditation might sound trivial. It’s not. I strongly suggest you give it a try for awhile; paying attention is a critical skill.

Have you heard of the consultant’s Rule of Three?[142] In general, if you can’t think of three ways a plan can go wrong or think of three different solutions to a problem, then you haven’t thought it through enough. You can think of the multiple-drafts model in that light; let at least three alternative ideas ferment and come to consciousness. They are in there already; just let them grow and ripen. And, yes, that might just mean sitting around and doing nothing. Feet up on the desk. Humming. Eating a crunchy snack.

Recipe 40    Make thinking time.

According to the research into distributed cognition, the tools you use for mental support outside your brain become part of your operating mind. As marvelous as the brain is, we can turbo-charge it by providing some key external support. External support is part of your mind.

Albert Einstein knew this well. Supposedly he was once asked how many feet there were in a mile and replied that he wouldn’t fill his brain with things that could easily be looked up. That’s what reference books are for; that’s an efficient use of resources. Your own book collection, your notes, and even your favorite IDE and programming language all form part of your exocortex, which is any mental memory or processing component that resides outside your physical brain.

Recipe 41    Use a wiki to manage information and knowledge.

Computers have a distinct advantage over our mental architecture; they are built to swap context easily and naturally. We aren’t built that way. If something interrupts us, breaks our flow, or causes us to lose our focus, it’s really expensive to drag everything back in.

Just to clarify, multitasking here refers to performing multiple concurrent tasks at different levels of abstraction. Fixing a couple of bugs while in the same area of code doesn’t count as multitasking, nor does returning several similar phone calls or cooking a multicourse meal. You get into trouble when you interrupt your code-fixing session by responding to an unrelated IM, email, or phone call or take a quick peek at a news site.

It takes twenty minutes to reload context. In today’s digital culture, this is part of a larger, dangerous phenomenon known as cognitive overload. It’s a cocktail of stress, too much multitasking, too many distractions, and the frequent flurry of new data to deal with. Scientists agree that trying to focus on several things at once means you’ll do poorly at each of them.

Recipe 42    Establish rules of engagement to manage interruptions.

Recipe 43    Send less email, and you’ll receive less email.

Recipe 44    Choose your own tempo for an email conversation.

Recipe 45    Mask interrupts to maintain focus.

I dare you to go to Staples or Office Depot and find an office desk that measure 17 inches diagonally. You can’t, because that’s a ludicrously small dimension for an office desk. And yet, most monitors are in the 17-to-21-inch range. And that’s where we do all of our work. On a small screen, you have to switch between active windows and applications all the time because you can’t keep enough context in such a small space. Do you know what Alt-Tab (or Command-Tab on Mac) is called? It’s a context switch. And as we’ve seen, context switching kills productivity. Even a small action like using Alt-Tab to switch between windows that aren’t all visible takes time and requires short-term memory and energy.

Recipe 46    Use multiple monitors to avoid context switching.

Recipe 47    Optimize your personal workflow to maximize context.

So, what does it take to stay sharp? The biggest thing is self-awareness—remembering that you need to deliberately work at staying sharp. Left to our own devices, our default settings aren’t ideal for programming and knowledge work. If nothing else, remember to do these three things: Learn to quiet your chattering L-mode. Deliberately work with and add to thoughts in progress, even if they aren’t “done” yet. Be aware of just how expensive context switching can be, and avoid it in all its myriad forms. If you start trying to tackle at least these areas, you will be well on your way to managing your focus and taking control of your attention.

Chapter 9 Beyond Expertise

Change is always harder than it looks—that’s a physical reality, not just an aphorism. An old, ingrained habit makes the equivalent of a neural highway in your brain. These old habits don’t go away. You can make new neural highways alongside, going a different route and making shortcuts, but the old highways remain. They are always there for you to revert to—to fall back on. Practice may not make perfect, but it sure makes permanent. Practice makes permanent.

Realize that these old habits will remain, and if you revert to one, don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s how you’re wired. Just acknowledge the lapse, and move on with your new intention. It will surely happen again; just be aware of when it does, and get back on the right path again. It’s the same thing whether you’re changing your learning habits, quitting smoking, or losing weight.

Start with a plan. Block out some time, and fight for it. Keep track of what you’ve accomplished, and review your accomplishments when you feel you haven’t done enough. You’ve probably come further than you think. This is a great use of your exocortex: use a journal, a wiki, or a web app to track your progress.

Inaction is the enemy, not error. Remember the danger doesn’t lie in doing something wrong; it lies in doing nothing at all. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.

New habits take time. It takes something like a minimum of three weeks of performing a new activity before it becomes habit. Maybe longer. Give it a fair chance.

Belief is real. As we’ve seen throughout, your thoughts will physically alter the wiring in your brain and your brain chemistry. You have to believe that change is possible. If you think you’ll fail, you’ll be correct.

Take small, next steps. Start with the low-hanging fruit. Set up a small, achievable goal, and reward yourself for reaching it. “Rinse and repeat”: set up the next small step. Take one step at a time, keeping your big goal in mind but not trying to map out all the steps it takes to get there. Just the next one. Learn what you need to know for the goals further out once you get closer to them.

Just start! It doesn’t particularly matter what you choose to start with, but start something from this book deliberately, first thing tomorrow morning. Here’s a suggested checklist of some possible first steps: Start taking responsibility; don’t be afraid to ask “why?” or “how do you know?” or “how do I know?” or to answer “I don’t know—yet.” Pick two things that will help you maintain context and avoid interruption, and start doing them right away. Create a Pragmatic Investment Plan, and set up SMART goals. Figure out where you are on the novice-to-expert spectrum in your chosen profession and what you might need to progress. Be honest. Do you need more recipes or more context? More rules or more intuition? Practice. Having trouble with a piece of code? Write it five different ways. Plan on making more mistakes—mistakes are good. Learn from them. Keep a notebook on you (unlined paper, preferably). Doodle. Mind map. Take notes. Keep your thoughts loose and flowing. Open up your mind to aesthetics and additional sensory input. Whether it’s your cubicle, your desktop, or your code, pay attention to how “pleasing” it is. Start your personal wiki on things you find interesting. Start blogging. Comment on the books you’ve read.[159] Read more books, and you’ll have more to write about. Use SQ3R and mind maps. Make thoughtful walking a part of your day. Start a book-reading group. Get a second monitor, and start using a virtual desktop. Go through the “next actions” for each chapter and try them. I’ve barely scratched the surface on a variety of really interesting topics, and researchers are discovering new things and disproving old ideas all the time. If anything I’ve suggested here doesn’t work out for you, don’t worry about it, and move on. There’s plenty more to try.

Recipe 48    Grab the wheel. You can’t steer on autopilot.