Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

• Always consider the context. Everything is a part of a system, and you can get into trouble by only considering things in isolation.
• Use rules for novices, intuition for experts. This is one of the core principles of the Dreyfus skill model.
• Know what you don’t know, be humble about your understanding and assume you don’t have a complete understanding or the full picture.
• Learn by watching and imitating, not by being lectured at.
• Keep practicing in order to remain an expert.
• Avoid formal methods if you need creativity, intuition, or inventiveness.

• Capture all of your ideas, such as in a notebook, to get more of them.
• Strive for good design, it really works better.
• The more senses you engage in a task, the more involved and focused your brain will be. Fiddling, music, walking, etc.
• Step away from the keyboard from time to time to solve hard problems.
• Change your viewpoint to solve the problem: look at it in reverse, or exaggerate it.
• Watch for outliers: rarely doesn’t mean never.
• Be comfortable with uncertainty.
• Trust ink over memory, every mental read is a write.

• Hedge your bets with diversity.
• Allow for different bugs in different people.
• Act like you’ve evolved, breathe, don’t hiss.
• Trust intuition, but verify.
• Create SMART objectives to reach your goals.
• Plan your investment in learning deliberately and developing your mind.
• Discover how you learn best, it might not be like other people.
• Form study groups to learn and teach.
• Read deliberately.
• To learn better: see it, do it, and teach it.
• Play more in order to learn more.
• Learn from similarities, unlearn from differences.
• Explore, invent, and apply in your environment—safely.
• See without judging and then act.

• Give yourself permission to fail; it’s the path to success.
• Groove your mind for success through envisioning it.
• Learn to pay attention.
• Make thinking time.
• Use a personal wiki to organize your knowledge and learning.
• Establish rules of engagement to manage interruptions.
• Send less email and you’ll receive less.
• Choose your own tempo for an email conversation, you can slow it down.
• Hide interruptions to maintain focus.
• Use multiple monitors to avoid context switching.
• Optimize your personal workflow to maximize context.
• Grab the wheel, you can’t steer on autopilot.

Questions to ask yourself to challenge your intuition:

• 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…?

The planning is more important than the plan.

Just because your plan is likely to change doesn’t mean planning isn’t valuable.

• 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.

If you can’t think of three ways a plan can go wrong or three different solution to a problem, then you haven’t thought about it hard enough.

• You can’t just rely on a good teacher. A teacher doesn’t just teach, a student must also do the learning, and you must know how to learn effectively.
• Uncorrected problems that you’re aware of only get worse. Fix them as soon as possible.