Quotes About Learning

Curiosity, he says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.

Your brain hosts a truly staggering number of loops. The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory.

When Blakely and her brother were growing up, her father would ask them a question every week at the dinner table: "What did you guys fail at this week?" "If we had nothing to tell him, he'd be disappointed," Blakely said. "The logic seems counterintuitive, but it worked beautifully. He knew that many people become paralyzed by the fear of failure.

Most PowerPoints aren't creating a lot of emotion. We decided to flip this on its head. Let's have people do something active and immersive. That's going to generate more of an emotional response so they will feel something. And then they can think about what they've learned.

Any new quest, even one that is ultimately successful, is going to involve failure.

Everything can look like a failure in the middle." A similar sentiment is expressed by marriage therapist Michele Weiner-Davis, who says that "real change, the kind that sticks, is often three steps forward and two steps back." If failure is a necessary part of change, then the way people understand failure is critical.

when you seek out situations where you might fail, failure loses some of its menace. You've been inoculated against it.

The growth mindset, then, is a buffer against defeatism. It reframes failure as a natural part of the change process. And that's critical, because people will persevere only if they perceive falling down as learning rather than as failing.

The promise of stretching is not success, it's learning. It's self-insight. It's the promise of gleaning the answers to some of the most important and vexing questions of our lives: What do we want? What can we do? Who can we be? What can we endure?

One of the worst things about knowing a lot, or having access to a lot of information, is that we're tempted to share it all.

One important implication of the gap theory is that we need to open gaps before we close them. Our tendency is to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts. The

avoid useless accuracy, and to dodge the Curse of Knowledge, is to use analogies.

Stories are like flight simulators for the brain.

Both women experienced moments of self-insight sparked by "stretching." To stretch is to place ourselves in situations that expose us to the risk of failure.

Self-understanding comes slowly. One of the few ways to accelerate it—to experience more crystallizing moments—is to stretch for insight.

But let's not confuse memorability with wisdom.

Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it.

Trip over the truth. Frey's activity allowed the vestry to discover insights for themselves

Lots of us have expertise in particular areas. Becoming an expert in something means that we become more and more fascinated by nuance and complexity. That's when the Curse of Knowledge kicks in, and we start to forget what it's like not to know what we know

George A. Miller's "Magical Number 7" has an expansion module, under certain conditions. We can load around 7 coherent "units" into our mental working space, but depending on our learning and expertise, those units may vary in size.

growth mindset compliment praises effort rather than natural skill:

TO OOCH IS TO ask, Why predict something we can test? Why guess when we can know?

This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has "cursed" us.

Teach the growth mindset. Every success is going to involve rough patches.