Quotes About Learning

Build a Wall Between Performance Review and Professional Development:

The staggering babies embody the deepest truth about deep practice: to get good, it's helpful to be willing, or even enthusiastic, about being bad. Baby steps are the royal road to skill.

GIVE A NEW SKILL A MINIMUM OF EIGHT WEEKS

One does not become a master coach by accident.

Things that appear to be obstacles turn out to be desirable in the long haul," Bjork said. "One real encounter, even for a few seconds, is far more useful than several hundred observations.

This works because when you communicate a skill to someone, you come to understand it more deeply yourself.

When you practice a soft skill, focus on making a high number of varied reps, and on getting clear feedback. Don't worry too much about making errors—the important thing is to explore. Soft skills are often more fun to practice, but they're also tougher because they demand that you coach yourself. After each session ask yourself, What worked? What didn't? And why?

If you have early success, do your best to ignore the praise and keep pushing yourself to the edges of your ability, where improvement happens. If you don't have early success, don't quit. Instead, treat your early efforts as experiments, not as verdicts. Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint.

The truth is, when you are starting out, you do not "play" tennis; you struggle and fight and pay attention and slowly get better. The truth is, we learn in staggering-baby steps. Effort-based language works because it speaks directly to the core of the learning experience, and when it comes to ignition, there's nothing more powerful.

More studies followed. In 2005 Fredrik Ullen scanned the brains of concert pianists and found a directly proportional relationship between hours of practice and white matter. In 2000 Torkel Klingberg linked reading skill to white matter increases, and in 2006 Jesus Pujol did the same for vocabulary development.

We're prewired to imitate," Anders Ericsson says. "When you put yourself in the same situation as an outstanding person and attack a task that they took on, it has a big effect on your skill.

Why is targeted, mistake-focused practice so effective? A: Because the best way to build a good circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again, over and over. Struggle is not an option: it's a biological requirement.

One of the best measures of any group's culture is its learning velocity—how quickly it improves its performance of a new skill.

The effect of this first phase of learning seemed to be to get the learner involved, captivated, hooked, and to get the learner to need and want more information and expertise.

deep practice is assisted by the attainment of a primal state, one where we are attentive, hungry, and focused, even desperate.

We think of effortless performance as desirable, but it's really a terrible way to learn

Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways—operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes—makes you smarter. Or

It's also why we've recently seen an avalanche of new studies, books, and video games built on the myelin-centric principle that practice staves off cognitive decline.

Many hotbeds use an approach I call the engraving method. Basically, they watch the skill being performed, closely and with great intensity, over and over, until they build a high-definition mental blueprint.

In one study, adolescents preparing for the PSAT who used this method chose to complete 60 percent more practice questions than the control group. In another, dieters consumed significantly fewer calories, were more physically active, and lost more weight.

is for amateurs.

What is one thing that I currently do that you'd like me to continue to do? What is one thing that I don't currently do frequently enough that you think I should do more often? • What can I do to make you more effective?

This book is about a simple idea: Clarissa and the talent hotbeds are doing the same thing. They have tapped into a neurological mechanism in which certain patterns of targeted practice build skill. Without realizing it, they have entered a zone of accelerated learning that, while it can't quite be bottled, can be accessed by those who know how. In short, they've cracked the talent code.

We think of effortless performance as desirable, but it's really a terrible way to learn," said Robert Bjork