“You wouldn’t expect to get a driver’s license by reciting the rules for building a car; it’s equally absurd to expect people to demonstrate that they know a language by reciting its rules. You prove that you know how to drive a car by driving; you prove that you know how to use the language by using it – by speaking, writing, reading, and understanding it.”
Suzette Elgin
Declarative knowledge is not the same as procedural knowledge. It’s not just different – it’s not even the same type of thing. It’s like comparing a sandwich you can eat and a recipe for a sandwich; they are not da same ting. We seem to think that the people who can recite sandwich recipes most accurately are also the best cooks. This is good enough as a first approximation, but we personally and collectively do ourselves incredible — and sometimes even irreparable — harm when we don’t correct such ideas on the basis of contradictory evidence.
“What seems to matter most is not how much practice you do, but how regularly”
The New Scientist October 31, 2015 issue
Critical frequency all the way, baby! Go for little and often. Go for wide standards; cover ground like a coat of grass. Take care of frequency and quantity’ll take care of itself!
“The free horse runs swifter than the one motivated by the whip or the carrot.”
Maria Montessori, quoted in “The Superman Syndrome”
If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong. You don’t need a teacher to show you the way. You already have an internal guidance system — it’s called the boredom/interest scale. You are a natural learning machine. All you need do is prepare, maintain and expand an environment that allows you to learn more or less naturally. And guess what? School is the literal opposite of that.
“Without boundaries, we are lost. At either truly creative crave them and, if they don’t exist, construct them…we need to become] rats who build a labyrinth from which they will try to escape…one of the greatest myths of creativity [is] that constraints are something to be avoided. In fact…we may actually undermine creativity if we make things too easy or too comfortable for individuals of significant creative potential… This less-is-more phenomenon holds true not only for individuals but for entire nations. A good example is the ‘oil curse,’ aka the paradox of plenty. Nations rich in natural resources, especially oil, tend to stagnate culturally and intellectually, as even a brief visit to Saudi Arabia or Kuwait reveals. The citizens of these nations have everything so they create nothing.” [Emphasis added] The Geography of Genius: The Search for the World’s Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley
Timeboxing is your friend. Timeboxing is your best effing friend. You need more time, you need less time. Less time to overthink. Less time to overplan. When you are given too much time, you just waste it overthinking. The less time you have, the more action you’ll take. Overthinking is to life as water hyacinth is to a lake: it takes steadily takes over and chokes out all other life.