Lessons Learnt From Reading 51 Books in 2018
I tried reading a book a week last year. Here's what I learnt, what I found surprising, and what I'm taking forwards.
I tried reading a book a week last year. Here's what I learnt, what I found surprising, and what I'm taking forwards.
The final part of a framework for putting mental models to practice. Here we attempt to answer a deceptively simple question: when someone gives you advice, how do you evaluate that advice before putting it into practice?
Have you ever tried putting deliberate practice to practice? If you have, it's likely that you'll have noticed just how difficult it is to apply deliberate practice principles to your career. Anyone that tells you otherwise is lying; here's why.
Peak is a 2016 book from K. Anders Ericsson, the leading authority on deliberate practice. It covers 30 years of research into the field, but ultimately fails as a practical guide to putting it to practice.
Ken Kocienda's book is about how Apple builds software in the time of Steve Jobs. Highly recommended, especially if you're a software engineer.
Greg Wilson's Teaching Tech Together is ostensibly about teaching computer programming, but contains a wonderfully written section on how humans learn.
Charles Duhigg's 2012 book on habit introduces a bunch of valuable ideas from the academic literature of habit creation, but is ultimately not very useful to the practitioner.
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Last week we covered a model for expertise called recognition-primed decision making. This week, we talk about how to use that model to build expertise of your own.
Experts make decisions in ways that are very, very different from conventional decision science models. This makes expertise a lot more important to good decision making than you might think.
Instrumental rationality is the sort of thinking that allows you to achieve your goals. We take a closer look at what decision science says is the 'best' way to pursue this purpose.