Learning Techniques

How do you actually get good in messy, real world domains? This tag covers practice, pedagogy design, theories of expert cognition, and the very cutting edge of expertise research.

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Be Good To Your Mentors

Mentor relationships can be absolutely wonderful over the arc of a career. This is a simple way to think about finding and keeping good mentors.

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Ill-Structured Domains Aren't Necessarily Wicked

Cognitive Flexibility Theory: the caveats. Also: a look at kind vs wicked learning domains, and what this tells us about building expertise in messy, real world domains.

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The Principles are Useless On Their Own

What happens if cases are more important than principles in your domain? Some non-obvious implications.

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How Note Taking Can Help You Become an Expert

What Cognitive Flexibility Theory tells us about the acceleration of expertise in ill-structured domains.

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The Best Way to Learn From Other People's Experiences

Why bother learning history, when history isn't likely to repeat itself? We take a look at what Cognitive Flexibility Theory tells us about the best way to learn from other people's experiences.

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Believability in Practice

Believability is a criterion for evaluating practical advice, originally articulated by Ray Dalio in his 2017 book Principles. These are some notes from practice.

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A Map of Expertise Research for the Career-Minded

How every post about expertise and expertise acquisition on this blog fits together. Also a few things I'm currently investigating.

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The Hard Thing About Learning From Experience

Much of life is about learning from experience. Not in class. Not mentorship. Not deliberate practice. And so the question: how do you learn better when it comes to learning from trial and error?

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Business Expertise: Using the Triad as a North Star

Some implications of using the triad mental model of business as a North Star for learning. Part of a series on business expertise.

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John Cutler’s Product Org Expertise

A few weeks ago, I helped Amplitude head of product education John Cutler extract tacit expertise around diagnosing and improving product organisations. Here's how that went.