Learning Techniques

What a question about growth marketing tells us about expertise — and why expert-novice differences are so useful to probe if you're a practitioner.

If you read history for concept instantiations, then: a) how do you hunt for cases for each concept, and b) how do you identify new concepts from the history you read? We look at answers to both questions.

Learning from history is often problematic — history is context and path dependent, and it doesn't repeat itself. But what if there is a better way to read history, one that sidesteps these problems?

Good news: we have a neat, universal milestone on the journey to mastery. What that looks like, and how to use it.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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