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The imperfect fungibility of time: thinking about how to use money to accelerate learning

Posted: - Modified: | learning

Any time I want to, I could spend more time consulting. This would make my clients happy. It would help me create much more value, and they would get more value from me than from other ways they could spend their budget. I would improve my skills along the way, especially with people's requests and feedback. And to top it all off, I would earn more money that I could add to my savings, exchange for other people's time or talents, or use to improve our quality of life.

How hard is it to resist the temptation to work on other people's things? It's like trying to focus on cooking lentils when there's a pan of fudge brownies right there, just waiting to for a bite. It's like wandering through the woods in hope of coming across something interesting when you know you can go back to the road and the road will take you to an enormous library. It's like trying to build something out of sand when there's a nifty LEGO Technic kit you can build instead. It's probably like Odysseus sailing past Sirens, if the Sirens sang, "We need you! You can help us! Plus you can totally kit out your ship and your crew with the treasures we'll give you and the experience you'll gain!"

Maybe I can use this temptation's strength against it.

Maybe I can treat client work (with its attendant rewards and recognition) as a carrot that I can have if I make good progress on my personal projects. If I hit the ground running in the morning, then I can work on client stuff in the afternoon. A two-hour span is probably a good-sized chunk of time for programming or reporting. It's not as efficient as a four-hour chunk, but it'll force me to keep good notes, and I know I can get a fair bit done in that time anyway.

The other part of this is making sure that I don't give myself too-low targets so that I can get to client work. It'll be tempting to pick a small task, do it, and say, "There, I'm done. Moving on!" But I have to sit with uncertainty and figure things out. I expect that learning to work on my own things will mean encountering and dealing with inner Resistance. I expect that my anxious side will whisper its self-doubt. So I lash myself to the mast and sail past the Sirens, heading towards (if I'm lucky!) years of wandering.

Part of this is the realization that even after my experiments with delegation, I'm still not good at converting money back into time, learning, ability, or enjoyment. Time is not really fungible, or at least I haven't figured out how to convert it efficiently. I can convert time to money through work, but I find it difficult to convert money back to time (through delegation) or use it to accelerate learning.

Extra money tends to go into projects, tools or cooking experiments. Gardening is one of my luxuries: a few bags of dirt, some seeds and starters, and an excuse to be outside regularly. Paying someone to do the first draft of a transcript gets around my impatience with listening to my own voice. Aside from these regular decisions, I tend to think carefully about what I spend on. Often a low-cost way of doing something also helps me learn a lot – sometimes much more than throwing money at the problem would.

But there are things that money can buy, and it's good for me to learn how to make better decisions about that. For example, a big savings goal might be "buying" more of W-'s time, saving up in case he wants to experiment with a more self-directed life as well. House maintenance projects need tools, materials, and sometimes skilled help. Cooking benefits from experimentation, better ingredients, and maybe even instruction.

What about accelerating my learning so that I can share even more useful stuff? Working with other people can help me:

  • take advantage of external perspectives (great for editing)
  • organize my learning path into a more effective sequence
  • learn about adjacent possibilities and low-hanging fruit
  • bridge gaps
  • improve through feedback
  • create scaffolds/structures and feed motivation
  • set up and observe deliberate practice
  • direct my awareness to what's important

In order to make the most of this, I need to get better at:

  • identifying what I want to learn
  • identifying who I can learn from
  • approaching them and setting up a relationship
  • experimenting
  • following up

How have I invested money into learning, and what have the results been like?

Tools? Yup, totally worth it, even for the tools I didn't end up using much of (ex: ArtRage). Do more of this. How can I get better at:

  • keeping an eye out for potentially useful tools:
    • Emacs packages
    • AutoHotkey scripts/ideas
    • Windows/Linux tools related to writing, drawing, coding
  • evaluating whether a tool can fit my workflow
  • supporting people who make good tools
    • expressing appreciation
    • contributing code
    • writing about tools
    • sending money

Books? Some books have been very useful. On the other hand, the library has tons of books, so I have an infinite backlog of free resources. Buying and sketchnoting new books (or going to author events) is good for connecting with authors and readers about the book du jour, but on the other hand, I also get a lot of value from focusing on classics that I want to remember.

Conferences? Mostly interesting for meeting people and bumping into them online through the years. Best if I go as a speaker (makes conversations much easier and reduces costs) and/or as a sketchnoter (long-term value creation). It would be even awesomer if I could combine this with in-person intensive learning, like a hackathon or a good workshop…

Courses? Meh. Not really impressed by the online courses I've taken so far, but then again, I don't think I'm approaching them with the right mindset either.

Things I will carve out opportunity-fund space for so that I can try more of them:

Pairing/coaching/tutoring? Tempting, especially in terms of Emacs, Node/Javascript, Rails, or Japanese. For example, some goals might be:

  • Learn how to improve Emacs Lisp performance and reliability: profiling, code patterns, tests, etc.
  • Define and adopt better Emacs habits
    • Writing
    • Organization
    • Planning
    • Programming
  • Write more elegant and testable Javascript
  • Set up best-practices Javascript/CSS/HTML/Rails environment in Emacs
  • Learn how to take advantage of new features in WordPress
  • Write more other-directed posts
  • Get better at defining what I want to learn and reaching out to people

Actually, in general, how does one accelerate learning?

  • General learning techniques: spaced repetition, skill breakdowns, deliberate practice…
  • Structure and motivation: personal trainers, courses
  • Instruction and perspective: expert, peer, or external
  • Higher-quality resources: original research, well-written/organized resources, richer media, good level of detail, experience/authority
  • Better tools: things are often much easier and more fun
  • Experimentation: learning from experience, possibly coming up with new observations
  • Feedback, analysis: experience, thoroughness
  • Immersion: languages, retreats
  • Outsourcing: research, summaries, scale, skills, effort
  • Relationships: serendipity, connection, conversation, mentoring, sponsorship
  • Community: premium courses or membership sites often offer this as a benefit
  • Freedom: safety net that permits experimentation, time to focus on it instead of worrying about bills, etc.

Hmm. I have some experience in investing in better tools, higher-quality resources, experimentation, feedback/analysis, delegation, and freedom. I'd like to get better at that and at investing in relationships and outsourcing. Come to think of it, that might be more useful than focusing on learning from coaching/instruction, at least for now.

Let me imagine what using money to accelerate learning would be like:

  • Relationships
    • Get to know individuals faster and deeper
      • Free: Build org-contacts profiles of people who are part of my tribe (people who comment/link/interact); think about them on a regular basis
      • Free: Proactively reach out and explore shared interests/curiosities
      • $: Figure out digital equivalent of treating people to lunch or coffee: conversation + maybe investing time into creating a good resource for them and other people + sending cash, donating to charity, or (best) cultivating reciprocal learning
      • $: Sign up for a CRM that understands Gmail, Twitter, and maybe even Disqus
    • Identify things to learn about and reach out to people who are good role models for those skills
      • Free: Be specific about things I want to learn
      • Free: Find people who know how to do those things (maybe delegate research)
      • $: Possibly buy their resources, apply their advice
      • $: Reach out with results and questions, maybe an offer to donate to their favourite charity
    • Help the community (like Emacs evil plans; rising tide lifts all boats)
      • $: Invest time and money into creating good resources
      • Be approachable
      • $: Bring the community together. Invest in platforms/organization. For example, I can use whatever I would have spent on airfare to create a decent virtual conference experience, or figure out the etiquette of having an assistant set up and manage Emacs Hangouts/Chats.
  • Outsourcing
    • Identify things that I want to do, regardless of skills
    • $: Experiment with outsourcing parts that I don't know how to do yet (or even the ones I can do but want external perspectives on)
    • Use the results to determine what I actually want and what to learn more about; iterate as needed

Huh, that's interesting. When I start thinking about investing in learning, I tend to fixate on finding a coach because I feel a big gap around directly asking people for help. But I can invest in other ways that might be easier or more effective to start with. Hmm… Thoughts?

View or add comments (Disqus), or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com

How can I make better use of my index card drawing process?

Posted: - Modified: | drawing, learning

I really like this practice of working with index cards, especially now that I've sorted out a sweet digital workflow for them.

I started with a straightforward workflow:

  1. Think of a question.
  2. Draw it on a paper index card.
  3. After I complete 5+ index cards, scan the cards.
  4. Convert and process the cards (colouring, etc.).
  5. Rename the cards.
  6. Upload the cards.
  7. Add them to my Flickr set (and to blog posts and so on).

I replaced my Flickr uploading process with a script. Then I replaced the paper index cards with digital index cards. I wrote another script to make renaming files easier. Then I built an outline of questions and used that to create index card templates. So now my workflow looks like this:

  1. I use Org Mode in Emacs to collect and organize questions. I use TODO states to track ones that need further research, ones that are ready to be drawn, and ones that are ready to be blogged.
  2. When I switch to tablet mode, I can select questions to draw using a custom pen-friendly Emacs interface that sets up the template for me.
  3. I upload the images using another script and add the links to my outline.

After I draft the blog post, I use another bit of code to move the relevant images out of my "To blog" directory and into another directory so that I can easily upload them (since I still haven't tweaked the all-Emacs way of doing things the way I want them).

An index card is a good size for a chunk. It's smaller than a blog post, so I can accelerate my learn-do-share-review cycle. If I invest more time into creating, organizing, and sharing them, I think they'll pay off well. Other people report that their Zettelkasten (index card organization systems) become almost like conversational partners and collaborators. I already feel that way about my blog archive, and it will probably be even more

Hmm… Should I add a unique identifier to sketches so that I can refer to them more concisely than giving the full link? This mostly matters for referring to sketches in the drawing itself, since I can use links in text or metadata. For example, I can assign codes to each chunk, possibly differentiating between sketches (letters?) and blog posts (numbers?). So, maybe "2015-01-01a" for the first sketch on January 1, and "2015-01-01-1" for the first blog post? I could omit the dashes, but then searching requires that mental translation, so we'll keep the dashes in there. The downside is that there'll be a little additional clutter, but it might be interesting to experiment with – adding a reference line, and maybe even adding the info to the filename. It gives some linking capability that can survive the disparate systems I publish sketches to (my blog, Evernote, Flickr), even for sketches that don't get turned into blog posts.

What about my 5-cards-a-day target?

Sometimes making five cards feels like a stretch, since I have to Think Interesting Thoughts. Using templates can help – I could make four cards and a journal entry, for example. I expect the awkwardness will subside as I build up my question store and do more research/experimentation.

Colour slows me down if I think about it too much or worry about becoming too repetitive. It might be fine to just quickly highlight things most of the time and save the development of colour sense for sessions of deliberate practice.

In terms of thinking, spending the extra few minutes to think about and capture the next questions or actions for a card can make a big difference in my focus. I can also relax my chunking guidelines so that a single sketch can be fleshed out into a quick blog post instead of waiting until I accumulate several sketches related to the topic – taking my own advice to schedule Minimum Viable Posts. If I phrase my outline in terms of questions instead of keywords, I'll probably find that more motivating and easier to scope.

That will probably also help me with some of the bottlenecks I identified while contemplating how I can make better use of my laptop. I'm doing okay at generating questions and drawing index cards, but I can do better at translating those ideas into research, experiments, and blog posts. So, I can clear out more of my backlog of index cards that I want to share (probably ending up with two months of scheduled blog posts, or maybe even more!). Then I can research and try out more ideas, so I'm not just drawing questions that I can answer with what's currently in my head. =)

Onward!

View or add comments (Disqus), or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com

Visual book notes: The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right – Atul Gawande

Posted: - Modified: | kaizen, visual-book-notes

Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (2009) emphasizes the power of checklists for improving reliability. Errors creep in when we forget things entirely or skip over things we should have done. In medicine, these errors can be fatal.

Gawande draws on his experience as a surgeon, the research he conducted with the World Health Organization, and insights from construction, finance, and other industries that take advantage of checklists to improve processes.

The book discusses ways to address the cultural resistance you might encounter when introducing a checklist. It recommends making sure that checklists are precise, efficient, short, easy to use, and practical. You need to develop a culture of teamwork where people feel that they can speak up as part of a team. You may even need to modify supporting systems to make the checklist doable.

I’ve sketched the key points of the book below to make it easier to remember and share. Click on the image for a larger version that you can print if you want.

I like the reminders that you should design your checklists around logical “pause points,” keep checklists focused on the essentials, and treat people as smart instead of making the checklist too rigid.

The book distinguishes between “Do-Confirm” checklists, which allow experienced people to work quickly and flexibly with a confirmation step that catches errors, and “Read-Do” checklists, which walk people step-by-step through what they need to do. I’m looking forward to applying the book’s tips towards systematizing my sharing. For example, I’m working on a YASnippets in Emacs that will not only display a “Read-Do” checklist for doing these sketched notes, but will also assemble the links and code to do the steps easily. Sure, no one will die if I miss a step, but I think discipline and thoroughness might yield dividends. I also want to develop a good “Do-Confirm” process for writing and committing code; that could probably save me from quite a few embarrassing mistakes.

I’m interested in the diffusion of ideas, so I was fascinated by the book’s coverage of the eight-hospital checklist experiment the WHO conducted. The book discussed the challenges of getting other people to adopt checklists, and adapting the checklists to local conditions. Here’s an excerpt:

… By the end, 80 percent reported that the checklist was easy to use, did not take a long time to complete, and had improved the safety of care. And 78 percent actually observed the checklist to have prevented an error in the operating room.

Nonetheless, some skepticism persisted. After all, 20 percent did not find it easy to use, thought it took too long, and felt it had not improved the safety of care.

Then we asked the staff one more qusetion. “If you were having an operation,” we asked, “would you want the checklist to be used?”

A full 93 percent said yes.

There’s a comparison to be made between the reluctance of doctors to accept checklists and the committed use of checklists by pilots and builders. I came across a quote from Lewis Schiff’s Business Brilliant in this comment by Rich Wellman:

The following quote sums up the essential difference between a checklist for a doctor and a checklist for a pilot.

“How can I put this delicately? Pilots are seated in the same planes as their passengers. Surgeons are not under the same knives as their patients. To paraphrase an old joke, surgeons may be interested in safety, but pilots are committed.”

So checklists are a good idea when you’re dealing with people’s lives, but what about the rest of us? Checklists are good for catching errors and building skills. They’re also great for reducing stress and distraction, because you know that the checklist is there to help you think. That’s why packing lists are useful when you travel.

Already a fan of checklists? Tell me what you have checklists for!

Somewhat related:

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Shrinking my learn-do-share-review cycle

Posted: - Modified: | learning, sharing

Sometimes I read too much without doing anything about what I learn. By the time I get around to applying ideas, my memory is fuzzy and I have to dig up my notes anyway. Sometimes I never get around to applying what I've learned.

Sometimes the tasks on my TODO list are too big to fit into a single session of thinking-about or doing, so I end up procrastinating them. Or sometimes I do them, but I feel like I'm wandering around.

Sometimes I let myself focus too much on learning and doing, moving onward. By the time I want to share what I've learned, I feel like there's just so much background I need to cover before people can get to the point of being able to do things. Or I've forgotten what those first crucial steps were.

Sometimes I get so caught up in learning, doing, or sharing, that I forget to spend time thinking about how I'm doing things. I've been keeping a journal, but the entries are often very short – just keywords that describe what I did, without notes on how I might do it better.

Have you felt like that too? Tell me I'm not the only one who has to think about the balance. =)

I've been working on reducing waste by shortening this learn-do-share cycle. Instead of spending a week reading five books about a topic, I might spend a couple of hours reading one book, extracting the key points from it, and identifying one or two actions I can try. Instead of doing an exhaustive search to find the best tool for what I want to do, I'll do a quick search, pick one, try it out, and then use that experience to help me learn. Instead of waiting until I feel confident about a topic (or even until I've worked out all the bugs), I'll share while I learn. Instead of trying to fill in all the gaps between where a beginner might start and where my post ends up, I write just the part that's fresh in my memory, and then I might fill in other gaps when people ask.

In fact, I've been moving towards posting more of my rough notes using index cards. That way, I don't even have to wait until I've summarized the cards into a more coherent blog post. They're out there already, easy to link to or share in conversations. I still suspect it's a bit of a firehose of incoherence, but I'm pleasantly surprised that some people actually find them interesting. =)

A fast learn-do-share cycle results in a new challenge: What do you do with all these little pieces? This matters for both organizing your own notes and making it easier for other people to learn.

I've been refining my workflows for organizing my index cards, snippets, and posts into outlines. Picking descriptive titles definitely helps. Fortunately, other people have given this challenge of personal knowledge management much thought. Zettelkasten looks like an interesting keyword to research, and I'm looking forward to picking up ideas from other people's techniques.

When it comes to organizing notes for other people, I'm still rather haphazard, but I'm planning to braindump a large outline of questions and use that to create maps for people.

As for the actual division of time, the pomodoro technique isn't part of my habitual workflow yet, but I've heard good things about it. Maybe I'll experiment with a pomodoro-based schedule: one for learning, one for doing, and one for sharing. But my learning cycle's actually a lot more intertwined. At its best, I'm learning as I'm doing (flipping between windows as needed), and the notes that I take while I'm learning and doing (thanks to Org Mode and literate programming!) can easily be shared as a blog post. So maybe each chunk of time represents a topic instead, and I can track whether I'm successfully getting things all the way through to the sharing stage.

Sure, some topics require deeper reflection and integration. For instance, you can't expect instant results from philosophy. But it might be interesting to shorten the distance from learning to action and from action to sharing.

I like the tips in Christian Tietze's "Use a Short Knowledge Cycle to Keep Your Cool" on how to figure out a good "size" for your research tasks so that you don't feel overwhelmed by them. It's a good reminder to iterate: you don't have to research everything before you start trying things out, you don't have to know everything before you start writing, and you don't have to have a perfect process – you can keep improving it.

So we'll see how this works out. For example, this post took me half an hour to research/think about, and another half-hour to write. It could be more interesting if I researched some more (found similar techniques, contrasting opinions, etc.), and it could be richer with more experiments and experiences, but here it is. I can always add to it in the future, or write another post and link to the previous one.

View or add comments (Disqus), or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com

Tell the difference between diminishing returns and compounding growth when it comes to investing in skills

Posted: - Modified: | learning, productivity

When is it worth improving a skill you're already good at, and when should you focus on other things?

I started thinking about this after a conversation about what it means to master the Emacs text editor. Someone wondered if the additional effort was really worth it. As I explored the question, I noticed that skills respond differently to the investment of time, and I wondered what the difference was.

For example, going from hunt-and-peck typing to touch-typing is a big difference. Instead of having to think about typing, you can focus on what you want to communicate or do. But after a certain point, getting faster at typing doesn't give you as much of a boost in productivity. You get diminishing returns: investing into that skill yields less over time. If I type a little over 100 words per minute, retraining bad habits and figuring out other optimizations so that I can reach a rate of 150 words per minute isn't going to make a big difference if the bottleneck is my brain. (Just in case I'm wrong about this, I'd be happy to hear from people who type that fast about whether it was worth it!)

Some skills seem shallow. There's only so much you can gain from them before they taper off. Other skills are deeper. Let's take writing, for instance. You can get to the point of being able to competently handwrite or type. You can fluently express yourself. But when it comes to learning how to ask questions and organize thoughts I'm not sure there's a finish line at which you can say you've mastered writing. There's always more to learn. And the more you learn, the more you can do. You get compounding growth: investing into that skill yields more over time.

I think this is part of the appeal of Emacs for me. Even after more than a decade of exploring it and writing about it, I don't feel I'm at the point of diminishing returns. In fact, even the small habits that I've been focusing on building lately yield a lot of value.

No one can objectively say that a skill is shallow or deep. It depends on your goals. For example, I think of cooking as a deep skill. The more you develop your skills, the wider your possibilities are, and the more enjoyable it becomes. But if you look at it from the perspective of simply keeping yourself fueled so that you can concentrate on other things, then it makes sense to find a few simple recipes that satisfy you, or outsource it entirely by eating out.

It's good to take a step back and ask yourself: What kind of value will you get from investing an hour into this? What about the value you would get from investing an hour in other things?

Build on your strengths where building on those strengths can make a difference. It can make a lot of sense to reach a professional level in something or inch towards becoming world-class. It could be the advantage that gets you a job, compensates for your weakness, opens up opportunities, or connects you to people. On the other hand, you might be overlearning something and wasting your time, or developing skills to a level that you don't actually need.

When you hit that area of diminishing returns – or even that plateau of mediocrity – you can think about your strategies for moving forward. Consider:

These questions are helping me decide that for me, learning more about colours is worthwhile, but drawing more realistic figures might not be at the moment; learning more about basic Emacs habits is better than diving into esoteric packages; and exploring questions, doing research, and trying things out is likely to be more useful than expanding my vocabulary. I'll still flip through the dictionary every now and then, but I can focus on developing other skills.

How about you? What are you focusing on, and what helps you decide?

Related: Good enough, good, awesome: Thinking about what I want to get to – March 2014

View or add comments (Disqus), or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com

Break down what people mean so that you can learn from the specifics

Posted: - Modified: | learning

People are vague. You are vague. I am vague. We say things without digging into the details; we often use the first word that comes to mind. This makes sense — otherwise, we'd spend all our time clarifying.

You can learn a lot from digging into things and making them more specific. (… she writes, self-conscious about the use of the vaguest word of all: "things.")

I'm fascinated by the challenge of understanding what people mean. I realized this while looking at it from two different directions:

Let me start with the example of inspiration, because it's something I want to translate into concrete feedback and action. I thought about the different responses I have to things that inspire me.

2015-01-14 Understanding different types of inspiration -- index card #inspiration #breakdown

In what ways do I want to inspire others? How can I get better at that?

Breaking a general statement down into more specific statements helps me learn a lot. I ask myself: "What would I or someone say that captures a different aspect of this?" and I write that down. When I split off different aspects, I can understand those aspects better, and I can understand the whole thing better too.

This technique is good to use for excuses, too.

2015-01-14 Breaking down excuses -- index card #excuses #breakdown

I'm getting better at catching myself when I give an excuse, drilling down with "Why?" and splitting it out into different excuses. (I guess, thanks to my parents' patience, my inner toddler never stopped asking questions.) Then I can check if those excuses match what's getting in my way, or if they don't resonate with me.

A technique I often use is to imagine other people giving those excuses, since sometimes my mind is perfectly willing to ascribe weakness to others even when it gets defensive about itself. ;)

I like sharing these excuses because that might help other people get over theirs. It's often easier to recognize one of your excuses instead of trying to articulate it yourself. "That's it! That's what's getting in my way!" you might say. Or even if you don't find something that completely fits, you might find something close, and then you can ask yourself: "What's missing here?"

For example, what does it mean when someone says something "takes too much time"? What's really getting in their way? Here are some ideas I came up with:

2015-01-14 What does it mean when something takes too much time -- index card #excuses #breakdown

"Too much time" is too vague to address. On the other hand, if you think something takes too much time because you're trying to do something complicated, you might be able to ask yourself: "What do I really need? Can I get away with doing something simpler?" and then reduce the task to something small enough for you to get started with.

Break things down. Find the statement behind the statement or the excuse behind the excuse, and you'll have more to work with. Instead of getting frustrated because you can't come up with one specific answer, come up with lots of them, and then see if you recognize yourself in any of them. Almost there, but not quite? Come up with more answers, maybe combining aspects of the ones you already have. This will not only help you understand yourself, but also understand others–and help others understand themselves and you.

If you find my posts inspiring, would you consider helping me understand more about what kind of inspiration you get and how I can get better at it? If you're reading this because you recognize one of your excuses in it, would you mind figuring out what your more specific reasons are and what could address them? I'd love to hear from you in the comments below. Thanks!

View or add comments (Disqus), or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com

Learning from people

Posted: - Modified: | connecting, learning

I have a friend who's focusing on learning how to ask better questions. Actually, he realized his goal is probably to ask more questions in the first place, since even simple questions ("Where did you come from?") can lead to interesting stories.

It got me curious about getting better at learning from people. I think this will help me learn about the stuff that I can't find in books because:

I think getting better at asking questions and learning from people involves figuring out:

So that gives me specific things to focus on in terms of learning from others and trying things out myself.

I've been thinking about two aspects of learning from people: working with mentors/coaches/trainers, and having casual conversations with other people.

2015-01-24 Imagining awesomeness at learning from people -- index card #learning #people

Mentors/coaches/trainers

I've been lucky to have many mentors (both formal and informal) who helped me learn how to navigate organizations, find opportunities, build skills, and so on. But I haven't been as deliberate about learning as I could have been. I periodically consider finding a coach for my writing or coding, but haven't taken the leap.

I've heard from people who weren't sure if therapy was working out for them; they couldn't evaluate their progress. I think I'm hesitant for similar reasons. I'm uncertain about choosing candidates, asking useful questions, evaluating the results, and balancing the value and the opportunity cost.

This is precisely the sort of situation for which an opportunity fund is useful, because it pushes me to Just Try Things Out. I'm slowly warming up to that idea, hence all the blog posts thinking out loud.

Here are some areas I'm considering:

For example, an editing experiment might help me develop a better mental model of an editor, forcing me to search for more specific vocubulary (down with "stuff"!), testing to see if something I've written makes sense, and checking for gaps.

2015-01-24 How can I learn from observation feedback -- index card #learning #people

In addition to directly asking for specific help, I might learn a lot from general observation. A friend suggested Atul Gawande's Better for its approach to learning: a surgeon inviting other surgeons to observe him and give feedback, even though this technique was mostly used by people with less experience. It makes sense to do that even when you're more experienced, and it's probably even more useful because people can swap tips or explain things they unconsciously do.

Other people

2015-01-24 Mixed feelings about learning from people -- index card #learning #people

I noticed that I have a strong bias towards online conversations instead of offline ones. Sure, online conversations might be lower-bandwidth or not as nuanced. But blog posts and comments expand the conversations to include other people, and it's easier to follow up on threads of ideas. I think this preference is among the reasons why, compared to several years ago, I now spend much less time going to parties or meetups. Instead, I focus on writing and connecting online.

But I get plenty of writing time already, so maybe I should mix more offline conversations into my life. This would follow the principle that I shouldn't always do what's fun and easy. It makes sense to develop skills and routines in other areas as well. For example, I can imagine getting better at cultivating acquaintances through shared activities like cooking at Hacklab and hosting board game afternoons. I can test and refine several quick stories for small talk, which frees me up to focus on learning more about the other person through questions. It's like the way foreign language learners can boost their feeling of fluency by anticipating common questions ("Where are you from?" "What do you do?") and practising answers to those.

I think that getting better at asking questions and learning from people starts mostly from getting to know people as individuals. What makes them different? What's interesting about their lives? There's always something to find. The next step after that is to gradually build the acquaintance or the friendship through things like lunches or get-togethers. It makes sense to open my world so that I can come across good people. I enjoy their company, I grow in helping out, and I learn from the conversations with them and the mental models of them.

More thoughts

2015-01-25 Learning from people -- index card #learning #people

Thinking about this, I realized that I'm not bad at learning from people. I'm pretty good at learning from books, blogs, and online conversations, which is why I rely on those so much. But there are some aspects of learning from people that I can improve, and I can play around with those without cutting too much into the time I spend learning in other ways.

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