‘Don’t end up a clone of your thesis adviser,’” he told me. “Take your skills to a place that’s not doing the same sort of thing. Take your skills and apply them to a new problem, or take your problem and try completely new skills.”

Himalayan mountain climbers—5,104 expedition groups in all—found that teams from countries that strongly valued hierarchical culture got more climbers to the summit, but also had more climbers die along the way. The trend did not hold for solo climbers, only teams, and the researchers argued that hierarchical teams benefitted from a clear chain of

the Einstellung effect, a psychology term for the tendency of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods even if better ones are available.

Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.

Netflix came to a similar conclusion for improving its recommendation algorithm. Decoding movies’ traits to figure out what you like was very complex and less accurate than simply analogizing you to many other customers with similar viewing histories. Instead of predicting what you might like, they examine who you are like, and the complexity is

In 2007, the U.S. Department of Education published a report by six scientists and an accomplished teacher who were asked to identify learning strategies that truly have scientific backing. Spacing, testing, and using making-connections questions were on the extremely short list. All three impair performance in the short term.

Frustration is not a sign you are not learning, but ease is.

Repetition, it turned out, was less important than struggle.

They were trying to turn a conceptual problem they didn’t understand into a procedural one they could just execute.