Get Better at Anything

“Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered for himself the child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely.”

the possible innovations that can be made. Expertise is required because, unless you are at the frontier, your insights may be individually creative, but not socially creative.

better strategy is to space your reviews out, a little bit each day, so that the same amount of time has a greater impact.

Direct Instruction curricula, in contrast, work by systematically breaking down complex skills into their component parts, and rigorously testing the sequence of instruction to be delivered. The end product is a highly scripted set of lessons, which quickly alternate between examples, teacher-led practice, and feedback.

Quality Comes from Quantity.

from quick feedback. When these favorable conditions are absent, we need to proceed more cautiously. Genuine expertise here requires going beyond gut feelings and relying more on simple estimates based on past data and explicit reasoning that can avoid the tempting bait-and-swap maneuver our intuition often uses to change a hard question into an ea

For many skills, there is no “correct” procedure, but there are better ones.

Finding a new way to perform a skill requires more than just tweaking an existing motor program, but building a new one from scratch.

Another reason for practice is the importance of memory retrieval.

Hiring a tutor or coach or finding a personal mentor can be helpful if you have them view some of your practice efforts.