Get Better at Anything

Tetris players are better today because their environment enables it. Video hosting allows detailed demonstrations of the best play to be broadcast widely.

Success Is the Best Teacher.

“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.”

See. Most of what we know comes from other people. The ease of learning from others determines, to a large extent, how quickly we can improve. Do. Mastery requires practice. But not just any practice will do. Our brains are fantastic effort-saving machines, which can be both a tremendous advantage and a curse. Feedback. Progress requires iterative

Another common mathematical heuristic is to look for an invariant. If you can find something that doesn’t change in a problem, no matter how you modify it,

The three explanations of creativity—expertise, environment, and randomness—are not mutually exclusive. A fairly simple model of creativity incorporates all three. In this model, the existing stock of knowledge defines

In some cases, memory can provide a method, even if it can’t provide an answer.

Access to the environments where knowledge resides is often a bigger hurdle to mastery than learning itself.

Examples alone are not always enough. Research finds that breaking apart worked examples into subgoals can help illustrate the reasoning behind a problem-solving procedure, and that encouraging students to engage in self-explanations of examples can enhance understanding.

Knowledge Becomes Invisible with Experience. Finally,