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.

problems can look trivial or excruciating depending on your past experience. Learning is the process of acquiring patterns in memory that help us cross that chasm.

When we’re able to learn from the example of other people, practice extensively ourselves, and get reliable feedback, rapid progress results. Yet, when one or all of these factors are inhibited, improvement often becomes impossible.

Seek Out Worked Examples

Courage is not action without fear, but action in spite of fear.

Following this line of reasoning, they argue that apprenticeship makes more sense as a path to practice than extensive schooling.

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

There’s an old tale about a woodcutter who was given an axe and three hours to chop down a large tree. The woodcutter decided to spend the first two and a half hours sharpening the axe.

Nonetheless, the ability to see what experts know is essential to accelerating our own improvement process.