Failure is not necessarily durable. Remember that the things that they fire you for when you are young are the same things that they give lifetime achievement awards for when you’re old.
~ Francis Ford Coppola
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Failure →
Cyclical? →
In some fields our knowledge and discoveries are seamlessly passed down across generations. In others, it’s fleeting. Knowledge in some fields is cumulative. In other fields it’s cyclical (at best).
There are occasional periods when society learns that debt can be dangerous, greed backfires, and more money won’t solve all your problems. But it quickly forgets and moves on. Again and again. Generation after generation.
I think there are a few reasons this happens, and what it means we have to accept.
~ Morgan Housel, from Cumulative vs. Cyclical Knowledge
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I spend significant time worrying about how to learn from all the experiences I have. Worrying, of course, is not good. When I stop and honestly assess however, I realize that I do a really good job closing loops and bringing what I’ve learned forward into my ongoing work and life.
And then I read pieces like this. If humanity keeps making these cyclical reset-lurches, forgetting hard-won and important lessons, does that bode well for my ability to keep learning and improving? Or is the problem the inter-personal, or inter-generational learning?
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Elusive of casual definition →
We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so. We hear Beethoven’s Ninth and hum poum, poum, poum, we see the pyramids at Giza and go, “that’s nice.” These sounds are asked to account for an experience, but their poverty prevents either us or our interlocutors from really understanding what we have lived through. We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.
~ Alain De Botton
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Knowledge →
The title “scholar” suggests that a person has gone to school, and that he studied, but it does not mean that he has acquired any truly important knowledge.
~ George Lichtenberg
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Scorn and censure →
He that cometh to seek after knowledge with a mind to scorn and censure shall be sure to find matter for his humor, but none for his instruction.
~ Francis Bacon
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Learning →
I’ve always treated the world as my classroom, soaking up lessons and stories to fuel my path forward. I hope you do the same. The worst thing you can ever do is think that you know enough. Never stop learning. Ever.
~ Arnold Schwarzenegger
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Playfulness →
To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as if nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with one another, we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcomes of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for unlimited possibility.
~ James Carse
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Seek to learn →
Embracing a growth mindset means to get pleasure out of changing for the better (inward rewarding) instead of getting pleasure in being praised (outward rewarding.) […] to seek as many opportunities to learn as possible is the most reliable long-term growth strategy.
~ Sönke Ahrens from, How to Take Smart Notes
Ahrens of course discusses, and gives credit where credit is due, to Carol Dweck’s ideas. (See Dweck’s, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.) Her comment about “reliable long-term growth strategy” struck me as insightful. Her use of, “most reliable,” is an understatement. What other strategy would even be reliable?
If I want to grow, I need to learn. If I want to learn, I need to maximize those opportunities.
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Spacing effect →
This is where the spacing effect comes in. It’s a wildly useful phenomenon: we are better able to recall information and concepts if we learn them in multiple, spread-out sessions. We can leverage this effect by using spaced repetition to slowly learn almost anything.
~ Shane Parrish from, The Spacing Effect
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It’s funny how ideas percolate in the brain. This article and another one, (back on the 29th, which is further down in this weekly email,) passed through my radar within a couple of weeks. (I can tell because my general digital reading pile is a FIFO queue.) They were read a few times, but again in relative closeness in time. And they both ended up making the cut to be blog posts.
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Problems →
Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; Indeed they create our courage and wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. When we desire to encourage the growth of the human spirit, we challenge and encourage the human capacity to solve problems, just as in school we deliberately set problems for our children to solve. It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn.
~ Scott Peck
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