This is by far one of the best books that I read during 2019. If you like Freakonomics or anything by Malcolm Gladwell, you will definitely find value and enjoy reading this book.
Flow: 4/5, it took me a while to read because I was reading several books at the same time but it could easily be read in less than a week.
Mindset: 5/5, it will get you thinking differently about how to achieve mastery.
Actionability: 4/5, although it is not a how-to book, you’ll get a lot of insights that you can apply to your life.
Some Of My Highlights:
-
“Deliberate practice… occurs when learners age ‘given explicit instructions about the best method’, individually supervised by an instructor, supplied with ‘immediate informative feedback and knowledge of the results of their performance,’ and ‘repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.”
-
“Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question.”
-
“In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.”
-
“…the bigger the picture, the more unique the potential human contribution. Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.”
-
“Compare to other scientists, Nobel laureates are at least twenty-two times more likely to partake as an amateur actor, dancer, magician, or other type of performer.”
-
“The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment. They employed what Hogarth called a “circuit breaker”.
-
“Three-quarters of American college graduates go on to a career unrelated to their major – a trend that includes math and science majors – after having become competent only with the tools of a single discipline.”
-
“Limb saw that brain areas associated with focused attention, inhibition, and self-censoring turned down then the musicians were creating. ‘It’s almost as if the brain turned off its own ability to criticize itself.”
-
“…successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it.”