Learn It Like an Expert

You should feel you’re in a better position to take control of your own learning experiences now.

In this chapter, we’ve looked at the value of playing to facilitate learning and the importance of actively embedding failure as an essential part of practice. We saw the important—and by now familiar—lessons from the inner game and the tricks your brain can play on you, for better or worse.

Don’t forget that as you gain experience, you’ll continue to transition through the stages of the Dreyfus model. Your ongoing experience will steadily reshape your views, and you’ll find yourself reinterpreting past experiences in the light of new knowledge and growing mental models.

As I noted in ​Meet Your Cognitive Biases​, every read of your memory is really a write. Memory is far from inviolate; your increasing expertise will steadily add to the filters and pattern matching you employ.

That’s how intuition grows: you have more patterns to draw on and apply, as well as a growing body of tacit knowledge to know what to look for and when. In other words, you’ll start to see the beginnings of expert behavior.

But First, Cut the Green Wire

It seems that anytime a character in a movie is given instructions on how to defuse a bomb, they start pulling out the parts and cutting the wires in the prescribed order in earnest. And then the bomb squad corrects them, adding, “Oh, but before you do any of that, cut the green wire.” By then, it’s too late, and the ominous ticking noise reaches a crescendo. So, in the next chapter, we’ll look at our “green wire,” the important thing you need to do first.

I’m guessing that you’re probably enthusiastic to start trying all the material in this book right away.

But then a day at work in the real world gets in the way—all the emails, the meetings, the design problems, the bugs. There’s too much to do, in too little time. All the grand intentions melt away under the unforgiving crush of the exigencies of the day.

In the next chapter, we’ll look at a few ways of managing the torrent of information and getting better control over the things that command your attention.