Reviews

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Range by David Epstein

David Epstein is a journalist, writer and generalist. In his book Range – why generalists triumph in a specialised world, he tries to debunk the myth that the key to a successful career is early specialisation. 

Kind vs wicked

Kind learning is restricted to a small and well-defined domain, like chess. The rules are specified and the scores can be easily measured. Wicked learning relates to a discipline that is broad and it is difficult to measure the progress. There is a disadvantage in being a specialist because, with the progress of AI, the machines are better and better, yet only in narrow domains. Computers have beaten humans in the most complex games like chess and Go, but these games live within kind learning. The rules are fixed, and it is ‘easy’ for the computer to calculate best moves. However, the biggest advantage of humans is the ability to gain broad knowledge and to move ideas between different domains by using lateral thinking.

Author wants to show that early specialisation is overrated and does not always lead to best outcomes. He shows research that proves the opposite true. Although early specialisation shows a lot of examples of its efficiency in creating experts, there are also examples of people who specialised not so early and achieved greatness in their domains.

Specialisers have a head start but generalists win in the long run

The education system is biased towards learning of specialisers. The usual methods for teaching involve providing blocks of information. Whereas the science shows that the better way to learn is to interleave. This feels counterintuitive, as most people, and probably teachers as well, would group learning materials in blocks. But apparently the learning process is more effective when we take advantage of interleaving the material. This feels harder to do, but this is exactly what one should seek. The desirable difficulty that the interleaving is bringing causes frustration, and this seems to be one factor that initiates neuroplasticity (i.e. learning).

Test and learn vs plan and implement

The study of Herminia Ibarra has shed more light on career switching. The career advice is usually to see the clear picture of the future and progress towards it. But this is a mistake. We learn who we are in practice and not in theory, which is why the more preferred option is to act and work forward from promising situations.

Author introduces us to the research by Angela Duckworth and the term coined by her – grit. Grit combines passion and perseverance. The situations where people are grittier might be indicators of the direction where they should be heading.

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The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler

art of impossible

Steven Kotler is a journalist and a bestselling author, whose purpose (among two others) is to advance the science of flow. Flow is the term coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describing the state of consciousness in which we feel our best and perform our best. We are fully focused on the task at hand and the time is passing differently (either it is slowing down or speeding up). Flow is a natural state. And the mix of neurochemicals that are produced during this state causes that our brain searches to be in that state. Our brain tries to remember what had led to this state, which explains enhanced memory during flow.

Steven Kotler has devoted many years and done many experiments to find the answers to the questions of peak performance. His book is trying to answer the question of how some people can perform things that others think are impossible. The key ingredient of the recipe is flow. But it is not the only one. 

Author underlines on multiple occasions, every person is different and his goal is not to find a solution that works for one individual but one that many people could apply. He searches therefore for the answers in biology. What he wants to achieve is to show how we can use our biology to work for us and not against us. The idea is to discover certain mechanisms in our bodies, brains and minds and use them to achieve our goals with smaller effort. Things we naturally gravitate to should be on our radar. And the intersection of many subjects should give us enough motivation to pursue it further. Addressing our curiosity a little at a time will finally build expertise which, mixed with an overarching purpose, is a fuel that enables achievement.

Motivation

Steven Kotler tries to decompose motivation as one of the factors that lead to achievement of Impossible. It comprises drive grit and goals. Motivation needs to be huge in order to achieve great things. That’s why, after analysing research in motivation, Steven suggests stacking and aligning multiple motivation building blocks. First, it is good to find intersection of multiple things that we naturally gravitate to, then set a goal that can only be achieved by doing things we are curious about or even passionate. On top of that, we should find a purpose – a goal that is not related to us directly but aims to resolve a greater problem.

Grit

Author often states that achieving impossible feats doesn’t involve doing extraordinary tasks every day, contrary it involves doing the same small steps every day which will bring the Impossible closer to us. In such perspective the grit is required. Grit, term coined by Angela Duckworth, is a mixture of passion and perseverance. And if achieving the impossible is a boring every day checklist, then we need a lot of grit. One exercise that helps in building grit is taken from another peak performer, Josh Waitzkin, whose book I’ve already described here. Josh suggests trying to perform best when we’re at our worst. The point is to work in very demotivating circumstances. For example, finish a training with a difficult exercise or practice a speech while hiking after the whole day of work.

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Effortless by Greg McKeown

effortless

Georg McKeown is the author of Essentialism, a book whose purpose was to help the readers to discern the essential from not important. However, as the author admits, focusing on the essential is sometimes not enough, because it turns out that these few essential things that we want to devote ourselves to, also require more power than we have available. This brings the author to the question, what are the ways we can still do the essential but with less effort. How can this all be effortless? 

All too often, we make things more complicated than they are or need to be. Author points out that more often he had problems by trying too hard than other way round. For example, he tells a story about how he was preparing for a speech he need to give the next day. He wanted it to be perfect, so he found new ideas and worked late in the night to prepare a new and interesting speech. But day after he was exhausted, and he hadn’t had enough time to practice so he seemed unprepared. 

Effortless State, Action and Results

The first part of the book is devoted to the effortless state. One could also entitle this part as effortless mindset. Placing this part of the book in the beginning shows the importance of starting with attitude. Sometimes our mindset might change a tedious or even difficult task into an effortless one. The advice is to ask the following question. What if this could be easy? Sometimes, to make things effortless, all we need to do is to intertwine some fun. This makes the burden of a chore go away.

Effortless action is focused on things we can do to make things done. Sometimes the task ahead of us seems so difficult that we are postponing it. An easy way out of this misery could be to define how the ‘done’ looks like. If we list necessary things that need to be done, we create an action plan and, by crossing the items from the list, we receive additional shots of dopamine as a reward for task completion and will be more motivated to finish the task.

Sometimes our inner critic is preventing us from doing the work. But if we agree to start with rubbish, then we can salient the critical inner voice and start producing work. The advice is to start ugly or imperfect. Our work can usually be corrected in the later stages.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast

This means it is better to be consistent and do even a small bit of work every day as opposed to pushing on only some days. The first approach will take us farther. It is even good to set an upper limit and to stop working after hitting the upper threshold.

Effortless results are related to actions that create constant results as opposed to linear results. Residual results are when we exert effort once and reap benefits multiple times. Learn general principles that can be used multiple times in different fields.

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Peak Performance by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness

peak-performance

What’s the secret behind the top performance? Is this secret common to peak performers across different domains? I believe these were the key questions that drove Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness to do an exhaustive research on performance and finally write a book. Having unique backgrounds makes them a perfect fit to answer the above mentioned question.

Right at the beginning they introduce the formula that growth equals stress plus rest. In this competitive world everyone is maximizing efforts and working longer hours but many forget that the rest has an equal part in the growth equation. Authors are encouraging to look at stress from a different angle. This might have tremendous effects on our performance. 

Good habits drive Performance

Peak performers let nothing to a chance. They want to prepare fully. They are priming their bodies and minds for the peak performance by following the same routines. So the writer has some kind of writing routine, meaning specific activities that they do each time before they start writing. They write in the same room, use the same pen. Peak performers consistently follow their routines day in day out.

Peak performers automate trivial decisions in matters that are not as important for them. They decide upfront, to remove thousand decisions later on. Once they meet a decision what to eat or to wear, they don’t have to decide later on, hence they save mental energy. Authors brought many examples of successful people who eliminated trivial choices from their life.

Purpose

The biggest takeaway from the book for me was the equation about effort. We can find additional reservoirs of energy if a purpose that is higher than us drives us. In order to keep up an outstanding performance when times get rough, we need to either make what we are doing more effortless, for example, by training, or we need to be pushed or motivated by a purpose bigger than our ego.

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The art of learning by Josh Waitzkin

art of learning

Josh Waitzkin the international Chess Master. He started playing chess when he was 6 years old and a year later he trained with a first formal trainer. After ending a successful career in chess, he started his learning adventure in martial arts. He chose Thai Chi Chuan as a complete beginner, and a few years later he became World Champion. 

In his book he describes his experience with learning and how he could succeed in two different disciplines. For me, the fact that he succeeded in chess is not super impressive, but the ability to distill the principles of learning and apply them to a different discipline, sets him apart from other masters.

His advice is to embrace failures as something that is required in a process of learning. When he lost a competition, he dissected what was the major cause and tried to replicate such conditions in his training process to improve in the future. He noticed for example that noise distracted him, so he started practicing in a noisy environment.

Training with a better opponent is Josh’s one way to achieve mastery in the trained discipline. It brings us out of our comfort zone as we can lose, hence it is unpleasant. Yet as Josh was defeated many times during training, his body and mind learnt how to embrace pain and loss.

“In the long run, painful losses may prove much more valuable than wins — those who are armed with a healthy attitude and can draw wisdom from every experience, ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ are the ones who make it down the road.”

Pursue Depth not Breadth

Josh suggests training of basics until it becomes ingrained in the body or head. Time slows down as the conscious mind doesn’t need to focus on things that are already performed automatically. The things which weren’t obvious become clearly visible. 

Josh points out that learners often neglect the basics and move too soon to more complex things. They often pursue shiny new objects, because this is more tempting. As described by Anders Ericsson in his book “Peak Secrets from the new science of expertise”, learning ends with reaching plateau and the indicator of a peak performer is his ability to rise above the plateau and keep practicing. One way for doing this is to raise the difficulty level a bit. Josh experienced this when during a tournament he broke his arm. He refused to stop the training, and he kept training with one hand. Soon he could defeat opponents with his one hand. He showed by example how to turn adversity into advantage.

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The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova – Book review

biggest bluff book review

Maria Konnikova is American-Russian psychologist and a writer. She is a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University and in her 3rd book ‘The Biggest Bluff’ she describes her project/experiment in which she entered the Poker world with the goal to compete in the World Series Of Poker tournament.

I’m not a big Poker fan, but this book is very interesting from the perspective of learning. Maria did not have any Poker playing skills prior to starting the project and in her book she describes the way for going from newbie to the winner of one of the Poker tournaments.

Although she didn’t play poker, she had some advantage at the beginning of the project. She is a Phd in psychology and this could give her an advantage at the poker table. Unlike any other player, she could psychologically analyze her opponents and read them like a book to check if they are bluffing or not. At least this is what she was thinking at the beginning.

Poker as life in miniature

Maria chose Poker as this game simulates life. She chose the Texas hold’em variant of this game, because there is a proper mixture of chance and skill involved. There is chance, but not everything depends on it. Conversely, in chess there is no luck factor. The rules are clear and every player has the same chances for success at the beginning. Maria assumed that the skills she will learn by playing Poker could be directly transferable to life. And she wanted to learn how to deal with chance in life and maintain the feeling of control. 

To accomplish what she planned, though, she needed a mentor. She convinced Erik Seidel, a professional Poker player and one of the best players in the world, to teach and guide her on this journey. As she didn’t have the experience in playing card games, having a mentor should significantly increase the learning process. Erik set up the learning milestones that needed to be achieved along the way. 

Poker is all about decisions, and Maria tries to show fallacies and biases of human decision-making process. The planning fallacy for example is a tendency to be optimistic while making plans. We forget or omit all the problems or obstacles that can occur. When we should consider only statistics and probabilities, our emotions often take over and imbue our decisions. For example, a person who has suffered from a flood is more likely to buy a flood insurance even though her new home is in an area that is statistically unlikely to be flooded. What’s remarkable is that when we are aware of biases, it doesn’t prevent us from making biased decisions.


Status quo fallacy

Advice from Erik Seidel- less certainty, more inquiry. This is questioning a status quo and checking internalized beliefs. It is hard, but it’s the basis of self-awareness and helps build self-discipline. Erik did not share with Maria any wonderful method which allowed him to be a winning player over a longer period. Instead, he shared the tools and thought processes that allowed him to keep winning. This always-adjusting attitude keeps his mind open and focused, but moreover it is the reason for constant growth. 

 Another golden advice on how to thrive in an unpredictable environment is to keep a deliberate decision-making process. Before every decision, there needs to be a justification. Even if you lose because of bad luck, you can always say that your decision-making process was correct. If you act on a hunch, without thinking through, you will never know what and how to improve. 

“If you want to grow, if you want to progress, you need to always dig deeper” – Maria Konnikova

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So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport

so good - book review

Cal Newport is a Professor in a Computer Science Department. When he was entering the ‘academic-job market’ he thought more intensively about people who end up loving what they do and what are the common principles that they follow. He was at such a point in his career, where his decisions might have an enormous influence on his future. 

He studied the career advice of prominent people. Steve Jobs in his commencement speech advised graduates to follow their passion. The book shelf labeled with career advice is full of books suggesting to do what you love. But Cal Newport knew there is something suspicious with this kind of thinking, and his research confirmed his doubts.

Don’t follow your passion!

Cal’s career advice number one is to not follow your passion. He claims that fantasizing about a dream job can make one’s life miserable. He shows example of people who followed their seeming true calling and once they achieved it they weren’t happier at all. Conversely, individuals who love their job and career didn’t have the passion at the beginning. This came with experience. They were building their skills slowly but persistently, gradually gathering career capital. Yet, just practicing is not enough and will not guarantee reaching an expert level. The best way to hone skills is purposeful practice. Anders Ericsson, who studied peak performers, coined this term. As deliberate practice, he defined the constant and planned endeavour to improve in some kind of skill with help of continual feedback.

When enough career capital is gathered, it can be exchanged for more control. Gaining more control makes people happier as it fulfills one of humans` psychological needs – need for autonomy. Newport argues that rare and valuable skills are necessary conditions, without which any pursuit of control might be useless. 

A fire of passion can be found in people who connected their job with a mission. A clear and catchy mission empowers to pursue bigger goals and differentiates from other professionals. However, it is not always apparent which mission to choose. Cal argues that to identify a true mission, one must get to the cutting edge of one’s field and keep eyes open to spot innovations.

People who love their jobs are often popular. To have a career you love, you need to be well known, at least within your field. If nobody knows about your skills, then it is difficult to have control over what you do as you only do what is available. On the other side, if there is a demand for someone with your skills and you are an authority in your field, you can choose the work that suits you best and therefore gain more control. The key element is to create something that people will remark to others, and it must be created in an environment that supports such remarking.


Amid the shiny and catchy slogans that tell people to throw everything away and do what they love, this book provides a reasonable and well-researched counterbalance. In the world full of distractions it is easy to find another shiny object, yet to pursue a good career we need a strategic plan and perseverance.

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Incognito by David Eagleman

Incognito - book review

To find out how to learn quicker, it’s good to understand how the brain works, at least to familiarize with the current state of what humanity knows about it. One book, which is ranked very high in neuroscience section is “Incognito” by David Eagleman. He is an American neuroscientist and science communicator. He teaches as an adjunct professor at Stanford University and is CEO of NeoSensory, a company that develops devices for sensory substitution. 

Do we really see everything?

One of the common misconceptions is that we think we see everything and perceive the reality as it is. However author provides many scientific proofs this is not the way it is. First, we think our eyes provide us with images like the digital camera. However, the existence of optical illusions causes us to believe, there is a part of the brain that receives the signals from eyes and interprets it. Finally, what we see is rather a retouched picture rather than original. To provide a good experience, our brain sometime makes things up. This is the case with the blind spot, a place where there are no light sensors on the retina and therefore is light insensitive. Brain is constantly analyzing what is around the holes to fill the blanks.

Brain’s Achilles’ heel

We are not good in detecting changes. The scientific term for this is change blindness. This means we need to direct our conscious attention to find differences, otherwise the programs in supercomputer between our ears will think this is not important for us. In fact, this is the reason it is recommended to the people who want to better understand the text, to ask questions prior to reading. As a result, they will give their subconscious a hint to what is important.

Scientists have proven that the left hemisphere is continuously trying to make sense of what is happening in the entire system and it provides us with this information. Yet sometimes is doesn’t have all informations so it makes things up. This might be the reason we remember our dreams with many details. It turns out there was something stitching the dream imagery together and providing a narration.

Brain’s advantages?

The biggest advantage of the human brain is its efficiency and plasticity. Kasparov did not burn as much energy as Deep Blue. Excellence comes with automatism. Experts have mastered their skills to such a level, that they are burned deep into the circuitry. In one study, the game players who played a game for the first time showed a lot more brain activity than the ones already familiar with it. 

Law based on the brain

Much of the book is devoted to a question of legal system and the question if criminals who have changes in brain but no biological signs of it, should be dealt with differently. Question of blameworthiness the author would replace with modifiability. To what degree are we sure that the man can change.

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Peak – secrets from the new science on expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool – book review

Peak - book review

What is the one thing all the top-performers, athletes, have in common? This must have been the life question of Anders Ericsson, who devoted thousands of hours to expert performance research. As a curious researcher, he wanted to check what happens when a human embarks on a journey from an average to a peak performer. One of many people he helped on their way to peak performance was Joshua Foer, who won US Memory Championships in 2006 after only one year of practice (you can find my review of his book in this post). Ericsson did not find any proof for the existence of some innate talents or abilities, causing top-achievers to outperform others. Instead, he is convinced that what connects all the world class performers is the deliberate practice. Using principles of purposeful practice, he could train an average student to remember 80 digits. 

10 000 hours are not enough

In 1993 Ericsson together with Ralf Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer published a study of the Berlin violin students that has received a lot of attention a few years later when Malcolm Gladwell published his book ‘Outliers’. Gladwell states that it is enough to train for 10 thousand of hours to achieve expert performance. Ericsson shows, this was not the result of his study. Some violinists had put as much time of training before they were 20, however they were still studying and nowhere near of expert performance. 

Author debunks the 10 thousand hours rule as this is not always sufficient to reach top level. Yet expertise can be achieved by applying deliberate practice, which is focused, goal driven and requires constant feedback about the progress. As soon as we reach a plateau and don’t see any progress, we need to push ourself out of the comfort zone and make a skill we’re working on a little harder. The way to achieve expertise might be shortened by employing a teacher or an expert, who has already done what we’re trying to achieve.

The purpose of deliberate practice is to create high quality mental representations of the skill that we learn. These mental structures that correspond to an idea or an object are very well developed in the minds of expert performers and allow the best chess players to play many chess games simultaneously while blindfolded.

Raise a genius

Although this book is not a parenting guide, there are a few hints for parents. First thing I have learnt is that ‘geniuses are born not made’. A Hungarian chess teacher and psychologist, László Polgár has proven that he can raise a genius. He conducted his experiment on his own three daughters, who he trained to become champions in chess.

According to author any skill can be learned with help of deliberate practice, thus it is completely not justified to say to someone, especially kids, that they are bad at something, as they will quickly believe it and won’t even try to improve. Conversely labeling someone as talented will put him in a spotlight and make him believe he has some innate abilities, which motivates him to work more on these skills. 

This book is definitely worth reading and worth of receiving my highest note. Deliberating is the fact that the expertise is open to anyone. By applying the principles of purposeful practice one can regain control of his life and might be actively shaping it instead of reactively waiting for what life will bring. There is no more excuse to start singing, dancing or whatever we say we suck at.

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Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer – book review

Moonwalking with Einstein - book review

Jim Kwik’s book “Limitless” gave me a lot of energy and motivation to work on my mental abilities. One of many books referenced there is “Moonwalking with Einstein”, which was labeled as groundbreaking. If you are the one who thinks human memory of a healthy human* can’t be improved, you definitely need to read the book.

*There are brain damages that destroy long therm memory, thus making memory improvement impossible.

Joshua Foer’s interest in memory training started with an unrelated visit at a Weightlifting Hall of Fame, where he watched a photo of a strongest man in the world. He questioned himself if there is also a title for the smartest person of the world. A good portion of googling did not provide him with an unequivocal answer. He stumbled on a name of Ben Pridmore – the world memory champion at that time. In one of his interviews, he revealed that anyone could train their memory and achieve similar results as he.

In 2005 Josh went to the US memory championships to write an article about not so popular at the time competition. His true motivation, though, was led by curiosity of how do the contestants perform such tricks. The participants of these championships called themselves mental athletes. It amazed Josh how these apparently ordinary people had the ability to remember so many things in seconds. He tried to talk to some of them to find out what special talents they possess. To his confusion, they all stated that there is no special power needed to memorize a deck of cards.

Journey to the depths of the memory

Josh followed the participants to know them better and with time they become friends. He kept thinking about the fact that anyone can do a memory training and he decided to train for the 2006 championships. One of the memory grand masters from England, Ed Cook becomes his mentor. 

Research led him to the Human Performance Lab, where Anders Ericsson and researchers are examining the top performers to find out what makes some people experts. Josh knew that if he wanted to place high during championships, he needed to become an expert within one year. Ericsson agreed to provide him with his feedback in exchange for the granular data from his everyday practice. This win-win solution provided Josh with constant progress analysis and support on how to improve. Ericsson received the possibility to track the process of building expertise from a novice to an expert.

The main story line covers author’s preparation for the Memory Championships, however the author has a brilliant way to plot his research results into the story. Starting from Simonides, who is the first person we know of, inventing memory techniques. Josh guides us through development of mnemonics and reveals how and why these techniques were used during the history of a mankind.

The number one takeaway from the book is that we can achieve the goals we set if we undertake a deliberate effort. What the Experts and top performers are doing we can replicate to achieve expertise. By harnessing focus, planning and constant feedback we can quickly find when our development reaches a plateau. This could be overcome by increasing difficulty or stepping out of comfort zone.

It might be comforting that years of practice are not equivalent to expertise. One can perform action for several years and still suck at it. Only a deliberate effort to improve can bring progress.

Memory training has not provided Josh with superpowers. Even after the comptetion he frogets things that he not focused on remembering. He still forgets where he put his keys. Despite this fact he learned to value memory as a necessary ingredient of creativity but also personality.