Andy Hunt - Pragmatic thinking and learning - 2017

Context

Learned in this study

Things to explore

Overview

Notes

• The question isn't the position they play, or even their years of experience; the question is, what is the value they bring to the organization?
  • A group is only as good as its weakest link. Put the best performers together to perform for the main service, and create "farm teams" for other services.
  • Keep a steady group with the same performers every week. You want the group to jell; rotating players in and out is counterproductive.
  • Timing is everything: the drummer (for a band) or accompanist (for choral groups) has to be solid. Better to use a prerecorded accompaniment than a flaky drummer or organist.
  • Make your group a safe place for talented musicians, and watch what happens.
• Positive emotions are essential to learning and creative thinking. Being "happy" broadens your thought processes and brings more of the brain's hardware online. "Use it or lose it" is perfectly accurate in this case, because your brain will dedicate more resources to whatever you are doing the most.
• But there's a downside to our natural tendency for mimicry. Emotions are contagious, just like a biological pathogen such as measles, or the flu. If you are around happy, upbeat people, it will tend to lift your mood. If you're hanging out with depressed, pessimistic people who feel like losers, you will start to feel like a depressed, pessimistic loser as well. Attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, emotions--they are all contagious.
• The model you build in your mind, the questions you ask to build that model, and your experiences and practices built up along the way and that you use daily are far more relevant to your performance.
• Mastery of the knowledge alone isn't sufficient.
• You don't have to see where you're going; you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the away. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you.
• The planning is far more important than the plan
• Reading is the least effective means of learning, compared to any sort of experiential learning.
• We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits on a hot stove-lid; he will never sit on a hot stove-lid again--and that is well; but also he will never sit on a cold one anymore.
  Mark Twain
• There's a well-known design problem in multiprocessor systems: if you're not careful, you can spend all the CPU cycles coordinating tasks with all the other CPUs and not actually get any work done.

See also

References