Category: Everything else

Amateur chess coaches start by teaching their students opening variations. Students learn by memorizing the “right” openings and by avoiding problematic ones. Expert chess coaches, on the other hand, start with the lowest amount of complexity. They start with just three pieces on the chess board – king and pawn versus a king. Then, they might substitute a pawn with a bishop or rook.

Piece by piece, expert coaches build an understanding of the power of each piece and a comfort with space on the chess board. Over time, they add more pieces to the board and build their student’s understanding of the game from first principles.

The contrast between these methods of learning is akin to reasoning like a cook and reasoning like a chef – an analogy from Tim Urban at Wait but Why. Cooks focuses on cooking by re-creating existing recipes. However, a chef starts by understanding the nuances of single ingredients and slowly builds from there. Tim argues that we ought to pick a few areas of our life (e.g. our careers) where we reason like chefs and behave like cooks (e.g. our choice of clothing) for the rest. This is similar to the balance we need to strike between being satisficers and maximizers.

(Thanks Wait but Why for the illustration)

While that approach is true when applied to approaching aspects of our life, I think learning works differently. Our dominant learning style is somewhere along the above spectrum and the art of learning lies in approaching all learning like a chef. When you’re able to do that, you begin every learning journey by understanding the building blocks and achieve competence with surprising efficiency. If you’ve read Richard Feynman’s autobiography and wondered about how he became competent in topics as wide ranging as theoretical Physics, lock picking, painting and Brazilian drums, well, you now know how he did it. Feynman was the textbook chef-style learner.

I was a cook-style learner for most of my life. It was thanks to writing here that I began understanding my shortcomings and exploring what learning like a chef feels like. And, while I’m still working on applying that learning style consistently, I have come to appreciate its power.

And, my synthesis is that the reason chef-style learning matters is because it is the only way you attain real competence – the kind that flows unconsciously and without effort. That’s because elite performers don’t get there because they copied someone else’s style. You can’t take the fighter out of Rafael Nadal’s tennis game and ask him to switch to become more like Federer. No, Rafael Nadal is who he is because he became the best he could be.

To achieve unconscious competence at a craft, we need to understand themselves and the first principles of our craft. Over time, we integrate who we are and what what we do and move as one.

And, to do that, we need to approach learning like a chef.

(For those receiving this via email: If this is the first time you are receiving A Learning a Day email, that was because Feedburner didn’t verify you when you did subscribe. I realize this might have happened a few years ago now. So, I apologize for the seemingly abrupt start to your daily learning subscription.)

Today’s post is dedicated to those of you who subscribe to A Learning a Day via email. Over the years, I’ve heard from many of you about issues with the daily email. Some of these issues were formatting related and made this email hard to read. Many were around how hard the email was to share socially. There was no easy way to share posts on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. And, even if you forwarded these notes to your friends and family and asked them to subscribe, it wasn’t easy for them to do so.

But, the worst kind of issues were those around Feedburner’s verification email. As I’ve come to realize, many of these went to spam folders and were never seen again. So, to a few of you, the email heads up from Feedblitz earlier today was the first time you heard from this blog as you have been in verification purgatory for as long as six or seven years. I cringed as I got a couple of unsubscribes rightfully sharing they had no recollection of subscribing – and I expect a few more to come through over the next few days. Again, I’m sorry.

I’ve been promising a fix to a few of you for a while. I am definitely a few years late in moving out of Feedburner and making this switch. While a part of the reason for this delay is to do with bandwidth, I’ll also admit to being a cheapskate. I started this blog ten years ago as a nineteen year old student. And, in many ways, that nineteen year old student’s attitude to “free” lives on. While I’m still grateful for that frugality in many areas of my life, there are areas where investing in better solutions is a no brainer. This is one of them. Thank you to the many of you who pushed me to invest in a better solution.

Replies to this email should reach me on rohan at rohanrajiv dot com as per normal. So, I hope to hear from you on how I can improve the email experience.

And, thank you Seth for recommending Feedblitz.

PS: For those reading this on feed readers, I hope this reached you fine. We’ll be back to normal service tomorrow. :)

A sperm whale washed up dead in Spain with 64 pounds (29 kg) of waste – most of it plastic – in its stomach. The waste includes ropes, nets, plastic bags and even a plastic drum.

Ocean plastics are killing fish and corals at an unprecedented rate and this is just one in a long list of examples.

So, I hope we’ll do more than sigh and look away. I hope that every such piece of news will push us to be more conscious about how we deal with our waste. We need to be more conscious about what we use, how we dispose our waste, how we recycle and to be more conscious about how we use natural resources.

The problem may seem too large for us to influence. But, all of this is caused by all of us and our collective behavior via the communities and organizations we belong to. Bit by bit, we can change the collective behavior.

It matters.

Choosing to reflect on our own behavior is trading off feeling bad now for feeling less bad (and maybe even good) some day in the future.

This speaks to the biggest challenge faced if you’ve just begun journal-ling or some similar form of regular reflection. Reflection triggers the inner critic. We rarely think of our actions during the course of the day and pat ourselves on our back. Instead, we naturally catch the five or six dumb things that point to our need to change some aspects of our behavior.

This may not seem like a fun way to spend time at the end of a day. But, it is a necessity as time passes. As we work with more people in our careers and perhaps influence young minds at home, it is on us to develop an internal compass of how we need to get better. And, it is consistent reflection that enables the development of that internal compass.

The best part about the process is that it becomes easier the more we do it. We become more (but, vitally, never fully) comfortable with our inner critic, begin to appreciate the need to work on one or two key themes at every point and learn to better enjoy the process of attempting to balance our strengths and vulnerabilities. It is through this process that we come to realize and accept that we’re all just works in progress. And, it is how we acquire a growth mindset.

And, there are few better gifts we can give ourselves than that.

Dustin Moskovitz had a great post on the Asana blog about the “work-rest fractal.” A fractal is an object that exhibits the same pattern at every scale. Imagine peeling off a layer of an object to see a miniature layer. His hypothesis is that work and rest work the same way.

His articulation is simple, powerful and true. Over the years, I’ve made it a habit to to disconnect from connectivity in the evening, sleep 8 hours a day, and disconnect again from work for ~48 hours during the weekend. It doesn’t always happen but it happens most of the time. And, when I slip on occasion, I immediately realize the difference it makes.

Thanks, Dustin, for sharing this.

A woman was about to cross the 33rd street in New York City. As she was about to cross, she looked the wrong way and took a step forward. But, a bicyclist she didn’t see swerved and narrowly missed her. She fell.

Instead of taking a step back to the pavement, however, she began screaming at the bicyclist. This turned out to be an unfortunate error as a taxicab followed the bicyclist a few seconds later and hit her.

There’s a saying that it takes at least 7 consecutive mistakes or unfortunate occurrence for a plane crash to occur. And, we’ve all likely witnessed downward spirals of varying degrees of severity. For example, we see it frequently in sports when talented sportsmen fall apart once they make a mistake on a big stage.

In all these spirals, it is not the first mistake that counts. Instead, it is when we get caught in the emotions of the moment – anger, annoyance, fear – and refuse to move on. That’s when we commit the second, third and the costly fourth mistake.

It is much easier to write about avoiding downward spirals than it is to do it – especially if you are given to bursts of emotions. But, in these critical moments, the only way out is to recognize you’ve made a mistake, stop, take a few deep breaths and snap out of the emotion as quickly as possible.

Failure is not the falling down – it is the staying down. Downward spirals are what convert falls to failures. And, as with most mistakes, the first step in dealing with one is being conscious and accepting of the fact that it happened.

(Story source: The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin)

After reflecting on a year of attempting to “seek to understand and then to be understood,” I realized that my ability to do so seemed to decline through the day. I write a quick note at the end of the day with an assessment of how I did. And, I found that I was most vulnerable to interrupt-itis at the end of the day. This is especially the case if there were a series of meetings in the second half.

As a result, a skill I’m working on is learning to reset during the day.

My thought process at the moment is that my ability to listen gets lost as I flow unconsciously through the day. And, teaching myself to reset would be a reminder to be conscious about how I approach the next section.

This sounds great in theory. But, I’ve struggled, so far, to execute on the idea. So, as is usually the case, I’m writing about it to clarify my thinking on it and make a public commitment to do better at it.

I hope to have more on this in a few weeks.

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage” | Anais Nin

Courage is not the absence of fear. Instead, it is when we take action in spite of the fear. We exhibit courage when we push ourselves to expand our perspective, have a difficult conversation and venture beyond our zone of comfort.

And, this quote is a lovely reminder of the fact that the depth and breadth of the impact we drive is a function of our ability to consistently venture beyond what is comfortable.

(H/T Tim Ferriss for the quote)

But, what if we did?

Would we spend as much time as we do at work?

How would it change the decisions on the margin when we are choosing between finishing that one last thing and going home a bit late?

Would we spend less energy at work so we come back home less tired and more willing to engage?

Would we still check our email in the evening?

This needn’t be limited to the home. It could be applicable in the gym, a book club, a yoga class or or a hiking group.

I’m not suggesting we start giving our spouse, our yoga classmates, or ourselves titles and promotions. But, the clear and measurable incentives that we have in place at work have a strong hold on our daily behavior. While this is great in the short run, it is the stuff that is hard to measure that gives us the kind of fulfillment and happiness we seek in the long run.

And, a good way to check in on our behavior is by asking – how different would we behave if there was a promotion on the line? If we’re talking about radical change, maybe it is time to change things up a bit.

First law: Success = Privilege x (Intention + Effort + Luck). Privilege acts as a platform for success and it’s height acts as a multiplier on hard work, effort and intention.  The more privilege you have, the more your hard work counts.

Second law: The biggest driver of privilege is birth – specifically who you are born to and where they are located. This combination ends up determining the ease with which you get opportunities to accumulate education, power and wealth – all of which combine to further increase the height of the privilege platform.

Third law: For every bit of privilege present, there is an equal and opposing internal force that refuses to acknowledge it. The more you have it, the harder it becomes to see it.