104Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows in response to certain signals.
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105We tend to think of our memory as a tape recorder, but that's wrong. It's a living structure, a scaffold of nearly infinite size. The more we generate impulses, encountering and overcoming difficulties, the more scaffolding we build. The more scaffolding we build, the better we learn.
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106When you're practicing deeply, the world's usual rules are suspended. You use time more efficiently. Your small efforts produce long, lasting results. You have positioned yourself at a place of leverage where you can capture failure and turn it into skill. The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your present abilities to target the struggle. Thrashing blindly doesn't help. Reaching does.
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107While the precise mechanism of optimization remains a mystery for now--Fields theorizes that a feedback loop is at work monitoring, comparing, and integrating outputs--the overall picture adds up to a process elegant enough to please Darwin himself--nerve firings grow myelin, myelin controls impulse speed, and impulse speed is skill.
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108Struggle is not optimal--it's neurologically required: In order to get your skill circuitry to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit suboptimally; you must make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes; you must slowly teach your circuit. You must also keep firing that circuit--i.e., practicing--in order to keep myelin functioning properly.
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109Deep practice x 10000 hours = world-class skill
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110Excellence is a habit - Aristotle
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111The narrative of the divinely-inspired artist is so tightly woven into our culture that it's easy to forget that there was a time when it didn't exist. Prior to the Italian Renaissance, skill at painting and sculpture was regarded as a useful craft, equivalent to masonry or weaving. Then, however, a painter named Giorgio Vasani invented the idea of the heroic artist. Et seq.
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112Barker's work conclusively establishes two facts about the Bronte's little books: first, they wrote a great deal in a variety of forms--22 little books averaging 80 pages each in one 15-month period--and second, their writing, while complicated and fantastical, wasn't very good. As barker put it, "Their slapdash writing, appalling spelling, and non-existent punctuation well into their late teenage years is usually glossed over, as is the frequent immaturity of thought and characterization...Et Seq.
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113...But myelin doesn't care who you are, it only cares about what you do.
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114When he fires his circuits to do a backflip, the gymnast doesn't have to think, "Okay, I'm going to push off with my legs, arch my back, tuck my head into my shoulders, and bring my hips around," any more than you have to process each letter of Tuesday. He simply fires the Backflip circuit that he's built and honed through deep practice.
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115Deep practice tends to leave people exhausted. They can't maintain it for more than an hour or two at a sitting.
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116The Japanese want kids to struggle...Sometimes the teacher will purposefully give the wrong answer so the kids can grapple with theory. American teachers, though, worked like waiters. Whenever there was a struggle, they waited to move past it, make sure the class kept gliding along. But you don't learn by gliding.
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117Where deep practice is a cool, conscious act, ignition is a hot, mysterious burst, an awakening.
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118Pursuing a goal, having motivation--all of that predates consciousness. Our brains are always looking for a cue as to where to spend energy now. We're swimming in an ocean of cues, constantly responding to them, but like a fish in water, we just don't see them.
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119...The unconscious mind is able to process 11 million pieces of information per second, while the conscious mind can only manage a mere 40. This points tot he efficiency and necessity of relegating mental activities to the unconscious.
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120When we praise children for their intelligence, we tell them that's the name of the game: book smarts don't risk making mistakes.
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121[The effort group] dug in and grew very involved in the test, trying solutions, testing strategies. They later said they liked it. But the group praised for its intelligence hated the harder test. They took it as proof they weren't smart.
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122At all the places I visited, praise was not constant but was given only when it was earned--a finding that dovetails with the research of Dweck, who notes that motivation does not increase with increased levels of praise but often dips.
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123It turned out that self-discipline was twice as accurate as IQ in predicting the student's grade point average.
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124Explanation, Demonstration, Imitation, Correction, and Repetition. (cf Montague why choose this book)
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125Kids today are hard to reach. They know how to give all the right answers, all the programmed answers. So when I see things, I say it so you can hear it. I say it a lot.
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12660% of what you teach applies to everyone. The trick is how you get that 60% to the person. If I teach you, I'm concerned with what you learn in a way that's right for you.
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127The relationship between phonics and whole language precisely mimics the relationship between deep practice and ignition.
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128Kaizen: When something goes wrong, ask why five times.
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