Pragmatic Thinking and Learning ← We Can Solve This

Whether you’re a programmer or frustrated user, you may have already suspected that software development must be the most difficult endeavor ever envisioned and practiced by humans. Its complexity strains our best abilities daily, and failures can often be spectacular—and newsworthy. We’ve smashed spaceships into distant planets, blown up expensive rockets filled with irreplaceable experiments, plagued consumers with automated collection letters for $0.00, and stranded airline travelers on a semiregular basis.

We tend to look at the teacher/learner relationship the wrong way around: it’s not that the teacher teaches; it’s that the student learns. The learning is always up to you.

Here are some observations that ring true for both nurses and programmers, and probably other professions as well: Expert staff members working in the trenches aren’t always recognized as experts or paid accordingly. Not all expert staff want to end up as managers. There’s a huge variance in staff members’ abilities. There’s a huge variance in managers’ abilities. Any given team likely has members at widely different skill levels and can’t be treated as a homogeneous set of replaceable resources.

Proficient practitioners need the big picture. They will seek out and want to understand the larger conceptual framework around this skill. They will be very frustrated by oversimplified information.

The expert is very good at targeted, focused pattern matching.

Rules ruin experts.

In one of the Dreyfus studies, the researchers did exactly that. They took seasoned airline pilots and had them draw up a set of rules for the novices, representing their best practices. They did, and the novices were able to improve their performance based on those rules. But then they made the experts follow their own rules. It degraded their measured performance significantly.

This has ramifications for teamwork as well. Consider any development methodology or corporate culture that dictates iron-clad rules. What impact will that have on the experts in the team? It will drag their performance down to the level of the novice. You lose all competitive advantage of their expertise.

forces in the industry conspire against us in both directions. A misguided sense of political correctness dictates that we treat all developers the same, regardless of ability. This does a disservice to both novices and experts (and ignores the reality that there is anywhere from a 20:1 to 40:1 difference in productivity among developers, depending on whose study you believe).

In industries or situations where one is not allowed a full-blown strike, a work slowdown is often used as a means of demonstration. Often this is called work to rule or malicious obedience, and the idea is that the employees do exactly what their job description calls for—no more, no less—and follow the rule book to the letter. The result is massive delays and confusion—and an effective labor demonstration. No one with expertise in the real world follows the rules to the letter; doing so is demonstrably inefficient.

Most people are advanced beginners. Sadly, studies seem to indicate that most people, for most skills, for most of their lives, never get any higher than the second stage, advanced beginner, “performing the tasks they need and learning new tasks as the need arises but never acquiring a more broad-based, conceptual understanding of the task environment.”

Described in Standards for Online Communication [HS97]

You may see this referred to as second-order incompetence, not knowing just how much it is that you don’t know. The beginner is confident despite the odds; the expert will be far more cautious when the going gets weird. Experts will show much more self-doubt.

If you’re lucky enough to have an expert on your team, you need to accommodate them. Similarly, you need to accommodate the few novices, the many advanced beginners, and the small but powerful number of competent and proficient practitioners

When pairing or mentoring within the team, you might try using mentors who are closer in skill level to the trainee.

there is some good news. Once you become an expert in one field, it becomes much easier to gain expertise in another. At least you already have the acquisition skills and model-building abilities in place.

Winners don’t carry losers.

Make your group a safe place for talented musicians, and watch what happens.

Given that the highest-skilled developers are orders of magnitude more productive than the least-skilled developers, the current common salary structures for developers is simply inadequate. Like the nursing profession years ago, we continually face the risk of losing a critical mass of expertise to management, competitors, or other fields.

Any time someone starts a sentence with “All you need to do is…” or “Just do this…,” the odds are they are wrong.

Avoid formal methods if you need creativity, intuition, or inventiveness.

Don’t succumb to the false authority of a tool or a model. There is no substitute for thinking.

In systems thinking, as in object-oriented programming, it’s often the relationships between things that are interesting, not the things themselves.

At the other end of the spectrum, experts need to have access to the big picture; don’t cripple them with restrictive, bureaucratic rules that aim to replace judgment. You want the benefit of their expert judgment. Remember they think they’re part of the system itself, for better or for worse, and may take things more personally than you would expect.

Capture all ideas to get more of them.

If you don’t keep track of great ideas, you will stop noticing you have them.

The corollary is also true—once you start keeping track of ideas, you’ll get more of them. Your brain will stop supplying you with stuff if you aren’t using it. But it will happily churn out more of what you want if you start using

Everyone has good ideas.

you might already be reaching for synthetic learning more often than you think. When faced with a difficult design problem, or an elusive bug, good programmers generally have an urge to reach for code and build something that they can learn from. That’s R-mode synthesis, as opposed to the L-mode analysis. That’s why we like prototypes and independent unit tests. These give us the opportunity to learn by synthesis—by building.

Design Trumps Features Commoditization means you compete on aesthetics.

The reason researchers had never witnessed neurogenesis previously was because of the environment of their test subjects. If you’re a lab animal stuck in a cage, you will never grow new neurons. If you’re a programmer stuck in a drab cubicle, you will never grow new neurons. On the other hand, in a rich environment with things to learn, observe, and interact with, you will grow plenty of new neurons and new connections between them.

Louis Kahn, offers a useful explanation of the relationship between beauty and design: “Design is not making beauty; beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.” Beauty emerges from selection.

for some fortunate few, the hemispheric differences are not as profound. Math prodigies, in particular, do not show these differences; their brain parts are much more cooperative.[47] When they see the I characters or the Hs, both hemispheres are more equally involved.

You can physically rewire your brain. Want more capability in some area? You can wire yourself that way. You can repurpose areas of the brain to perform different functions. You can dedicate more neurons and interconnections to specific skills. You can build the brain you want.

the human brain is wonderfully plastic—so much so that researchers have been able to teach a blind man to see with his tongue.[48] They took a video camera chip and wired its output to the patient’s tongue in a small 16x16-pixel arrangement. His brain circuits rearranged themselves to perform visual processing based on the neural input from his tongue, and the patient was able to see well enough to drive around cones in a parking lot! Also notice that the input device isn’t particularly high resolution: a mere 256 pixels. But the brain fills in enough details that even this sort of low-res input is enough.

Make a short list of your favorite software applications and a list of the ones you just despise. How much does aesthetics play a role in your choices?

try fiddling with a paper clip or some sort of tactile puzzle while stuck on a tedious conference call or while pondering a tricky problem.

Add sensory experience to engage more of your brain.

Lead with R-mode; follow with L-mode.

Author Anne Lamott is an advocate of purposefully creating a shitty first draft. That is, it’s better to complete a shitty first draft than to never complete a perfect one.

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”

One of the Po techniques is random juxtaposition. You take a word from your subject area and combine it with a completely random, unrelated word. For instance, consider the words cigarette and traffic light. The challenge is to form a bisociation from these completely unrelated ideas. For example, cigarette and traffic light might meld into the concept of using a red band on the cigarette as a stop-smoking aid.

Coming up with a really good metaphor that has generative properties suitable for your context is much harder. There is no “metaphor compiler” that can tell you whether it’s right or not; you have to actually try it in practice. Use the metaphor to guide your design, and be aware of how it helps—or not. You won’t know immediately; the outcome will be uncertain. And as we saw in Engage an R-mode to L-mode Flow, you need to be OK with

Humor is neither a waste of time nor a harmless diversion; instead, it reflects an important ability necessary for thinking, learning, and creativity. It’s all about connections.

A quick wit—being able to draw connections between things that aren’t related or to extend an idea past its breaking point—is a skill well worth practicing, honing, and encouraging in your team.

Have you ever heard an old song on the radio and then several days later you suddenly remembered the title or artist? Your R-mode was still working on the problem, asynchronously in the background, until it finally found the memory.

Many ideas are not verbalizable.

Image streaming is a technique designed to help harvest R-mode imagery.[62] The basic idea is to deliberately observe mental imagery: pay close attention to it, and work it around in your mind a bit. First, pose a problem to yourself, or ask yourself a question. Then close your eyes, and maybe put your feet up on the desk (this is perfect for doing at work) for about ten minutes or so. For each image that crosses your mind, do the following: Look at the image, and try to see all the details you can. Describe it out loud (really use your voice; it makes a difference). Now you’re sitting with feet up on the desk and talking to yourself. Imagine the image using all five senses (or as many as practical). Use present tense, even if the image was fleeting.

When you try to start any creative endeavor, such as writing on a blog, an article, or (heaven help you) a full-length book, you will encounter massive resistance. Resistance can take many forms, from niggling self-doubt to wildly creative procrastination to a myriad assortment of other distractions and excuses (see The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles [Pre02] for a disturbingly complete catalog of the many manifestations of resistance).

Here are the rules: Write your morning pages first thing in the morning—before your coffee, before the traffic report, before talking to Mr. Showerhead, before packing the kids off to school or letting the dog out. Write at least three pages, long hand. No typing, no computer. Do not censor what you write. Whether it’s brilliant or banal, just let it out. Do not skip a day.

after a while, he noticed other stuff started appearing in his morning pages. Marketing plans. Product directions. Solutions. Germs of innovative ideas. He overcame his initial resistance to the idea and found it to be a very effective technique for harvesting thoughts. Why does this work? I think it’s because you’re getting an unguarded brain dump. The first thing in the morning, you’re not really as awake as you think. Your unconscious still has a prominent role to play. You haven’t yet raised all the defenses and adapted to the limited world of reality. You have a pretty good line direct to your R-mode, at least for a little while.

Thomas Edison had an interesting twist on this idea. He’d take a nap with a cup full of ball bearings in his hand. He knew that just as he started to drift off into sleep, his subconscious mind would take up the challenge of his problem and provide a solution. As he fell into a deep sleep, he’d drop the ball bearings, and the clatter would wake him up. He’d then write down whatever was on his mind.

Have you ever noticed that great ideas or insights may come to you at the oddest times? Perhaps while taking a shower, mowing the yard, doing the dishes, or doing some other menial task. That happens because the L-mode sort of gets bored with the routine, mundane task and tunes out—leaving the R-mode free to present its findings.

Henri Poincaré, the famous mathematician, used a variation of this idea as a problem-solving technique.[66] Faced with a difficult, complicated problem, he would pour everything he knew about the subject onto paper (I’ll suggest something similar in a later section; see Visualize Insight with Mind Maps). Looking at the problems that this step revealed, Poincaré would then answer the easy ones right away. Of the remaining “hard problems,” he would choose the easiest one of those as a subproblem. Then he would leave his office and go for a walk, thinking only about that particular subproblem. As soon as an insight presented itself, he would break off in the middle of the walk and return to write the answer down.

Proficients and experts will bristle at poor code if it’s harder for them to see the patterns they’re used to seeing, whatever those may be.

If you don’t see the value in these patterns but more expert folks on your team do, humor them. Realize it’s not a waste of time on some foolish affectation but an important communication tool.

At one point, young Arthur is learning to fly with the wild geese, flying high above the countryside. As a goose looking down on the landscape below, Arthur is struck with the insight that boundaries are artificial constructs: there are no painted lines on the ground showing kingdoms or countries. He begins to realize that all of England could be united under one king.

Think about your morning routine. The order you perform your daily preparations in is probably pretty consistent, right down to small details such as which tooth gets brushed first. You want to mix that up and get out of the rut. Use a different hand. Park on the other side. Change the part of your hair. Use a different kind of towel. Start shaving. Stop shaving. Eat earlier or later. These small changes are good for your brain; they help change the wiring and prevent neural ruts. Seriously. Your brain is tuned to be adaptive; if there’s nothing to adapt to, it will get “flabby,” metaphorically speaking.

Do morning pages for at least two weeks.

Hone a quick wit. Look for connections or analogies between unrelated things.

I never set out to be weird. It was always the other people who called me weird. ‣ Frank Zappa

That means you’ll be at your peak of intelligence at the very end of the project and at your most ignorant at the very beginning. So, do you want to make decisions early on? No; you want to defer closure for as long as possible in order to make a better decision later. But that means critical issues may stay unsettled for a long time, which makes many people acutely uncomfortable. Resist the pressure. Know that you will reach a decision, and the matter will be settled, just not today.

Trust ink over memory; every mental read is a write.

Start and maintain an engineer’s log of notes from design meetings, coding questions and solutions, and so on. Put a mark next to older entries any time you have to go back and use it.

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things. ➤ Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

Have you ever pondered why you value those things you value?

Are they the values your parents instilled in you? Or are they a reaction against those who raised you? Did you ever sit down and deliberately decide to be liberal, conservative, libertarian, or anarchist? A workaholic or a slacker?

Want to see something really scary? The Beliot Mindset List (on the Web at http://www.beloit.edu/mindset) tracks interesting facts and observations about the cohort entering college in any given year.

Generation X, 1961--1981 One of the best descriptions I’ve read of Gen X described them as being “raised by wolves.” These are free agents, with an inherent distrust of institutions. They form the greatest entrepreneurial generation in U.S. history. Gen X is the greatest entrepreneurial generation.

Although they don’t set out to save the world, they do have a greater emphasis on civics, and they expect that those in authority will fix the problem.

These generational generalizations[87] help shed basic understanding as why people value the things they do and remind us that not everyone shares your core values or your view of the world. Here are the four generational archetypes and their dominant characteristics: Prophet: Vision, values Nomad: Liberty, survival, honor Hero: Community, affluence Artist: Pluralism, expertise, due process Archetypes create opposing archetypes.

Although I can see the Boomer’s point of view on many levels, that group’s ascribed lack of pragmatism—often placing their own values ahead of practicality—frustrates me. Not everyone values pragmatism; this group values ideals more so. My approach to pragmatism can be seen as “cheating,” as in “You’re just doing that because it works.” Well, that is

Well, that is the general idea, as far as I’m concerned.

Not everyone shares your deep-seated values, and that doesn’t mean you’re right or they’re wrong.

Bear that in mind as you passionately argue for or against a topic. Are you making a logical argument, an emotional one, or just a familiar one?

Seventy-five percent of the population lean to the extravert end of the scale.[90] The other twenty-five percent of us wish they’d leave us alone.

Seventy-five percent of folks are sensing.

Allow for different bugs in different people.

Pretend you are the complete opposite type from yourself on each axis. What would the world look like to that kind of person? How would you interact with that person?

consider a recent report in the journal Nature[91] about a very modern problem—road rage. In this study, the leading predictor of a tendency for road rage was the amount of personalization on a vehicle: custom paint job, decals, bumper stickers, and so on. Even more amazing, the content of bumper stickers didn’t seem to matter, just the quantity. Five “Save the Whales” stickers could actually prove more dangerous than one “Right to Bear Arms” sticker, for example. Why? We’re marking our territory.

Attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, emotions—they are all contagious.

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be. ➤ Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

You need unit tests for yourself, too.

Expectations create reality, or at least color it. If you expect the worst from people, technology, or an organization, then that’s what you’re primed to see.

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled. ‣ Mestrius Plutarchos (Plutarch), 45-125 A.D.

At our current state of technology and culture, your ability to learn may be your most important element of success. It’s what separates getting ahead from just getting by.

The majority of all scientific information is less than fifteen years old.

it casts serious doubt on most, if not all, technology certification programs. The “body of knowledge” is demonstrably not the important part.

You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.

many goals never get past that stage—the lofty, generalized “I want to be better at xyz.”

“When I learned to play the piano, my teacher created my yearly goal and gave me specific instructions week by week to make sure I achieved that goal. Now, since I’m in charge of my own learning, I do the same.

The Pragmatic Investment Plan is based on a very simple but effective idea: model your knowledge portfolio with the same care as you would manage a financial investment portfolio.

Unfortunately, relegating learning activities to your “free time” is a recipe for failure.

Time can’t be created or destroyed, only allocated.

remember what General Eisenhower advised us: the planning is far more important than the plan.

When choosing areas to invest in, you need to make a conscious effort to diversify your attention—don’t have all your eggs in one basket. You want a good mix of languages and environments, techniques, industries, and nontechnical areas (management, public speaking, anthropology, music, art, whatever).

All knowledge investments have value.

One major difference between knowledge investments and financial investments is that all knowledge investments have some value. Even if you never use a particular technology on the job, it will impact the way you think and solve problems.

speaking of value, don’t forget that time is not the same as value. Just because you spend a lot of time doing something doesn’t mean that it’s adding value to your knowledge portfolio.

You need to make a commitment to invest a minimum amount of time on a regular basis. Create a ritual, if needed. Escape to your home office in the attic or down to the coffee shop that has free wi-fi. Not all your sessions will be equally productive, but by scheduling them regularly, you will win out in the long run. If instead you wait until you have time or wait for the muse, it will never happen.

Plan your investment in learning deliberately.

many educators have differentiated three main types of learners: visual (see Figure 17, Obligatory diagram for visual learners),

Work Together, Study Together Studies have shown that peer study groups are very much “the real thing.”

The adult learner is motivated to learn if learning will satisfy their own interests and needs.

Beside the incredible education benefits, it’s a great way to help jell a team. The team that studies together learns together, teaches each other, and learns more effectively

Here’s an exercise to try: Take a four-to-five-item bullet list that is of importance to you. Draw a mind map for the items on the list (on paper with pen or pencil). Wait a day. Now spend fifteen to twenty minutes embellishing the drawing. Tart it up. Add thick lines; use color; and add little doodles, pictures, angelic cherubs from a Gothic manuscript in the corners, whatever. Review the mind map a week later. Any surprises?

Chance favors the prepared mind.

Gaining experience is key to learning and growth—we learn best by doing. However, just “doing” alone is no guarantee of success; you have to learn from the doing for it to count, and it turns out that some common obstacles make this hard.

and, in the playing, learn deep mathematical concepts. His early work with Logo led to the LEGO Mindstorms robotic toys, named for his hugely influential book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas [Pap93]

Real life has no curriculum.

I think most people are a lot more capable than they give themselves credit for. Papert

I think most people are a lot more capable than they give themselves credit for.

We’re confident that smart people have all the answers on a clipboard, dressed in their crisp white lab coats. Dumb people drive the car in front of us on the highway.

mind-size bites.

A man’s errors are his portals of discovery. ➤ James Joyce,

“Errors benefit us because they lead us to study what happened, to understand what went wrong, and, through understanding, to fix it.”

Look it up. Google it. Fill in the blanks. “I don’t know” is a fine answer, but don’t let it end there.

popular book The Inner Game of Music [GG86] and

In a famous example, the author takes an older subject, a woman in her late fifties or so, who has never played tennis or indeed engaged in any significant physical activity for the past twenty years. The challenge was to teach her to play tennis in just twenty minutes. There’s no way to succeed at this challenge using a traditional approach. But Tim Gallwey had a better idea—one that didn’t involve any lengthy lectures or extended demonstrations. First, she was to just watch the ball and say out loud “Bounce” and “Hit” as Gallwey hit the ball. A minute or so of this, and it was her turn: just say “Bounce” and “Hit.” Don’t try to hit the ball; just say “Hit” when it seems about the right time, and swing when you feel like it. The next exercise was to listen to the sound of the ball hitting the racket. If you’ve never played, the ball makes a particularly sweet, clear sound when it hits just the right spot on the racket. This fact wasn’t made explicit; our student was merely told to listen. Next, it was time to serve. First, she was to just hum a phrase while watching Gallwey serve in order to get the rhythm of the motion. No description of the movements; just watch and hum. Next, she tried the serve—humming the same tune and focusing on the rhythm, not the motions. After twenty minutes of this sort of thing, it was time to play. She made the first point of the game and played a very respectable, lengthy set of volleys

In another example, you hit balls across the court where a chair is sitting. The idea is not to try to hit the chair but to simply note where the ball lands in relation to the chair. So while hitting balls, you would verbalize observations such as “Left,” “Right,” “Over,” and so on. We learn best by discovery, not instruction.

she was able to concentrate on a very simple feedback loop. Hit the ball like this, and it lands here. Hit the ball like that, and it lands over there. Follow this rhythm. It’s nonverbal learning, for a nonverbal skill, with a tight feedback loop and short feedback gap.

The inner game theory has the solution: instead of issuing a stream of instructions to the student, the idea is to teach the student awareness and to use that awareness to correct their performance. Awareness is an important tool in becoming more than a novice.

He had the student play just as he was but directed him to really observe every aspect of his playing—how did it feel, where was everything positioned, what passages were difficult, and so on. Then, without explanation, he corrected the student’s posture and finger placement and guided his hands through a few bars of the piece. The instruction was the same: observe all of these aspects; how does it feel now? Now go ahead and play the piece. Consistently, his students now showed great improvement after this kind of awareness exercise.

Jerry Weinberg maintains that most clients will tell you their most serious problem, and its solution, in the first five minutes you talk with them.

For whatever reasons of cognitive or neuroscience, once you make it OK to fail, you won’t.

if failure is costly, there will be no experimentation. No risk taking. No learning. Just a frozen mind, like deer in the headlights, bracing for the inevitable bloody impact.

Yet your body reacts as if you’re in real danger. And it doesn’t have to be a movie; a book would work as well. It doesn’t even have to be happening in the present moment. Remember that really mean bully in grade school or that awful teacher? First love? These are just memories, but the remembering can cause appropriate physical responses. It turns out that your brain isn’t very good at discriminating between input sources.

since the brain is kinda gullible with regards to its input source: imagining success is provably effective in achieving it.

You can improve your performance—whether you’re playing a violin, debugging code, or designing a new architecture—by imagining that you’ve already done so successfully.

“Always be the worst guy in every band you’re in. If you’re the best guy there, you need to be in a different band. And I think that works for almost everything that’s out there as well.”

The Inner Game folks suggest you should pretend you are the expert, the pro, the famous soloist. They observed that simply telling a student to “play like” someone famous in their field was enough to increase the student’s performance.

Olympic athletes do this sort of offline practicing, too. They’ll envision themselves hurtling down the course, taking the turns, and reacting appropriately. By continuing this practice even off the field, the brain gets grooved.[134] It becomes used to the experience of doing things correctly so that when the time comes to do it in the field, success comes naturally.

Groove your mind for success.

Be the expert. Don’t just pretend, actually play the role of the expert. Notice how this changes your behavior.

Consider what kind of scaffolding you might need to share in the

Consider what kind of scaffolding you might need to share in the expert experience, and see if you can arrange for that.

The teenager’s mind is easily distracted, and that doesn’t seem to be one of those things that gets any better as you age.

Folks who had been given substantial training in meditative techniques fared better than those who had been given only minimal training. But, most interestingly, nobody was meditating during the test itself.

Some problems yield only to a less conscious approach. And that brings up an interesting question. What counts as “work” or as “effort”? Are you “cooking” when you’re letting something marinate for twelve hours? Are you “working” when you’re sitting around thinking about a problem? Yes, is the short answer. Creativity does not function on a time clock and does not generally yield results when pressured.

Albert Einstein knew this well. Supposedly he was once asked how many feet there were in a mile and replied that he wouldn’t fill his brain with things that could easily be looked up. That’s what reference books are for; that’s an efficient use of resources.

Not every day will be a productive day. If events turn chaotic, it might be more effective to acknowledge that and realize you’re just not going to get in the groove. Fight the fires, enjoy the pizza at your desk, and hope for a better tomorrow.

Practice may not make perfect, but it sure makes permanent

Realize that these old habits will remain, and if you revert to one, don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s how you’re wired. Just acknowledge the lapse, and move on with your new intention. It will surely happen again; just be aware of when it does, and get back on the right path again. It’s the same thing whether you’re changing your learning habits, quitting smoking, or losing weight. The topic of change, be it personal or organizational,

Inaction is the enemy, not error.

Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now ➤ Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Just start! It doesn’t particularly matter what you choose to start with, but start something from this book deliberately, first thing tomorrow morning.

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few. ➤ Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi

The professional kiss of death for an expert is to act like one. Once you believe in your own expertness, you close your mind to possibilities. You stop acting on curiosity. You may begin to resist change in your field for fear of losing authority on a subject you’ve spent so long mastering. Your own judgment and views, instead of supporting you, can imprison you.

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

My email address is andy@pragprog.com. Let me know what worked really well for you and what fell flat. Point me to your new blog or that great open source project you’ve started. Scan and email me that cool mind map you made.