Chapter 5. Learning to learn
This chapter covers
- What learning mode means
- How to identify future pitfalls
- How to use trends to plot your future
Learning mode can be defined as follows: you have slack time and are using it to do deliberate practice of new skills. It usually requires people to get out of their comfort zones, because acquiring new skills presents a challenge.
In his book Becoming a Technical Leader, Jerry Weinberg describes how he visualized his improvement at pinball. I talked briefly about this in chapter 4, but I plan to go a bit more deeply into it now to show how learning works. He plotted his points over time on a chart, as shown in figure 5.1.
At first glance, it seems there’s steady progress—a steady learning curve in which he keeps getting better and better at pinball. But something interesting happens when you zoom in on the chart. It turns out the progress isn’t steady at all; see figure 5.2.
- There are plateaus where the learning progress is slow and steady.
- There are peaks in which there’s a lot of quick learning.
