Hill-Climbing

A key strategy for getting better at things is hill-climbing: Try different things, keep doing the things that work, stop doing those that don’t.

The strategy is named because you can envision it as finding the highest spot in a landscape filled with fog. You can’t necessarily see the highest point, but you can always walk uphill.

Most of the time, this approach works fairly well. It likely explains how we get better at many things simply by doing them repeatedly. Where this strategy runs into trouble, however, is when you need to do something worse before you can do it better.