Effective learning=organizing your goals

Learning how to learn is critical for everyone. Most of us have to deal with a changing world and to learn how to manage tons of new information.

However, most of our learning methods are outdated and far from optimal. It may even be giving us an illusion of learning, like re-reading and highlighting that don't provide proper feedback to show what you haven't learned.

Focused and diffuse modes provide two models for how we develop, elaborate, deepen and broaden connections. Both methods are important.

• The focused mode of learning is about bringing related concepts together into a unit, called a chunk. 
• The diffuse mode operates through a wider net of connecting general ideas across different fields. We use this diffuse mode while we sleep, exercise or daydream.

In this digital age, knowledge and expertise have been devalued.

What you know is now less relevant than what you can learn, and employers are less interested in hiring people with particular expertise than with the general ability to develop the right expertise in the future.

When we can all retrieve the same information, the key differentiator is not access to data, but the ability to make use of it, the capacity to translate the available information into useful knowledge.

Like any other discipline, becoming good at analyzing data requires seasoning and experience. Executives with deep analytical expertise, sitting on the top of the organizational charts are responsible for spreading a culture of evidence-based, data-driven decision making.

This also ensures that data quality, data hygiene, implementation of data management and data privacy are respected and adhered to.

The larger group of non-executives need to reinforce proper analytical techniques, and while not everyone can be an elite quantitative analyst, there is a certain basic level of proficiency that can be attained.

Employees need to be provided with project opportunities and made to attend training academies that provide the specific activities to be completed for increasing their analytical capability.

Organizations that invest in senior-level expertise and reinforce daily analytical activities will be able to take advantage of Big Data to expand and evolve in the future.

A growth mindset is a belief that anyone can change their talents, abilities, and intelligence. Those with a growth mindset:

• take on challenges
• take advantage of feedback
• use the most effective problem-solving strategies
• provide developmental feedback
• is persistent in accomplishing goals

Conversely, those with a fixed mindset believe that talents, abilities and intelligence can't be improved.

Leaders with a learning mindset are motivated to increase their competence and master something new.

A performance mindset desires to gain favorable judgments about competence and avoid negative judgements.

Repeating the sounds (out loud or in your head) will give you a feel for the language. Memorize not just words, but sentences and even songs to get the rhythm and intonation of the language. 

Read words, sentences, children’s books, newspaper articles. Read as far and near as you can, whether out loud to an audience or quietly to yourself. 

Seeing the language in print helps you understand word structures. It also anchors the new sounds, and helps them get imprinted in your mind.

The behaviorist perspectives of learning originated in the early 1900s. The main idea of behaviorism is that learning consists of a change in behavior because of obtaining, strengthening and applying associations between input from the world, and observations of the individual.

• Learning is reinforced by exercise and repetition, followed by a positive reward.
• Learning takes place when the right parts of more complex behavior are rewarded.

Cognitive psychology started in the late 1950s and contributed to the move away from behaviorism.

• Instead of viewing people as collections of responses to external stimuli, people are viewed as information processors.
• Cognitive psychology was influenced by the computer that processes information, that became analogous to the human mind.
• Cognitive psychology understands learning as absorbing knowledge, acting on it, and storing it in memory.
• The main teaching methods are lecturing and reading textbooks, where the learner receives knowledge passively.

Doing something every day doesn't guarantee mastery, only adequacy. What is needed is deliberate practice.

Only putting in time does not lead to mastery. You may improve at first but will eventually reach a comfortable level and stay there indefinitely.

Research on violinists shows that those who went on to become concert performers didn't practice more, but the time spent in deliberate practice was much higher.

Deliberate practice means trading automatic behavior for strategies to increase performance.

"Our brains evolved to learn by doing things, not by hearing about them. This is one of the reasons that, for a lot of skills, it’s much better to spend about two thirds of your time testing yourself on it rather than absorbing it."

It can keep you accountable, but it can also lead to a false sense of completeness. One way to avoid sabotaging yourself is to state your goal as a commitment rather than progress towards the finished product.

• It ignores the market. Unless you have a trust fund waiting for you, you’ll have to feed yourself and others. 
• It will turn a passion into a job. 

1. Identify real needs in the market that are currently not being well met. 
2. Assess your strengths: Whatever is easy for you that most others have a harder time with, that’s a worthy option.
3. Match up these two in a constantly iterative process: This process takes many years if not decades.

“Remember, people do business with people they know, like, and trust.” - Susan Solovic