MINDSHIFT by Barbara Oakley

• What I learned in one career often enabled me to be creatively successful in the next phase of my life.
• A “mindshift” is a deep change in life that occurs thanks to learning.
• People have unexpected twists in their career paths all the time.
• The Pomodoro technique is a deceptively simple, extremely powerful focusing technique developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980s.
• To do the Pomodoro, all you need to do is turn off all potentially distracting beeps or buzzers from your cell phone or computer, set a timer for twenty-five minutes, and then focus as hard as you can on what you’re working on for those twenty-five minutes. When you’re done (and this is equally important), allow your brain to relax for a few minutes—do
• Learning something new sometimes means stepping back to novice level. But it can be a thrilling adventure!
• Surprisingly often, capturing your thoughts and putting them onto paper can help you discover what you really think and help you take more effective action.
• New neurons are born every day, particularly in the brain’s hippocampus, a vital area for learning and memory.
• As humans age, we naturally lose synapses—connecting points between neurons. It’s a bit like corroding pipes that spring leaks and eventually can’t bring water to where it’s needed.
• Exercise is a powerful enhancement for any mental shift you want to make in your life. Commitment followed through with exercise has great benefits for learning and mood.
• Don’t always trust your mind. Sometimes it tells you to do stupid things. Find trusted advisers and run any drastic decisions by them.
• It is much easier to imitate than initiate action. So seek advice and follow directions. Adapt it to your own circumstances.
• Spend as much time outside in nature as possible.
• Eras and cultures change—change is the only consistency.
• Whatever you think you are, you are actually bigger than that—you can find a way to go beyond.
• By watching prototypical career changers, you can get ideas about how you can go about reframing yourself.
• Becoming an expert in something new, whatever the subject, means building small chunks of knowledge using day-by-day practice and repetition. Gradually, these small chunks can then be knit together into mastery.
• Practice and repeat little chunks of learning over the course of several days. This will create the neural patterns that underlie your gradually growing expertise. The more difficult the little chunks are to learn, and the more deeply you learn them, the more rapidly your expertise will grow.
• It’s normal to feel inadequate when you might begin trying to understand a new subject or to broaden or change your career. Even though what you are doing is difficult, you are bringing fresh perspectives into your studies and work. This can not only be useful to your new colleagues—it can freshen your own personal outlook. Don’t discount this.
• There will always be somebody out there who is better than you at something you want to do. You must realize that you are on your own journey, on your own path, and you are being the “best version of you” rather than a bad version of somebody else.
• Learning how to learn is an important meta-skill that can help you keep up with rapidly evolving skillsets.
• It takes a special knack—developed over time—to understand trolls, haters, and others who cause strife, and to deal effectively with them.
• We often develop passions around what we are good at.
• Hobbies often bring valuable mental flexibility and insight. If you’re lucky, these insights can spill over and enhance your job. But even if they don’t, your brain can be getting a workout.
• Surprisingly often, people’s worst nightmare—having to leave a job they want to keep—ends up becoming one of the best things that’s ever happened to them.
• Those with broad experience in the working world often observe that being forced to leave a job makes people far happier with the new job than the old—no matter how impossible this might initially seem.
• Sometimes creativity can leave you feeling out of step with those around you. Millions around the world have experienced this “marching to the beat of a different drum” feeling, so if you have periods in your life when these feelings are particularly pronounced, it’s nice to know you are not alone.
• You have to be trained emotionally and psychologically, not just rationally, for entrepreneurship. The abstract nature of so many business classes doesn’t train the right habits of mind for building something from nothing, which is often just the unglamorous slog of solving boring little problems each day compounded over time.”
• Too often education snuffs out our differences, instead of giving people the autonomy to do something great.”
• As Joan McCord’s work shows, sometimes we can feel so certain that our approach is correct that we don’t examine other possibilities. Part of learning well is being able to remain open to others’ ideas and to intentionally work to create situations where we can discover whether we are wrong.
• Traditionally, careers have been stepping- stones where you lingered at each step. Modern careers, however, are more like conveyor belts. You have to keep moving and learning no matter what stage you’re at.
• But no matter what your first skill, you protect yourself by having some second skill—deeper than just a dabbling in another area. That second skill can either complement the first or give an alternative path if your personal situation changes.
• Skill development curves are typically logarithmic, not linear. This means that while developing deep expertise may take a long time, you can often rapidly accelerate to the point of diminishing returns in a fairly short period of time. And this is often good enough to get a toehold in a new area.
• Second-skilling is a good idea in today’s swiftly changing career environment. A second skill can allow you to be more nimble if the unexpected arises in your day job.
• A second skill can grow from work-related needs, or from passion. An optimal second skill can arise from both.
• Many individuals focus on acquiring a specific skill—say, a certain programming language—but forget that other skills, such as being able to speak humorously and effectively, can add formidable value to their talent stack.
• Change is accelerating, and we need to build the capacity for change to continue to be relevant.”
• It’s easy to fall into a rut of thinking that you can only do what you’ve done in the past. But enormous change and growth is possible if you open your mind to the potential.
• A learning lifestyle is something that can be nurtured and grown in communities, nations, and cultures.
• Five Key Mindshifts That Enhance Learning Create vivid mind-map sketches that bring the material to life. Memorize by using visual association. Use pockets of time that are often neglected, such as sitting on a bus. Practice over and over again until you can work a tough problem with ease. Visualize your successful future with whatever you are learning.
• A technique known as Flash Anzan teaches children to rapidly add numbers on a mental abacus. And by “rapidly,” we’re talking spooky-fast—numbers
• Procedural fluency is a sort of automaticity of thought that arises because you’ve done something many times before.
• Practice is what builds the well-connected neural networks that underlie procedural fluency.
• Cognitive load theory, first developed in the late 1980s and increasingly supported by recent neuroimaging research, posits that if you overload working memory, the brain simply can’t process the information.
• Develop Neural Chunks Through Deliberate Practice
• Whenever you are trying to learn a difficult new topic or skill, focus on deliberate practice with the toughest parts of the material. Break whatever you are learning into tiny chunks—a little part of a song on the piano, a word or verb conjugation in Spanish, a side kick in Tae Kwon Do, or a homework solution in trigonometry. Practice that chunk of material until you have created a solid “neural chunk”—a pattern that you can easily call to mind and accomplish. Once that chunk is mastered, however, don’t fall into the trap of repracticing it just because it’s easy and feels good—instead, keep the bulk of your focus and practice on what you find most difficult.
• You suffer from paralysis of analysis if you only think without doing. If you don’t jump in, you never get lucky.
• The only way to ensure your skills don’t become obsolete is to always keep learning,
• Learn more about your area of expertise, but also learn about things outside your area of expertise.
• “Lucky” people are those who learn to see opportunities when others see problems.
• Creative people sometimes say that one of the best ways to be creative yourself is to be around creative people.
• No teaching method comes with a 100 percent guarantee of success.
• Knowing your subject matter is key.
• You only have so much cognitive energy. Be selective about what you choose to become expert in—you don’t want to be typecast as an expert in areas you do not want to spend time on.
• To avoid falling into a career rut, it’s important to be open to change,
• Humility is important during the learning process, along with persistence.
• If you are learning something new and difficult, explore boot camp–like experiences to make new connections and immerse yourself in the new ideas. No matter how smart you may be, give yourself the time you need to truly learn the discipline.
• The circumstances in which we perceive something—its context—have an enormous effect on how we react to it.
• All in all, your expectations about what will happen, and the underlying context, can powerfully shape your mind and body’s reaction, both for good and for ill.
• Exercise is one of the most powerful “medications” we know of that produces new neurons.
• A variety of hobbies keeps us mentally tuned up—especially when those activities are combined with exercise.
• What you learn as a mature adult, or as an older person, continues to build and maintain your cognitive reserve.
• “Imposter syndrome” is the feeling that you are not truly deserving of your accomplishments—or, at the very least, far less able than those around you. Though it’s called a “syndrome,” feeling like an imposter is not a mental disorder—it’s simply an emotionally harmful way of framing your achievement.
• Imposter syndrome, oddly enough, occurs most commonly in high achievers.
• Part of the challenge in overcoming the syndrome is that the imposter’s humility can be refreshing for regular people who catch a whiff of it (she’s humble!).
• And the reality is that although talents and skills matter, luck can also play an important role in our lives.
• Feeling like an imposter can lead to discomfort and doubt, but is not all bad. It can help you to look with the dispassionate eye of an observer at what’s going on around you. It can also help you avoid the arrogant overconfidence that can lead to bad decision making and poor leadership skills.
• Sometimes the best way to succeed in a seemingly impossible task is to slip through a side door.
• Focus Is Good, but Not All Learning Involves Focusing
• It takes time to understand complicated systems, whether we are studying the human heart, laying out a new lawn irrigation system, or analyzing the multifaceted causes of World War II. To untangle such complex subjects, we often need to alternate a tight focus on the issue at hand with steps back to look at the bigger picture.
• A little intermittent background noise can allow us to more easily alternate between focused and diffuse modes. This is especially useful with learning that encompasses new concepts, approaches, or perspectives.
• Mentors can be invaluable in your career and personal development. People don’t need to even know that you consider them to be mentors for them to be of value in your life. Look for ways to make yourself somehow useful to the mentor, just as they are for you, to make such relationships flourish.
• Even the most disheartening people can make positive contributions to your life.
• Consider learning opportunities as an important factor when making career and job decisions. How supportive is the new environment of new learning?
• Online learning provides a great way to refresh old learning, bone up on the skills you need for a critical test, or simply gain foundational skills.
• Don’t enroll in too many courses at the same time. It’s better to study a few subjects deeply than many courses superficially.
• Life holds many—sometimes too many—learning opportunities.
• There can sometimes be great value in striking off on your own and not following traditional approaches. Even though it may be intimidating, look for opportunities to bring your own unique insights and fresh ways of doing things into your work or your hobby.
• Learning on the fly when the right opportunity might arise is part of the key to success.
• The take-home message here is that, for a truly outstanding learning experience, you want to look for instructors who have an almost religious zeal for effectively conveying their information in this new online terrain.
• Research has shown that if you watch a professor on a video for about thirty seconds, you can get a very good sense of how effective that professor actually is as a teacher.
• There’s one more reason why the instructors are key: good ones can break through convention and present the material in a fresh, profoundly useful way.
• Even just thinking about learning something you aren’t partial to, like studying math, activates the insular cortex—a pain center of the brain.6 Humor can counterbalance this pain—it activates the brain’s opioid reward systems.
• Your first impression about whether an instructor is effective is usually spot-on. Look for an instructor who shows unexpected flashes of humor—it’s a clue that you’ll probably enjoy the time you’re putting into learning.
• Learning with others can enhance your entire experience—that’s why discussion forums and social media can be so worthwhile.
• The easiest way to decide whether an online learning experience is right for you is to check out an online ranking site.
• Most of us aren’t taught how to learn.
• Knowledge of the brain’s workings can allow us to leverage every aspect of our learning.
• Attitude trumps everything.