SIMPLE SABOTAGE by Robert M. Galford, Bob Frisch, Cary Greene

• Occurring on a wide scale, simple sabotage will be a constant and tangible drag on the war efforts of the enemy.”
• These are the eight tactics from the Simple Sabotage Field Manual:
• “Insist on doing everything through ‘channels.’ Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.”
• “Make ‘speeches.’ Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate ‘patriotic’ comments.”
• “When possible, refer all matters to committees, for ‘further study and consideration.’ Attempt to make the committees as large as possible—never less than five.”
• “Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.”
• “Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.”
• “Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.”
• “Advocate ‘caution.’ Be ‘reasonable’ and urge your fellow-conferees to be ‘reasonable’ and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.”
• “Be worried about the propriety of any decision—raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.”
• OSS leaders didn’t want members of the Resistance caught and killed. That’s why the tactics they taught had strong plausible deniability. These are good behaviors, but taken to an extreme. That’s why they are insidious.
• But rooting out these corrosive behaviors isn’t so simple, since they are often mutant excesses of laudable aspects of organizational life and group behavior—enforcing rules, checking that processes have been followed correctly, involving co-workers in decisions and seeing that decisions are made in the right way.
• Exposing and inoculating any working group against sabotage requires several stages:
• Identify: Spot sabotage as it occurs, and help others see when a positive behavior has crossed the line into becoming counterproductive or destructive.
• Calibrate: Put into place the right expectation for tolerance—the range of acceptable behaviors—so that productive behavior is encouraged, but sabotage is prevented.
• Remediate: Give everyone in the organization the permission, the language, and the techniques to call out damaging behaviors in a constructive way.
• Inoculate: Introduce tools, metrics, and process changes to prevent the sabotage from recurring (or from occurring in the first place) and to help develop a low-sabotage culture.
• Sabotage by Obedience Insist on doing everything through channels. Never permit shortcuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
• Organizations run more smoothly most of the time if everyone is following instructions set with no variability. But obedience becomes Sabotage by Obedience—instantly—when it prevents personal judgment from overriding processes that for whatever reason are not working at that moment.
• You probably know who the squeaky wheels are in your group. These are the people who are out of line a lot; they probably try your nerves. But they’re easy to spot. To ferret out the Obedient Saboteurs (and the flawed rules they may be following), you have to look for the people who don’t make any noise at all.
• To get a sense of where the norms are, create a bell curve where the middle of the curve shows the number of exceptions to the rule that you would expect to see.
• it will be clear, by looking at the far right side of the curve, which employees are pushing the limits on your guidelines—who
• But it will also be clear who works at the other extreme—those
• Ultimately, those people probably represent the more grievous threat. They’re not your squeaky wheels. They’re invisible. But their behavior is slowly, surely, building rigidity into your company—rigidity that can cause it to crack.
• Exposing the “hidden” side of the curve is a big step toward eliminating Sabotage by Obedience.
• You want your metrics—the things you measure and the ways you measure them—to reinforce your processes and drive the outcomes you seek.
• You will inadvertently create Obedient Saboteurs if you reward people for adhering to the rules even when common sense tells them not to.
• some organizations chase a particular outcome or performance metric simply because they have become accustomed to the chase itself and have lost any sense of what a reasonable stopping point might be.
• Continuous improvement is a business philosophy created by W. Edwards Deming in the mid-twentieth century. This philosophy thinks of processes as systems and holds that if each component of the system constantly tries to both increase quality and reduce costs, efficiency and success will follow.
• But taken to an extreme, even continuous improvement can lead to sabotage.
• Organizations, like people, can become addicted to self-improvement.
• When people are worn down, they often follow the rules with glazed eyes and shut minds. They may not realize when a rule is hurting their ability to get work done well.
• Sometimes when people use their own judgment, they’re going to be wrong (read: they’re going to make what you think is a bad decision). In the interests of the greater good, those mistakes must be tolerated. An old saying sums this up pretty well: “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”
• But perhaps there’s no better way to protect your organization against obedient sabotage than to celebrate examples of when people use good judgment—even if the person you’re praising has broken the rules.
• If your group or organization does a lot of things simply because “That’s the way we’ve always done them,” it’s probably time to give your processes a spring cleaning.
• Here’s a painless way to overhaul some of your processes. Put someone with experience through the new-employee orientation for that person’s function. See whether he or she thinks new employees are being told to do the right things, for the right reasons.
• Obedient Saboteurs are not harmless.
• Obedient Saboteurs can destroy the productivity of your group and rob it of its true potential.
• Sabotage by Speech Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.
• There’s nothing specifically wrong about occasionally indulging in monologues at staff meetings. When done right, they can inspire, inform, and direct. They can call people to action.
• But talking too much, too frequently, can delay or derail a discussion long enough to make everyone just a little late for their next task and maybe just confused enough, agitated enough—or dulled enough—to make a mistake.
• The first step to countering Sabotage by Speech is to understand the many forms it can take.
• Clearly, we all need to talk; we need to contribute to conversations and participate in meetings in order to get our work done.
• Long Talkers go on and on every time they speak—whether on a conference call or a video chat or at a meeting in person. When they are asked a question, they never answer with a quick “yes” or “no.”
• Long Talkers rob us of our time.
• Tangent Talkers barrel off in a direction that may only marginally relate to what the meeting is about, if it relates at all.
• Lost Talkers start speaking with the best of intentions. They really do think that they have something meaningful to contribute to the conversation. But before too long (in fact, sometimes within thirty seconds or so), it becomes apparent that it’s going to take them a while to figure out what that “something meaningful” is.
• Lost Talkers aren’t Speech Saboteurs when they have a proven record for being insightful, and “lost” really means that they have a clearer grasp of the big picture and are “ahead of everyone else” in understanding it (which is why everyone else has a hard time following).
• Lost Talkers are Speech Saboteurs when they are chronic offenders. Or when it is increasingly clear that they have lost their train of thought but keep talking, trying to find it again.
• Sensitive Talkers understand that people learn in different ways, and that just because they think they have explained something thoroughly doesn’t mean that people get it—so they repeat their message or say the same thing in a different way so that everyone “gets it.”
• “Oh! Oh!” Talkers are like Hermione Granger of the Harry Potter books and movies. They know the topic inside and out, and they are the people who cut to the chase and save the group a lot of time by helping everyone home in quickly on what matters most. The speeches of “Oh! Oh!” Talkers often deliver the insight that people put to good use later on.
• But “Oh! Oh!” Talkers can also be Speech Saboteurs. Sometimes, they feel the need to contribute to every conversation even when the discussion is not within the scope of their areas of expertise or knowledge.
• At the beginning of any group discussion, remind everyone how long the meeting is supposed to be and then appoint someone formally to keep track of time and interrupt people as needed.
• Give meeting participants something tangible—an agenda or specific goals—that you can all use to keep yourselves on track.
• The sheer amount of data available to bring to bear on almost any topic these days can subtly encourage many types of Speech Saboteurs. To be effective contributors to meetings, people are often expected to be able to convert data into insight, and insight into usable insight, and there’s real skill involved in doing that. It doesn’t come naturally to most people.
• The goal in any meeting is to foster usable insights that are then actually used to render a positive result. Any meeting that does that has been a good meeting.
• Sabotage by Committee When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible—never less than five.
• committees represent the possibility for accountability to be lost.
• When a larger group delegates something to a committee, control of the task or activity goes off the radar of the group’s leader.
• Many times, committees are left to devise their own ground rules, which can mean that the committee never bothers to set any rules.
• Often, no one is explicitly made head of the committee, and so no one is responsible for the work of the committee getting done.
• When an individual is delegated a task, someone is clearly in charge. But if the work is too large for a single person and a temporary committee is formed, that accountability may be diluted or lost completely.
• As our friends in the OSS no doubt understood only too well, committees, by their very nature, have tunnel vision. Once they are formed around a mandate, they often find it difficult to change course in the middle of their work—even if a change is warranted.
• Finally, committees . . . can be . . . sluggishly . . . slow.
• The best way to stop an idea dead in its tracks without actually having to disagree with anything is to assign it to a committee—preferably one, like Ben’s suggested committee, with a diverse membership, no clear objectives, and no deadlines.
• If no single person ultimately has accountability for resolving an issue or coming to closure, then there’s a good chance the group is an unsuspecting victim of inadvertent Sabotage by Committee.
• If no one has articulated what the outcome of the committee’s work is—a report, a recommendation, an action—then the committee is in trouble.
• All three of the issues just discussed—no mechanism to close on an agreement, no goals, and no deadlines—have a common root cause: Nobody is in charge.
• Decisions need owners, and a committee can’t be an owner. A person needs to be the owner. And so a person needs to be delegated the authority to be in charge of the final decision of the committee.
• Using RACI to great effect involves remembering just four phrases: Responsible—the team. Accountable—one person. Consulted—before a decision is made. Informed—after a decision is made.
• Keep committees small and nimble to prevent them from becoming breeding grounds of Sabotage by Committee.
• The most common way to populate a committee is to ask for volunteers. That’s because being on a committee generally represents an effort above and beyond a person’s regular job. So if someone volunteers, that person is acknowledging that he or she can make room in their schedule to take on another responsibility. While that may be the easiest way to get a committee going, it is often not the best way. Those volunteers may not be the right people to get the job done.
• Wisdom is about having the ability to recognize patterns and to make connections where others might not—abilities that come from years of experience.
• Try this simple fix. Either set a deadline, if you created or chair a committee, or ask for a deadline, if you’re a committee member. Set a clear outcome, or “deliverable,” that needs to be ready by that deadline. Or if you’re not in a position to set a deliverable, at least ask that you be given one.
• Clarity is the “simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
• Spotting sabotage when others commit it is difficult, but spotting sabotage when you are the saboteur is even harder.
• Sabotage by Haggling Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
• Haggling over communications is natural; we’re hardwired to do it. Unfortunately, we’re also hardwired to do too much of it.
• Sabotage by Reopening Decisions Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to reopen the question of the advisability of that decision.
• That’s the best way to stop the Reopening Decisions Saboteur in his or her tracks. Ask, “What’s changed since we made our decision?” If nothing has, then there’s no reason to move backwards.
• It’s impossible to take biases out of decision-making, but it’s good to be aware of the influence they can have.
• One tool we have used (and seen used) effectively to inoculate organizations from acts of sabotage related to individuals not expressing their opinions candidly and directly is to establish the following ground rule: Qui tacet consentire videtur, or “Silence denotes consent.”
• Err on the side of too much care, or hesitation, and you might sabotage yourself or your group, despite your best intentions.
• Sabotage by Is-It-Really-Our-Call? Be worried about the propriety of any decision—raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.
• There’s no faster way to stall decision-making than by seeding doubt in the minds of those who are making the decisions: Do they have the right to make the call at all?
• Often, the reason why people question the authority of a group to make a decision stems from lack of confidence—in themselves or in the group.
• If you aren’t in charge of the group and suspect there’s ambiguity about what the group needs to make a decision on, speak up. Try to seek clarity from the group itself or whoever assigned your group the task to make the decision in the first place.
• Successful organizations make and execute decisions faster than their competitors.
• Modern Sabotage by CC: Everyone CC: Everyone. Send updates as frequently as possible, including in the distribution list anyone even peripherally involved.
• Take Yourself Off as Many Distribution Lists as Possible.
• Being deluged with information is not the same as being informed.

SIDE HUSTLE by Chris Guillebeau

• A side hustle has many benefits, but it all starts with the right idea.
• Some hustle ideas are better than others.
• Once you have multiple ideas, you need to be able to identify the best ones.
• As you move forward with an idea, study what other people are doing. Then, do it better or do it differently.
• Once you have a great idea and a specific idea of who it’s for, you need to transform that idea into an offer. An offer includes a promise, a pitch, and a price.
• Resourcefulness is your most valuable hustle skill. Get all the logistics out of the way so you can focus on more important things.
• Use the cost-plus model and follow two easy guidelines for much higher odds of success.
• Many new hustlers get caught up in mundane details. Avoid that trap from the beginning, and keep your focus on just two things.
• When’s the best time to get your offer out in the world and see what happens? Usually before you feel totally confident.
• No man is an island, and few side hustles thrive without the help of friends and supporters. As you begin hustling, don’t hesitate to ask friends, family, and maybe even your mail carrier to join your cause.
• try different things and keep a record of results.
• small victories can be disproportionately satisfying.
• Don’t get distracted—identify what’s working and do more of that.
• To make significant improvements (and save more time) as you expand your hustle, systemize wherever you can.
• When you receive multiple paychecks from different sources, you are no longer dependent on the whims of a single employer.
• More income means more options. More options mean more freedom.
• No matter what it is you do in your day job, or whether you want to identify as an “entrepreneur” or not, you need a side hustle.
• Everyone should have a side hustle. Even if you love your job, having more than one source of income will give you more freedom and more options.
• To be successful at hustling, you first need to understand how to generate profitable ideas and then choose which one is best at any particular time.
• Side hustles are all about action! You need to launch your idea, usually before you feel totally ready, then regroup and refine after seeing the initial results.
• you need a willingness to learn and experiment.
• Most business education teaches people how to be a corporate manager, which is fine if that’s what you do for your day job. But with a side hustle, you’re starting your own business, not running someone else’s. You don’t need an MBA.
• The initial goal is to start on your own, using your own skills and effort.
• Once you acquire the skill of idea generation, you’ll have no problem coming up with ideas whenever you need.
• The only way to master side hustle skills is by doing.
• The key point is to move through these stages in sequence.
• Sometimes it helps to have a visual reminder of how you’re doing.
• Whether you love your job or can’t stand it, everyone should have more than one source of income.
• Remember, a side hustle is the new job security. There’s no downside, and the possibilities are unlimited.
• When you build something for yourself, even as you continue to work your day job, you become empowered.
• A side hustle is like a hobby, with one big difference: most hobbies cost money. A side hustle makes money.
• Happy faces are nice, but you can’t deposit them in your checking account.
• Once you understand that money really does grow on trees, the next step is to learn to plant the right seeds. The seeds for a money tree consist of moneymaking ideas.
• They may not be obvious at first, but if you look closely, you’ll find no shortage of ideas that can be converted into money available for the taking.
• Every hustle starts with an idea—and for best results, you may need more than one.
• Before we go on, take note of an important fact about hustle ideas: not all of them are created equal. In fact, there’s a tremendous range of potential profit among them.
• almost every hustle idea that’s worth pursuing shares three qualities. You want your idea to be feasible, profitable, and persuasive.
• Your goal is to start a project in a short period of time that earns money outside your day job. If any of these pieces of the equation are not immediately evident in the idea you’re considering, you don’t have a feasible idea.
• Start A Project / That Earns Money / In A Short Period Of Time
• Can you envision your next steps? If not, abandon the idea.
• A side hustle produces income. If you don’t see a clear way to get paid, abandon the idea.
• if your idea requires three years to get going, abandon the idea.
• A feasible idea is one that you can turn into reality using the skills, time, and resources you already have. To put it simply, an idea that isn’t feasible is not worth considering.
• Even if you don’t know every step of the way, you must be able to see a pathway from idea to launch.
• if you have a hard time explaining the primary benefit of your concept in more than a sentence or two, you may need to rethink the idea.
• If the primary benefit is unclear to potential customers, you won’t convert many of them into paying customers
• A side hustle is something that makes you money, not costs you money. If you don’t see how you could make money from the idea, preferably in a short amount of time, it’s probably not a good idea.
• Your idea has to arrive at the right time, and be so persuasive that it’s hard for customers to say no to.
• To be successful, you want the right idea at the right time.
• THE HIGH-POTENTIAL IDEA CHECKLIST Can you describe how to turn your idea into action in one sentence? Is there an obvious way to make money with this idea? Does this idea solve a problem for someone? Can you figure out how to make this idea happen quickly? Is it relatively low maintenance? Can you get paid more than once for this idea?
• In creating your side hustle, the goal is to turn your idea into an asset, something that has real value and produces income for you over time.
• Side hustle ideas are like that stock certificate. They hold the potential for real value—but only if you cash them in. If they remain in your head or scribbled on the pages of your journal, the value remains trapped in the world of potential. Your goal as a hustler is to unlock that potential and start converting the idea into profit.
• What are these people doing, and what do they need?,
• Whenever you encounter groups of people, ask yourself What do these people need or want?
• Generally speaking, there are three broad categories of side hustles. You can sell a product, whether one of your own or someone else’s, you can provide a service, or you can be a middleman of some kind.
• Selling a product is simple enough: you make, buy, or acquire something that you then sell to someone else.
• Providing a service is also pretty simple: there’s something you do for someone else, in exchange for payment.
• Some very profitable hustles can be found in “decoding” or improving an existing process, improving it in a way that produces income without creating a product and without directly serving any customers.
• Wherever money is exchanged, there’s usually at least one way that a creative individual has found to make the process more efficient, and to profit from that improvement.
• Offer online tutoring services in your field of expertise
• Create an online (or offline) course in some quirky subject you happen to know a lot about
• Publish a blog with a new lesson on a specific topic every day
• Start a podcast and sell sponsorship
• Start a membership website, where people pay a monthly or annual fee to access useful information about a specific topic
• Write and publish a book (if I can do it, you can too!)
• Most important, always be on the lookout for feasible, profitable, and persuasive ideas as you go about your daily life.
• Just by applying a little logic, you should be able to immediately spot at least some obstacles and opportunities that are inherent in your service or product.
• Identifying the obstacles and opportunities in your idea may call for more formal research, but you don’t necessarily need to head to the library and spend your weekends immersed in a stack of books.
• For each idea, consider what would be uniquely good or uniquely challenging about it.
• By understanding how easy or difficult your idea will be to implement, you’ll have a much better understanding of which of your ideas to shelve, and which one you’ll choose to move forward with.
• The secret to turning a profit for any business or venture, whether it’s a side hustle renting out cars or a multinational corporation, boils down to one basic principle: don’t spend more money than you take in. With this principle in mind, the projected profit for just about any hustle can be calculated by the following simple equation: EXPECTED INCOME - EXPECTED EXPENSES = PROJECTED PROFIT
• The point is that by forecasting profit and expense with a simple estimate like this, you’ll be able to make decisions for your hustle with far more confidence than you would simply by guessing.
• It doesn’t matter how many people walk into your bar; what matters is how many people buy something.
• Your side hustle absolutely must have a clear plan to make money. Don’t set aside this requirement and decide that you’ll “figure it out later.” That’s fine for a hobby, but not for a hustle.
• Don’t worry about being on-the-nose accurate; the goal is to compare the profit potential of your various ideas to see which one might be more worthwhile to pursue.
• Any idea that doesn’t have a likely path to profit should be abandoned. Money isn’t everything, but when it comes to a side hustle, money matters a lot.
• Money grows on trees, but you have to plant the right seeds. Start to notice potential opportunities wherever you go.
• Not all hustle ideas are created equal. For best results, your ideas should be feasible, profitable, and persuasive.
• Starter ideas are fine for a while, but at some point you’ll want to transition to NLIs (next-level ideas).
• Use the back-of-napkin financial analysis (or a simple spreadsheet) to estimate the profit of your idea (or ideas) before proceeding further.
• Once you have multiple ideas, you need to be able to identify the best ones.
• FEASIBILITY: The ability to begin turning the idea into action in a short period of time
• PROFITABILITY: The potential to make money from this idea, also in a short period of time
• PERSUASION: Not only is this a good idea, it’s a good idea now
• EFFICIENCY: How quickly can this be executed?
• MOTIVATION: How excited are you about this idea?
• The point is to compare multiple ideas to see if a clear winner emerges. If one idea clearly ranks higher on most qualities, it’s a pretty good indication that that’s the one to try.
• Remember, your goal is to rank and compare different ideas, then select the best candidate.
• Save all your other ideas for later—you may end up coming back to them at some point.
• Hang on to those extra ideas, but never save your best idea for later.
• Use the selector tool to figure out which idea is strongest and has the most potential, and then lead with that.
• If you still can’t decide after all the analysis, just pick what feels right at the moment.
• When it comes to side hustles, action is almost always better than inaction.
• Even if you end up changing course later, you’re still gaining valuable experience and building valuable skills.
• You just want to learn two things: Who else is offering the same thing or something similar How your idea will be better or different
• You don’t have to be better at everything—in fact, you probably won’t be. When you closely observe the competition, though, you may be able to pick up on some things that they either haven’t noticed or just haven’t had time to address.
• When you “follow the money,” your goal is not only to determine roughly how feasible and profitable the idea is, but also what your competitors are doing that’s making them money. Then, you want to figure out how you can adopt and improve on their strategy.
• If you have a big idea and want to get some real-world feedback (not just from your friends) before going further, you can set up an advertisement and see how people respond.
• Convincing people that they want to buy something they’ve never heard of and didn’t know they needed is challenging, so you’ll have a great advantage if your concept is crystal clear and very easy to understand.
• Every side hustle has a target customer, a specific type of person that its product or service is designed for.
• And the better you can understand those people—who they are, what they need, and where their pain points are—the better equipped you’ll be to serve them.
• If you have an idea of who your customer is, but are having trouble figuring out their pain points, it may help to have an extended (albeit one-way) conversation with them.
• When you’re presenting an offer, you want to make sure to give people all the pertinent information they need to make a purchase.
• A complete offer includes the following elements.
• THE PROMISE: how your hustle will change someone’s life
• THE PITCH: why they should purchase or sign up now
• THE PRICE: what it costs to purchase or sign up (and how to do it)
• The promise should focus on the benefit people will receive from whatever you’re selling. You want to craft a short, bold statement that attracts attention and makes the benefit to customers immediately clear.
• The pitch should provide everything someone needs to know, without getting bogged down in a bunch of irrelevant details.
• The price should tell prospective customers or clients not only what your product or service costs, but also what it includes and exactly what they need to do to receive it.
• Write to a person, not a group.
• Have a purpose for every word. In good copywriting, nothing is superfluous. Every fact and every bullet point is there for a reason. Write multiple drafts and edit ruthlessly each time.
• Don’t just list a bunch of features; maintain the focus on how your offer makes people feel better in some way.
• Enthusiasm is contagious, so don’t be afraid to put yours on display.
• No matter what it is you’re selling, you need an origins story, too.
• Unless you’re selling a completely generic product (and you probably shouldn’t be), you’ll be much more successful if you provide your customers with a history about how your hustle came to be.
• Unless you have a reason to not include any information about yourself in the origins story, it’s almost always a good idea to infuse some personality into your narrative.
• Some ideas are better than others. Use the Side Hustle Selector to find the best ones by comparing them on a range of criteria.
• You don’t have to be better than the competition in every way, but you should at least be different. Become a detective and survey the landscape to understand what else is out there.
• Get super clear on your avatar or ideal customer. Start with the basics, but then think about some deeper questions: What do they really want? What are their hopes and dreams? These answers will guide you as you prepare to launch with maximum impact.
• Resourcefulness is your most valuable skill as a side hustler.
• EVERYTHING IS FIGUREOUTABLE
• Resourcefulness is often worth more than any amount of business experience or know-how.
• It doesn’t have to take money to make money, but sometimes, big investments in a proven hustle can pay off.
• Logistical questions like these are all “figureoutable,” but without a plan for generating income, you don’t have a hustle.
• Get a bank account that’s just for your side hustle.
• Similarly, get a separate credit or debit card you use only for expenses associated with your hustle.
• Pay for everything you can up front.
• Set aside at least 25 percent of your hustle income for taxes.
• Be fast with invoicing.
• It’s good to pay people quickly, but it’s even better to get paid quickly.
• Whenever possible, insist on a written agreement for service work.
• Legal structure: operating as a sole proprietor is perfectly acceptable for many hustles.
• Right from the beginning, set up a very simple accounting system.
• If at all possible, set aside a dedicated hustle workspace, even a small one, in your home or apartment.
• Once you’re making money, pay yourself first.
• Don’t be intimidated by the word contract. If you’re freelancing or otherwise doing contract work with clients, you should absolutely have some sort of written agreement, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be a hefty document with lots of fine print. The most important thing is to have clear communication regarding the work to be completed, a timeline by which it will be done, and the fee you’ll be paid.
• The first thing to know is there there’s usually a range of possible prices you could successfully charge. You want it to be low enough that you don’t turn away or lose customers, but high enough that you can still make money. Assuming you want to maximize profit, your long-term goal is to find a sweet spot at the higher end of what people are willing to pay.
• With cost-plus pricing applied to a product, you first figure out how much it will cost to provide the product, and then you simply add on a markup (a dollar amount or a percentage) that serves as your profit.
• One good rule of thumb is that your minimum accepted hourly income should be at least what you make per hour in your day job, and probably more. Since you’ll be working on the project in your spare time, the income you earn needs to be worth the leisure time you’ll be giving up.
• To recap, just keep this in mind as you go along:
• PRODUCT: Minimum acceptable profit per item or per sale
• SERVICE: Minimum acceptable hourly income or flat rate
• The great thing about side hustles is that you can set your hustle’s price based on what works for you. With this method of pricing, you determine your desired profit, then you examine what needs to happen to achieve the goal.
• Whenever possible, design your hustle with recurring revenue in mind. Why sell something once when you can sell it over and over?
• Instead of having clever pricing, have a great product and a fair (fixed) price.
• Don’t stray too far from market prices.
• Only by publishing your offer and seeing how customers react will you know if your price is viable.
• Because side hustles are designed to be moneymaking projects that you can get off the ground quickly, you want to be able to design a simple and efficient process to go from idea to implementation in as little time as possible.
• The more you can simplify your idea and break down the creation process into clear, specific steps, the easier it will be to get up and running quickly.
• Many, if not most, hustles these days should have some kind of website. A website is essentially an online home—and you probably don’t want to be homeless.
• Don’t overpay for a website: you can get all the bandwidth and space you need for as little as $5 a month.
• Don’t worry about trying to be everywhere in the social media universe at once. Pick one or two networks and spend your time on those.
• However, do register your name (or your hustle’s name, if appropriate) on the most popular networks—even if you don’t intend to use them—to make sure no one else does first.
• It sounds obvious: if you want to make money, you need a way to get paid. Yet I continue to be surprised by how many retail websites have a checkout button that is difficult or impossible to find, or how many new consultants don’t have a process in place to file invoices.
• Before you launch your hustle to the world, you need a payment system in place, and the system you need will vary depending on what kind of hustle you’re starting.
• With a product hustle, where you sell either a physical item or a digital one, your price should reflect the cost of expenses, plus the minimum acceptable profit per item or per sale.
• With a service hustle, where you’re essentially selling your time or expertise, you want to set your initial price according to your minimum acceptable hourly income, or charge a flat rate based on what your time is worth.
• If you’re selling a product, a simple payment system will likely meet your needs; for a service hustle, you’ll also need an easy method for invoicing customers.
• You can add a button or link to your website to accept funds through PayPal, or you can bill customers directly through the system.
• Payment schedules can vary, but since we’re keeping it simple, you probably want to choose one of these three: Payment in full prior to beginning work Partial payment prior to beginning work, the rest at completion Payment in full when the work is completed Which of these you choose depends largely on what kind of service you’re providing.
• Keep it simple and do whatever is common in your industry (though when you have a choice, getting payment in advance is almost always best).
• There’s no need to invent an all new system of invoicing. Just make sure it’s convenient for you, and seamless for your customers.
• The goal of a contract is to cover your bases, while striking the right balance between your protection and good-faith efforts.
• A very basic contract should specify what you’ll do, how much you’ll be paid, and when you’ll get paid. That’s it.
• A basic contract should also specify any protections you require.
• Setting up a way to get paid is pretty simple, but it’s also critical. Money has to find its way to your bank account! Decide on at least one method of payment, and make sure it’s ready to go (and working properly) before you launch.
• A workflow is simply a series of activities or processes that must occur to complete a project. In the case of hustles, it’s everything that needs to happen for customers to make a purchase and receive whatever they’ve paid for.
• One of the best things about making a customer workflow is that it can help you pinpoint a few places where something could go wrong.
• One way to troubleshoot any workflow is to test out the customer experience yourself,
• do more of what’s important, and less of what’s not.
• But the best hack of all is to do something that makes a difference in people’s lives, or at least the life of the ideal customer that you identified on Day 8.
• No matter what your hustle is, you should always focus on improving the experience for your customer.
• Underpromise, overdeliver. Manage expectations but go above and beyond whenever possible.
• Respond to unspoken needs.
• Highlight positive results. If you report back to customers in some way, show them how your service has benefited them.
• Hustlers tend to fall in the trap of trying to do too much.
• You need to work smart, not just hard.
• When you focus on what’s important, you make a lot more progress. Don’t let yourself get distracted from the two things that matter the most for your side hustle: the benefit for customers, and the income for you. Spend at least 10 percent more time on each of these areas, and spend less time on everything else.
• Ideas must turn into offers so that people can pay you for them. An offer includes a promise, a pitch, and a price.
• Use the cost-plus model to set your price. You want it to be low enough that you don’t turn away or lose customers, but high enough that you can still earn enough money to make the hustle worth your time.
• Once your idea is more fully formed, create workflows and list every action your customer will need to go from discovery to purchase (then consider a few common scenarios to find solutions where something might go wrong).
• Make it as easy as possible for customers to pay you. Always start with simple technology. You can upgrade later if the hustle takes off.
• When you’re not sure how to spend your hustle time, focus at least 10 percent more of your time on two things: change people’s lives, and make more money.
• Even when you feel confident, you never know for sure if your idea is going to work until it comes to life.
• The second reason to launch before you’re ready is that perfectionists do not make for good hustlers. If you wait for perfection, your twenty-seven-day plan could morph into twenty-seven years.
• “Done is better than perfect.
• In short: when in doubt…start!
• What if you aren’t ready to launch? Well, you’re hardly ever fully ready…so here’s a trick. Go ahead and publish your offer, but add the label “beta” to it.
• The people who need your hustle want to be marketed to! They are waiting to hear about it.
• Benefits should help people feel better. You don’t always want to mention these emotional needs explicitly, but you should keep them in mind as you craft your language.
• Here’s a good rule of thumb: benefits are the ways in which a product will improve someone’s life; features are the details that demonstrate how.
• Always think about what people really want and why they want it. With that information in hand, it’s much easier to figure out how to offer them the tools that will help them get it.
• As you begin hustling, don’t hesitate to ask everyone you know to join the cause and get the word out.
• SUPPORTERS: general cheerleaders who can provide support and pitch in in various ways
• MENTORS: guides or experts who give you specific feedback and advice
• INFLUENCERS: trusted authority figures who have the ability to connect you with potential customers and help you get the word out
• IDEAL CUSTOMERS: people who represent your avatar and can offer detailed, honest opinions on the many “Should I do this or that?” questions you’ll have
• The golden rule of relationship building is: do not be “that guy.”
• Remember, it’s a small world. People talk, and if you do cringeworthy things like the ones on this list of true stories, the word will get around. Be the person everyone wants to help, not “that guy” they try desperately to avoid.
• Remember, no man is an island. As you build your hustle, don’t hesitate to ask for a little help from your friends.
• Choose mentors carefully, and don’t buy into the common belief that everyone needs one.
• When you’re beginning a new hustle, you don’t usually know which approach will be the most effective. To find out, try different things and keep a record of results.
• find out if you’re right about something, you have to test it.
• One of the simplest experiments you can do is called an A/B test.
• To A/B test your hustle, you might present customers with two versions of your product or offer and see which one people tend to select. Or, to do A/B testing on your website, you might create two versions of a page and direct half your traffic to one and half to another. Over time, you can easily see which version performs better—then you switch to that version and test something else.
• You don’t need to test everything. You just need to test the things that matter most. Start with the big stuff! Here are the big three: Your product or service (what you offer) Your offer (how you present it) Your price (how much it costs)
• You should avoid running more than one A/B test at a time, because then you can’t know which factor influenced the different results. However, you should continue running different A/B tests, one after another.
• Deals, discounts, and special offers are your not-so-secret weapon to encourage customers to purchase.
• Human beings are conditioned to respond to deals. Everyone loves getting something for less.
• Two key psychological variables are at work: scarcity and urgency. The first relates to the perception of limited resources or opportunities, and the second relates to the perception that those resources or opportunities won’t be around forever.
• SCARCITY: “There are only a limited number of items! I’ll miss out if I don’t buy one.”
• URGENCY: “The deal is going to go away soon. I’ll miss out if I don’t buy it now.”
• Generally speaking, the more you can introduce these factors in your marketing—without being dishonest—the more successful you’ll be.
• ANNOUNCE THE SALE IN ADVANCE.
• YOUR CUSTOMERS SHOULDN’T HAVE TO JUMP THROUGH A BUNCH OF HOOPS TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE DEAL.
• THE SALE MUST PROVIDE SUBSTANTIAL PERCEIVED SAVINGS FOR CUSTOMERS.
• MAKE SURE YOU PROVIDE AN OFFER THAT CUSTOMERS CAN GET EXCITED ABOUT.
• The key here is to appeal to emotion and show them why they simply must have something they may not even have realized they wanted.
• TEST YOUR SYSTEMS (ORDER FORM, SHOPPING CART, ETC.) TO MAKE SURE EVERYTHING REFLECTS THE RIGHT INFO.
• There’s nothing worse than when customers think they’re getting a great deal, only to find out the discount or offer doesn’t automatically get applied at checkout like the ad promised.
• WHEN THE SALE ENDS, IT REALLY ENDS.
• People will often ask you to extend the sale for them. Most of the time, the best policy is to say no.
• Remember this: to make more money, offer a limited time discount or a sale.
• Always celebrate your early achievements. There’s more work to be done, but small victories can be disproportionately satisfying.
• Making money for yourself, outside of your day job, is a transformative experience.
• When you’re first hustling, it’s good to be frugal and conservative. You want to keep expenses low and focus on growing income. But don’t take this too far. Your hustle exists to pay you, not the other way around. Don’t just invest back in “the business.” Invest in yourself.
• Even small celebrations can be meaningful.
• Start before you’re ready and look for “proof of concept.”
• “Sell like a Girl Scout”—if you’ve correctly identified your ideal customer, remember that they’re looking for you, not just the other way around. Don’t be afraid to get creative in reaching them with your message.
• Testing is boring in the way that making a lot of money is boring. Set up at least one A/B test to see how you can improve your offer.
• Use deals and promotions to encourage action. Show up with a tank!
• As you learn more about how customers respond to your hustle, take note of the most crucial metrics—then take action on what you learn.
• keep up with your metrics in three key areas: Profit (income minus expenses) Growth (number of new prospects, customers, or clients) Time (how many hours per week you spend starting and operating the project)*1
• IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED, KEEP TRYING
• Expect your hustle to give you the results you want, or choose a different hustle.
• Don’t get distracted—identify what’s working and do more of that.
• Average is boring. Find the winners and focus your efforts on them.
• Consider this quote from Bill Gates: “Headlines are misleading. Bad news is a headline, and gradual improvement is not.”
• As you continue to develop and improve your hustle, follow these two basic rules of iteration: If it works, do more of it. If it doesn’t work, abandon it and move on.
• Gradual improvement may not make for a great headline, but it looks great when you deposit it in your bank account.
• Set a goal to do one thing that will increase income in the existing hustle. Similarly, don’t be afraid to let go of at least one thing that isn’t working well, and then put that energy toward improving the things that are.
• One of the easiest ways to grow a hustle is by horizontal expansion. If everything’s going well, consider adding another version of it to better serve your customers.
• You aren’t trying to build a Silicon Valley startup and make money for a million investors; you’re doing this to make money for yourself.
• For a lot of businesses, it’s generally much easier to sell more to existing customers than it is to acquire new ones.
• The easiest way to turn over a rock and sell more to your current customers is to “remix” your offer. To remix, you typically add an additional version of what you’re already doing. Maybe it’s a premium version, a “next-level” version, a Volume II—or something else entirely.
• Too much choice and the customer feels confused and overwhelmed. Some choice, however, is usually smart.
• The reality is that people want at least some choice. Give the people what they want!
• Every business has key systems. As a side hustler, yours are probably stored in your head—and that’s not always wise. To make significant improvements (and save more time) as you expand your hustle, systemize wherever you can.
• When it comes to hustling, “systems” doesn’t mean fancy IT software or expensive network servers; it simply refers to all the procedures that allow you to serve customers or otherwise make money.
• At some point in their journey, longtime hustlers learn an important lesson: you can do something repeatedly, or you can do something just once. They also usually find out that documenting your work does not come naturally. Frankly, most people don’t want to do it—it’s a future pain point, so they wait until they have to. But if you ever want to grow your hustle, or if you just want to save time, consider doing it on the front end instead.
• Documenting your processes gets you out of the mundane details of the day to day.
• The two most important workflows for most hustles are sales and service. Basically, you want to document how you sell to people and how they receive what they purchase.
• Taking the time to document your systems and improve your workflows will almost always be less tedious than the damage control you’ll have to do if things go awry.
• Another important workflow is focused entirely on welcoming and orienting new customers. This is called onboarding, and it’s all about helping your buyers become familiar with whatever they’ve just paid for.
• Here’s the thing about a good side hustle. It can help support your life, but it doesn’t have to be your whole life.
• Always remember that a hustle is different from other startup ventures or businesses. You don’t have to listen to the advice of experts or follow conventional wisdom.
• There is no single “right way.” There’s only the right way for you.
• Continue to learn, experiment, and improve.
• Don’t worry about tracking everything, but do choose two or three metrics to keep an eye on.
• Iteration is the real way to win. If at first you succeed, try something else.
• Audit your hustle to see where you can make more money, save time, or both.
• If you have a big idea and want to get some real-world feedback (not just from your friends) before going further, you can simply set up an advertisement and see how people respond.
• If 10 percent or more of the people who landed on your blog post clicked on the link to your landing page, that’s widely considered to be a pretty good sign that people are interested in the product or service that you’re thinking of offering.
• Common sense is not always common.

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.

A MIND FOR NUMBERS by Barbara Oakley

• Surprisingly, your brain can also work on a problem even while you are sleeping and are not aware of anything. But it does this only if you concentrate on trying to solve the problem before falling asleep.
• What’s surprising is that a lot of learners use ineffective and inefficient strategies.
• When we read material over and over, the material becomes familiar and fluent, meaning it is easy for our minds to process. We then think that this easy processing is a sign that we have learned something well, even though we have not.
• You’ll be surprised at how spending a minute or two glancing ahead before you read in depth will help you organize your thoughts.
• Focused-mode thinking is essential for studying math and science. It involves a direct approach to solving problems using rational, sequential, analytical approaches. The focused mode is associated with the concentrating abilities of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, located right behind your forehead.4 Turn your attention to something and bam—the focused mode is on, like the tight, penetrating beam of a flashlight.
• Diffuse-mode thinking is what happens when you relax your attention and just let your mind wander. This relaxation can allow different areas of the brain to hook up and return valuable insights. Unlike the focused mode, the diffuse mode seems less affiliated with any one area of the brain—you can think of it as being “diffused” throughout the brain.
• (Metaphors are powerful tools for learning in math and science.)
• If you are trying to understand or figure out something new, your best bet is to turn off your precision-focused thinking and turn on your “big picture” diffuse mode,
• As long as we are consciously focusing on a problem, we are blocking the diffuse mode.
• “Befuddlement is a healthy part of the learning process.
• The learning process is all about working your way out of confusion.
• Articulating your question is 80 percent of the battle.
• Don’t worry about finishing the task—just worry about working on it.
• Our brain uses two very different processes for thinking—the focused and diffuse modes. It seems you toggle back and forth between these modes, using one or the other.
• It is typical to be stumped by new concepts and problems when we first focus on them.
• To figure out new ideas and solve problems, it’s important not only to focus initially, but also to subsequently turn our focus away from what we want to learn.
• The Einstellung effect refers to getting stuck in solving a problem or understanding a concept as a result of becoming fixated on a flawed approach. Switching modes from focused to diffuse can help free you from this effect. Keep in mind, then, that sometimes you will need to be flexible in your thinking. You may need to switch modes to solve a problem or understand a concept. Your initial ideas about problem solving can sometimes be very misleading.
• For most people, shifting from focused to diffuse mode happens naturally if you distract yourself and then allow a little time to pass.
• The key is to do something else until your brain is consciously free of any thought of the problem.
• Once you are distracted from the problem at hand, the diffuse mode has access and can begin pinging about in its big-picture way to settle on a solution.
• Enlisting the diffuse mode helps you learn at a deep and creative level.
• Understanding how your mind works helps you better understand the creative nature of some of your thoughts.
• We learn a great deal from our failures in math and science.
• Know that you are making progress with each mistake you catch when trying to solve a problem—finding errors should give you a sense of satisfaction.
• Mistakes are inevitable.
• Keep your working sessions short.
• Remember, when you take breaks, your diffuse mode is still working away in the background.
• Sleep is probably the most effective and important factor in allowing your diffuse mode to tackle a difficult problem.
• According to recent research, blinking is a vital activity that provides another means of reevaluating a situation. Closing our eyes seems to provide a micropause that momentarily deactivates our attention and allows us, for the briefest of moments, to refresh and renew our consciousness and perspective.
• The resting times between your focused-mode efforts should be long enough to get your conscious mind completely off the problem you’re working on.
• A good rule of thumb, when you are first learning new concepts, is not to let things go untouched for longer than a day.
• Rising frustration is usually a good time-out signal for you, signaling that you need to shift to diffuse mode.
• Learning often means making sense of what we’ve ingested, and for that, we need to have ingested something.
• Success is important, but critically, so is failure. Persistence is key—but misplaced persistence causes needless frustration.
• Working memory is the part of memory that has to do with what you are immediately and consciously processing in your mind.
• It’s now widely believed that the working memory holds only about four chunks of information.
• We tend to automatically group memory items into chunks, so it seems our working memory is bigger than it actually is.
• Generally, you can hold about four items in your working memory,
• When you master a technique or concept in math or science, it occupies less space in your working memory. This frees your mental thinking space so that it can more easily grapple with other ideas, as shown on the right.
• Research has shown that when your brain first puts an item of information in long-term memory, you need to revisit it a few times to increase the chances you’ll later be able to find it when you need it.
• It takes time to move information from working memory to long-term memory. To help with this process, use a technique called spaced repetition.
• Studies have shown that sleep is a vital part of memory and learning.
• If you go even further and set it in mind that you want to dream about the material, it seems to improve your chances of dreaming about it still further.
• If you’re tired, it’s often best to just go to sleep and get up a little earlier the next day, so your reading is done with a better-rested brain.
• A sleep-deprived brain simply can’t make the usual connections you make during normal thinking processes.
• Use the focused mode to first start grappling with concepts and problems in math and science.
• After you’ve done your first hard focused work, allow the diffuse mode to take over. Relax and do something different!
• When frustration arises, it’s time to switch your attention to allow the diffuse mode to begin working in the background.
• It’s best to work at math and science in small doses—a little every day. This gives both the focused and diffuse modes the time they need to do their thing so you can understand what you are learning. That’s how solid neural structures are built.
• If procrastination is an issue, try setting a timer for twenty-five minutes and focusing intently on your task without allowing yourself to be drawn aside by text messages, web surfing, or other attractive distractions.
• There are two major memory systems: Working memory—like a juggler who can keep only four items in the air. Long-term memory—like a storage warehouse that can hold large amounts of material, but needs to be revisited occasionally to keep the memories accessible.
• Spaced repetition helps move items from working memory to long-term memory.
• Sleep is a critical part of the learning process. It helps you: Make the neural connections needed for normal thinking processes—which is why sleep the night before a test is so important. Figure out tough problems and find meaning in what you are learning. Strengthen and rehearse the important parts of what you are learning and prune away trivialities.
• Creativity is a numbers game: The best predictor of how many creative works we produce in our lifetime is . . . the number of works we produce.
• Criticism makes us better.
• Focusing your attention to connect parts of the brain is an important part of the focused mode of learning.
• Chunks are pieces of information that are bound together through meaning.
• One of the first steps toward gaining expertise in math and science is to create conceptual chunks—mental leaps that unite separate bits of information through meaning.
• Chunking the information you deal with helps your brain run more efficiently.
• Chunking is the mental leap that helps you unite bits of information together through meaning.
• The first step in chunking, then, is to simply focus your attention on the information you want to chunk.
• When you first begin to learn something, you are making new neural patterns and connecting them with preexisting patterns that are spread through many areas of the brain.
• The second step in chunking is to understand the basic idea you are trying to chunk,
• Do not confuse the “aha!” of a breakthrough in understanding with solid expertise!
• The third step to chunking is gaining context so you see not just how, but also when to use this chunk.
• Learn the major concepts or points first.
• Attempting to recall the material you are trying to learn—retrieval practice—is far more effective than simply rereading the material.
• When you have the book (or Google!) open right in front of you, it provides the illusion that the material is also in your brain. But it’s not.
• When marking up the text, train yourself to look for main ideas before making any marks, and keep your text markings to a minimum—one sentence or less per paragraph.
• Using recall—mental retrieval of the key ideas—rather than passive rereading will make your study time more focused and effective.
• Try to touch again on something you’re learning within a day, especially if it’s new and rather challenging.
• It’s worth knowing that well-designed electronic flash card systems, such as Anki, have built into them the appropriate spaced repetition time to optimize the rate of learning new material.
• Merely glancing at the solution to a problem and thinking you truly know it yourself is one of the most common illusions of competence in learning.
• The ability to combine chunks in novel ways underlies much of historical innovation.
• Lady Luck favors the one who tries.
• Most difficult problems are solved through intuition, because they make a leap away from what you are familiar with.
• If you don’t understand a method presented in a course you are taking, stop and work backward.
• Strengthening an initial learning pattern within a day after you first begin forming it is important.
• But you can’t learn mathematics or science without also including a healthy dose of practice and repetition to help you build the chunks that will underpin your expertise.
• In the same amount of time, by simply practicing and recalling the material, students learned far more and at a much deeper level than they did using any other approach, including simply rereading the text a number of times or drawing concept maps that supposedly enriched the relationships in the materials under study.
• The retrieval process itself enhances deep learning and helps us begin forming chunks.
• If you try to build connections between chunks before the basic chunks are embedded in the brain, it doesn’t work as well.
• The fact is, when learning any new skill or discipline, you need plenty of varied practice with different contexts.
• Recalling material when you are outside your usual place of study helps you strengthen your grasp of the material by viewing it from a different perspective.
• Interleaving means practice by doing a mixture of different kinds of problems requiring different strategies.
• Continuing the study or practice after it is well understood is called overlearning.
• But be wary of repetitive overlearning during a single session in math and science learning—research has shown it can be a waste of valuable learning time.
• Once you have the basic idea of a technique down during your study session (sort of like learning to ride a bike with training wheels), start interleaving your practice with problems of different types.
• Just knowing how to use a particular problem-solving technique isn’t enough—you also need to know when to use it.
• EMPHASIZE INTERLEAVING INSTEAD OF OVERLEARNING
• Doing too many problems of the same kind in immediate succession provides diminishing returns.
• There’s evidence that writing by hand helps get the ideas into mind more easily than if you type the answer.
• Beware—a common illusion of competence is to continue practicing a technique you know, simply because it’s easy and it feels good to successfully solve problems.
• Practice helps build strong neural patterns—that is, conceptual chunks of understanding.
• Practice gives you the mental fluidity and agility you need for tests.
• Chunks are best built with: Focused attention. Understanding of the basic idea. Practice to help you gain big-picture context.
• Simple recall—trying to remember the key points without looking at the page—is one of the best ways to help the chunking process along.
• To remember the key points without looking at the page—is one of the best ways to help the chunking process along.
• Unlike procrastination, which is easy to fall into, willpower is hard to come by because it uses a lot of neural resources.
• You shouldn’t waste willpower on procrastination except when absolutely necessary!
• For most people, learning math and science depends on two things: brief study sessions where the neural “bricks” are laid, and time in between for the mental mortar to dry.
• We procrastinate about things that make us feel uncomfortable.
• The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing the task itself.
• Procrastination is a single, monumentally important “keystone” bad habit.
• It’s easy to feel distaste for something you’re not good at. But the better you get at something, the more you’ll find you enjoy it.
• We procrastinate about things that make us feel uncomfortable. But what makes us feel good temporarily isn’t necessarily good for us in the long run.
• Procrastination can be like taking tiny amounts of poison. It may not seem harmful at the time. But the long-term effects can be very damaging.
• Habit is an energy saver for us. It allows us to free our mind for other types of activities.
• Habits have four parts:
• The Cue: This is the trigger that launches you into “zombie mode.”
• The Routine: This is your zombie mode—the routine, habitual response your brain is used to falling into when it receives the cue.
• The Reward: Habits develop and continue because they reward us—give us a dollop of pleasure.
• The Belief: Habits have power because of your belief in them.
• To change a habit, you’ll need to change your underlying belief.
• The trick to overwriting a habit is to look for the pressure point—your reaction to a cue. The only place you need to apply willpower is to change your reaction to the cue.
• If you protect your routine, eventually it will protect you.
• Don’t try to change everything at once.
• The Pomodoro technique—the twenty-five-minute timer—can be especially helpful in shifting your reaction to cues.
• Remember, habits are powerful because they create neurological cravings. It helps to add a new reward if you want to overcome your previous cravings. Only once your brain starts expecting the reward will the important rewiring take place that will allow you to create new habits.
• The most important part of changing your procrastination habit is the belief that you can do it.
• Learn to focus on process, not product.
• To prevent procrastination, you want to avoid concentrating on product. Instead, your attention should be on building processes—habits—that coincidentally allow you to do the unpleasant tasks that need to be done.
• The essential idea here is that the zombie, habitual part of your brain likes processes, because it can march mindlessly along.
• If you learn under mild stress, you can handle greater stress much more easily.
• Focusing on process, not product, is important in avoiding procrastination.
• It is the consistent, daily time you spend getting into the flow of your studies that matters most.
• Focus on doing a Pomodoro—a twenty-five-minute timed work session—not on completing a task.
• One helpful tip is to just get started.
• One of the single most important pieces of advice I can give you on dealing with procrastination is to ignore distractions!
• Each tiny shift back and forth of attention siphons off energy.
• Practice ignoring distractions.
• A little bit of work on something that feels painful can ultimately be very beneficial.
• Habits such as procrastination have four parts: The cue The routine The reward The belief
• Change a habit by responding differently to a cue, or even avoiding that cue altogether. Reward and belief make the change long-lasting.
• A habit by responding differently to a cue, or even avoiding that cue altogether.
• Focus on the process (the way you spend your time) instead of the product (what you want to accomplish).
• Use the twenty-five-minute Pomodoro to stay productive for brief periods. Then reward yourself after each successful period of focused attention.
• Be sure to schedule free time to nurture your diffuse mode.
• Mental contrasting is a powerful motivating technique—think about the worst aspects of your present or past experiences and contrast these with the upbeat vision of your future.
• Multitasking means that you are not able to make full, rich connections in your thinking, because the part of your brain that helps make connections is constantly being pulled away before neural connections can be firmed up.
• A little physical exertion can have a surprisingly positive effect on your ability to understand and recall.
• Procrastination is the death of success.
• Preparation is key to success.
• Practice is where you are supposed to fail.
• Learning fundamental concepts of math and science can be a lot easier than learning subjects that require a lot of rote memorization.
• STEPS TO BUILDING A POWERFUL CHUNK
• 1. Work a key problem all the way through on paper.
• 2. Do another repetition of the problem, paying attention to the key processes.
• 3. Take a break.
• 4. Sleep.
• 5. Do another repetition.
• 6. Add a new problem.
• 7. Do “active” repetitions.
• Keep your focus on the parts of the problem that are the most difficult for you. This continued focus on the hard stuff is called “deliberate practice.”
• Generating (that is, recalling) the material helps you learn it much more effectively than simply rereading it.
• Research has shown that the more effort you put into recalling material, the deeper it embeds itself into your memory.
• Recall, not simple rereading, is the best form of deliberate practice in study.
• Remember, retrieval practice is one of the most powerful forms of learning. It is far more productive than simply rereading material.
• Chunking compresses your knowledge and makes room in your working memory for those pieces so you don’t go into mental overload so easily.
• Testing in itself is a powerful learning experience.
• A key to building mental flexibility and expertise is to build your library of chunked solution patterns.
• Chunking means integrating a concept into one smoothly connected neural thought pattern.
• Chunking helps increase the amount of working memory you have available.
• Building a chunked library of concepts and solutions helps build intuition in problem solving.
• When you are building a chunked library, it’s important to keep deliberate focus on some of the toughest concepts and aspects of problem solving.
• Occasionally you can study hard and fate deals a bad hand. But remember the Law of Serendipity: If you prepare well by practicing and building a good mental library, you will find that luck will be increasingly on your side. In other words, you guarantee failure if you don’t try, but those who consistently give it a good effort will experience many more successes.
• Research has confirmed that a special place devoted just to working is particularly helpful.
• Another trick involves using meditation to help you learn to ignore distracting thoughts.
• Self-experimentation can be used by non-experts to (a) see if the experts are right and (b) learn something they don’t know.
• The best way for you to gain control of your habits is simple: Once a week, write a brief weekly list of key tasks. Then, each day, write a list of the tasks that you can reasonably work on or accomplish. Try to write this daily task list the evening before.
• Do the most important and most disliked jobs first, as soon as you wake up. This is incredibly effective.
• Planning your quitting time is as important as planning your working time.
• It’s important to transform distant deadlines into daily ones.
• Big tasks need to be translated into smaller ones that show up on your daily task list.
• Chronic procrastinators, as it turns out, tend to see each act of procrastination as a unique, unusual act, a “just this one time” phenomenon that won’t be repeated again.
• A little procrastination here and there is unavoidable. But to be effective in learning math and science, you must master your habits.
• But remember the Law of Serendipity: Lady Luck favors the one who tries. Planning well is part of trying. Keep your eye on the goal, and try not to get too unsettled by occasional roadblocks.
• A simple timer plus pen and paper are often the most straightforward tools to avoid procrastination, but you can also make use of technology.
• Mental tricks can be powerful tools.
• Put yourself in a place with few interruptions, such as a library, to help with procrastination.
• Practice ignoring distracting thoughts by simply letting them drift past.
• If your attitude is troubled, reframe your focus to shift attention from the negative to the positive.
• Realize it’s perfectly normal to sit down with a few negative feelings about beginning your work.
• Planning your life for “playtime” is one of the most important things you can do to prevent procrastination, and one of the most important reasons to avoid procrastination.
• At the heart of procrastination prevention is a reasonable daily to-do list, with a weekly once-over to ensure you’re on track from a big-picture perspective.
• Write your daily task list the evening before.
• Eat your frogs first.
• People who make a habit of getting their work done in binges are much less productive overall than those who generally do their work in reasonable, limited stints.
• Staying in the zone too long will send you toward burnout.
• A healthy form of procrastination entails learning to pause and reflect before jumping in and accomplishing something. You are learning to wait wisely. There is always something to be done. Prioritizing allows you to gain big-picture context for your decision making. Sometimes waiting allows a situation to resolve itself.
• We develop a passion for what we are good at. The mistake is thinking that if we aren’t good at something, we do not have and can never develop a passion for it.
• Willpower is a lot like muscle. You have to use your muscles to strengthen and develop them over time. But at any given time, your muscles have only so much energy available. Developing and using willpower is a bit of a balancing act.
• All you need to do is keep working to improve your process.
• Keep a planner-journal so you can easily track when you reach your goals and observe what does and doesn’t work.
• Commit yourself to certain routines and tasks each day.
• Write your planned tasks out the night before, so your brain has time to dwell on your goals to help ensure success.
• Arrange your work into a series of small challenges. Always make sure you (and your zombies!) get lots of rewards. Take a few minutes to savor the feelings of happiness and triumph.
• Deliberately delay rewards until you have finished a task.
• Watch for procrastination cues.
• Put yourself in new surroundings with few procrastination cues, such as the quiet section of a library.
• Obstacles arise, but don’t make a practice of blaming all your problems on external factors. If everything is always somebody else’s fault, it’s time to start looking in the mirror.
• Gain trust in your new system. You want to work hard during times of focused concentration—and also trust your system enough that when it comes time to relax, you actually relax without feelings of guilt.
• Have backup plans for when you still procrastinate. No one is perfect, after all.
• Eat your frogs first.
• This is a firm reminder that it’s best to focus without distraction if you really want to put something into memory.
• To begin tapping into your visual memory system, try making a very memorable visual image representing one key item you want to remember.
• The more neural hooks you can build by evoking the senses, the easier it will be for you to recall the concept and what it means.
• The memory palace technique involves calling to mind a familiar place—like the layout of your house—and using it as a sort of visual notepad where you can deposit concept-images that you want to remember.
• Songs that help cement ideas in your mind are related to the memory palace technique in that they also make preferential use of the brain’s right hemisphere.
• The memory palace technique—placing memorable nudges in a scene that is familiar to you—allows you to dip into the strength of your visual memory system.
• Learning to use your memory in a more disciplined, yet creative manner helps you learn to focus your attention, even as you create wild, diffuse connections that build stronger memories.
• By memorizing material you understand, you can internalize the material in a profound way. And you are reinforcing the mental library you need to become a genuine master of the material.
• One of the best things you can do to not only remember but understand concepts in math and science is to create a metaphor or analogy for it—often, the more visual, the better. A metaphor is just a way of realizing that one thing is somehow similar to another.
• The little book Calculus Made Easy, by Silvanus Thompson, has helped generations of students master the subject.
• Sometimes textbooks can get so focused on all the details that you lose sight of the most important, big-picture concepts.
• Metaphors are never perfect. But then, all scientific models are just metaphors, which means they also break down at some point. But never mind that—metaphors (and models!) are vitally important in giving a physical understanding of the central idea behind the mathematical or scientific process or concept that you are trying to understand.
• Metaphors and visualization—being able to see something in your mind’s eye—have been uniquely powerful in helping the scientific and engineering world move forward.
• Focusing your attention brings something into your temporary working memory. But for that “something” to move from working memory to long-term memory, two things should happen: the idea should be memorable (there’s a gigantic flying mule braying f = ma on my couch!), and it must be repeated.
• Much of what goes on around you is basically trivial.
• Repetition is important; even when you make something memorable, repetition helps get that memorable item firmly lodged in long-term memory.
• Writing appears to help you to more deeply encode (that is, convert into neural memory structures) what you are trying to learn.
• Remember that sleep is when your mind repeats patterns and pieces together solutions.
• Interestingly, one of the best ways to remember people’s names is to simply try to retrieve the people’s names from memory at increasing time intervals after first learning the name.
• Another key to memorization is to create meaningful groups that simplify the material.
• It’s much easier to remember numbers by associating them with memorable events.
• If you’re memorizing something commonly used, see whether someone’s come up with a particularly memorable memory trick by searching it out online.
• Although there is little research in this area,11 many educators have observed that there seems to be a muscle memory related to writing by hand.
• If you really want to boost your memory as well as your general ability to learn, it seems one of the best ways to do it is to exercise.
• By using mental pictures instead of words to remember things, you can leap more easily into expert status.
• Learning to process ideas visually in math and science is a powerful way to become a master of the material.
• Memory tricks allow people to expand their working memory with easy access to long term memory.
• Understanding also helps a lot with the memorization process.
• Your childlike creativity is still there—you just need to reach out to it.
• Metaphors can help you learn difficult ideas more quickly.
• Repetition is critical in allowing you to firm up what you want to remember before the ideas fade away.
• Meaningful groups and abbreviations can allow you to simplify and chunk what you are trying to learn so you can store it more easily in memory.
• Stories—even if they are just used as silly memory tricks—can allow you to more easily retain what you are trying to learn.
• Writing and saying what you are trying to learn seems to enhance retention.
• Exercise is powerfully important in helping your neurons to grow and make new connections.
• Remember—people learn by trying to make sense out of information they perceive. They rarely learn anything complex simply by having someone else tell it to them.
• people learn by trying to make sense out of information they perceive. They rarely learn anything complex simply by having someone else tell it to them.
• At some point, self-consciously “understanding” why you do what you do just slows you down and interrupts flow, resulting in worse decisions.
• Teachers and professors can inadvertently get too caught up in following rules.
• Once you understand why you do something in math and science, you shouldn’t keep reexplaining the how.
• Being smarter often equates to having a larger working memory.
• Your ability to solve complex problems may make you overthink simple problems, going for the convoluted answer and overlooking the simple, more obvious solution.
• Research has shown that smart people can have more of a tendency to lose themselves in the weeds of complexity.
• It is the practice—particularly deliberate practice on the toughest aspects of the material—that can help lift average brains into the realm of those with more “natural” gifts.
• Smarter people also sometimes struggle because they can so easily imagine every complexity, good and bad.
• Extremely smart people are more likely than people of normal intelligence to procrastinate because it always worked when they were growing up, which means they are less likely to learn certain critical life skills early on.
• At some point, after you’ve got chunked material well in hand (and in brain), you start to let go of conscious awareness of every little detail and do things automatically.
• It may seem intimidating to work alongside other students who grasp material more quickly than you do. But “average” students can sometimes have advantages when it comes to initiative, ability to get things done, and creativity.
• Part of the key to creativity is to be able to switch from full focused concentration to the relaxed, daydreamy diffuse mode.
• Focusing too intently can inhibit the solution you are seeking—like trying to hammer a screw because you think it’s a nail. When you are stuck, sometimes it’s best to get away from a problem for a while and move on to something else, or to simply sleep on it.
• It seems people can enhance the development of their neuronal circuits by practicing thoughts that use those neurons.
• We can make significant changes in our brain by changing how we think.
• Metaphors and physical analogies also form chunks that can allow ideas even from very different areas to influence one another.
• One important key to learning swiftly in math and science is to realize that virtually every concept you learn has an analogy—a comparison—with something you already know.
• Brains mature at different speeds. Many people do not develop maturity until their midtwenties.
• Some of the most formidable heavyweights in science started out as apparently hopeless juvenile delinquents.
• One trait that successful professionals in science, math, and technology gradually learn is how to chunk—to abstract key ideas.
• Metaphors and physical analogies form chunks that can allow ideas from very different areas to influence one another.
• Regardless of your current or intended career path, keep your mind open and ensure that math and science are in your learning repertoire. This gives you a rich reserve of chunks to help you be smarter about your approach to all sorts of life and career challenges.
• Simplify and Personalize Whatever You Are Studying
• One of the most important things we can do when we are trying to learn math and science is to bring the abstract ideas to life in our minds.
• Simplifying is also important.
• Surprisingly, simple explanations are possible for almost any concept, no matter how complex. When you cultivate simple explanations by breaking down complicated material to its key elements, the result is that you have a deeper understanding of the material.
• Learning expert Scott Young has developed this idea in what he calls the Feynman technique, which asks people to find a simple metaphor or analogy to help them grasp the essence of an idea.11
• You’ll be surprised to see how often understanding arises as a consequence of attempts to explain to others and yourself, rather than the explanation arising out of your previous understanding.
• Transfer is the ability to take what you learn in one context and apply it to something else.
• Equations are just ways of abstracting and simplifying concepts. This means that equations contain deeper meaning, similar to the depth of meaning found in poetry.
• Equations are just ways of abstracting and simplifying concepts.
• Your “mind’s eye” is important because it can help you stage plays and personalize what you are learning about.
• It’s important to grasp the chunked essence of a mathematical concept, because then it’s easier to transfer and apply that idea in new and different ways.
• Multitasking during the learning process means you don’t learn as deeply—this can inhibit your ability to transfer what you are learning.
• Persistence is often more important than intelligence.
• Approaching material with a goal of learning it on your own gives you a unique path to mastery.
• Research has shown that students learn best when they themselves are actively engaged in the subject instead of simply listening to someone else speak.
• College isn’t the only way to learn.
• Taking responsibility for your own learning is one of the most important things you can do.
• Truly great teachers make the material seem both simple and profound, set up mechanisms for students to learn from each other, and inspire students to learn on their own.
• There will always be those who criticize or attempt to undermine any effort or achievement you make.
• The greater your achievement, the more other people will sometimes attack and demean your efforts.
• Failure is not so terrible. Analyze what you did wrong and use it to correct yourself to do better in the future. Failures are better teachers than successes because they cause you to rethink your approach.
• Many individuals are far more interested in affirming their own ideas and making themselves look good than they are in helping you.
• Use your natural contrariness to defy the always-present prejudices from others about what you can do.
• Learning on your own is one of the deepest, most effective ways to approach learning: It improves your ability to think independently. It can help you answer the strange questions that teachers sometimes throw at you on tests.
• In learning, persistence is often far more important than intelligence.
• Train yourself to occasionally reach out to people you admire. You can gain wise new mentors who, with a simple sentence, can change the course of your future. But use your teachers’ and mentors’ time sparingly.
• If you aren’t very fast at grasping the essentials of whatever you are studying, don’t despair. Surprisingly often, “slower” students are grappling with fundamentally important issues that quicker students miss. When you finally get what’s going on, you can get it at a deeper level.
• People are competitive as well as cooperative. There will always be those who criticize or attempt to undermine any effort or achievement you make. Learn to deal dispassionately with these issues.
• If you go off track early on, it doesn’t matter if the rest of your work is correct—your answer is still wrong.
• Good learners vet their work to ensure that it makes sense.
• If you or one of your study buddies thinks something is wrong in your understanding, it’s important to be able to plainly say so, and to hash out why it’s wrong without worrying about hurt feelings.
• The focused mode can allow you to make critical errors even though you feel confident you’ve done everything correctly. Rechecking your work can allow you to get a broader perspective on it, using slightly different neural processes that can allow you to catch blunders.
• Working with others who aren’t afraid to disagree can: Help you catch errors in your thinking. Make it easier for you to think on your feet and react well in stressful situations. Improve your learning by ensuring that you really understand what you are explaining to others and reinforcing what you know. Build important career connections and help steer you toward better choices.
• Criticism in your studies, whether you are giving or receiving it, shouldn’t be taken as being about you. It’s about what you are trying to understand.
• It is easiest of all to fool yourself.
• Testing is itself an extraordinarily powerful learning experience.
• If you compare how much you learn by spending one hour studying versus one hour taking a test on that same material, you will retain and learn far more as a result of the hour you spent taking a test.
• Testing, it seems, has a wonderful way of concentrating the mind.
• While taking a test, you should also remember how your mind can trick you into thinking what you’ve done is correct, even if it isn’t.
• There is often more than one way to solve a problem, and checking your answers from a different perspective provides a golden opportunity for verifying what you’ve done.
• Not getting enough sleep the night before a test can negate any other preparation you’ve done.
• Taking a test is serious business. Just as fighter pilots and doctors go through checklists, going through your own test preparation checklist can vastly improve your chances of success.
• Counterintuitive strategies such as the hard-start–jump-to-easy technique can give your brain a chance to reflect on harder challenges even as you’re focusing on other, more straightforward problems.
• The body puts out chemicals when it is under stress. How you interpret your body’s reaction to these chemicals makes all the difference. If you shift your thinking from “This test has made me afraid” to “This test has got me excited to do my best!” it helps improve your performance.
• If you are panicked on a test, momentarily turn your attention to your breathing. Relax your stomach, place your hand on it, and slowly draw a deep breath. Your hand should move outward, and your whole chest should expand like a barrel.
• Your mind can trick you into thinking that what you’ve done is correct, even if it isn’t. This means that, whenever possible, you should blink, shift your attention, and then double-check your answers using a big-picture perspective, asking yourself, “Does this really make sense?”
• Sometimes, as we’ve discovered, your desire to figure things out right now is what prevents you from being able to figure things out.
• Reshaping your brain is under your control. The key is patient persistence—working knowledgeably with your brain’s strengths and weaknesses.
• The Pomodoro—a brief, timed period of focused attention—is a powerful tool in diverting the well-meaning zombies of your habitual responses.
• We now know that deep, practiced internalization of well-understood chunks is essential to mastering math and science.
• Focused attention is indispensable for problem solving—yet it can also block our ability to solve problems. Persistence is key—but it can also leave us unnecessarily pounding our heads. Memorization is a critical aspect of acquiring expertise—but it can also keep us focused on the trees instead of the forest. Metaphor allows us to acquire new concepts—but it can also keep us wedded to faulty conceptions.
• Part of the magic long used by the world’s best thinkers has been to simplify—to put things into terms that even a kid brother or sister can understand.
• Remember—Lady Luck favors the one who tries. A little insight into learning how to learn best doesn’t hurt, either.
• TEN RULES OF GOOD STUDYING
• 1. Use recall. After you read a page, look away and recall the main ideas.
• 2. Test yourself. On everything. All the time. Flash cards are your friend.
• 3. Chunk your problems. Chunking is understanding and practicing with a problem solution so that it can all come to mind in a flash. After you solve a problem, rehearse it. Make sure you can solve it cold—every step.
• 4. Space your repetition. Spread out your learning in any subject a little every day, just like an athlete. Your brain is like a muscle—it can handle only a limited amount of exercise on one subject at a time.
• 5. Alternate different problem-solving techniques during your practice. Never practice too long at any one session using only one problem-solving technique—after a while, you are just mimicking what you did on the previous problem. Mix it up and work on different types of problems. This teaches you both how and when to use a technique.
• 6. Take breaks. It is common to be unable to solve problems or figure out concepts in math or science the first time you encounter them. This is why a little study every day is much better than a lot of studying all at once.
• 7. Use explanatory questioning and simple analogies. Whenever you are struggling with a concept, think to yourself, How can I explain this so that a ten-year-old could understand it?
• 8. Focus. Turn off all interrupting beeps and alarms on your phone and computer, and then turn on a timer for twenty-five minutes. Focus intently for those twenty-five minutes and try to work as diligently as you can. After the timer goes off, give yourself a small, fun reward. A few of these sessions in a day can really move your studies forward.
• 9. Eat your frogs first. Do the hardest thing earliest in the day, when you are fresh.
• 10. Make a mental contrast. Imagine where you’ve come from and contrast that with the dream of where your studies will take you.
• An ability to recall—to generate the ideas from inside yourself—is one of the key indicators of good learning.
• Handwriting builds stronger neural structures in memory than typing.
• Use explanatory questioning and simple analogies. Whenever you are struggling with a concept, think to yourself, How can I explain this so that a ten-year-old could understand it?
• The additional effort of speaking and writing allows you to more deeply encode (that is, convert into neural memory structures) what you are learning.
• Unless you can prove that the material is moving into your brain by recalling the main ideas without looking at the page, rereading is a waste of time.
• Highlighting your text can fool your mind into thinking you are putting something in your brain, when all you’re really doing is moving your hand.
• You need to be able to solve a problem step-by-step, without looking at the solution.
• Your brain is like a muscle—it can handle only a limited amount of exercise on one subject at a time.
• Every tug of interrupted attention pulls out tiny neural roots before they can grow.
• Your brain pieces together problem-solving techniques when you sleep, and it also practices and repeats whatever you put in mind before you go to sleep.
• If you don’t get a good sleep before a test, NOTHING ELSE YOU HAVE DONE WILL MATTER.