Learning, Practice, Mastery
Go and try
Leveling up aptitude
Thinking in situations
Naturally, practice is not preceded but followed by theory.
Such study promotes a more lasting teaching and learning
through experience. Its aim is development of creativeness
realized in discovery and invention – the criteria of creativity,
or flexibility, being imagination and fantasy. Altogether
it promotes “thinking in situations,” a new educational concept
unfortunately little known and less cultivated, so far.Practice before theory
Instead of mechanically applying or merely implying laws and rules
of color harmony, distinct color effects are produced
– through recognition of the interaction of color –
by making, for instance,
2 very different colors look alike, or nearly alike.The aim of such study is to develop – through experience
– by trial and error – an eye for color.
This means, specifically, seeing color action
as well as feeling color relatedness.As a general training it means development of observation and articulation.
This book, therefore, does not follow an academic conception
of “theory and practice.”
It reverses this order and places practice before theory,
which, after all, is the conclusion of practice.Amassing the archive
I once sent a camera to a client, with a request that she keep a visual diary of her newly completed house. For a number of months she duly sent me one photograph a day, of whatever caught her attention, and it was fascinating seeing the spaces from her point of view.
In part it's simply about amassing the archive, but it's also about understanding the implications of every design decision and bringing this knowledge to bear on new projects. You have to keep pushing the learning process.
The basic course
The Basic Course was a general introduction to composition, color, materials, and three-dimensional form that familiarized students with techniques, concepts, and formal relationships considered fundamental to all visual expression, whether it be sculpture, metal work, painting, or lettering. The Basic Course developed an abstract and abstracting visual language that would provide a theoretical and practical basis for any artistic endeavor.
The skill of perception
The newborn baby and the [blind man suddenly gifted with sight] do not have to learn to see. Sight is given to them. But they do have to learn to perceive. Perception is learnt and learnt slowly. Skill is required for perception as for speech. We are largely unaware of the skill we exercise. None of the things we have to learn to perceive are self-evident, or, apparently, instinctively evident. No doubt, however, we have an instinctive aptitude for this learning, and once we have learnt we cannot easily see as though we had not.
As Ruskin says, one has to strive, if one is to see with the 'Innocent Eye'.
The wisdom of the apprentice
Diderot's solution to the limits of language was to become himself a worker.
Become an apprentice and produce bad results so as to be able to teach people how to produce good ones.
Curiosity spurred on
Methodically noting and filing resources is a sign of a mature and deliberate craftsman—it is an investment into future learning and projects. Before long, you will begin to reach the point where this collection generates projects and ideas with minimal effort; previously isolated ideas are consolidated and curiousity spurred on.
Reading
I suppose it’s because I believe you don’t really become a finer person just by reading lots of books.
Nobody was doing anything
"The thing that amazed me is that they had these drawing classes, and I'd be in there drawing like a son of a bitch, and then I'd go around and look at everybody else's drawing boards to see what was going on, and there wouldn't be anything on them! They were all talking and going through these weighty things, and nobody was doing anything."
Learning how to learn
"Once you learn how to make your own assignments instead of relying on someone else, then you have learned the only thing you really need to get out of school, that is, you've learned how to learn. You've become your own teacher."
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn
A Book by Richard HammingThe Art of Doing Science and Engineering is the full expression of what "You and Your Research" outlined. It's a book about thinking; more specifically, a style of thinking by which great ideas are conceived.
The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge
An Essay by Abraham FlexnerInheriting Froebel's Gifts
A Podcast by Kurt KohlstedtFroebel’s Gifts were meant to be given in a particular order, growing more complex over time and teaching different lessons about shape, structure and perception along the way. A soft knitted ball could be given to a child just six weeks old, followed by a wooden ball and then a cube, illustrating similarities and differences in shapes and materials. Then kids would get a cylinder (which combines elements of both the ball and the cube) and it would blow their little minds. Some objects were pierced by strings or rods so kids could spin them and see how one shapes morphs into another when set into motion. Later came cubes made up of smaller cubes and other hybrids, showing children how parts relate to a whole through deconstruction and reassembly.
These perception-oriented “Gifts” would then give way to construction-oriented “Occupations.” Kids would be told to build things out of materials like paper, string, wire, or little sticks and peas that could be connected and stacked into structures.
Things you didn't know you can be bad at
An Article by David R. MacIverI wonder how many things we're all going around doing badly because the idea of not knowing how to do them well seems too ridiculous to admit to.
...You've probably never been taught to have a conversation. I've had exactly one class on it and it was in the last six months. I know damn well that many people have not self-taught this well... In general there's this entire class of implicit skills that we mostly don't think of as skills, that we're entirely self-taught on, and that we practice sufficiently non-demonstratively that we can't easily watch what other people do. The result is a very personal skill idiolect.
Some thoughts on writing
An Essay by Dan LuuBesides being unlikely to work for you even if someone is able to describe what makes their writing tick, most advice is written by people who don't understand how their writing works. This may be difficult to see for writing if you haven't spent a lot of time analyzing writing, but it's easy to see this is true if you've taken a bunch of dance classes or had sports instruction that isn't from a very good coach. If you watch, for example, the median dance instructor and listen to their instructions, you'll see that their instructions are quite different from what they actually do. People who listen and follow instructions instead of attempting to copy what the instructor is doing will end up doing the thing completely wrong. Most writing advice similarly fails to capture what's important.
Menus, Metaphors and Materials: Milestones of User Interface Design
An Article by Boris MüllerStudents traditionally learn art and design by studying the masters, analyzing, sketching and interpreting the grand visions of the past. In doing this, they get to understand the ideas, concepts and motivations behind the visual form.
In user interface design, this practice is curiously absent.
What do I need to read to be great at CSS?
An Article by Baldur BjarnasonA rule of thumb is that the importance of a blog in your feed reader is inversely proportional to their posting cadence. Prioritise the blogs that post only once a month or every couple of weeks over those that post every day or multiple times a day...Building up a large library of sporadically updated blogs is much more useful and much easier to keep up with than trying to keep up with a handful of aggregation sites every day.
What to learn
An Essay by Dan LuuWhile being an extremely broad generalist can work, it's gotten much harder to "know a bit of everything" and be effective because there's more of everything over time (in terms of both breadth and depth).
...If you watch an anime or a TV series "about" fighting, people often improve by increasing the number of techniques they know because that's an easy thing to depict but, in real life, getting better at techniques you already know is often more effective than having a portfolio of hundreds of "moves". I've personally found this to be true in a variety of disciplines.
Eulogy for Steve Jobs
An Article by Jonathan IveHe was without doubt the most inquisitive human I have ever met. His insatiable curiosity was not limited or distracted by his knowledge or expertise, nor was it casual or passive. It was ferocious, energetic and restless. His curiosity was practiced with intention and rigor.
Many of us have an innate predisposition to be curious. I believe that after a traditional education, or working in an environment with many people, curiosity is a decision requiring intent and discipline.
In larger groups our conversations gravitate towards the tangible, the measurable. It is more comfortable, far easier and more socially acceptable talking about what is known. Being curious and exploring tentative ideas were far more important to Steve than being socially acceptable.
Our curiosity begs that we learn. And for Steve, wanting to learn was far more important than wanting to be right.
I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine
An Article by Rach SmithWhat I’ve learnt through experience is that the number of languages I’ve learned or the specific frameworks I’ve gained experience with matters very little. What actually matters is my ability to up-skill quickly and effectively.
If you focus on:
- learning how you best learn, and
- practicing effectively communicating the things you've learned
you can't go wrong.
Against Canvas
An Article by Alan JacobsEven with all the features and plugins, Canvas presumes certain ways of organizing classes that might not be universal, just typical. And if (like me) you’re an atypical user, you have to choose between constantly fighting with the system or gradually doing more and more things the way Canvas wants you to do them. This, by the way, is why it’s never true to say that technologies are neutral and what matters is how you use them: every technology without exception has affordances, certain actions that it makes easy, and other actions that it makes difficult or impossible. A technology whose affordances run contrary to your convictions can rob you of your independence — and any technology deployed on the scale of Canvas will inevitably do that. It will turn every teacher into an obedient Canvas-user. I don’t want to be an obedient Canvas-user.
Apprenticeship: An Internship Replacement
An Essay by Ivana McConnellUniversities are often too large, dulling the student-educator relationship. Internships are often transitory and involve large volumes of work without context or learning: building web pages or presentations from pre-built components to meet a deadline, for example. It’s work that people need to do, but it doesn’t require learning or understanding the client or the project. Thankfully, there is a middle ground that we seem to have forgotten about in tech: the apprenticeship.
Walking lessons
A TweetLecturing Birds on How to Fly, from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile
If children started school at six months old and their teachers gave them walking lessons, within a single generation people would come to believe that humans couldn't learn to walk without going to school.
What 80% Comprehension Feels Like
An ArticleOne of the major principles of extensive reading is that if a learner can comprehend material at 98% comprehension, she will acquire new words in context, in a painless, enjoyable way. But what is 98% comprehension?
Four stages of competence
An IdeaIn psychology, the four stages of competence, or the "conscious competence" learning model, relates to the psychological states involved in the process of progressing from incompetence to competence in a skill.
- Unconscious incompetence
- Conscious incompetence
- Conscious competence
- Unconscious competence
Re-learning to learn
An Article by Erica Heinz- Pause at the end of each chapter and try to recall it (Recall)
- Highlight relevant passages for later comparative reading
- Analyze the book once I’m finished
- Explain it to unfamiliar audiences (The Feynman technique)
- Review topics I care about at regular intervals (Space repetition)
You and Your Research
A Speech by Richard HammingThis talk centered on Hamming's observations and research on the question "Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?"
Evergreen notes
A Definition by Andy MatuschakEvergreen notes are written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects. This is an unusual way to think about writing notes: Most people take only transient notes.
- Evergreen notes should be atomic
- Evergreen notes should be concept-oriented
- Evergreen notes should be densely linked
- Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies
On Love
Not knowing quite what they mean
"Do you understand all the symbolism?"
"Not really, besides its being Venus and Cupid."
"I didn't even know that, so you're one up on me. I wish I'd read more about ancient mythology," she continued. "But actually, I like looking at things and not knowing quite what they mean."
We're not children, you know
We're not children, you know.
And with these words, she placed her lips on mine and we embarked on one of the longer and more beautiful kisses mankind has ever known.
To think
Few things are as antithetical to sex as thought. Sex is instinctive, unreflective, and spontaneous, while thought is careful, uninvolved, and judgmental. To think during sex is to violate a fundamental law of intercourse.
A cruel paradox
When we look at someone (an angel) from a position of unrequited love and imagine the pleasures that being in heaven with them might bring us, we are prone to overlook a significant danger: how soon their attractions might pale if they began to love us back. We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as ideal as we are corrupt. But what if such a being were one day to turn around and love us back? We can only be shocked. How could they be as divine as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us? If in order to love we must believe that the beloved surpasses us in some way, does not a cruel paradox emerge when we witness this love returned? "If s/he really is so wonderful, how could s/he love someone like me?"
Shoes
It was perhaps a pedantic matter over which to come to such a decision, but shoes are supreme symbols of aesthetic, and hence by extension psychological, compatibility. Certain areas and coverings of the body say more about a person than others: shoes suggest more than pullovers, thumbs more than elbows, underwear more than overcoats, ankles more than shoulders.
I marshmallow you
Then I noticed a small plate of complimentary marshmallows near Chloe's elbow and it suddenly seemed clear that I didn't love Chloe so much as marshmallow her. What it was about a marshmallow that should suddenly have accorded so perfectly with my feelings toward her, I will never know, but the word seemed to capture the essence of my amorous state with an accuracy that the word 'love', weary with overuse, simply could not aspire to.
From then on, love was, for Chloe and me at least, no longer simply love, it was a sugary, puffy object a few millimeters in diameter that melts deliciously in the mouth.
A social animal
What does it mean that man is a "social animal"? Only that humans need one another in order to define themselves and achieve self-consciousness, in a way that mollusks and earthworms do not. We cannot come to a proper sense of ourselves if there aren't others around to show us what we're like.
"A man can acquire anything in solitude except a character," wrote Stendhal.
Possible lives
Watching Alice talk, light a candle that had blown out, rush into the kitchen with the plates, or brush a strand of blonde hair from her face, I found myself falling victim to romantic nostalgia, which descends whenever we are faced with those who might have been our lovers, but whom chance has decreed we will never properly know. The possibility of an alternative love story is a reminder that the life we are leading is only one of a myriad of possible lives, and it is the impossibility of leading them all that plunges us into sadness.
The threat of happiness
Dr. Saavedra had diagnosed a case of anhedonia, a disease defined by the British Medical Association as a reaction remarkably close to mountain sickness resulting from the sudden terror brought on by the threat of happiness. It was a common disease among tourists in this region of Spain, faced in these idyllic surroundings with the sudden realization that earthly happiness might be within their grasp, and prey therefore to a violent physiological reaction designed to counteract such a daunting possibility.
I don't see a wall
"I don't know, really. It's just a sense I have that ever since about the middle of September, we haven't really been communicating. It's like there's a wall between us and you're refusing to acknowledge it's there."
"I don't see a wall."
"That's what I mean. You're refusing to admit there was ever anything other than this."
"Than what?"
Romantic terrorism
Once a partner has begun to lose interest, there is apparently little the other can do to arrest the process. Like seduction, withdrawal suffers under a blanket of reticence. The very breakdown of communication is hard to discuss, unless both parties have a desire to see it restored.
This leaves the lover in a desperate situation. Honest dialogue seems to produce only irritation and smothers love in the attempt to revive it. Desperate to woo the partner back at any cost, the lover might at this point be tempted to turn to romantic terrorism, the product of irredeemable situations, a gamut of tricks (sulking, jealousy, guilt) that attempt to force the partner to return love, by blowing up (in fits of tears, rage, or otherwise) in front of the loved one. The terroristic partner knows he cannot realistically hope to see his love reciprocated, but the futility of something is not always (in love or in politics) a sufficient argument against it.
Certain things are said not because they will be heard, but because it is important to speak.
Walls
As the plane pierced through the clouds, I tried to imagine a future: a period of life was coming brutally to an end, and I had nothing to replace it with, only a terrifying absence.
What would life mean from now on? Though we continued holding hands, I knew how Chloe and I would watch our bodies grow foreign to each other. Walls would be build up, the separation would be institutionalized, I would meet her in a few months or years, we would be light, jovial, masked, dressed for business, ordering a salad in a restaurant—unable to touch what we were now revealing: the sheer human drama, the nakedness, the dependency, the unalterable loss. We would be like an audience emerging from a heart-wrenching play but unable to communicate any of the emotions they had felt inside, able only to head for a drink at the bar, knowing there was more, but unable to touch it.
In order that
No philosophy is further from the thought that what happens to us is random than psychoanalysis. I did not simply love Chloe and then she left me. I loved Chloe in order that she would leave me. It was not for the shape of her smile or the liveliness of her mind that I had chosen Chloe. It was because the unconscious, perverse casting director of my life had recognized in her a suitable character to leave the stage after inflicting the requisite amount of suffering.
The significance of love's burden
There is an Arabic saying that the soul travels at the pace of a camel. While most of our self is led by the strict demands of timetables and diaries, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory. If every love affair adds a certain weight to the camel's load, then we can expect the soul to slow according to the significance of love's burden.
What does wisdom counsel?
We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, that living one's life is a skill that has to be acquired, like learning to ride a bicycle or play the piano. But what does wisdom counsel us to do? It tells us to aim for tranquility and inner peace, a life free from anxiety, fear, idolatry, and harmful passions. Wisdom teaches us that our first impulses may not always be trustworthy, and that our appetites will lead us astray if we do not train reason to separate vain from genuine needs.
Once again begun to fall
Such lessons appeared all the more relevant when Rachel accepted my invitation for dinner the following week, and the very thought of her began sending tremors through the region the poets have called the heart, tremors that I knew could have meant one thing only—that I had once again begun to fall.