I picked this book up to support the whole purpose of this blog – to accelerate my personal and professional learning process. It has provided good material to reflect on, and a few concrete steps to implement which I’ll go into more detail with later.

This review is chapter-by-chapter – barring the boring ones.

Becoming a Dynamic Learner

The author suggests that the way to thrive in the global, specialised, non-routine economy is to become a dynamic learner.

The key elements laid out are:

  • Valuing failure
  • Process focus
  • Questions over answers
  • Reflection and relaxation
  • Integrity and non-conformity
  • Playing to strengths
  • Balancing specialisation and variety
  • Learning from others

Each of which are given a chapter to be more or less thoroughly examined. Given my desire to amplify learning and become what the author calls a dynamic learner, it seems these chapters are worthy of individual analysis and reflection!

Valuing Failure

The author spends most of the chapter presenting evidence that failure is a valuable learning opportunity. This is fine, but I already believe it.

Fortunately, there is also a section dealing with the hard parts and what to get good at in the endeavour of really leveraging failure, and failing forward.

  • The examined hard parts are fear of failure and inability to see failure. The remedy for each is (seemingly) simple:
  • To combat a fear of failure, maintain a strong bias for action – keep doing things, the pain will dull, the fear will dissipate, and you will recognise that failure is never as scary as it seems.
  • To combat an inability to see failure, accept responsibility – when things go wrong, examine the root cause with the specific aim of finding out how you failed.

Process Focus

The author contrasts a process focus against an outcome focus. By focusing on outcomes rather than process, many pieces of the learning puzzle are missed. By understanding why things happen, how things work, and what inputs contribute to a specific output, the observer is better equipped to understand and learn.

This translates neatly into asking lots of “how” and “why”, and optimising subroutines. This is a natural focus for me, and is probably a strength that doesn’t need further specialisation just now. It also aligns with one of my dearly held Bear Principles; understand how the machine works.

Questions Over Answers

It’s a given that good questions precede good answers. The author does a good job of outlining barriers to asking good questions.

We want to get things done, so we move directly to solutions rather than refining questions.

We bend under the weight of cognitive biases such as availability bias and confirmation bias, which narrow down or questioning methods to the point where they are useless.

The prescribed solution is to have “strong opinions, weakly held”

  • Have a clear picture of how the world works
  • Be constantly trying to find ways in which that picture is wrong
  • Surround yourself with diverse perspectives
  • Always aim to determine what is true
  • Listen actively
  • Simultaneously hold contrasting views inside your mind and compare them

This is similar to great advice by Ray Dalio in Principles.

Reflection and Relaxation

It’s widely accepted that pushing too hard into stress diminishes our capacity to improve, and that taking time out to relax and reflect is critical to our health, mental and physical.

The author goes further than this, laying out factors that can prevent us from taking time to reflect and relax, as well as how to work around them.

  • We want to be seen doing something. Relaxing and reflecting looks an awful lot like inaction to our peers, and we don’t like to seem lazy.
  • We confuse action with progress. We think the faster we run, the further we’ll get. This just doesn’t hold true for knowledge workers, and it prevents us from working smarter, not harder.
  • We overestimate our capacity for extended work, and underestimate the cost of not taking breaks to relax and reflect.
  • We underestimate the size of the gains available by taking time to relax and reflect. We just don’t imagine they’re worth the time.

Strategies to address these issues include

  • Morning reflection. Start the day with some kind of reflective practice. Meditation, free writing, planning your day, or reflecting on the past day’s performance.
  • Pre-mortem idea evaluation. When planning large projects, imagine you’re 3 months past deployment, and the project has failed. Reflect on why.
  • After-action reviews. Setting aside time after deployment to evaluate on how things went (pretty standard).
  • Plan breaks. Both during the workday (pomodoro and similar techniques), between workdays, and on vacations. Planning a good restitution cycle for learning is not dissimilar to planning one for workouts.

Integrity and Non-Conformity

This chapter covers the importance of being ourselves when learning. This may seem trivial or cliché, but the author makes a point valid point about 2 potent forces at play: When we are true to ourselves, and do things our own way, we are more motivated to achieve our goal (because it’s truly ours) and we’re generally in a more positive mindset. Both things contribute to learning in their own way, and make up a strong package when combined.

The challenge towards integrity and non-conformity is clear and familiar; the desire to meet the expectations of others looms.

The solution is simple, yet confounding – be yourself and take pride in how you express that identity to the world. Lean in with your true self, and embrace how you interface with the world. This is surprisingly well aligned with the brand vision for Trendhim…

Playing to Strengths

The author uses an excellent framework to put this into context. There is wildly varied advice on whether to despise and eliminate weakness, or ignore it completely and focus only on one’s strengths, but the author takes a balanced view, and frames it in a way I’ve long held internally.

Some traits and styles are order winners, and some are order qualifiers. The key is to hone order qualifiers to the minimum required level, which is generally just to the level of base competence, just enough that the weakness is not overly prohibitive of learning.

Meanwhile, the order winners, your specialisations, are where focus should lie.

Essentially, this is equivalent to building a T-shaped personality-profile, but the concept of order winners and order qualifiers makes the subject more salient, at least to me.

To accurately develop a plan for honing strengths and lifting weaknesses to order qualifying level, one must understand what one is like. This is in line with Ray Dalio’s advice on hiring and organisation – understanding what everyone is like is key.

The author recommends the Reflected Best Self Exercise, in which the “truth” about yourself is established by bringing in feedback from 15 people who know you well. I may try this at some point, as it’s the only clear way to remove personal bias in evaluating strengths. If so, I will ask for the help of an “outsider” to facilitate, removing any further bias.

Balancing Specialisation and Variety

This chapter is similar to the previous, but deals with specific skills, learning goals rather than learning methods or traits.

This is more directly related to the standard T-shape that all employers look for nowadays.

The author makes the case that balance is key in specialisation and variety. Too much specialisation brings diminishing returns and a lack of crosstopical synergy. Too much variety brings a superficial skill-set that lacks the depth to deal with real challenges in any area.

The author’s prime example of a successful approach to balancing specialisation and variety is the Valve Handbook, specifically this quote sums it up: “The most successful people at Valve are both (1) highly skilled at a broad set of things and (2) world-class experts within a more narrow discipline.”

This implies that Valve expects sharp and keen people, who have the capacity to be highly skilled at many things, as well as being world-class experts within their primary specialisation. It’s a simple paradigm for personal development.

Personally, I am currently only a strong generalist, and if I want to be among the strongest learners in the world, I am missing the depth of being world-class within a narrow discipline. The challenge comes in choosing.

Learning From Others

By working in a team, solving problems with and for each other, we can accelerate learning immensely as compared to working alone. Many other works are devoted to examining the many facets of team and tribal leadership, and this book barely scratches the surface.

However, the author surfaces a few insights on things that prevent us from learning from others.

First, we don’t have a searchable index of the things others know. This means it’s difficult for us to know where our knowledge overlaps, and where we each know different things. Consequently, without consistent effort to explore the unknown unknowns, we tend to neglect a significant portion of the potential learning.

Second, even though we abstractly and theoretically know that our own world view and others’ world views fit together to form a huge and complex jigsaw puzzle that is the truth, we tend not to take this into account in our daily work. Instead we assume that we can see the whole big picture.

Fortunately both these fundamental problems are overcome by the same approach: An active search for the unknown unknowns. A proxy for this, is always approaching interactions with others with the question “What can I learn from this person?”

For me, this translates into leaning much more on my team to teach me what they know and I don’t, explaining how they understand their work.