Chapter 12 Flashcards
(10 cards)
Think of an area where persistence has paid off for you in your life. Is there a new area where you would like to start developing your persistence?
What backup plan can you develop for low times when you might feel like faltering?
People often try to stop their daydreaming because it interrupts activities they truly intend to focus on, like listening to an important lecture.
What works better for you—forcing yourself to maintain focus, or simply bring your attention back to the matter at hand when you notice your attention wandering?
DON’T UNDERESTIMATE YOURSELF
I coach Science Olympiad at our school. We have won the state championship eight outof the last nine years.
We fell one point short of winning the state this year, and we oftenfinish in the top ten in the nation.
We have found that many seemingly top students (who are getting an A+ in all their classes) do not perform as well under the pressure of a Science Olympiad event as those who can mentally manipulate the knowledge they have.Interestingly, this second tier (if you will) of students at times seem to think of themselves as less intelligent than these top students I would much rather take ostensibly lower.
Performing students who can think creatively on their feet, as the Olympiad requires, thantop students who get flustered if the questions being posed don’t exactly fit the memorized chunks in their brain
REACHING TOWARD THE INFINITE
Some feel that diffuse, intuitive ways of thinking are more in tune with our spirituality.
The creativity that diffuse thinking promotes sometimes seems beyond human understanding.
As Albert Einstein noted, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is.”
IT’S NOT WHAT YOU KNOW; IT’S HOW YOU THINK
Experience has shown me an almost inverse correlation between high GRE scores and ultimate career success.
Indeed, many of the students with the lowest scores became highly successful, whereas a surprising number of the ‘geniuses’ fell by the wayside for some reason or other.”
What type of practice helps the average achieve the lifted realm of understanding?
Practice—particularly deliberate practice on the toughest aspects of the material—that can helplift average brains into the realm of those with more “natural” gifts.
What can lead to overthinking?
Once you understand why you do something in math and science, you shouldn’t keep reexplaining the how.
Such overthinking can lead to choking.
How can following the rules too closely backfire?
Teachers and professors can inadvertently get too caught up in following rules.
In an intriguing study that illustrates this, six people were filmed doingCPR, only one of whom was a professional paramedic. Professionalparamedics was then asked to guess who was the real paramedic.
Ninety percent of these “real deal” expert paramedics chose correctly, remarking along the lines of “he seemed to know what he was doing.”
CPR instructors, on the other hand, could pick the real paramedic out of the lineup only 30 percent of the time.
These overly picky theoreticians criticized the real expertsin the films for issues such as not taking the time to stop and measure where to put their hands. Precise rule following had come to mean more to the instructors than practicality.
How do experts rapidly make complex decisions? What is intuition and how can it benefit you? What could disrupt yout flow of understanding?
Chess masters, emergency room physicians, fighter pilots, and many other experts often have to make complex decisions rapidly.
They shut down their conscious system and instead rely on their well-trained intuition, drawing from their deeply ingrained repertoire of chunks.
At some point, self-consciously “understanding” why you do what you do just slows you down and interrupts flow, resulting in worse decisions.
How can you create muscle memory? Why can’t you learn something in one day? How long could it take to build those skills?
you don’t learn how to hit in one day.
Instead, your body perfects your swing from plenty of repetition over a period of years.
Smooth repetition creates muscle memory so that your body knows what to do from a single thought—one chunk—instead of having to recall all the complex steps involved in hiting a ball.
In the same way, once you understand why you do something in math and science, you don’t have to keep reexplaining the how to yourself every time you do it
