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Pre refused to slow down, ease off. He pushed himself to the brink and beyond. This was often a counterproductive strategy, and sometimes it was plainly stupid, and occasionally it was suicidal. But it was always uplifting for the crowd. No matter the sport—no matter the human endeavor, really—total effort will win people’s hearts.
Or electrical engineer Claude Shannon, who launched the Information Age thanks to a philosophy course he took to fulfill a requirement at the University of Michigan. In it, he was exposed to the work of self-taught nineteenth-century English logician George Boole, who assigned a value of 1 to true statements and 0 to false statements and showed that logic problems could be solved like math equations. It resulted in absolutely nothing of practical importance until seventy years after Boole passed away, when Shannon did a summer internship at AT&T’s Bell Labs research facility. There he recognized that he could combine telephone call-routing technology with Boole’s logic system to encode and transmit any type of information electronically. It was the fundamental insight on which computers rely. “It just happened that no one else was familiar with both those fields at the same time,” Shannon said.
But skill doesn’t come from observation alone—considerable practice is required to get good at anything. In the next four chapters, I’ll discuss the role doing plays in learning, from finding the difficulty sweet spot to the importance of creating a practice loop; the research that shows our mental abilities are more specific than we realize; and why variability beats repetition for acquiring flexible skills. Finally, I’ll talk about the importance of increasing our productive output if we wish to move beyond imitation and find truly creative solutions.
Get Better at Anything
Scott Young
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