The Learning Code

You have a Limitless Mind, go make some mistakes.

Protect Ourselves to be able to Protect Others. Our words or writing are the shields & armor that others may need, right now.

Written and Published By Atul Gawande on December 3, 2007 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist

"The checklists provided two main benefits, Pronovost observed. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events. (When you’re worrying about what treatment to give a woman who won’t stop seizing, it’s hard to remember to make sure that the head of her bed is in the right position.) A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes."

Written and Published by Atul Gawande https://slate.com/technology/2014/10/end-of-life-medical-decisions-atul-gawande-book-excerpt-on-no-risky-chances.html

that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; and that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, culture, and conversations to transform the possibilities for the last chapters of all of our lives.

Written by Atul Gawade - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/07/29/slow-ideas

Some innovations spread fast. How do you speed the ones that don’t? 

Person to Person communication is the Key. 

All the words here and in the episode were composed of Atul Gawande.

The mistake, then, is to believe that the educational credentials you get today give you any special authority on truth. What you have gained is far more important: an understanding of what real truth-seeking looks like. It is the effort not of a single person but of a group of people—the bigger the better—pursuing ideas with curiosity, inquisitiveness, openness, and discipline. As scientists, in other words.

Even more than what you think, how you think matters. The stakes for understanding this could not be higher than they are today, because we are not just battling for what it means to be scientists. We are battling for what it means to be citizens.

Education may expose people to science, but it has a countervailing effect as well, leading people to be more individualistic and ideological.

The following was delivered as the commencement address at the California Institute of Technology, on Friday, June 10th. 2016 by Atul Gawande. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-mistrust-of-science

Written and Published on Mar 5 2018 by Tiago Forte - https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-v-the-faster-you-forget-the-faster-you-learn/

Progressive Summarization is about using the information you consume as training data for your intuition. You can consume a lot more because you’re able to continuously offload it. But more importantly, even if you lost all that data, you would still be left with the greatest prize: who you’ve become and what you’re sensitive to as a result of the diversity and depth of your personal experience.

We must transition from knowledge hoarders to knowledge curators. We must learn how to frame our options about what to read, watch, and review in a way that restricts what we pay attention to, so we can see clearly instead of being overwhelmed.

What is being called into question is the very purpose of learning. What is learning for, now that we can access any knowledge on demand?

Learning is no longer about accumulating data points, but training our algorithm. Our algorithm is our intuition — our felt sense about what matters, what is relevant, what is interesting, and what is important, even if we’ve never seen it before and can’t explain why we like it.

Written and Published on Mar 11 2017 by Tiago Forte - https://fortelabs.co/blog/gtd-x-pkm/

“You’re not at a loss about what to do with anything — a business card you collected at a lunch meeting, a harebrained idea you woke up with this morning about a project you might want to launch, an unexpected private invitation to a major gala event, or your blood panel report from your last medical checkup. You can create the right placeholder for any type of potentially meaningful data.”

David Allen goes on to lay out many of the qualities such a reference system should have:

Written and Published on Feb 25 2017 by Tiago Forte - https://fortelabs.co/blog/the-throughput-of-learning/

Learning in the 21st century is not about acquiring more information, knowledge, or even insights. The goal is to maximize the throughput of invalidated assumptions. But you have to get there one step at a time.

True listening requires giving up the prerogative of your own mental model. You have to allow them to set the rules of engagement, no matter how bizarre, so that they let their guard down and realize you are not a threat, because you have no intention of blaming them for anything. The way they set these rules will reveal their assumptions and constraints, which thoughts and actions are open to them. If you can tell an authentic story that speaks to these assumptions, you can break through, because stories speak to emotions expressed in the body, which fortunately refuses to go along with even our most well-reasoned rationalizations.

Written and Published on Feb 19 2017 by Tiago Forte - https://fortelabs.co/blog/the-future-of-online-learning-steves-short-tiny-exclusive-virtual-experiences/

1. BALANCE BETWEEN OPTIONALITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY

How do you create forms of accountability that exert a helpful pressure to complete the course, while also allowing for more flexible and needs-driven forms of interaction?

2. EXERCISES AND ACTIVITIES

How do you structure exercises and activities to convince participants to complete them, building to a final outcome while also delivering immediate value?

3. FOLLOW-THROUGH AND SUPPORT

How do you provide ongoing support and follow-through to people who complete online bootcamps, in a way that is both effective and sustainable for everyone involved?

I call this third wave Short Tiny Exclusive Virtual Experiences (STEVEs). They deploy a wide range of tactics to bring accountability back into the process.

Short: anything that is supposed to last a long time must necessarily be low intensity, which is exactly the opposite of what we’re going for. Anything that can be done at any time, tends to get done at no time.

Tiny: scale breeds anonymity, which is the arch-nemesis of accountability. These courses offer either limited enrollment that allows personal interaction with the instructor, or peer or small group structures that allow interaction with mentors or fellow learners.

Exclusive: a quirk of human psychology is that we don’t value anything that is available in abundance. Exclusivity, through high prices, application and selection processes, time-limited enrollment, or referral-only is a powerful signal that cuts through ambivalence.

Virtual: these courses still take place online, but using a whole new generation of collaboration and creation tools.

Experiences: this new generation steps away from the pure efficiency of highly condensed media, instead combining the unpredictability, humanity, and connection of live interaction with qualities borrowed from bootcamps: short, very intense, skill-based, forces you out of your comfort zone, develops camaraderie, and…you have to perform to stay in.