Prep Your Mindset

Sharpen The Saw...on purpose

From Upgrade Your Technical Skills with Deliberate Practice. (accessed by Benjamin Hobbs on 7/8/2023)

This brief article makes the assertion that simple repetition of a task does not necessarily increase skill at that task.

In order to get better at something, one must apply deliberate practice.

The term deliberate practice was coined by psychology professor Anders Ericsson to capture a description of the "right type of work" necessary to build what he called "a remarkable life"

To quote Cal Newport from his blog

The mistake most weak pianists make is playing, not practicing. If you walk into a music hall at a local university, you’ll hear people ‘playing’ by running through their pieces. This is a huge mistake. Strong pianists drill the most difficult parts of their music, rarely, if ever playing through their pieces in entirety.

The article's author then defines deliberate practice as thus:

Activities designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.

The key ideas behind deliberate practice are that deliberate practice should:

• Be designed to improve performance - deliberate practice should push one outside of their comfort zone, stretching an individual just beyond their current abilities.

• Be repeated often - high repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice and performing the task for real.

• Have continuously available feedback on results -

• Be highly mentally demanding -

• Be difficult -

• Require good goals -

The Matasano Crypto Challenges

• a set of exercises that meet these criteria for the majority of intermediate to senior level developers. They relentlessly pummel you with problems that require hard, focused thinking and fiddly solutions. The feedback is continual: your solutions either break crypto and produce the desired results or they don't.

Rosalind

• another example of a set specifically crafted challenges designed to help you learn a technical specialty (bioinformatics) by applying your existing skills to real world problems.

Watch Carol Dweck on the Growth Mindset. (10 minutes) Watch Angela Lee Duckworth on Grit. (6 minutes) Watch Alain de Botton on Redefining Success. (17 minutes) Assess your emotional intelligence. If you have done it in the past, now you can identify the areas you have grown in recently. Assess your biases. If you have done it in the past, now you can identify the areas you have grown in recently.