Summary of "Mindshift"

Intro

This post is a weekise summary of very famous Coursera course “Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential” by Barbara Oakley.

Let’s Ignite some fire

• Life hardly goes to plan. So forget your plans and put on a show instead.
• Don’t be a donkey. Act, do, think, adjust when needed. You’re smarter doing than you are thinking
• I don’t care what you do or much you earn, what sets your soul on fire?
• Learning isn’t linear.
• A good life can be lived by simply avoiding the things you know don’t work rather than always searching for the right thing to do.
• Show, don’t tell.
• Most undervalue the power of the follow-up.
• You were born to adapt.
• Earn your dopamine.
• Luckmaxing: increase your chances of serendipity happening.
• Fix your balance: Creation vs. consumption.
• It’s amazing what you can get if you just ask.
• Build more things with your hands.
• Time spent doing nothing is rarely wasted.
• Copy others until you have your own style.
• Amplify your weirdness.
• Why so serious?
• What else is hidden in plain sight that we’re missing out on?.
• Love yourself like your life depends on it.

Key Topics from Week 1

• Slow learners: By using persistence and flexibility, slow learners can see things that geniuses miss.
• Active learning: Try to actively do whatever you are trying to learn.
• Mastery learning: Whether you learn it quickly or slowly, you can still learn it!
• The value of your past: Seemingly unconnected knowledge from your past can bring unexpected assets to your work in the present.
• Remember—it’s typical to feel incompetent when you first try to change.
• Focused and diffuse modes of thinking bring very different insights into your learning.
• Match passions with opportunities: It’s important to take a strategic as well as a passion influenced approach to your learning. Work to broaden, not just follow, your passions.
• Who you hang out with, and the environment you live and work in, can make a difference in your behavior. Occasional small disruptions, as with the clinking in a coffee shop, can sometimes enhance bigger picture learning. Also, complex systems shouldn’t just be memorized.

Key Topics from Week 2

• A poor memory is valuable. It can help you be more creative and to see shortcuts that other people can’t figure out.
• Meditation can have different effects. Focused attention types of meditation help enhance focused mode type thinking, while open monitoring types can enhance diffuse, imaginative thinking. It’s important to have time each day where your mind can wander.
• The Pomodoro technique can be a form of working meditation where you practice your focus on work or studies.
• Procrastination can arise from many factors. To tackle procrastination, it helps to increase expectancy of success, to increase the value of what you’re working on, or to decrease impulsiveness (remove distractions!).
• Procedural fluency and deliberate practice can help the hard stuff become easy.
• Mental tricks can be invaluable in helping you reframe and reduce anxiety and worry. Putting a label on your feelings is especially valuable in allowing you to reduce painful emotions.
• Avoid learning styles—instead, use all of your senses that you can to help boost your learning!
• You can try to learn too much. Make sure you have balance in your learning and your life.
• Who you hang out with strongly influences who you are. Choose friends and coworkers who have aspirations that fit in with your goals.

Key Topics from Week 3

• Don’t just follow your passion—also work to broaden your passions.
• Develop career resiliency by obtaining a second skill, or developing a broad talent stack of many mediocre skills.
• Read, take MOOCs, and take courses and seminars to keep yourself prepared, no matter what twists or turns your career may take. This is the best way to ensure your skills don’t become obsolete.
• Hobbies help keep your brain fresh and agile, and can sometimes even be useful for your career.
• When facing people who oppose your mindshift, good strategies are to dabble, lead a double life, and be a contrarian.
• General competence and selective ignorancecan each be important in career-building.
• Feeling like an imposter gives you a valuable beginner’s mindset.
• “The golden rule of career catastrophes” is “It’s never as bad as you think it is at the time, and there is always a silver lining.”
• Your worst traits can sometimes be some of your BEST traits.
• Both rational cognition and emotion both combine to make you intelligent.

Key Topics from Week 4

• Exercise, learning, exposure to new envi­ronments, and even video games can help create and nurture new neurons and synapses that help create a “cognitive reserve” that keeps you healthy as you age. If you don’t use it, you can lose it—no matter how innate and natural your gifts might seem.
• Good online teaching can sometimes be even better than face-to-face teaching. Great scripts, good editing, and a creative approach can give you a terrific learning experience.
• MOOCs are a fantastic way for adults to keep up with a learning lifestyle. Use some common sense tips like checking Class-Central’s reviews of a course, and ensuring the course is well-designed, to make sure you choose the best learning experience for you.
• Mentors can be invaluable—there are both firm and inspiring types.
• Reading is one of the best ways to become the smartest person in the room.
• With the disruption of the new information economy comes plenty of new opportunity. Be prepared for a lifetime of learning!