Avoid intuitive action. It’s lazy and abstract. Make it precise and tangible, so that you can better communicate and grow.
Learn to communicate the fundamentals of what you are good at. Learn to break things down into incremental steps.
When teaching someone something, allow their natural creativity to drive the transfer of knowledge. Don’t just hand them a cookie cutter mold.
After making an important decision, (or preferably during) explain your thought process.
Practice in difficult scenarios. If practice is easy, the real thing will bulldoze you.
Risk loss when the consequences are not that severe. Always winning is a brittle facade that will inevitably crumble, so practice in preparation for that.
Practice with opponents who are a little better than you.
Learn to be at peace in chaos and suboptimal environments.
If overwhelmed, take advantage of the physiological reset provided by deep breathing, short bursts of exercise intense, or cold water.
Lessons
As we grow in any given topic, we begin to become less calculating, and rather operate by feel. This is likely our subconscious taking over. Conscious effort is then able to switch into looking for growth opportunities. The potential pitfall here is that the conscious mind, rather than continuing to improve, will simply go into energy saving mode and shut down.
Intuition is not a good philosophy. We should strive to be more precise in identifying what these subconscious things are. Intuition is much too abstract. Instead, we should aim to make the unconscious conscious.
Professionals of anything at the highest level can sometimes fail to become successful teachers of their craft because they’ve internalized foundational principals so deeply that they can no longer effectively communicate them.
In teaching children, it’s important not to quiet their natural sense of experimentation. Giving them all the answers, or some sort of playbook, kills their drive. Let them be creative. This probably expands further into teaching people who are new to any given thing.
If the goal is growth, objectivity is more important than feelings.
We should strive to put a bit of ourselves, our personality, into everything we do. How do we parse this out? What’s the step by step?
Presence of mind is the most critical factor in problem solving.
Be on the lookout for growth opportunities within failure.
It is often the case that some will use learning as an excuse to avoid confronting themselves and their actual skill level. This philosophy claims to not care about results, that competition is meaningless and that learning is the only goal. This is a dangerous and easy to succumb to falsehood. We have to actually use what we learn, otherwise, what’s the damn point?
Build an appreciation for the process rather than the reward. This helps foster a growth mindset and avoids devastation upon a loss. There is a fleeting nature to any success, so it’s important not to care too much about the rewards of it.
Don’t avoid failure by pretending it’s inconsequential and meaningless. There’s a reason we work hard. When we fail after that, it matters. Use it as an opportunity to grow.
Don’t avoid giving something your all as a safety net against failure. Try as hard as you can in everything and if you fail, learn from it.
Adaptability is crucial. Rather than attempt to submit the world into your vision with overpowering force, focus on intelligent preparation and a cultivated resilience.
Indian Parable: A man wants to walk across the land, but the earth is covered with thorns. He has two option - one is to pave a road and tame all of nature into compliance. The other is to make sandals.
Distractions never cease. We cannot control every environment. Rather than curating the perfect environment, learn to be at peace in any.
Everything is an expression of the self.
Quotes
”Confidence is critical for a great competitor, but overconfidence is brittle."
"While a fixation on results is certainly unhealthy, short-term goals can be useful developmental tools if they are balanced within a nurturing long-term philosophy. Too much sheltering from results can be stunting. ” expectations are the enemy of happiness
”A key component of high-level learning is cultivating a resilient awareness that is the older, conscious embodiment of a child’s playful obliviousness."
"In most everyday life experiences, there seems to be a tangible connection between opposites."
"The human mind defines things in relation to one another - without light the notion of darkness would be unintelligible.” we don’t notice our objective status
”To my mind, the fields of learning and performance are an exploration of greyness - of the in-between. There is the careful balance of pushing yourself relentlessly, but not so hard that you melt down. Muscle and minds need to stretch to grow, but if stretched too thin, they will snap. A competitor needs to be process-oriented, always looking for stronger opponents to spur growth, but it is also important to keep on winning enough to maintain confidence. We have to release our current ideas to soak in new material, but not so much than we lose touch with out unique natural talents. Vibrant, creative idealism needs to be tempered by a practical, technical awareness.”