Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
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fused by others, but I hope you’ve gotten “new eyes” and some-
where have the germ of an intention—of what you want to do next.
But like everything we’ve looked at here, you need to approach this
deliberately. So, let me suggest a few things that might help you
achieve change, take a look at where to start, and, finally, see what
lies beyond expertise.
9.1 Effective Change
Your brain is not necessarily going to cooperate with us on this
venture. While your mind has an intention to learn, your phys-
ical brain is trying to keep things, well, lean. Like an overactive
housekeeper, if the brain doesn’t think this is emotionally charged
content, valuable to your survival, out it goes. It’s relegated to the
same pile as the morning drive to work that we talked about ear-
lier. So, you have to convince your brain that this is important. You
have to care. Now that we have your attention....
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EFFECTIVE CHANGE
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Change is always harder than it looks—
Practice makes
that’s a physical reality, not just an apho-
permanent.
rism. An old, ingrained habit makes the
equivalent of a neural highway in your
brain. These old habits don’t go away. You can make new neu-
ral highways alongside, going a different route and making short-
cuts, but the old highways remain. They are always there for you
to revert to—to fall back on. Practice may not make perfect, but it
sure makes permanent.
Realize that these old habits will remain, and if you revert to one,
don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s how you’re wired. Just acknowl-
edge the lapse, and move on with your new intention. It will surely
happen again; just be aware of when it does, and get back on the
right path again. It’s the same thing whether you’re changing your
learning habits, quitting smoking, or losing weight.
The topic of change, be it personal or organizational, is huge and
complex.1 Appreciate that it’s not easy, but it does yield to con-
sistent effort. Here are just a couple of suggestions to help you
manage effective change:
Start with a plan.
Block out some time, and fight for it. Keep track of what you’ve
accomplished, and review your accomplishments when you
feel you haven’t done enough. You’ve probably come further
than you think. This is a great use of your exocortex: use a
journal, a wiki, or a web app to track your progress.
Inaction is the enemy, not error.
Remember the danger doesn’t lie in doing something wrong; it
lies in doing nothing at all. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.
New habits take time.
It takes something like a minimum of three weeks of perform-
ing a new activity before it becomes habit. Maybe longer. Give
it a fair chance.
Belief is real.
As we’ve seen throughout, your thoughts will physically alter
the wiring in your brain and your brain chemistry. You have
1.
For more on effective organizational change patterns, see Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas [MR05].
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WHAT TO DO TOMORROW MORNING
255
to believe that change is possible. If you think you’ll fail,
you’ll be correct.
Take small, next steps.
Start with the low-hanging fruit. Set up a small, achievable
goal, and reward yourself for reaching it. “Rinse and repeat”:
set up the next small step. Take one step at a time, keeping
your big goal in mind but not trying to map out all the steps
it takes to get there. Just the next one. Learn what you need
to know for the goals further out once you get closer to them.
9.2 What to Do Tomorrow Morning
In any new venture, there’s a certain amount of inertia. As an object
at rest, I have a tendency to remain there. Moving in a new direction
means I have to overcome inertial resistance.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has
genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now
Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Just start! It doesn’t particularly matter what you choose to start
with, but start something from this book deliberately, first thing
tomorrow morning.
Here’s a suggested checklist of some possible first steps:
! Start taking responsibility; don’t be afraid to ask “why?” or
“how do you know?” or “how do I know?” or to answer “I don’t
know—yet.”
! Pick two things that will help you maintain context and avoid
interruption, and start doing them right away.
! Create a Pragmatic Investment Plan, and set up SMART goals.
! Figure out where you are on the novice-to-expert spectrum in
your chosen profession and what you might need to progress.
Be honest. Do you need more recipes or more context? More
rules or more intuition?
! Practice. Having trouble with a piece of code? Write it five dif-
ferent ways.
! Plan on making more mistakes—mistakes are good. Learn
from them.
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BEYOND EXPER TISE
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! Keep a notebook on you (unlined paper, preferably). Doodle.
Mind map. Take notes. Keep your thoughts loose and flowing.
! Open up your mind to aesthetics and additional sensory
input. Whether it’s your cubicle, your desktop, or your code,
pay attention to how “pleasing” it is.
! Start your personal wiki on things you find interesting.
! Start blogging. Comment on the books you’ve read.2 Read
more books, and you’ll have more to write about. Use SQ3R
and mind maps.
! Make thoughtful walking a part of your day.
! Start a book-reading group.
! Get a second monitor, and start using a virtual desktop.
! Go through the “next actions” for each chapter and try them.
I’ve barely scratched the surface on a variety of really interesting
topics, and researchers are discovering new things and disproving
old ideas all the time. If anything I’ve suggested here doesn’t work
out for you, don’t worry about it, and move on. There’s plenty more
to try.
9.3 Beyond Expertise
Finally, after all this talk about expertise and becoming more
expert, what lies beyond the expert? In an oddly circular way,
the most sought-after thing you want to achieve after becoming
an expert is...the beginner’s mind.
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the
expert’s there are few.
Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi
The professional kiss of death for an expert is to act like one. Once
you believe in your own expertness, you close your
mind to pos-
sibilities. You stop acting on curiosity. You may begin to resist
change in your field for fear of losing authority on a subject you’ve
spent so long mastering. Your own judgment and views, instead of
supporting you, can imprison you.
2.
And of course, I’d really appreciate it if you mentioned this book. Please use this link if you do: http://pragprog.com/titles/ahptl. Thanks in advance.
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BEYOND EXPER TISE
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I’ve seen a lot of this over the years. Folks invest
heavily in some language, say, Java, or C++ before
it.3 They get all the certifications; they memo-
rize the fifteen lineal feet of books on the API
and related tools. Then some new language comes
around that lets them write programs much more
concisely and more intuitively, test more thor-
oughly, achieve greater concurrency more easily, and so on. And
they don’t want any part of it. They’ll spend more energy deriding
the newcomer than in seriously evaluating it for their needs.
That’s not the kind of expert you want to become.
Instead, always keep a “beginner’s” mind. Ask “what if?” You want
to emulate a child’s insatiable curiosity, full of wonder and amaze-
ment. Maybe this new language is really cool. Or maybe this other,
newer language is. Maybe I can learn something from this cool
object-oriented operating system, even if I never intend to use it.
Approach learning without preconceived notions, prior judgment,
or a fixed viewpoint. See things exactly as they are—just as a child
would.
Wow. This is cool. I wonder how it works? What is it?
Be aware of your own reaction to new technology, new ideas, or
things you don’t know about. Self-awareness is key to becoming
an expert—and beyond—but it falls prey to the “old-habit-neural-
highway” problem.
Be aware of yourself, of the present
moment, and of the context in which Be aware.
you’re operating. I think the biggest rea-
son that any of us fail is that we have a tendency to put things
on autopilot. Unless we sense some new and novel attribute, we
zone out. Leonardo da Vinci complained about this 600 years
ago: “People look without seeing, hear without listening, eat with-
out awareness of taste, touch without feeling, and talk without
thinking.” We remain guilty of this all the time: we scoff down
a hurried meal on the go without actually tasting or savoring it;
3.
I’d mention C programmers, except that they all stayed C programmers through the years.
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BEYOND EXPER TISE
258
we hear users or sponsors tell us precisely what they want in a
product, but we don’t listen. We look all the time without seeing.
We presume we already know.
In the novel The Girl with the Pearl Earring, the author describes a
fictional account of the painter Vermeer and a serving girl who may
have inspired one of Vermeer’s most well-known paintings (and the
title of the book). In the story, Vermeer takes to teaching the girl
how to paint. He asks her to describe the dress a young lady is
wearing. She replies that it is yellow. Vermeer feigns amazement:
is it really? She looks again, a little more carefully, and then says,
well, it has some brown flecks as well. Is that all you see? asks
Vermeer. Now the girl studies the dress more intently. No, she says,
it has flecks of green and brown, a bit of silver on the edge from
a nearby reflection, specks of black where openness of the weave
shows the garment underneath, darker yellow where the shadows
of the folds of the dress fall, and so on.
When the girl first sees the dress, she reports merely that it is
“yellow.” Vermeer challenges the girl to see the world as he sees it:
full of marvelous complexity and rich, subtle nuances. That’s the
challenge we all face—to see the world that way and to continue to
see that world—and ourselves—fully.
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
Popular phrase after John Philpot Curran, 1790
Not only is eternal vigilance the price of liberty,
but it’s the price of awareness as well. As soon as
you go on autopilot, you’re not steering anymore.
Maybe that’s OK on a long straight highway, but
life more often resembles a twisty, narrow road
like the Road to Hana in Maui. You need to con-
stantly reevaluate yourself and your condition, lest habits and past
wisdom blind you to the reality in front of you.
TIP 48
Grab the wheel. You can’t steer on autopilot.
Go ahead and grab the wheel. You have everything you need: the
same brain as Einstein, Jefferson, Poincaré, or Shakespeare. You
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BEYOND EXPER TISE
259
have more facts, fictions, and viewpoints at your fingertips than at
any other time in history.
Best of luck, and let me know how it goes.
My email address is andy@pragprog.com. Let me know what worked
really well for you and what fell flat. Point me to your new
blog or that great open source project you’ve started. Scan and
email me that cool mind map you made. Post to the forums at
forums.pragprog.com. This is just the beginning.
Thanks,
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Appendix A
Photo Credits
Portrait of a wizard, 1977, marker on cardboard by Michael C. Hunt.
Man with hat, 2007, pen and ink by Michael C. Hunt.
Portrait of Henri Poincaré, public domain image courtesy of
Wikipedia.com.
Portrait of John Stuart Mill, public domain image courtesy of
Wikipedia.com.
Photo of labyrinth at Grace Cathedral copyright Karol Gray, reprinted
with permission.
Photo of labyrinth etched in marble copyright Don Joski, reprinted
with permission.
Photo of plunge sheep dip copyright 1951 C. Goodwin, reprinted under
the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.
Photo of Mark II engineer’s log courtesy of the U.S. Naval Historical
Center.
Screen shot of PocketMod courtesy of Chad Adams, reprinted with per-
mission.
Diagram of affinity grouping copyright Johanna Rothman and Esther
Derby, reprinted with permission.
Figure of representational system predicates courtesy of Bobby G.
Bodenhamer, at www.neurosemantics.com, reprinted with permission.
Pencil illustrations by the author.
Except as noted, remaining photographs court
esy of iStockPhoto.com.
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Appendix B
Bibliography
[AIT99]
F. G. Ashby, A. M. Isen, and A. U. Turken. A neuro-
psychological theory of positive affect and its influ-
ence on cognition.
Psychological Review, (106):529–
550, 1999.
[All02]
David Allen. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free
Productivity. Simon and Schuster, New York, 2002.
[Ari08]
Dan Ariely. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces
That Shape Our Decisions.
HarperCollins, New York,
2008.
[AT04]
Erik M. Altmann and J. Gregory Trafton. Task interrup-
tion: Resumption lag and the role of cues. Proceedings
of the 26th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science
Society, 2004.
[BB96]
Tony Buzan and Barry Buzan. The Mind Map Book:
How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain’s
Untapped Potential. Plume, New York, 1996.
[Bec00]
Kent Beck. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace
Change. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 2000.
[Bei91]
Paul C. Beisenherz. Explore, invent, and apply. Science
and Children, 28(4):30–32, Jan 1991.
[Ben01]
Patricia Benner. From Novice to Expert: Excellence and
Power in Clinical Nursing Practice. Prentice Hall, Engle-
wood Cliffs, NJ, commemorative edition, 2001.
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APPENDIX B. BIBLIOGRAPHY
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[Ber96]
Albert J. Bernstein. Dinosaur Brains: Dealing with All
Those Impossible People at Work. Ballantine Books, New
York, 1996.
[Ber06]
Ivan Berger. The virtues of a second screen. New York
Times, April 20 2006.
[Bre97]
Bill Breen. The 6 myths of creativity. Fast Company,
Dec 19 1997.
[Bro86]
Frederick Brooks. No silver bullet—essence and acci-
dent in software engineering. Proceedings of the IFIP
Tenth World Computing Conference, 1986.
[BS85]
Benjamin Samuel Bloom and Lauren A. Sosniak. Devel-
oping Talent in Young People. Ballantine Books, New
York, first edition, 1985.
[BW90]
H. Black and A. Wolf. Knowledge and competence: Cur-
rent issues in education and training.
Careers and
Occupational Information Centre, 1990.