real learning

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In the early 1980s, two physicists at Arizona State University wanted to know whether a typical introductory physics course, with its traditional emphasis on Newton’s laws of motion, changed the way students thought about motion.

They gave the test to people entering the classes of four different physics professor, all good teachers, according to both colleagues and their students.

Did the course change student thinking? Not really. After the term was over, the two physicists gave their examination once more and discovered that the course had made comparatively small changes in the way students thought. Even many “A” students continued to think like Aristotle rather than like Newton. They had memorized formulae and learned to plug the right numbers into them, but they did not change their basic conceptions. Instead, they had interpreted everything they heard about motion in terms of the intuitive framework they had brought with them to the course.

The conducted individual interviews with some of the people who continued to reject Newton’s perspectives to see if they could dissuade them from their misguided assumptions. The students performed all kinds of mental gymnastics to avoid confronting and revising the fundamental underlying principles that guided their understanding of the physical universe.

Those physics students who made A’s yet failed to grasp anything about Newtonian concepts had not rebuilt their mental models about motion. They had merely learned to plug numbers into formulae without experiencing an expectation failure with the universes they imagined in their minds. They took all they heard from their professors and simply wrapped it around some pre-existing model of how motion works.

Perhaps because they were focused on grades rather than on understanding the physical universe, they didn’t care enough to grapple with their own ideas and build new paradigms of reality.

Ken Bain,  What the Best Teachers Do

the strongest political bias of all

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The strongest bias in American politics is not a liberal bias or a conservative bias; it is a confirmation bias, or the urge to believe only things that confirm what you already believe to be true. Not only do we tend to seek out and remember information that reaffirms what we already believe, but there is also a “backfire effect,” which sees people doubling down on their beliefs after being presented with evidence that contradicts them. So, where do we go from here? There’s no simple answer, but the only way people will start rejecting falsehoods being fed to them is by confronting uncomfortable truths.

Emma Roller writing in the New York Times

Motivated reasoning

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Motivated reasoning is thinking through a topic with the aim, conscious or unconscious, of reaching a particular kind of conclusion. In a football game, we see the fouls committed by the other team but overlook the sins of our own side. We are more likely to notice what we want to notice. Experts are not immune to motivated reasoning. Under some circumstances their expertise can even become a disadvantage. 

People with deeper expertise are better equipped to spot deception, but if they fall into the trap of motivated reasoning, they are able to muster more reasons to believe whatever they really wish to believe.

Tim Harford, How to Make the World Add Up

Once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy

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The implicit assumption behind any goal is this: “Once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy.” The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone.  

Furthermore, goals create an “either-or” conflict: either you achieve your goal and are successful or you fail and you are a disappointment. You mentally box yourself into a narrow version of happiness. This is misguided. It is unlikely that your actual path through life will match the exact journey you had in mind when you set out.  

James Clear, Atomic Habits

Acting The Part

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The late Oscar-winning director Sydney Pollack once told me that he was at a loss when he first moved behind the camera, so he simply acted like a director. 

 The feeling of not being up to the job, the belief that the role is too big, is something every leader has felt. It is evidence that the role is greater than the individual—and thus worth taking on. Pollack made the leader's requisite leap into the unknown, accepting the risk of failure that is the first step in becoming a leader—and he excelled. 

That adaptive capacity is the most important attribute in determining who will become a leader. It's also the defining trait of the best actors. Inhabiting roles other than the one most of us think of as self is essential to both. So is the empathy needed to project yourself into someone else's skin.

Like great actors, great leaders create and sell an alternative vision of the world, a better one in which we are an essential part. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote that Churchill idealized his countrymen with such intensity that in the end they rose to his ideal. Mahatma Gandhi made India proud of herself. Washington and the other Founding-Fathers shared that great leader's gift of making people believe they could be—and were—part of a great nation. Martin Luther King Jr. had that same genius. 

When you consider such towering and theatrical leaders, you realize leadership may be the greatest performing art of all—the only one that creates institutions of lasting value, institutions that can endure long after the stars who envisioned them have left the theater. 

Warren Bennis, The Essential Bennis

A better option than giving advice

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Giving advice feels good, but it doesn’t empower other people. Experts suggest that instead of telling others what to do, we coach them to find their own solutions. This approach is more motivating and helps others grow. While it takes more time asking questions to guide others into their own answers, doing so lets other people develop independence, increasing their productivity. This also frees you to accomplish more.