Pragmatic Thinking and Learning - 48 Tips

1. Always consider the context.
2. Use rules for novices, intuition for experts.
3. Know what you don’t know.
4. Learn by watching and imitating.
5. Keep practicing in order to remain expert.
6. Avoid formal methods if you need creativity, intuition, or inventiveness.
7. Learn the skill of learning.
8. Capture all ideas to get more of them.
9. Learn by synthesis as well as by analysis.
10. Strive for good design; it really works better.
11. Rewire your brain with belief and constant practice.
12. Add sensory experience to engage more of your brain.
13. Lead with; follow with.
14. Use metaphor as the meeting place betweenand.
15. Cultivate humor to build stronger metaphors.
16. Step away from the keyboard to solve hard problems.
17. Change your viewpoint to solve the problem.
18. Watch the outliers: “rarely” doesn’t mean “never.”
19. Be comfortable with uncertainty.
20. Trust ink over memory; every mental read is a write.
21. Hedge your bets with diversity.
22. Allow for different bugs in different people.
23. Act like you’ve evolved: breathe, don’t hiss.
24. Trust intuition, but verify.
25. Create SMART objectives to reach your goals.
26. Plan your investment in learning deliberately.
27. Discover how you learn best.
28. Form study groups to learn and teach.
29. Read deliberately.
30. Take notes with bothand.
31. Write on: documenting is more important than documen- tation.
32. See it. Do it. Teach it.
33. Play more in order to learn more.
34. Learn from similarities; unlearn from differences.
35. Explore, invent, and apply in your environment—safely.
36. See without judging and then act.
37. Give yourself permission to fail; it’s the path to success.
38. Groove your mind for success.
39. Learn to pay attention.
40. Make thinking time.
41. Use a wiki to manage information and knowledge.
42. Establish rules of engagement to manage interruptions.
43. Send less email, and you’ll receive less email.
44. Choose your own tempo for an email conversation.
45. Mask interrupts to maintain focus.
46. Use multiple monitors to avoid context switching.
47. Optimize your personal workflow to maximize context.
48. Grab the wheel. You can’t steer on autopilot.