Professional Documents
Culture Documents
These chapters
introduce a number of general principles of rapid skill acquisition and effective learning. The remaining chapters, on yoga, programming,
touch typing, go, ukulele and windsurfing, are meant to illustrate how the author applied those principles to learning each of these skills. As
one reviewer has pointed out, however, there is “relatively little connection between what [the author] writes about (say) the history and
practice of Yoga and the principles expounded in the first few chapters.” For this reason, these chapters are omitted in the summary below.
Skill acquisition is fundamentally different from learning. Learning is only instrumentally useful: we don’t acquire a skill by learning; rather,
we learn to acquire a skill. Learning concepts related to a skill helps you self-edit or self-correct as you practice.