Are You Doing Things In The Zone Of Desirable Difficulty?
Edition #182
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best. It also enables you to draw a blueprint for what it takes to get extraordinary things done. You can share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation here.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession, to drive peak performance.
The Creativity Hack No One Told You About: Read the Obits.
In a world of templates, sameness, and machine algorithms that build on what you do or search by throwing more of the same, Keith Sawyer, one of the world’s leading creativity researchers, writes about what does it take to come up with creative ideas that are genuinely original and ones that can lead to breakthroughs. Keith talks about obituaries, of all the unlikely places, where one can get new but original creative ideas! Here are some of the key points he makes in this article:
‘One popular piece of advice for boosting creativity is to learn something new every day.’
‘Creativity thrives on making connections between very different concepts.’
‘Creative ideas are more likely to emerge from combinations of concepts that are further apart in the mind’s conceptual network.’
‘The more conceptually distant the two ideas are, the more creative their combination tends to be.’
How can obituaries be an ideal way to boost your creativity? ‘Will any of the life stories you read cause you to have a surprising, creative insight? In every person’s life story, there’s always a narrative, always a deeper principle at work…research shows that distant analogies often lead to creative breakthroughs, often in unexpected ways. What you’re doing is filling up your brain with a range of very different cognitive material.’
Read the entire article here.
How AI Could Solve Education (Instead Of Breaking It).
We often hear a lot of chatter around how AI is disrupting education and how students are misusing AI in their classrooms and schools, which is leading to poor learning outcomes and understanding of different concepts.
In this podcast by Neuron, Corey Noles, the editor of The Neuron, and Grant Harvey talk about how AI can transform learning gains and help teachers in ways that could have never been imagined before.
Here are some key thoughts from the conversation that will make you want to listen to the entire episode:
“I think the key element that kids are going to need to leave school with tomorrow, well, today, frankly, is a stronger ability to learn on their own.”
‘Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor, points out that when students are given unguided ChatGPT versus when they're given a teacher-assisted, teacher-guided tool that basically the teachers designed specifically to help learning, the results are very fascinating.”
“Resistance to using certain tools in a classroom is nothing new at all. Calculators in the 20th Century…a similar thing happened with personal computers. All the kids who didn't have access to the PC at that time… were at a disadvantage compared to the kids who did.”
“In fact, by 2017, it was found that homework only helped 45% of students, and that's down from 86% in 2008, because a lot of people will just copy the answers online. I'm sure it now helps like 0% of students because of ChatGPT.”
“The focus needs to be on learning, not just proving learning.”
“AI system keeps track of your individual track as the student, and you only move on to the next subject once you've proven that you've mastered. Then, once you've mastered that, you move on. So, you know, they say students(start to) learn twice as fast.”
“Teachers are using AI too… On average, 37% use it for lesson planning. 80% say it saves time on worksheets and assessments. And 64% report better quality when modifying student materials. So, 64% actually think they do better at creating their students, with AI.”
“What does the science say about how we actually learn? In school, a lot of times, the thought is like, you need to read it multiple times and underline it, and practice memorizing it, and that is what actually leads to learning. Struggling with it makes a lot of sense because there's this thing called desirable difficulties, and desirable difficulty is basically, you want something in a range where here's where you are now, and you know what you don't know, and to learn the next level of something you need to know, it needs to be just hard enough that you can build on what you already know in order to get there and put it together.”
“An AI tutor would be able to help explain that to you in a way that's personal to you, that is relatable back to you. We're not there yet, but there are some prompts that you can use to help you create this with the tools that are available now.”
You can also listen to the entire episode on:
On Culture | Ben Horowitz with David Weiden.
In this video, Ben Horowitz, Co-founder, Andreessen Horowitz, talks about what culture really means and how to decode various aspects of company culture.
Ben’s definition of what exactly the meaning of culture is really lucid, vivid and laser sharp. He defines culture in a simple but easy way that can be understood, and he goes on to explain this with some great examples of great leaders and visionaries he has interacted with and worked with. Here’s a snapshot of some lovely moments and thoughts from the conversation:
Ben quotes Bushido’s definition of what culture really means: “Culture is not a set of beliefs, but it's a set of actions.”
“Culture is the little things like… somebody calls…. do you call them back in five minutes…. an hour the next day, or do you just drop them on the floor and never call them back. Or do you show up on time for meetings, or five minutes late, or ten minutes late?”
“When you're talking to somebody, realize you're not talking to that person, you're talking to everybody in the company.”
“The thing that makes you(CEO) good is some combination of competence and confidence, and the difficulty with boards and VCs is they're really good at identifying what you can't do.”
“This is my company, whatever I contribute is going to matter because this is something that I built and that feeling, the longer you can preserve it, the better your company is going to be.”
You can click on the above link and watch the video.
Are You Doing Things In The Zone Of Desirable Difficulty?
Cary Noles and Grant Harvey talk about an intriguing term called ‘desirable difficulty’ as something important when it comes to learning and retaining what you learn. It is such a powerful concept that it has applications not just for learning at school but also for learning new skills when you go to work and strive to achieve mastery at work, too. As you get older and maybe even as you gain more experience at work or anything that you do over the years, you tend to reduce or lose the ‘zone of desirable difficulty’ that you started your career with. Hence, there is bound to be ‘learning decay’, which puts you under mental stress and also under the lens at the workplace. This ‘learning decay’ is not visible to you in the short term, but it starts to show up, and you realize it over time. By then, it is too late. Hence, learning to stay in the ‘zone of difficulty’ and continuously increasing the ‘degree of difficulty’ is vital to remain relevant and competitive in your field.
So, what is ‘Desirable Difficulty’?
‘Desirable Difficulties’ is a term coined by Robert Bjork, a leading psychologist at UCLA. ‘Desirable difficulties’ are learning tasks that are more effortful but ultimately lead to better long-term retention, transfer, and mastery of knowledge or skills. Robert Bjork concluded in his research that making learning harder in the short term can improve performance in the long term, provided the difficulty is "desirable", i.e., just hard enough to challenge but not discourage the learner.
When there is ‘cognitive strain’, it leads to richer encoding, which means it helps you process different sensory inputs like words(semantic encoding), images( visual encoding), and sounds(acoustic encoding) and helps it stick in your long-term memory. It also enables you to learn better when you make minor and acceptable errors, which helps you retain and reinforce correct information. And finally, there is a forced retrieval of what you know, and it creates new synaptic connections, which is a method of reinforced learning, too.
So, when things are too comfortable, it gives you an illusion of competence, and when you struggle with the feedback you get, it allows you to build real expertise.
Therefore, if your job gets too comfortable or you seek a comfortable job, these are early signs of a reduction in your ‘zone of difficulty’ and the early stage of onset of ‘skill decay’ as your learning reduces over time in anything that you are doing.
So, how do you practice being in the ‘Zone of desirable difficulty’?
Out of the many practices that Robert Djork recommends, some of the ones that are relevant to learning or enhancing your skills in your path to either becoming or staying as an expert or achieving or maintaining your mastery are:
Interleaving - mixing different topics or skills during practice. For example, applying what you know to a problem and using a new concept or technology that is emerging in your field or a technique from a totally new field that you came across to solve the problem differently. This will make you a little uncomfortable or slightly increase your chances of making an error, but improve your ability to transfer and apply new concepts.
Change the conditions you are typically used to - When you vary the conditions or environments that you are normally comfortable with, it adds a new perspective. It enhances your flexibility or adaptability, which leads to handling new situations or challenges better.
If the degree of difficulty is too steep, it can lead to frustration. When there is no feedback, it results in a higher error rate velocity as conditions continue to change in the external environment, but you are not paying attention to them. Finally, when it is done without a context setting, it creates motivation and meaning for the effort.
Great leaders or managers set up a platform for you to play in your ‘Zone of Desirable Difficulty'. They have an intuitive sense of this. Bad leaders and managers often fail to understand how this differs across individuals. Great professionals are self-aware and also find a way of doing it themselves by constantly changing their ‘Zone of Desirable Difficulty’.
Currently, evaluate if you are playing in your ‘Zone of Desirable Difficulty’? If not, move the needle up.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
To boost creative thinking, learn something new every day.
The future of learning is building a stronger ability to learn on your own.
Culture is not a set of values or beliefs but a set of actions and behaviour.