Thomas Edison was one of the great inventors and businessmen of all time but he had a tendency to rely only on his own bank of knowledge. Why shouldn’t he? He had been enormously successful until he was asked to change his own way of thinking.
People make decisions based on what they know. Well, that makes perfectly good sense, right? There’s a name for using what you know to make a decision. It is called the availability heuristic. It is quicker and easier to decide based on what you know than it is to learn something new.
In the early 1400s China assembled fleets of dozens of ships carrying as many as 20,000 people or more to explore the world. Does a country’s history create a certain psyche for that country?
Published in 2011, this book continues to change how we understand decision-making and behavior. It is the basis for the early blogs in Learning about Leadership. Rather than attempt to review a 400 page book, we decided to provide a taste of why you should read it.
When we are young, what we are learning wires our brain. When we are older, our brain modifies what we are learning to fit what we already know – what is already wired.
Many of us like to imagine ourselves as adventurous but are we really? Might we really be far more cautious by nature than we care to admit? The tendency to stick with what is familiar is powerful.
Can students learn deeply without learning surface knowledge?
Suppose you are having a parent-teacher conference, it’s the end of the first six weeks, and the parent says, “Has my child learned much in your class? How do you respond?
We value confidence in a leader, but confidence in what? Typically, we value self-confidence but is self-confidence over valued? Do we need leaders with a decent dose of self-doubt?
There is a science of learning but very few of us studied it in college, or since. If we want to improve student learning, we can look to the science of learning.