Tag: #mindset
Writing on GPUs, LLMs, MLOps, Kubernetes — and mindset · 81 posts
Fourteen Things Table Tennis Taught Me: Skill Makes the Relationships, a Title Blocks the Growth
Fourteen principles from years of playing table tennis, and how they carry over into work and life. The structure that turns skill into an entry ticket to relationships, why playing only for fun never makes you better, a
2026-08-16 · 11 min read #mindset#growth#deliberate-practice#sports#careerWhat It Means to Be Smart: What Gets Measured and What Does Not
The word intelligence has three different things mixed into it. The general factor as a statistical regularity, CHC as the mainstream model of psychometrics, and the social usage we reach for when we size someone up in d
2026-08-16 · 14 min read #mindset#intelligence#psychometrics#expertise#evidenceThe Power of Small Habits — The 21-Day Myth, the 66-Day Median, the 18-to-254-Day Reality
The claim that a habit takes 21 days has no research behind it. That number came from a plastic surgeon's observation in 1960. The most-cited habit-formation study, from Lally and colleagues, actually reported an average
2026-08-16 · 12 min read #mindset#habits#psychology#self-improvement#2026-08How Not to Wait for Motivation — Drive Is Not So Much the Cause of Action as, Often, Its Result
Why does the plan to start once the drive arrives fail structurally? The order of action and mood as shown by a behavioural activation meta-analysis, the autonomy, competence and relatedness of self-determination theory,
2026-08-16 · 12 min read #mindset#motivation#psychology#self-improvement#2026-08Experts Do Not Know More, They See Differently
The 1973 chessboard experiment is the starting point of expertise research. Masters remember real game positions far better, but on randomly scattered arrangements most of that advantage disappears. That means pattern pe
2026-08-16 · 13 min read #mindset#learning#expertise#chunking#perceptionThe Road to Becoming an Expert: Feedback First, Volume Second
This post moves the evidence set out in the previous four posts into an executable form. Narrow the domain to where feedback arrives, build the feedback loop before you build the volume, practise under the conditions you
2026-08-16 · 14 min read #mindset#learning#expertise#deliberate-practice#careerThe Structure of Being Good — Self-Assessment, Feedback, and a Narrow Scope
The wish to be good at something runs strong, yet what being good is actually made of is a question people ask surprisingly rarely. This is a map post that lays out the structure of skill in three pillars: calibrated sel
2026-08-16 · 10 min read #mindset#growth#deliberate-practice#self-improvement#2026-08When Your Purpose Is Unclear — Clarity Is Not a Precondition for Starting
Why does the strategy of waiting until purpose becomes clear fail, in a state of not knowing what you are living for? The view that purpose is discovered downstream of accumulation rather than upstream of planning, the l
2026-08-16 · 12 min read #mindset#purpose#career#self-improvement#2026-08The Structure of Practice: Why Practice That Goes Well and Practice That Lasts Are Different
Spacing, retrieval practice, mixing things up. Three things with relatively solid evidence in learning research, set out together with their effect sizes. And then the central paradox of the field: the conditions that ma
2026-08-16 · 14 min read #mindset#learning#practice#retrieval#spacingHow Not to Lower Your Standards: A Structural Problem, Not a Willpower One
Standards do not collapse because you decide to let them go. They slip quietly through unnamed exceptions, renegotiation while exhausted, and convergence on the median of what surrounds you. This piece covers the five me
2026-08-16 · 7 min read #mindset#standards#discipline#growth#2026-08Metacognition — The Gap Between Feeling You Know and Knowing
Metacognition lost its definition as it became a buzzword. This post returns to the original definition of monitoring and control, and sets out the way the feeling of knowing is manufactured from fluency as a proxy signa
2026-08-16 · 12 min read #mindset#metacognition#learning#psychology#2026-08People Do Not Change Easily, and People Change — The Evidence and Speed of Personality Change
The statement that people do not change and the statement that people can change are both true, and that tension is the subject of this post. The rank-order stability of the Big Five that holds throughout adulthood, the
2026-08-16 · 12 min read #mindset#personality#psychology#self-improvement#2026-08What It Means to Work Hard — Effort Is Not a Virtue but a Problem of Allocation
The advice to work hard carries no direction. Treat effort as a budget rather than a total and the picture changes. The nonlinear relationship between working hours and output, a meta-analysis of more than 600,000 people
2026-08-16 · 12 min read #mindset#productivity#burnout#self-improvement#2026-08What Studying Well and Playing Sport Well Share Is Narrower Than It Looks
Is there really an ability that carries over between studying and sport, between coding and playing an instrument? The conclusion of the cognitive-training transfer literature runs against popular expectation. Near trans
2026-08-16 · 13 min read #mindset#learning#expertise#transfer#evidenceThe Illusion of Talent — What the Practice Research Actually Says, and What Actually Compounds
In late July 2026, "The Illusion of Talent" climbed to the top of GeekNews. The title makes it sound like a scientific dispute about talent and practice, but the original is a personal essay about a junior developer's ca
2026-07-31 · 14 min read #career#deliberate-practice#expertise#psych-papers#mindsetThe Experiment Where One Dollar Beat Twenty — Cognitive Dissonance and Sixty Years of Rebuttal
Participants were made to do a deliberately boring task, then asked to lie about it. One group was paid one dollar, the other twenty dollars. The people who later rated the task as more enjoyable were the ones who had be
2026-07-26 · 13 min read #psychology#paper-review#social-psychology#decision-making#mindsetOn Getting Older — Where the Common Story and the Data Come Apart
Across data from many countries, the age at which life satisfaction is lowest sits somewhere around forty-seven, and after that it mostly rises. The U-curve does have serious critics, though. This post walks through the
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #mindset#aging#psychology#life#healthLoneliness Works Like Hunger — How to Read a Signal of Deficit
Loneliness is not the state of being alone. It is the gap between the relationships you want and the ones you actually have. John Cacioppo read that sensation as a deficit signal from the same family as hunger and thirst
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #mindset#healing#loneliness#relationships#connectionHow to Decide Well — A Good Decision and a Good Outcome Are Not the Same Thing
When the last pass of the Super Bowl was intercepted, everyone called it the worst call in history. But grading a decision by its outcome erases almost everything there was to learn from it. Here is the idea of resulting
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #mindset#decision-making#psychology#productivity#self-improvementHow to End Things Well — The Skill Nobody Taught Us
We learn how to start things countless times, but nobody ever taught us how to end them. This post looks at the structure by which the sunk cost fallacy keeps us pinned down, the one-sentence question Andy Grove asked at
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #mindset#endings#sunk-cost#decision-making#retrospective