All of these books fall into the category of rounding out my world view. I’m an engineer, and spent nearly 100% of 10-12 years of my life (school plus early career) focused solely on engineering topics. These books have made me drastically more effective at achieving personal and professional goals, especially ones that require cooperation of other people.
My process is to dig in and really try to apply the knowledge in some place where it is required to solve the problem.
This has never failed me, but it’s hard, because it’s WORK. You can’t just sit and consume material (though consuming material is important). My typical strategy for consumption of material is to do such when I hit a road block in the application of my knowledge.
A few concrete examples to get the idea:
Want to learn about how cars work? Don’t take your car to a mechanic, force yourself to fix it.
Want to learn about electronics? Build an electronics project.
Want to learn about machine learning? Build an actual ML powered software application.
Want to learn about math? Use it to solve a real problem (physics/engineering has some of the most concrete representations of applied math from algebra to through differential equations, etc)
More difficult subjects will take more “projects” in order for you to gain in-depth knowledge. However, nothing beats experience at applying the knowledge in order to achieve true mastery.
Where some folks get hung up is they think they need to pass some knowledge threshold before they begin to try to apply it. I think this is false, for any application where a lack of knowledge is not actually dangerous. The sooner you try to apply what you know, the sooner you will master the subject.
I really like thought exercises like this, but find it troublesome when authors (like this one) do not offer alternatives that address the weakness of the common approach, they just just point the weaknesses out and metaphorically “shrug”.
Left with this, people will still revert to the status quo because they’ve been offered no true alternative that provides more value.
Never Split the Difference - Chriss Voss
Three Laws of Performance - Steve Zaffron
Peak - Anders Ericsson
All of these books fall into the category of rounding out my world view. I’m an engineer, and spent nearly 100% of 10-12 years of my life (school plus early career) focused solely on engineering topics. These books have made me drastically more effective at achieving personal and professional goals, especially ones that require cooperation of other people.