Paddy Upton's Barefoot Coach

Paddy Upton is not just a sports coach. He is also a researcher and professor. Instead of anecdotes and personal coaching style tips,  he brings-in a comprehensive thesis on achieving excellence based on latest research findings in this great book. He provides a lot of insights for individuals as well as leaders. For a cricket crazy nation, this book is bound to resonate very well and I hope many reads it. I am not that much into Cricket(or any other sports for that matter), but I found the lessons  interesting are equally applicable to any pursuit. 

Core part of the story is about what did Paddy, as mental conditioning coach for Indian cricket team in the ICC 2011 world cup campaign,  try and how it helped in India winning the cup. Key takeaways in my opinion are 

1. Identify your values(if have not done already) and take it seriously
2. Focus more on ones strengths rather than weakness
3. Focus on the process rather than the outcomes
4. Empower the individuals or if you are that individual be empowered
5. Use your intuition appropriately
6. Practice to be in the moment and operate in the 'zone'. Consciously avoid distractions
7. While the advice is not to focus on the outcome, don't use that as an excuse. Be 200% committed to the outcome. 
8. Review and learn from failures and then move on

These points would sound obvious and boring, that is why I urge everyone to read this book and put the insights you learn into practice. Become your best self.

Learning, Thinking and Thinking about Thinking aka Metacognition

“It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain

Why? 

I am passionate about Learning and Knowledge(Just to be clear, I am not bragging that I am a learner or knowledgeable person. It's the process I am curious about). As usual I need to answer the why question at the outset and at a very basic level. Otherwise, this piece wont progress. 
Learning is not about intelligence or even basic cognitive capabilities. Even inanimate things learn. At least that is what my hypothesis is. For example light knows(?) to travel exactly at a constant speed. No more and no less. How did that happen? We can extend this argument to every observable behavior of animate and inanimate things. How did a Deer learn to run at the sight of a predator Tiger? All these can be explained with evolutionary theory. Any Deer that wanted to stand and fight a Tiger would have died a long time ago giving it no opportunity to leave an offspring for us to observe. Similarly an inanimate thing has its behavior because anything else would have been unstable and died off long time ago. May be there was an universe where light was traveling at different speed but it was unstable and got destroyed.
The point for the humans with cognitive capabilities is that if we don't continuously learn the right thing we will disappear.  Nature gives a long rope we can do a lot of stupid things and still not perish. That is why even when we do not know what is that absolutely correct way of behaving we are still able to survive. No one knows, no one would ever know or there is no such absolute correct way of behaving. But it is clear that there are many things which we absolutely should not do if we don't want to perish. Humans or anything for that matter will eventually learn, but the choices for us are, either we leave the control of learning process to evolution or take it in our hand and constantly learn so the pursuit of knowledge can be accelerated.
As a species named sapience( knows), not just knows but knows that it knows, it's an obligation for humans to continuously learn. Learn so we don't perish and continuously because knowledge is evolving continuously.
Fixed Mindset and Growth mindset.Then the question comes how to learn effectively? Learning is generally associated with intelligence and smartness. We celebrate smart people. But latest research suggests smartness is achieved via hard work and practice. The more we praise smartness/intelligence a person tends to assume since they are already smart they don't have to work hard for learning. This is called fixed mindset, and it results in sub-optimal learning outcome. But if we celebrate and praise the hard work and process of learning more than the outcome itself, a person tends to work hard and practice more and more for learning. This is growth mindset. Researchers have shown kids and adults with a growth mindset do much better in learning outcome compared to the ones that have a fixed mindset.
UnlearningAnother aspect of learning is the unlearning part. The moment one is so sure of what they know and become dogmatic in the face of evidence to the contrary, it becomes a downward spiral. We need to cultivate the habit of unlearning things that don't work anymore.
Metacognition
We learn not just by hearing a lecture or reading a book. We learn mostly by thinking about all that we have received and observed. In fact thinking goes deeper. Consider this.

“I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am ” - Charles Horton Cooley

Ok, that's too much thinking there. But will you dispute that 'Thinking' defines us. In that case, don't we have to understand how we think. That is what Metacognition. Thinking about thinking. We need to take a step back and observe how we think and how we learn facts and form opinions. When we understand that, it makes us less susceptible to bias, pseudo sciences, and fake narratives.

Nurturing Intuition

Zen Buddhist and Japanese nationalist Master Nissho Inoue started a group popularly known as "Blood Oath Corps" in the early 1930s, with a purpose to restore the degrading national character of Japan by resorting to violence against politicians and rich business owners. One of the members of the group assassinated the Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai on 15 May 1932. Many attributes this assassination as one the defining events that eventually led to consolidation of power which emboldened Japan to enter World War II. Though the core teaching of Buddhism is compassion to all, what caused a committed Zen master to resort to violence and murder.

In his trial when asked about his political ideology behind his actions, he replied: "It is more correct to say that I have no systematised ideas. I transcend reason and act completely upon intuition." 

As a fan of mindfulness and Zen, I was bewildered while reading this insightful Aeon article on "Zen Terror". We were discussing about the power of intuition and this case shows, acting completely upon Intuition, even for a seasoned Zen master, could result in terrible outcomes.

Acting based on pure reason may be impractical, that is the reason all of us resort to intuition to make quick decisions. And many glorify the intuitive decision making. I think, while we use intuition all the time, we need to be careful about it. Intuition is essentially informed by reasoned analysis. In his book “The Power of Intuition” , Gary Klein suggests we should not be depending neither on analysis  nor on intuition alone and rather we should use a blend of them. His model of intuition as shown in the picture below involves having a mental model and quickly rapidly simulating the scenario in the model and taking decisions upon the action script that passes the model. 

Illustration - https://readingraphics.com/book-summary-the-power-of-intuition/

By constantly reviewing the decisions and adjusting the mental model with reasoned and analytical inputs we can nurture the intuition. Considering intuition as a natural or divine gift and making intuitive decisions without regular reviews would lead to a toss of coin situation eventually.

Back to basics

It is the results season. Kids and parents are talking about what they have scored and which college to study next and how much money its going to cost. Lots of courses are talked about. But one thing I am very sure about is no parent or kid is talking about studying philosophy as a course. I am not even sure if BA philosophy is even offered as a degree course in some college. 

We want results and now. Job and immediately after degree. Profit and right after one starts of business. When I read about "First Principles Approach" I just fell in love with that concept. One can say it's a fancy way of saying "Ask Why", which it kind of is.  Nevertheless when we look at the world from a "First Principles" point of view it gives a completely different meaning to even mundane things . Your decisions become much more clear. It also shows how people are completely unable to do simple reasoning on their every day decisions or when they take a political position. Don't get me wrong, this is not hubris. Most people would take a much better decision than me, but I am also certain most people don't have solid reasoning on why they take a particular decision. Social and empirical rules influence our decisions a lot or at least help to get to one quickly. But the problem is that decisions that doesn't have solid reasoning also hampers the society and self in making progress. Irrationality creeps in and costs a lot of money, time, opportunities and creates avoidable problems. I think that's why studying philosophy will train the society to reason right and wrong, ethics and morals, instead of just taking deciding from empirical formulas.

I was extremely glad when I saw the an assignment on Kantian and Utilitarian approaches to ethics in our Information Systems course. I was hoping that we would have detailed discussion. But due to lack of time and probably also due to our aversion of anything philosophy we did not delve into the first principles of ethics of privacy policies of IT companies in our class. I would have enjoyed that session.

I am kind of digressing; it's getting late and you are losing interest. My argument is that we think education and learning is a way to get a job or advance our career or improve the profit as a business. I think it is wrong and counter productive. We need to go back to basics, learn the first principles, and have a philosophical construct. Then one would learn to make better decisions and that will help him/her with better jobs, advance career and help improve profit of their organizations.

I am looking forward to a day when Logic and Categorical imperative is taught in Kindergarten and beyond.