Tag Archive for 'Psychology'

It Bears Repeating

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on August 16, 2010
in Strategy
. 0 Comments

Let me start this post by noticing that the sentence «It bears repeating» can be found on answers.com, categorized as follows:

Answers.com > Wiki Answers > Categories > Animal Life > Wild Animals > Mammals > Land Mammals > Bears > Black Brown and Grizzly Bears > Bears or Bares repeating?

Nice one. And now, for something completely different, if you’ve done any speech writing, you know that a speech should have a central theme, a leitmotiv, a single idea that it tries to get across, and any other elements in the speech are just salad dressing wrapped around that idea to help it come across correctly.

Apple Keynotes are an excellent example, because their leitmotiv is quite obvious:

What is very interesting about Apple keynotes is how obvious their leitmotiv is : they’re great. They’re fantastic. They’re awesome. They’re easy to use. And they only have one message, so that when all those tech editors and bloggers and sneezers leave the conference room, the message just sticks.

Did I mention my blog is awesome?

You might grab the attention of several people. That’s not very hard, assuming that you have the right network or enough money. You can speak to them. Maybe they’re willing to listen to everything you say (as in the Apple Keynote crowd situation). Maybe they’re willing to remember everything you say (as in a typical classroom situation). But they’re not geniuses. No one becomes an expert just because they’ve listened to another expert for a short while.

You can have your audience leave with one idea. One emotion. What is it going to be?

Where Has The Magic Gone?

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on August 13, 2010
in People
. 1 Comment

Last month, Chris “powerpig” McVeigh uploaded this image to his flickr account:
Picture of Darth Vader riding a chipmunk
Yes, this is Darth Vader riding a chipmunk. In the days of yore, one would say that the image was edited, tampered with, or fake. Today, we say that it has been photoshopped (or shopped). This goes a long way to show how iconic Adobe’s software has become. I still remember the early days of Photoshop 6.0, when the splash screen still showing the 33 authors and 14 patents of the software.

Except that this image is not photoshopped. Chris McVeigh uploaded a video a short while later to explain this fact:

I understand that my chipmunk photography can seem unbelievable at times, and I’m used to getting questions such as “How did you do that?” and “Is it all Photoshop?”

As this video will show, it’s all happening right there in front of the camera. I get no satisfaction out of a composited photo—the challenge for me is to capture the chipmunk engaged in a real and rather extraordinary situation.

The challenge. If you’re in my generation, you’ve been in school at a time when only the nerdy computer users ever managed to print the papers they handed in. And other people looked at them and said «wow, this is so cool, you must have used a computer» with a tinge of admiration in their voice—or was that fear? Back in the 90s, using a computer to print documents was surprising for a 14-year-old.

And now, the magic is gone. Kids look at you in disbelief when you suggest they write their paper, then go back to copy-pasting Wikipedia articles.

People used to be amazed when they saw an actual programmer. Software was some kind of magic resource that appeared in the bowels of huge mega-corporations with thousands of engineers and millions of dollars in budget. A few people had heard about shareware, yes, but those were the exception. When you showed people that you could program computers, they would all go «oooh» and «aaaah» and beautiful young girls would ask to have sex with you (or at least, that’s what the pictures in the pop-ups said).

That magic is gone as well, with the rise of the reclusive anti-social geek stereotype.

And yet… A few days ago, I was commuting in the Parisian subway. Next to every subway door, there’s a map like this one:

plan-de-metro-bonne-definition

Sitting next to the door was a young girl with an HTC smartphone I did not recognize. Her head was literally inches from the map on the door, at a perfect reading distance. And yet, she fumbled around the cell phone interface and launched a subway map application that, for all practical purposes, was just an on-screen version of the map next to her. And then, she fingered the screen some more to scroll her current position into view.

Such a reliance on magic technology can only mean one thing — the geeks have won.

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Bounce Rates : Bait and Switch

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on August 11, 2010
in Strategy
. 0 Comments

You are a cell phone retailer, and you’ve bought a whole lot of Angbandroid cell phones. These phones are usually not sold to individuals: corporations buy them in bulk for their employees for about $50 apiece directly from the manufacturer. Besides, mainstream attention is focused on the upcoming CryPhone 3 which will sell at $349. And this gives you an idea, because you’re a filthy, conning cell phone retailer.

So, you bait some victims by running ads for a $299 CryPhone 3. Customers start flowing into your shop, and you switch by telling them that the price was so low you’ve sold all your CryPhone 3 models in minutes, and to apologize you will let them buy the enterprise-only, high-quality Angbandroid models for the bargain price of $319.

A lot of people will just leave because they were looking for the CryPhone 3 and no substitute will do. A few will decide that:

  • They’ve come all the way to your shop, they might as well buy something
  • You sold the CryPhone 3 at -15%, so the $319 Angbandroid is probably a good price.
  • The Angbandroid costs more than the CryPhone 3, so it must be better.
  • The Angbandroid is an enterprise-only phone, so this must be an unique opportunity.
  • $319 is within their $349 budget for a CryPhone 3.

Five good reasons for buying the phone, and you just made an 84% margin.

Bait-and-Switch is a type of fraud, and it’s illegal in many countries. The principles behind it are well-known powerful cognitive biases such as bad assessment of sunk costs, price anchoring and  post-purchase rationalization, so they can be applied in many situations that would not legally qualify as a bait-and-switch fraud.

For a real-life example, consider this: Pixmania (an online retailer) advertises low prices on price comparison web sites, such as €48 for a flatbed scanner instead of an average market price of €51. However, delivery costs (which you only discover once you’re midway through the ordering process) are at least €6, which brings the price up to €54—and even picking up the flatbed scanner from their warehouse in Paris counts as a delivery. Other retailers do not charge anything if you pick up the item yourself, so you can actually find that flatbed scanner for €51. The Pixmania trick is too small to count as a fraud, but it relies on the same basic principles.

And then, they started spamming me weekly because I had entered my e-mail address when I started ordering. /me waves a flamethrower at Pixmania.

Bait-and-Switch is dangerous. If your customers suspect that you’re using bait-and-switch techniques to sell them something when they were actually looking for something else, you’re in trouble. Not only will they stop buying from you, but they will also tell everyone who listens to them—god forbid that they should be an influent twitter user. And you should be extra careful because this can happen even if you honestly never intended to use bait-and-switch at all.

Bounce Rates

I personally use bait-and-switch a lot. I don’t really mean to, but that’s just how search engines work.

My page on how Doodle God does Marketing is on the first results page for «Doodle God Easter Eggs», which brings me a healthy number of daily visits looking for such easter eggs. Some of these people are bound to think that I’m a jerk trolling for Google hits when in fact I’m just really good at unintentional SEO (I should start a consulting gig…).

My page on how Magento was pretty secure in early 2009 is literally the first result for «Hacking Magento», and it has been the most visited page on this web site so far. There’s no doubt here that 99% of the people who read that page are looking for a way to hack into a Magento store, and will be pretty disappointed when they find out I didn’t write a how-to guide.

On the other hand, I’m pretty happy that the person who looked for «web sex performer nicollet» yesterday was not satisfied by this blog.

The bounce rate is the percentage of first-time visitors who leave your web site after viewing only one page. If they’re coming from a search engine, this could mean they didn’t like what they found there, because if they did, they would have explored your web site a little further.

My Doodle God page has a 91% bounce rate – only one person in ten decides that the rest of my blog would be worth exploring. The Hacking Magento page has a 83% bounce rate – one person in five. Most people who end up on those pages did not find what they were looking for.

By contrast, the bounce rate on my About Me page is 0% – all the people who end up there (usually looking for “Victor Nicollet”) are happy with what they found.

Then again, who wouldn’t? ;)

Posts With Great Titles and Bad Content

Blue Man Group – The Outsider

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on August 9, 2010
in People
. 1 Comment

The Blue Man Group consists in several musical theatre troupes, acting all around the world, that follow the same conventions: three characters designed to be identical (the same size, the same body shape, the same blue latex bald caps and black clothes, and no voices), acting as outsiders to our modern world.

This is a short video of an interview with founders Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton and Chris Wink:

My favorite quote here is from Matt Goldman:

The group of three is the smallest contingent where you can have an outsider.

Find two other people and start discussing something. Could be a topic in the news, what you ate for lunch, a project you’re working, or a new start-up.

Sometimes, one will be talking and the others will listen. He is the outsider.

Sometimes, two will be discussing the topic while the third listens. He is the outsider.

Sometimes, two will agree and the third will disagree. He is the outsider.

Sometimes, one will have the solution when the other two are lost. He is the outsider.

We find the 2vs1 situation inherently remarkable, fun or interesting, because it makes it easier to see what is the norm and who is anormal. The outsider introduces creativity and disruption into the mix, where the two others provide stability and prevent the entire thing from going astray too much. As long as you switch roles often enough, there’s enough energy in a group of three to keep a discussion going forward for a while.

Three people is an entirely different group dynamic from only two people (and of course, the group dynamics of being only one person are different as well).

  • One person is excellent for eliminating communication costs (maximum efficiency when you know what has to be done). If you can do it alone properly, then do it.
  • Two people are good for high-bandwidth information transfer, because there’s no interruption.
  • Three people are good for thinking outside the box, for creative meetings where one acts as the disruption and the other two are stabilizers. Less than two stabilizers leads to a situation that is too unstable. More than two stabilizers prevents things from going forward.

What are you trying to achieve? How many people do you really need in that meeting?

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My Ideas Love Having Sex

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on July 30, 2010
in People
. 0 Comments

They’re like that. Blame them. Actually, blame Matt Ridley, who gave a rather interesting 2010 Ted talk titled When ideas have sex. It’s just over fifteen minutes of pure sexy goodness:

To stand on Matt’s shoulders, I would say that as time passes, we are becoming better at sharing and combining ideas.

We improved how the ideas are packaged: that’s our ability to turn complex systems into black boxes. Almost every single thing we use today is a stack of countless layers of abstraction. In the 300 milliseconds this article took to reach your computer, it was encoded as HTML, sent over the HTTP protocol (which enables you to ask for a piece of data and receive it), which in turn is built on top of the TCP protocol (which enables you to communicate data to someone else). And your TCP uses the underlying IP protocol (which enables you to communicate fixed-size data packets to someone else). And IP is just a protocol used by routers to talk to each other, but the actual transmission involves fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, and relays, and error-checking. And there is not a single person on earth who can explain, in detail, what happens at all points during this transmission. Let alone understand the underlying physical properties of the cable and the routers and the processors in the routers and the transistors in those processors.

I know HTML, I kind-of-get HTTP, I understand the basic principles of TCP, I think I heard rumors about IP, and I honestly don’t know how data is actually transmitted over the ocean. Maybe there’s satellites?

We’re not standing on the shoulders of giants anymore. We’ve built a pyramid of midgets, with thousands of layers, and no one has any deep knowledge about more than one or two layers above and below.

And then, we improved how ideas are shared: that’s our ability to hear the ideas of thousands of people within the same week. Homo Erectus didn’t get to meet thousands of people in his entire life. The internet, with the ability for anyone to push their ideas forward for anyone to hear, is helping us.

First, we moved from the “no one talks to strangers” approach to the “one talks to the couple of strangers they meet every month” one when we started trading stuff in early history. Then, missionaries, books, radio and television finally introduced the “a few people speak to a lot of strangers” which, as long as those few people had great and original ideas, was even better. Now, we’re moving to “many people speak to many people“, which is less efficient as a whole for spreading ideas: there are more people talking, but you still only have 24 hours a day to listen to other people, which means the previously well-spread ideas get less audience. Where one church or one radio channel could be heard by everyone, now there are so many sources of information that none can get as many listeners as before.

On the other hand, this many-to-many universe means there’s a lot more potential for two ideas to meet. Instead of having idea A breed with ideas B, C, D; now you have pairings A-B, C-D and E-F. More pairings means more potential for an unexpectedly great outcome. As a society, we don’t need to help good ideas survive—we manage that quite well already. What we need is a way to help more good ideas emerge.

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Fwoosh!

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on July 26, 2010
in People
. 4 Comments

I have a fascination with flamethrowers. I’m lazy and I love fire, so anything that can let me burn things without having to stand up will get two thumbs up from me. One of the nice things about World War II is that they actually used flamethrowers on the battlefield.

Remember, back in the 1940s. Guns were scary because you knew they could kill you. Your brain is telling you that people die because of guns, so you’re scared. Artillery and mines are about the same, except for the russian roulette aspect: you know you can be blown to shreds, but that’s your brain talking.

But a flamethrower? You’re scared because you see that it can kill you. It’s your animal instincts. Animals are not afraid of guns, but they are afraid of flamethrowers. Nothing spells death like a fiery orange cloud.

“Yes, you love flamethrowers. Now get to the point”

The point. Right. What did flamethrowers actually not do in World War II ?

Work.

They didn’t work. They’re big, scary, macho killing machines, shinier than an iPhone 4 on your birthday, and they just didn’t work.

Turns out, they have a shorter range than almost every single gun in existence, and they look like giant flashing “shoot me from a distance” signs whenever you use them.

Has this every happened to you? To have that great idea, the one that looks like a real winner, the one that’s sure to work and make you millions? And a short while later, you find out that reality disagrees with your analysis?

Do you have any tips or techniques to avoid spending too much time on a flamethrower idea? Or how to recycle it once it goes bad, so that all the time you spent on it will not be wasted? Or how to actually distort reality into accepting your idea as the great world-changing concept you believe it should be?

Please tell me.

Related Posts Barbecues

I’m Twice the Man I Used to Be

Published
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Victor Nicollet
on July 13, 2010
in People
. 0 Comments

Like so many of us, I spent a lot of my early career suckling (metaphorically) at Joel Spolsky’s teat. Although he’s stopped writing, the archives are still a gold mine for people who might not know about him yet. For instance, back in the 2001 stone age of computing, he came up with this particular bit of knowledge about multitasking:

On the individual level — have you ever noticed that you can assign one job to one person, and they’ll do a great job, but if you assign two jobs to that person, they won’t really get anything done? They’ll either do one job well and neglect the other, or they’ll do both jobs so slowly you feel like slugs have more zip.

I’m not really into the whole « choose an idol and become a fan » thing, so whenever I read something online that makes sense, I start looking for the special cases: those boundary conditions where it stops making sense. Not only is it fun to nitpick about things written nine years ago, it’s also excellent food for thought.

Multi-tasking is a necessary evil. While a 1991 genius programmer could write a new OS  from scratch for a whole six months, stopping only for brief restroom pauses and keyboard-pillowed naps, he would miss the early stages of Linux and fail to contribute his efforts to a larger project.

pillow-keyboard

Your brain needs a co-pilot. While your main thought process spends all day working on a given task, there should be another smaller thought process that deals with the « why am I doing this? » question. What is important here is that the co-pilot should look at the work being done with a different pair of eyes in order to ask the relevant questions, without being blinded by the assumptions that have not been context-switched out yet or the emotional involvement related to sunk costs. Four eyes are better than two. That’s why there’s an actual co-pilot on most commercial flights.

It helps if you have an outspoken, annoying co-pilot personality. One that isn’t afraid to speak out when something is boring, demeaning or a waste of your time and money. One that can bullwhip you into correcting a nasty situation instead of letting it rot slowly. The kind that you’d love to punch. In the face. With a pineapple.

(And in case you were wondering, the title is a Duke Nukem quote from Balls of Steel).

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Understanding Social Media

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on June 30, 2010
in People
. 0 Comments

Every single thing that has ever happened on the internet can be explained using two very simple rules.

Rule 1 : there is too much content available.
Rule 2: some of that content is too interesting to miss.

As a consequence, most people on the internet mostly spend their time looking for the content that they want to see. And any tools, tips, techniques or tactics they can use to find that content will be successful.

Suppose you’re looking for specific content, such as the name and location of a nearby restaurant.

You can ask an automated service for the information—here, automated means that your query is processed in real-time without human intervention, even if the data was originally typed in by a human being. Sometimes, you’re lucky enough to have a specialized service for your question (Qype for restaurants, Stack Overflow for computer programming…) Sometimes, you have to resort to a general-purpose system (Wikipedia, Google…)

A recent evolution : if you’re looking for a product or service, chances are that providers of that service will have optimized their web sites to appear at the top of the search results for that query, making Google a good way to find product or service providers. This might create an artificial monopoly, as Google provides the best results, thereby prompting most users to use Google, thereby prompting most companies to optimize their web sites for Google, thereby helping Google provide the best results.

You can ask your friends and acquaintances. Depending on how specific the question is, you might get a very good answer from a trusted friend, or a set of blank looks. If you know an expert in the field, he might at least be able to point you in the right direction (an expert could be someone who eats in restaurants a lot, and can therefore point you to an appropriate automated service). This could be done by mail, or through networking sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, Viadeo…)

A big Facebook early win was to move from “I can find someone who might know, and send them a private message” approach that originated with e-mails and was perpetuated by LinkedIn et al, to “I can just publish the question, and all of my friends will see it”. This ability to tell everyone you know without being perceived as an inbox spammer is one of the core communication advantages of the new social network generation.

You can ask random people who might know about it. This is the general idea behind discussion forums and bulletin boards: many people who share a common interest huddle together, other people come there to ask questions about that common interest, and the well-informed old-timers answer. This is usually the last (and best) recourse when looking for extremely specific information.

A classic problem for such communities is to leverage the answers once the asker has moved on. The crudest technique for doing so is the FAQ, and it’s generally the only one available in real-time mediums like IRC. Search engines may be able to find discussion threads in forums, but they are rarely in an easily readable form because they rely on context and reading through several pages of replies, or sometimes even trees of replies. A big advantage for Stack Overflow is to have participants write in an easy-to-search, easy-to-read-later format, even if it feels less natural than standard message boards.

You can ask people whose job is to know about it. This is the typical “customer support” situation where you pay for having access to someone who can answer your questions about a certain topic. Assuming that the system works as advertised, the results are of a higher quality: these people are trained to provide information, very familiar with the problem domain, and effectively act as an authority that can be trusted.

Lately, a lot of companies started using Twitter to handle customer support. There are no serious technical benefits to doing so, especially since they also have to handle standard by-mail or by-online-form support for those people who don’t use Twitter. The real benefit is to differentiate yourself from old-school firms who don’t give a damn about customer support: customers will notice that you made an effort to set up a Twitter account, and they can look at the history for that account to see how serious you are about it. Twitter is basically an embodiment of show, don’t tell for customer support.

The other side of the coin is receiving information that you’re not actively looking for. You’re glad that someone sent you that link to I Can Has Cheezburger even though you weren’t looking for cute cat pictures in the first place. It’s like randomly browsing through the comic book section of your book store to find new comics worth reading, except that you want to spend as little time as possible looking for good comics, and you want to read only those comics that you like.

You can find a large website with interesting content. If the website is large enough, chances are that you’ll spend a while there before you run out of content. The only requirement is that the content should be consistent. Not having a specific editorial line can hurt a lot because readers don’t know what to expect (yes, I should be showing instead of telling). Examples include the entire I Can Has Cheezburger network, Cracked, Snopes and even Wikipedia. Obligatory XKCD reference:

People like “Best Of” lists for a reason: they’re afraid of ending up reading mediocre content. And even if a blog or website does happen to have quality content everywhere, you will run out of content sooner or later because you consume content faster than they can produce it.

Another possibility is to find an average website with quality outgoing links that you can follow. It’s the main reason why many “echo chamber” blogs are so successful despite contributing no quality content of their own: the mere aggregation of quality content from other sources is, in itself, an added value that readers will be grateful for. How often does one see original content on, say, Ajaxian? The same goes for Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and similar bookmarking, link-rating and link-sharing applications.

The trouble is that link-sharing sites can be perverted. Loopholes exist, and as advertiser awareness about social media grew, they managed to kill it. The main reason is that these sites aggregate anyone’s opinion, which includes the opinion of people who really want you to see their own content.

The natural solution is to only listen to people that you believe have an interesting opinion. Could be your Facebook friends. Could be Twitter accounts that you are following. The key element here is not “I know these people and trust their judgment” as much as it is opt-in. You actively choose who you start listening to.

Penetrating this kind of social bookmarking is harder for advertisers, because they can only be heard by those people who are listening to them. Penetrating e-mail was easy (hence, spam), penetrating anonymous link-sharing was easy, but as soon as you have to convince people to listen to you before telling them anything, you need to start being remarkable.

Last but not least, you can subscribe to web sites you like. The reasoning is that if a web site has interesting content, and if it’s frequently updated, then there’s a fair chance that it will have good content in the future. And you want to be notified when this happens.

The issue is that there’s no standard way of being notified. Not in the technical RSS-vs-Atom sense, but rather because person X likes being notified through RSS because he loves his feed aggregator, while person Y likes Twitter more because everyone will attempt to describe their new post in a clear 140-character title, and person Z would rather get updates by e-mail because they don’t want to learn any more software, and so on. It’s almost mandatory for blogs to deliver content updates through several channels, because plain old RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore.

In the end, it’s a constant fight between people who want to find interesting content, and people who create uninteresting content and want others to read it. The internet is slowly evolving through natural selection, as people use solutions that eliminate the noise and keep the signal. Looking for the next big trend on the internet is as silly as wondering what new species are going to emerge: it’s all about mutations, and mutations are random.

The Evil Overlord Problem

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on June 22, 2010
in Random Randomness
. 30 Comments

This is a contest! EDIT: and it’s closed. Round two is here.

Find the right answer to the question below, and you can win a 40€ Amazon gift card  (or $50, your choice). To participate, just leave a comment below with your answer. The deadline is July 1st 2010 at 12:00 am (GMT+0).

The problem:

Once again, the Evil Overlord is ready to take over the world. His plan involves stealing a nuke, flailing it around wildly like the madman he is, and waiting for all nations to surrender. Igor, his incompetent yet endearing henchman, informs him that the government of Probabilistan has recently built a nuclear silo, cleverly hidden under a soda storage warehouse. The problem is that there are thirty warehouses and the Dark Legions only have enough troops to storm one. Igor can’t seem to remember which one it was…

Now, the nice thing about the Probabilistan soda industry is that the supply chain is just flawless. Every day, large numbers of soda bottles are produced in the plant and every bottle will be neatly stored in a single warehouse until the delivery truck comes to take it away. A bottle in warehouse 1 always waits for one day before it’s delivered. A bottle in warehouse 2 always waits for two days. A bottle in warehouse N always waits for N days before it’s taken away. Every bottle has its manufacturing date clearly printed on its side.

And despite his incompetence, Igor managed to bring back a soda bottle from the very warehouse that sits on top of the silo! But how can a random bottle taken from a random warehouse help the Evil Overlord’s scheme? Never underestimate a mad genius!

The question:

What is the probability of the Evil Overlord sending his Dark Legions to the correct warehouse?

Edit (2010/06/26) a few clarifications:

  • The Evil Overlord is infinitely intelligent. He knows all of the above, knows the manufacturing date, and will use that data to maximize his chances of finding the correct warehouse. You know neither the location of the nuclear silo, nor the manufacturing date, nor the warehouse that will be attacked (since it probably depends on the manufacturing date anyway).
  • Bottles are stored in the warehouses at noon, and also delivered from the warehouses at noon. Igor stole the bottle at midnight (so all storage and deliveries for the day had already taken place).
  • Every day, the same number of bottles is produced (several thousands) and split evenly across all warehouses. So, there are no empty warehouses. What “stored in a single warehouse” means is that a given bottle will not be stored in two warehouses.
  • Igor took the bottle from the warehouse. So, it was in the warehouse when it was taken.
  • Probabilistan isn’t a real country.
evil

White persian cat. Evil overlord not included.

 

If several people provide the right answer, I will pick one at random using the MD5 hash of their post names and the opening price of the Dow Jones Industrial Average on July 1st 2010, as provided by Google. If the winner’s email is invalid, or if I get no answer within a week, I will pick another winner until I run out of winners, at which point I’ll buy myself a book.

Seven Steps for Fast Learning

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on June 17, 2010
in People
. 0 Comments

Learning an entirely new concept does not happen overnight. On the other hand, there are ways you can follow to make it happen faster or avoid reaching a dead end. Here are seven simple, three-word steps you can follow:

1. Find someone knowledgeable. By this, I mean a real person that you can meet face-to-face or on the phone, not some random person on the internet or, worse, a manual. Then, ask them to talk about the topic. If you found someone who is passionate, they’ll throw a flurry of sentences at you that are probably way too complex for you to understand. Grasp what you can, ask questions if it helps, and don’t be afraid to come back later if you have more questions or need written references.

2. Write everything down. If you’re not familiar with a topic, you are bound to forget everything you hear or read. By writing things down, you are doing a second pass on your short-term, which helps you commit that to a longer term. And besides, you’ll have it in writing for future reference. Mind maps do help: they don’t contain a lot of details, but their graphical nature helps bring back detailed memories.

3. Unravel the threads. Any domain is like a web of related concepts. You ultimately need to understand all the major concepts and relationships, and you will learn a lot of minor details along the way. So, follow the links as often as you can: every word you hear, every concept you discover should be written down so that it can be explored later on. This is a good time to start looking for manuals: Wikipedia can do a fine job explaining the general idea, but you usually need more practical textbooks or courses for the finer details.

4. Never stop exploring. It can be tempting to decide that you understand a given concept. In fact, we do it all the time because we simply don’t have time to become an expert at anything. Think you know what a backorder is? There are probably many concepts you have never heard about, or never thought were relevant, that may completely change how you look at backorders if you take the time to examine them closely. Every new concept we discover can change the way we look at things we took for granted.

5. Try explaining it. Find an audience that is unfamiliar with the topic and make yourself understood. Participate in online forums and discussions on the subject (you might want to do it anonymously at first). Thinking of an explanation or practical application for your theoretical knowledge will highlight any grey areas you might overlook. Confronting human intelligences with your ideas follows the nothing ever goes according to plan theory, which forces you to look at the subject in a different light in order to communicate.

6. Sleep on it. When you keep a lot of concepts in short-term memory, it’s easy to forget what is right, what is wrong, and what is an outdated assumption. Flushing things out of your brain by sleeping or doing something else for a while will keep only whatever ended up in your long term memory. Then, you can go back and fill the holes through more thinking or reading, thus eliminating any inconsistencies as you find them.

7. Practice, practice, practice. No amount of reading or thinking about a topic will make you into an expert. The devil is in the details, and most teachers or resources take those details for granted… or left as an exercise to the reader. Do your homework: you can learn what? from books, but how? is something taught only by experience and why? is for you to meditate on.

—

How often do you get paradigm-shifted by a new discovery that changes everything you thought you knew about something? This once happened to me very often, but the frequency is starting to decrease. I must be getting close to knowing everything :)

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