Keywords:: PermanentNote
Reference: R: How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens
Implementation and internalization produce the expertise that is required to become a master or an expert. In other words, you need to put the concepts into practice in various situations to get the necessary experience.
Internalized knowledge becomes your intuition or gut feeling. It removes the need to hold principles or instructions in your mind which leaves more space for thinking. In other words, you're using the automatic part of your brain (intuition or gut feeling) for the majority of judgments and your conscious mind (system II) for important and complex thinking.
Recently I've experienced this principle in my own life. I've been learning to shoot the basketball as best as possible. This requires using a proper technique that consists of 4 main aspects: holding the elbow perpendicular to your body; holding the ball above your hairline; firmly flicking the wrist; clearly removing the supporting hand. Having those aspects right enables you to have a great shot. I was training shooting with proper technique for the last two weeks and it went really well. My accuracy increased by around 10%! Yesterday, I've played with my uncle 1v1. During the game, and I've kept my improved accuracy – for the first 15 min... After that, however, I got back to my default – a worse shooting technique.
I was wondering why it happened though I've been doing so well during practice. And I think I know. It's because haven't practiced the new technique enough. When I've become tired, I haven't had sufficient energy to keep my mind and especially my body focused to use the better technique.
When you get fatigued your body does what's easier - it returns to the old habits because they're deeper ingrained, thus more automatic. Therefore, you need to practice more to internalize the new skills. You need to put in sufficient hours to wire them deep enough so that your body does them automatically no matter how tired you are (or at least for an hour of intensive play).
This situation shows the importance of putting in the work to internalize new skills. The 10k hours rule makes sense. Internalization allows you to transfer the new skill from the conscious brain to the unconscious. This enables you to focus on more important things like making tough decisions, tackling exceptionally hard things, or maintaining your performance during stressful situations.
Relevant notes:
PN: Tension and insight: the road to expertise requires perseverance and patience.
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What's important here is that this learning comes mostly from action, not from theory (PN: Internalization leads to expertise). Childrens' brains are not developed enough to be able to grasp abstract concepts and transform them into action. Children learn by imitation and doing. This means that the most important catalysts for learnings will be the examples the adults set and daily tasks, challenges, activities they face. And these two things are mostly the product of particular a particular culture.
PN: Internalization leads to expertise: internalization moves information into the intuition, maybe that's why it then flows out so effortlessly.
I interpret the integration of an idea as understanding it. Because understanding means connecting new information to previous information in a meaningful way. Such information becomes an integral part of your brain structure and can not be forgotten anymore.
PN: Internalization leads to expertise: experts can break down complicated concepts into their building blocks.
One of the goals of an apprenticeship is to acquire expertise or hard skills (related: TK P: Recipe for success: specific knowledge, authenticity, and product-market-fit: comes from curiosity and passion).
PN: Internalization leads to expertise; P: Bring the metaphysical into the physical: developing expertise.
Building a broad network of ideas through proper learning, one in which you connect new ideas to previous information (i.e., internalization), prevents you from being the "man with a hammer for whom every problem looks like a nail" because you have more tools (or lenses) for understanding reality (PN: The first principles: Each tool can be derived from carefully examining principles that rule existence).