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Dear Readers:
For the next 10 days, I will be vacationing with my family in Mexico. Posted below for your reading pleasure are 10 of my favorite articles from the past year:
#10: Never Let Your Ego Stop You From Unlearning
#9: Train Your Mind to See Different Points of View
#8: Unlearning "Land Bridges": A Lesson for Scientists
#6: Unlearning Intelligence: Or Why You Shouldn't Tell Your Kid S/he is Smart
#4: Unlearn or Die
#3: To Unlearn: Become Uncomfortable in Your Own Skin
#1. "The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn." --Alvin Toffler
#2: “The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.” -- President John F. Kennedy
#3: "In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists". --Eric Hoffer
#4: "In some sense our ability to open the future will depend not on how well we learn anymore but on how well we are able to unlearn". -- Alan Kay
#5: "Two things seemed pretty apparent to me. One was that in order to be a pilot a man had to learn more than any one man ought to learn; and the other was that he must learn it all over again in a different way every 24 hours." -- Mark Twain
#6: "Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out." --Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
#7: "The most important lessons lay not in what I needed to learn, but in what I first needed to unlearn." Jim Collins
#8: "Strange about learning; the farther I go the more I see that I never knew even existed. A short while ago I foolishly thought I could learn everything--all the knowledge in the world. Now I hope only to be able to know of its existence, and to understand one grain of it." -- Charly in Flowers for Algernon
#9: "The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue." -- Antisthenes
#10: "The difficulty lies, not in new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of have been, into the corners of our minds." -- John Maynard Keynes
Related Posts
“The curious thing is that with these exponential changes, so much of what we currently know is just getting to be wrong. So many of our assumptions are getting to be wrong. As so, as we move forward, not only is it going to be a question of learning it is also going to be a question of unlearning.” --John Seely Brown
Question: In a pond, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day the patch doubles in size. If it takes 30 days for the patch to cover the entire pond, how long would it take for the lily pads to cover half the pond?
The answer is 29 days because the size of the patch doubles every day. (Surprisingly, at Day 20, the pond would only be covered a miniscule 0.1 percent.)
In his best-selling book, Only the Paranoid Survive, Andy Grove, then CEO of Intel, recounted the story of his discussion with Gordon Moore regarding the future of the company in the wake of its profits dwindling from $198 million to less than $2 million in the mid-1980’s. “I looked out the window at the Ferris wheel of the Great American amusement park revolving in the distance when I turned back to Gordon, and asked ‘If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?’ Gordon answered without hesitation, “He would get us out of memories.’ I stared at him, numb, and then said ‘Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back, and do it ourselves?”
Grove did exactly that and abandoned the memory market and jumped into the microprocessor market. A few years later he made the then controversial decision to begin branding Intel’s technology with the “Intel Inside” slogan.
During Grove’s tenure, the company grew at an impressive annual compound rate of 30%. Undoubtedly, Grove was an intelligent, capable and visionary leader but what really lay behind his extraordinary leadership? It was his ability and willingness to unlearn.
Before Intel could become a microprocessor company it had to unlearn that it was a memory manufacturer, and before it could adopt an innovative marketing campaign, it had to unlearn the idea that a technology company could only appeal to consumers based on raw computer processing power. In a culture dominated by engineers this was no easy sell.
Unlearning is hard work. In fact, often it requires a brutal act of will. Intel only recovered from Grove’s decision after it laid off 8,000 employees and suffered through a one-year loss of $180 million. Throughout his reign, Grove kept Intel successful by constantly keeping an open mind.
The key to his success was his willingness to set aside everything he knew – or thought he knew. It might be easy to think that the semiconductor industry is somehow unique and is more responsive to change because the industry’s underlying technology–the transistor—is constantly changing (the number of transistors that can be placed on a chip doubles roughly every 18 months). And, perhaps, this is true. It is, however, no reason for complacency.
We now live in an era of accelerating change and every industry must embrace the concept of unlearning or risk perishing. Wikipedia, the open-source movement, virtual and augmented reality, electronic books, and free online courses are whip-sawing educational institutions; and yet, amazingly, many teachers and administrators are reluctant to embrace new paradigms and new ways of doing business. Why? Because they can’t unlearn the old ways of doing things. This is true even when confronted with overwhelming proof that the system and its current models aren’t working.
The healthcare industry is about to be bombarded with a wealth of new genomics data that will fundamentally alter both patients and doctors understanding of a plethora of diseases. Before the industry can take advantage of these new findings and treatments, medical professionals will first need to unlearn much of what they think they know about how diseases are caused, and how those ailments are best treated.
Mobile communication; radio frequency identification (RFID) technology; vast networks of “smart” sensors; and flexible electronics are poised to revolutionize everything from advertising and marketing to how consumers shop for goods. Unless these industries can unlearn some of their current behaviors they will be at a severe competitive disadvantage to those who are aren’t wedded to old ways of doing business.
Advances in rapid prototype manufacturing, robotics and material science threaten to disrupt the manufacturing industry, and breakthroughs in solar power, fuel cell technology, demand management tools as well as more far-fetched energy technologies such as wave power, synthetic biology and, perhaps, even nuclear fusion could also force energy providers to unlearn what they currently believe to be the most economical, cleanest, and convenient energy sources.
Add to this amazing array of technological progress as yet unknown advances; combine them with the accelerating power of the Internet; mobile and social communication tools, advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence; and then sprinkle on top of that voice and speech technology which will help information flow more easily to hundreds of millions of aspiring entrepreneurs all across the globe and it is easy to understand how many forecasters are predicting a wave of innovation unlike anything ever seen in the history of humankind.
Like a surfing novice paddling to catch her first wave, the prospect is both thrilling and terrifying. If you approach the wave with an open mind – one that is ready to unlearn and jettison old skills that are no longer suitable for the new environment – your prospects for a successful adventure improve markedly. If you are rigid and cling to your old ways, the wave will either pass you by and leave far from shore or, worse, slam your stiff and inflexible body (and thinking) onto the shoals of future progress.
Returning to Andy Grove now for a moment, if you looked out the window of your office and saw a large wave approaching and it was doubling in size every few moments what would you do?
Homework Assignment: Rank the previously mentioned technologies—computer processing power, wireless technology, RFID, rapid prototype manufacturing, social networking, robotics, genomics, biotechnology and nanotechnology—in terms of their ability to necessitate unlearning within your organization.
Dear Reader:
It is the time of the year for lists so I figured I would put together a list of the books which most influenced my thinking on the topic of unlearning this year. (Note: These are the books I read in 2009 -- some were published earlier.) There are also some books still on my bookshelf such as Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt and SuperFreaknomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance) by Steven Levitt which I have not yet read but, to be fair, may have made the list.)
1. Think Twice: Harness the Power of Counter-Intuition by Michael J. Mauboussin: The double entendre in the title alone almost makes this book worth reading. (Do you see the words "Thin Ice" in the title "Think Twice"?) This book wins my award for most underlined of the year.
2. Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Super Athletes and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall. Did you know there isn't a single scientific study demonstrating running shoes prevent injuries? Not a single one! This book is why I read. It is entertaining, informative and successfully challenges conventional wisdom. (I have even started running barefoot because of it.)
3. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely. Think you are rational? You'll think again after reading this book.
4. How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life by Thomas Gilovich. Written in 1991, this book left me wishing I read it 18 years earlier. It would have saved me from making a great many mistakes.
5. How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. This book offers a compelling look at the practical lessons we can learn from neuroscience -- such as why we don't want to tell our kids that they are smart.
6. The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow. Did you know that you are twice as likely to die in route to buying a lottery ticket as you are to actually winning the lottery? Randomness has a much greater influence on our lives than most people appreciate.
7. A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Dan Pink. This book has helped me see the world in a different way. For example, did you know that the average toaster is only used for 15 minutes a day but is on display the remaining 1425 minutes? This might not seem like a deep revelation but to the people who make toasters it should be because it might inform their decision to place a great emphasis on design.
8. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Did you know that by simply framing a question differently Austria was able to get 99% of its citizens to agree to voluntarily donate their organs (in the event of an accident). This is opposed to Germany where only 12% of its citizens agreed to the same request? Often, a small "nudge" can make a huge difference.
9. Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman. If you need to interview someone for an important job read this book. It will explain why your best strategy may be not to interview the person at all.
10. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes: This was one of the first additions to my anti-library. I especially liked this quote: "Strange about learning; the farther I go the more I see that I never knew even existed. A short while ago I foolishly thought I could learn everything--all the knowledge in the world. Now I hope only to be able to know of its existence, and to understand one grain of it."
Good words to end on. Here's to more unlearning in 2010 and beyond!
“It’s not what you don’t know that hurts you; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.”--Satchel Paige
Question #86: In both 1995 and 1996, David Justice of the Atlanta Braves had a higher batting average than the New York Yankees Derek Jeter. Who had the higher two-year average over the same two-year period?
The answer is Derek Jeter. The anomaly, known as Simpson Paradox, occurred because in the first year Jeter had only 48 at-bats and 12 hits for average of .250, while Justice batted 411 times with an average of .253. The following year Jeter batted 582 times and hit for a .314 average, while Justice hit .321 but had only 140 at bats.
In other words, when you combined the players totals for both years Jeter comes out on up as the table below demonstrates.
|
1995 |
1996 |
Combined | ||||
|
Derek Jeter |
12/48 |
.250 |
183/582 |
.314 |
195/630 |
.310 |
|
David Justice |
104/411 |
.253 |
45/140 |
.321 |
149/551 |
.270 |
The sporting world is ripe with unlearning examples. One of my favorites occurred on December 30, 1936 when over 17,000 fans packed into the old Madison Square Garden to watch Long Island University, the country’s top-ranked basketball team, take on Stanford University. It was slated to be a great game. Long Island was putting up its 43-game winning streak up against the reigning Pacific Coast Conference champions.
More than that, though, people were eager to watch Hank Luisetti, Stanford’s star sophomore. He was the only player known for shooting the ball with one hand while jumping up in the air. At the time, every other basketball player in the country shot with two-hands or took hook shots.
Luisetti’s “jump-shot” was so radical, in fact, that it caused Nat Holman, the legendary coach of City College of New York—and a man known as “Mr. Basketball”—to remark, “That’s not basketball! If my boys ever shot one-handed, I’d quit coaching.”
Luisetti and Stanford went on to crush Long Island University and, two years, later, Luisetti became the first college player ever to score 50 points in a game.
Today, it is impossible to find a single player at either the collegiate or professional level who shoots two-handed.
It took a long time for basketball players (and their coaches) to unlearn the two-handed shot but the story and Jeter/Justice anomaly remind us that unlearning can be both counter-intuitive and paradoxical.
To this end, while it is true that a return to two-handed shooting is unlikely, it might make sense on one area of the basketball court: the free-throw line. Consider the case of Rick Barry. Although he used an unorthodox under-handed “granny-style” style to shoot free-throws, Barry is the National Basketball Association’s second most accurate free-throw shooter of all-time with an average of .900. Today, not a single player shoots free-throws under-handed. This is in spite of the fact that the average accuracy rate in the NBA is roughly 75% and many games are determined by just a few points.
For those players and coaches with the courage to unlearn their current free-throw shooting style, it could lead to an “above average” outcome because even a modestly higher free-throw average could result in a handful more victories each season.
Homework Assignment: Explain why you think no one in the NBA shoots under-handed free-throws. For extra credit: Name at least two NBA players who might want to unlearn their current form and consider shooting “Granny-style”? (Hint: At 52.4%, Shaquille O’Neal is only the second worst free-throw shooter.)
“When men know not what to do, they ought not to do what they know not.”--Abigail Adams.
Question #58: If five frogs are sitting on a log and four decide to jump off, how many are remaining on the log?
The answer is five because deciding to do something isn’t the same as actually doing it.
From childhood, we are instilled with a bias for action. In many cases, it is a useful trait. It is even possible that our bias for action is a genetic hand-me-down from our pre-historic ancestors and it enabled us to avoid being devoured by predators by reacting with haste to the slightest rustling in the bushes.
Is this bias toward action something that we may need to unlearn?
The answer is a qualified yes. Scientists studying the odds of goalies trying to stop penalty kicks concluded that a goalie’s best strategy was to stay put. If they had followed this course of action, goalies would have been successful 33 percent of the time. According to the data, however, they only employed the strategy 6 percent of the time.
There is a reason for this: people don’t like “doing nothing.” In fact, people who don’t act often feel a deep emotional pang of guilt for their inaction. In the case of a goalie during a shoot-out, for instance, the goaltender would feel worse for standing there than he would have if he had dived left on a kick to the right. This is true even though the outcome would have been the same – a goal. In common parlance, “At least he did something.”
The example of a goalie staying still might seem trivial, but the implications for staying put can have real-world implications. Consider the stock market.
It is not uncommon for people to rush in and buy a certain stock when others are doing the same. The result, as a spate of investing “bubbles” have recently demonstrated, is the creation of artificially high and, ultimately, unsustainable stock prices. Counter-intuitively, many people also follow the actions of others when selling a stock. They sell only because other people are selling—not because the underlying of the fundamentals of the stock has changed.
Warren Buffett is one of the world’s richest men, but his sage partner, Charlie Munger, says “Half of Warren’s time is spent sitting on his ass and reading; the other half is spent talking on the phone or in person to a highly gifted person that he trusts and trusts him.” In other words, Buffett has a bias toward inaction.
A bias toward inaction can also reap other unexpected benefits. Have you ever been traveling down the freeway and then spotted the other cars moving over into a more crowded lane? What is occurring is that drivers in the trailing cars believe that the action of the drivers in front of them are based on the knowledge of something that they can’t yet see and so they decide to mimic the action. Sometimes there really is something ahead in the road, but sometimes it is the result of nothing more than two cars simultaneously shifting lanes for arbitrary and unrelated reasons.
The problem begins to manifest itself as this faulty logic gains momentum and subsequent drivers shift lanes and thus create more “evidence” for others to shift lanes.
If you want to get ahead on the freeway and in life in general it behooves you to wait to “jump off the log” until you actually have access to compelling information that requires movement.
Homework Assignment #58: For the top five stock holdings in your portfolio, write down your rationale for holding the stock as well as the length you expect to hold it. Next, list the conditions under which you will sell the stock. Before you sell the stock revisit your notes.
“I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another and that is: I say that I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the argument against my position better than the people who support it. I think only when I’ve reached that state am I qualified to speak.”
Question #31: If you had to fit one of these two tables into a long narrow space which would you choose?
Did you say the table on the left? If so, you are correct. If, however, you opted for the other table you are also correct. Why? Because both tables have the same dimensions. Don’t believe me? Measure the width and the length of the sides of each table.
The optical illusion and the above quote from Charlie Munger -- Warren Buffett’s right-hand man for more than 40 years -- offer visual evidence and worldly advice for anyone wishing to stay open to the importance of unlearning because they both serve as useful reminders that it is important to consider all sides of something – be it a table or an issue.
Munger’s practice of arguing opposite sides of a question is a practice that dates back thousands of years. As Nassim Taleb recounts in his book, Fooled by Randomness, in 155 B.C. the Greek philosopher, Carnaedes, traveled to Rome to argue against a penalty which had been levied upon the Athenians. With unmatched eloquence, Carnaedes sang the praises of Roman justice and convinced his audience of the merits of his position. But that wasn’t the point he was trying to make. The very next day Carnaedes dissected his previous arguments and proceeded to convince the same audience that the opposite was true.
So where did Carnaedes really stand on the issue? We don’t know. But that doesn’t matter because what he wanted to advocate was a doctrine of ‘uncertainty of knowledge.” Carnaedes was a “radical skeptic” and believed that all knowledge is impossible to know, except for the knowledge that all knowledge is impossible to know. Or, as Taleb writes, “[h]e stood all his life against arrogant dogma and belief in one sole truth.”
The philosophy calls to mind a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald who once said: “The test of a first rate mind is the ability to hold two diametrically opposed ideas at the same time and still function.”
This ability to deal with ambiguity is not a luxury reserved only for ancient philosophers and poets. In 1988, a study by the American Management Association found that the leadership characteristic most essential for steering organizations through troubled and complex times was “the ability to deal with ambiguity.”
One strategy for preparing for such ambiguity is, like Munger and Carnaedes, to know the opposing side of an argument was well as the supporting arguments. In this way, whenever new—and perhaps contradictory information—becomes available, the holder of the opinion can assimilate that information into their decision-making process. This, in turn, might make it easier to unlearn a position in spite of having voiced support for it in the past.
Why might this be so? Because the previous work in understanding the opposite view will have created the space for a different but equally plausible idea – or even a table – to fit.
Homework Assignment #31: List all of the reasons why your top competitors products or service are superior to your own, and why their revenue growth, profits and stock performance may outperform yours over the next three years. For individuals, identify your favorite stock and list all the reasons it may underperform the broader S&P index.
