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I ran into this the other day, someone was once again saying “If everything goes as planned.” We’ve all said it. But here’s the thing: it never does. So why don’t we spend just as much time learning what to do when things inevitably stray off our path as we do to create the plan [...]
In parts one through eight I first introduced, then explained and summarized my Topography of Skill Acquisition. But as I made clear in Part 3, the absolutely essential event to ever add a skill to your resume is to not die on the Plain of Suckitude. Because if you do, you are never coming back. [...]
In Part 2 of this series, I formally introduced my Topography of Skill Acquisition. It is comprised of five distinct parts, which I described in the following posts: Part 3: The Plain of Suckitude — “When acquiring a new skill, everyone begins on this plain. It is flat, since when you are on the plain [...]
In Part 6 of this series, I described how one becomes a true master of a skill — by putting in around 10,000 hours (or nearly five years of full-time work) using that skill. Obviously, few of us ever achieve this, so if you have reached the 10,000 Hour Crest for any given skill you [...]
In a Part 5, I discussed the Long Incline of Experience, upon which, I asserted, many would camp. This means they would never reach the point of true mastery of a skill. That’s fine, as few of us do for any given skill. If it were easy we would all be masters of nearly everything. [...]
As I described in an earlier post, the Elevator of Enlightenment saves you from the Plain of Suckitude, and dumps you out on the Long Incline of Experience. For most people, this is where you will camp. This means it is a skill that you will always have, but that you will never truly become [...]
In the previous post, I introduced the Plain of Suckitude, which is where we all suck at some new skill until, suddenly, we don’t. When you arrive at the “ah ha!” moment of a new skill, it is when muscle memory takes over, or when the mental grooves are finally deep enough that you suddenly [...]
In previous posts I discussed what “being different” meant to me and sketched out my “topography of skill acquisition” in which the first stage of the journey was “The Plain of Suckitude”. Now I will explain what I mean by that. When acquiring a new skill, everyone begins on this plain. It is flat, since [...]
Data-driven voter outreach has become a crucial component of modern political campaigns, and Wadsworth Public Library (WPL) recently illustrated that the analytics tools that underpin those efforts can also help libraries get-out-the-vote.
Last week I gave a talk at Internet Librarian for which I created a slide that highlighted the gender imbalances of various professions (see picture). I’ve worked in libraries my entire adult life, and yet I was still surprised by the gender imbalance in libraries — according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2011 [...]
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