“Whether the task is mental or physical, interleaving improves the ability to match the right strategy to a problem.”
“That happens to be a hallmark of expert problem-solving. Whether chemists, physicists, or political scientists, the most successful problem solvers spend mental energy figuring out what type of problem they are facing before matching a strategy to it, rather than jumping in with memorized procedures. In that way, they are just about the precise opposite of experts who develop in-kind learning environments, like chess masters, who rely heavily on intuition. Kind learning environment experts choose a strategy and then evaluate; experts in less repetitive environments evaluate and then choose.”
“Desirable difficulties like testing and spacing make knowledge stick. It becomes durable. Desirable difficulties like making connections and interleaving make knowledge flexible, useful for problems that never appeared in training. All slow down learning and make performance suffer, in the short term.”
Gaining knowledge is the first step, but there is no point in being a generalist if you do not know how to intertwine different knowledge. Successful people know how to get inspired from different subjects to come up with innovative solutions.
Hence, as mentioned in the book, to be a successful problem-solver, you should know how to determine the deep structure of a problem before you proceed to match a strategy to it.
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