My favourite example of this is the Wired video series of 'X explains one concept in 5 levels of difficulty'.
Take this example of Jacob Collier, for instance. By the time he gets to jazz legend Herbie Hancock, it's ALL vocab point shop talk.
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12/ Interestingly, the vocab point often becomes the end goal for some of my skills.
Take Judo, for instance. I've long made peace with the fact that I cannot reach mastery. (I'm in a race against my declining physical ability).
But I think I can get to the vocab point.
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13/ I want to be able to watch Olympic level Judo and really understand the chess game that occurs before a throw or pin happens.
And I think I can get there with a decent amount of hard work. (Mastery, on the other hand, would likely require a decade or so of 100% focus).
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14/ Other useful implications of the vocab point:
When you're listening to two experts talking shop, the vocab they use can become a map of the skill domain, even though you can't see it yet. This was what I was getting at in
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15/ Another implication: when someone uses cliched language / well-known categories to describe their skill, you can probably guess that they haven't reached the vocab point yet.
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16/ This can lead to some surprising things! For instance, I recently read a breakdown of Paul Graham's writing style.
I could tell, within the first three paragraphs, that it was written by a novice. They totally missed what was hard about pg's writing.
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17/ They were leaking information about their own skill level, without knowing it.
I think about this a lot whenever I write about business or about org design. I wonder if I'm leaking information about my (lack of) skill.
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18/ Another implication of the vocab point: you should get to the vocab point of at least one skill, because then you learn to recognise it in others.
Preferably when you're younger (i.e. if you have kids, it's good to get them to the vocab point of at least one skill).
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19/ By this I mean: if you know the vocab point exists, you'll also know what it feels like to have arrived at it. This means that you'll know what to look for when climbing other skill trees.
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Replying to
I like this, but I have a problem with the idea that it is a point you arrive at. It makes it a lot easier to describe, of course.
It's like the middle of a logistic curve, where learning builds on itself, but short of the really hard work toward deep expertise.
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Replying to
I agree with you. In practice I think it's continuous: the more skill you get, the more nuances to the skill you can see.
But I think the made up notion of a 'point' is useful because there really is a point where you begin to see the shape of the skill.
Replying to
Yes, exactly. Tried to squeeze too much into a single tweet. The point (or points) where you take note are indeed points.
A big part is you start to get a roadmap of what you do not know. That's important for further learning, but also for operating with sub-expert knowlege.
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