Zhihu answerer with 600,000 likes: Why can’t I become an expert even though I read dry stuff all day long?

Most people know that Cai Tong is the author of "Performance: How to Become a Great Person", but few people know that it took him five years from getting his Ph.D. in psychology to publishing the book.

There are two kinds of psychology: the first is psychology constructed in papers and in terminology. The second is practical psychology that is dedicated to solving real-world problems.

Teacher Cai Tong has spent 5 years studying applied psychology, dedicated to helping others solve the difficulties they encounter in life, such as how to think more efficiently, how to learn more efficiently...

Therefore, last Thursday we invited Teacher Cai Tong to the Circle Museum to share with everyone how to become an expert in the workplace.

After a lot of investigation and research, psychologist Dreyfus divided people into five levels and constructed the "Dreyfus Hierarchy Model."

The five levels are: Novice, Advanced Novice, Competent, Proficient, and Expert. Below we briefly list the characteristics of each level to help us identify which level we are at .

First of all, newcomers are generally employees who have just entered the workplace for 1 to 3 years. Their characteristics are that they strictly follow the rules and do not have too many ideas of their own , so they will not make big mistakes and will not achieve too much.

After working for a few years, newcomers begin to learn to subdivide tasks and gradually develop their own ideas about the work . At this point, you have reached the advanced novice stage.

The third stage is competent. As the name suggests, a competent person is one who can complete tasks at his or her job with quality and quantity, and is able to make plans and handle tasks according to circumstances .

Compared with competent people, proficient people begin to discover problems that arise in their work and have their own thoughts on the problems. At this point, proficient people begin to establish a big picture and holistic view of their work and become more flexible when dealing with problems.

The last stage is the expert. The expert’s excellence lies in the fact that “no tricks are better than tricks”. Because experts' work no longer requires specific methods and rules, their job is to explore more personalized and creative ways to solve problems from existing working methods .

So why are experts able to respond quickly and creatively to problems that arise? How do students at the top of the pyramid possess a unique knowledge system ?

Each expert has his or her own unique knowledge system, which consists of five knowledge modules: basic subject knowledge, methodology, basic operational skills, world view and material library . These five modules support the ways and means by which experts solve problems.

For example, it is impossible for a chef to only know how to cook one dish. Instead, in his mind, there are hundreds of ways to process and cook ingredients. At the same time, the chef is also familiar with the usage and techniques of each kitchen utensil.

So when actually making a dish:

The definition of food is [worldview]. Every chef has his own philosophy, which will not be defined here. Of course, this example is not to say how difficult it is to be a chef, but to illustrate that in any field, if you want to become an expert, you cannot do without the knowledge blocks composed of five modules .

At the same time, it needs to be emphasized that each knowledge block plays a decisive role in solving the problem and none of them can be missing. Therefore, it is necessary for us to carry out corresponding deliberate practice on these five knowledge blocks.

In the process of developing deliberate practice, we always encounter learning bottlenecks from time to time. Current research shows that each learning process is divided into stages and grows linearly, which is called a learning curve .

Use the learning curve to correspond to the current learning stage and adjust the mental state in a targeted manner to grasp the overall progress more effectively. Then let’s understand that the learning curve is divided into three stages - slow start period, rapid improvement period and plateau period .

The first stage is called the slow start period , and many people stop learning at this stage. Many people ask me: I feel like I am interested in everything, but I can’t study in depth.

This type of people are interested in many things, but when they encounter difficulties when they go deep into something, they give up and do something else. Everything is the same, so these people are masters of nothing because they cannot overcome difficulties.

The second stage is called the rapid improvement period . Those who remain in this stage have overcome the first difficulty and successfully discovered the method of learning. They know how to improve themselves, and they also know what is beneficial and what is inefficient.

The third stage is called the plateau period , which is the stage where experts are. Many people who are in the rapid improvement period cannot overcome this hurdle and enter the plateau period. The root cause is that they are too dependent on the original working methods and cannot establish their own methodology from the existing working methods.

But once they reach the plateau, their returns are also quite high. We can look at the curve below: When we superimpose the income curve and the learning curve, we will find that the income is the highest only during the plateau period .

As introduced in the previous article, experts are based on the knowledge blocks of five modules and are at the plateau period of the learning curve. It is also worth noting that experts are different from ordinary people in the way they acquire knowledge .

Most ordinary people learn knowledge from books, live broadcasts , and push notifications, and obtain the essential information directly; while experts acquire knowledge from practice and work, adjust their knowledge in a timely manner, and accelerate their growth process.

The former is called theoretical knowledge, also known as explicit knowledge . Due to the remnants of the education system, some people tend to rely solely on "knowledge" and think that they can directly handle work tasks, but the results are often unsatisfactory;

The latter is called tacit knowledge, which is the knowledge that everyone really needs to have in the job and can be acquired from practice. It also enables people to adjust their way of acquiring knowledge in time at work and accelerate their growth process.

So how can you gradually develop an expert working style at work? The method is simple: pay attention to those experts who are very good in practical fields . Learn about the thinking and working philosophy of experts from their books, interviews or talk shows.

Not only do we learn some superficial work concepts, but what we need to learn more is the growth mindset of the big names - how to promote our own thinking growth and self-improvement through daily work and life.

Even if you know that the experts have reached a high level of learning, it is better to imitate their learning methods and achieve qualitative change from quantitative change. Many people learn in a single way and find it difficult to adjust. It is worth noting that experts learn in a variety of ways. Here, learning methods are divided into four categories: reading, observation, practice and parameter adjustment .

The first type of learning method, reading: learning from text. Many people have a narrow reading range. Taiwanese publisher He Mingyi said, "Reading is like eating." Reading is divided into 4 categories:

Category 1: Reading is like eating staple food, it solves the problem of being full. We read books related to practical skills.

The second category: reading is like eating fish and meat, which supplements protein. We read books on art, philosophy and science.

The third category: reading is like eating vegetables and fruits, it helps digestion. We should read some tool books and encyclopedias ;

The fourth category: Reading is like eating snacks. It is harmless to read some popular novels or comics at this time.

The second type of learning is learning from observation. This is related to the tacit knowledge we talked about above. We cannot acquire implicit knowledge from reading; we must acquire some implicit knowledge from observation.

Ricardo Recarreta, a 23-year-old Mexican architecture student, asked Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, "What is the best way to learn architecture?" Gropius said, "Travel as much as possible." In the end, Ricardo became a famous architect.

We can actually find from this example that constantly observing examples during travel is more efficient than acquiring pictures and knowledge from books. Therefore, observing examples and learning from them is a very effective way of learning .

The third type of learning method is practice, which is self-training designed with feedback. In the Republic of China period when there were few English textbooks, Wang Yunwu invented a unique learning method to learn English:

He found an English essay, translated it into Chinese first, then into English, and finally compared the two. In this way, he could easily see his own shortcomings.

Similarly, when we practice, we can follow the closed-loop learning method of "input-output-feedback" and find positively correlated feedback methods under large amounts of input and output, thereby improving our abilities.

The fourth type of learning method is parameter adjustment. At work, each task is composed of many small tasks, and each task has its most suitable and optimal parameters. As long as the parameters of each subtask reach the optimal value, the overall task will also reach the optimal value.

So how do you find the parameters and adjust them? It requires a lot of repeated practice to extract the key parameters in the work and adjust them to the optimal state.

After talking about the experts’ effective learning methods, we still need to discuss the experts’ working methods. The differences in work between experts and ordinary people often come from three expert work methods: deep work, essentialism , and facing failure .

The first is deep work. Deep work can be divided into ascetic mode, bimodal mode, rhythm mode and reporter mode according to its intensity.

In ascetic mode, absolutely no one and nothing can disturb me. Just like when writers sometimes go back to the mountains to live in seclusion for a while to write books, they are completely undisturbed at that time and their efficiency can reach its peak.

Next is the bimodal model. During the year, we can set which months are used to focus on one thing and which months are used to deal with miscellaneous matters, and switch back and forth. This is called the bimodal model.

The bimodal model is based on months, while the rhythmic model is based on days. The whole day is divided into several time blocks. If you concentrate on doing one thing in different time blocks, you will gradually form your own work rhythm, and then you will be more comfortable with it.

The last one is the reporter mode, which is the most difficult to get started with among the four modes. As we all know, journalists have to start interviewing and writing articles anytime and anywhere, so the journalist mode is a working mode that allows them to enter the working state at any time.

To extend this, many people will ask me after I finish talking about deep work: What should I do if I am always interrupted when I am working well? At this time, we must learn essentialism, that is, focus on the top work and learn to say no to others .

Before working, screen your work first, keep the high-value things, and remove the unimportant things. At the same time, set a work goal for yourself every day, and the goal should not be too small or vague. Because once it is too vague, it will be impossible to tell whether the goal has been achieved.

Some people also ask me, how to reject others gracefully? Here are four tips:

Using the above four methods, you can gracefully reject those who want to trouble you.

The last expert working method is to learn to face failure. Many people lose the courage to continue doing a task after failing. We need to learn to face failure with greater determination.

A determined person will generally have a variety of ways to deal with different failures. Here we focus on the most important point - reasonable attribution. Let’s take a very common example in the workplace: being scolded by the boss. Many people feel aggrieved and think that their leaders know nothing.

These are false attributions because they place the blame on people who have no control over the situation. If we blame ourselves, for example, we think about what we did wrong and how we can be more thoughtful next time. This way we can learn from our failures and continue to grow.