Understanding and Remembering
To get better at soft skills you must accomplish two things:
Understanding and remembering.
Step One. How to understand
Understanding is the only way you make progress. Any improvement that you attained from repetition/memorization came as a side-effect of understanding.
Understanding doesn't happen automatically. You need to ask questions.
Ask questions and you'll improve your understanding. Uncover the truths.
What questions should you ask? Ask "why?" The more you practice the better you will get at asking questions.
(after you unearth the concepts, you now have to remember them)
(how can you remember them? one strategy is to keep training and unearthing patterns. chances are if you do it enough, you will find the same truths again. like a good compression algorithm, you will find similarities. the repetition will make you remember)
(another strategy to remember what you discovered is to active recall but with a small twist. more on that later)
It's not simply "stealing mental representations". You are having someone ask the questions for you, and spoon-feed you the answers. You'll steal them.
Through which medium do you progress understanding? You can ask questions in your head. Best way is to write them down (more on that later)
Step Two. How to "remember"?
Take notes. Explain the concepts. And parallelism.
What does it mean? Break down a piece, then rebuild it, slightly differently.
"Active recalling" isn't enough. You must apply parallelism. Use the concept and create your own new idea. It will lead to a deeper understanding. It will also test your mental representations, and in the case of them being vague/wrong, it will help you polish them into what they should be.
Every moment you discover a new concept you have an opportunity to apply parallelism. But that happens "on the road" during your training session.
You need to use your skill and obtain feedback. That will make your practice aimful. For that you should play the game.
(without the existence of an expert coach your only source of feedback is yourself. and for that you need to create. practicing concepts in a vacuum is not the same as doing the actual thing)
Playing the game makes your practice aimful. Without feedback you will put half the effort, and waste your time on stuff that's not important. Playing the game is creating. And you should strive to make it at least 10% of your practice time. Or ideally 20%.
How to play the game?
You create a draft. With a goal in mind. No editing. And you should take notes. Finish then review.
Conclusion?
You are using input to train your neural-net to predict better. See the patterns. Develop a natural intuition.
Refer to my previous post The 4 stages of soft skills for further understanding.
Repetition develops understanding through pattern recognition.
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