Skill First / Mental Models
A different idea. A different answer.
The same technique can work in one round and stall in the next. A mental model helps you notice the difference: what changed, and which choice fits now?
The libraryThe Skill First foundation
Not a recipe for every situation. Ideas worth noticing, testing and looking at again.
Three ideas to start with
Kaizen, Shu Ha Ri and Form to Leave Form share a foundation: keep adjusting, change your relationship with structure and learn without being tied to a fixed form.
Form to Leave Form
A clear form gives you somewhere dependable to begin. Understanding and experience make that structure available without reciting every step.
Kaizen
Sustainable improvement begins with a concrete problem. Investigate it, try a manageable change and use the result to choose the next step.
Shu Ha Ri
An instruction can initially provide stability and later become too restrictive. Shu Ha Ri helps consider the relationship with structure that a particular task needs.
The library
67 models
Learning
27Beginner's Mind
Experience helps you recognize situations but can supply answers too quickly. Beginner's Mind leaves room to investigate something familiar again.
Chunking
Several details can become one meaningful pattern. Chunking makes information manageable when the relationships are learned, rather than merely given a name.
Cognitive Load
Attention can process only part of the available information at once. Useful practice makes the relevant problem accessible and limits unnecessary demands.
Compounding
Some improvements do more than help immediately. They change what you can learn later by creating more room, attention or useful practice time.
Concepts over Techniques
A technique shows something you can do. Its underlying concept helps explain why it works and when a different execution is needed.
Constraints Led Approach
A coach can change the problem without prescribing every movement. Useful conditions preserve real information and invite appropriate solutions.
Contextual Interference
Switching tasks can disrupt today's performance while sometimes helping tomorrow's learning. The effect depends on the learner, task and test.
Contextual Variability
A skill should work with more than one partner or starting condition. Contextual variability expands experience around the same learning problem.
Deliberate Practice
More training is not identical to targeted improvement. Choose a specific skill, design an appropriate task and use feedback to shape the next attempt.
Desirable Difficulties
Some conditions make practice harder while supporting learning later. The difficulty is desirable because of what it produces, not because struggle is inherently valuable.
Effortful Retrieval
Recognizing an explanation feels easy. Retrieving what matters yourself makes a different demand and reveals what is available without support.
Feedback Loop
An outcome teaches something when you understand its meaning. A feedback loop connects trying, noticing and adjusting without flooding every attempt with advice.
First Principles
When a familiar answer stops working, ask what must be true for it to work. Build from those requirements instead of defending the recipe.
Form to Leave Form
A clear form gives you somewhere dependable to begin. Understanding and experience make that structure available without reciting every step.
Incremental Learning
A large task becomes accessible through thoughtful progression. Each step prepares the next and stays connected to the eventual problem.
Interleaving
Repeating one answer is different from choosing the right answer. Interleave related problems to practise that choice as well as the movement.
Making Smaller Circles
A smaller movement matters when its useful effect remains. Investigate what an action accomplishes before trying to shorten it.
Naming Concepts
Shared language helps coach and learner recognize the same relationship. Its name must stay connected to something you can explain, feel or observe.
Perception Action Coupling
You read an opponent while moving, not from outside the exchange. Practice should connect the information you use with the actions it supports.
Prediction Error
A prediction error is the difference between what you expected and what occurred. Making that difference visible turns surprise into a more useful learning question.
Scientific Method
A good explanation should risk being wrong. Make a prediction, test it fairly and let the result change what you believe.
Shu Ha Ri
An instruction can initially provide stability and later become too restrictive. Shu Ha Ri helps consider the relationship with structure that a particular task needs.
Spaced Repetition
Many repetitions on one day can feel familiar. Returning on other days reveals what remains and makes recall and application do useful work again.
Specificity of Practice
You learn a task together with the information and conditions that support it. Changing those conditions can reveal that a familiar skill is more specific than expected.
Teach to Learn
Trying to explain a skill often exposes the gaps your own practice hides. Use those gaps to guide what you ask, check and practise next.
Transfer of Learning
Learning becomes useful when it survives a change of setting. Transfer asks which parts of an experience carry across, and which need to be learned again.
Visualization
Mental practice can make a familiar action available again. It remains connected to experience and needs later examination in physical practice.
Mindset
1610 Minute Rule
Commit to a small task for ten minutes, then decide what comes next. Make starting manageable without pretending you have promised the whole project.
10-10-10 Rule
Consider a decision from ten minutes, ten months and ten years away. The changing horizon helps reveal which consequence is driving you.
Abundance Mindset
Another person's improvement can increase your opportunities to learn. An abundance mindset looks for shared gains while recognising real limits.
Abundance Paradox
Access to more knowledge does not guarantee a sense of progress. The abundance paradox asks whether expanding possibilities have quietly become impossible expectations.
Advice Paradox
You may need advice to improve while lacking the knowledge to judge it fully. Turn a recommendation into a clear, testable learning question.
Bayesian Updating
Begin with a provisional belief and change your confidence when evidence arrives. The important question is how surprising that evidence would be under competing explanations.
Compartmentalization
Give a concern a place and a next step so it does not need to occupy every activity. Compartmentalization here means an attention boundary, not denial.
Confirmation Bias
We can search for and interpret evidence in ways that favour what we already believe. A useful correction makes contradictory evidence easier to notice and harder to dismiss.
Extreme Ownership
Start with the part of the problem you can act on. Ownership becomes useful when it produces a concrete change, rather than a harsher story about yourself.
Growth from Discomfort
Unfamiliar work can feel awkward before it becomes manageable. Growth from discomfort asks you to engage with a useful challenge while keeping clear boundaries.
Habits over Results
Results vary from day to day. A useful habit makes a good action easier to repeat, then lets evidence decide whether that action still helps.
Investment in Loss
Developing a better approach may temporarily reduce your results. Invest in that cost only when it creates specific learning you can use.
Mindfulness
Notice what is happening without immediately turning it into a judgment. Mindfulness gives attention a way to return to the task when thoughts pull it elsewhere.
Prioritize Longevity
A good session should leave room for the next one. Judge today's choices partly by whether they support months and years of useful practice.
Resulting Fallacy
A good result can follow a poor decision, and a sound decision can end badly. Review the choice using the information that was available when you made it.
Self Competition
Compare your current ability with a relevant earlier version of yourself. The comparison becomes useful when the task and conditions are clear.
Practice
9Defensive Thinking
Trying to do nothing wrong does not tell you what to do next. Translate an avoidance goal into behavior you can actually practise.
Explore vs Exploit
Searching for new options and using a proven solution serve different purposes. The right balance changes with the goal of practice.
Gamification
A useful game makes the learning task visible. Its score helps only when it rewards the behavior you intended.
Kaizen
Sustainable improvement begins with a concrete problem. Investigate it, try a manageable change and use the result to choose the next step.
Marginal Gains
Several small improvements can contribute to a meaningful change. Find them around a real problem and check how they interact.
Opportunity Cost
A choice also costs the best option you leave aside. Compare your plan with a realistic alternative before committing.
Plus, Minus, Equals
A productive week needs several kinds of resistance. Different training relationships reveal different parts of your development.
Training Handicaps
Temporarily excluding a familiar solution can reveal a neglected skill. A useful restriction serves learning and remains safe.
You Are What You Train
Your intention does not automatically determine what gets learned. Repeated behavior deserves as much attention as the drill's name.
Strategy
13Compatible Intent
Partners do not need identical practice goals. Their intentions should allow a round in which both can learn.
Defense Paradox
Knowing how to recover from an unsuccessful attack can make exploration easier. Defense matters partly through the next action it makes possible.
Dictate the Pace
Dictating pace means influencing the moment of action. Sometimes that takes acceleration; sometimes it takes a pause or a better position.
Dilemma
A dilemma exists when different responses each concede something useful. The second option must genuinely emerge from the response to the first.
Diminishing Returns
The next investment does not always contribute as much as the previous one. Examine what additional practice time actually changes.
Do What Works
A familiar name does not automatically make a solution useful. Ask what it achieves, for whom and under which conditions.
Economy of Motion
Efficient movement uses appropriate means for the problem. The smallest movement is not always the best solution.
Fighting the Last War
Past success provides direction but can also fix attention in place. Check which conditions of the earlier solution still exist.
Hick's Law
Unclear choices can delay action. Practise recognisable possibilities while remembering that a fight differs from a simple choice reaction test.
OODA Loop
The situation changes as you act. OODA helps you look again at what is happening and what you think it means.
Probabilistic Thinking
A good choice can fail and a poor choice can get lucky. Think in possibilities and probabilities, and stay willing to change your estimate.
Return on Investment
An investment earns its place through what it contributes relative to its costs. The appropriate measure depends on your goal and time horizon.
Tokui Waza
Your best technique is more than an attractive demonstration. You need to reach it, adapt it and release it when the situation asks for something else.
Environment & Coaching
2Jim Rohn Rule
What a group considers normal can quietly shape your training. Look at the habits you adopt and the ones you want to contribute.
Raise the Level in the Room
Stronger partners and better conversations give you more to work with too. Your contribution starts with how you shape the next round together.