His mom was a coach, but she never coached him. He would kick a ball around with her when he learned to walk. As a boy he played squash with his father on Sundays. He dabbled in skiing, wrestling, swimming, and skateboarding. He played basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, badminton over his neighbor's fence, and soccer at school. He would later give credit to the wide range of sports he played for helping him develop his athleticism and hand-eye coordination.

He found that the sport really didn't matter much, so long as it included a ball. “I was always much more interested if a ball was involved,” he would remember. He was a kid who loved to play. His parents had no particular athletic aspirations for him. “We had no plan A, no plan B,” his mother would later say. She and the boy's father encouraged him to sample a wide array of sports. In fact, it was essential. The boy “became unbearable,” his mother said, if he had to stay still for too long.

Though his mother taught tennis, she decided against working with him. “He would have just upset me anyway,” she said. “He tried out every strange stroke and certainly never returned the ball normally. That is simply no fun for a mother.” Rather than pushy, a Sports Illustrated writer would observe that his parents were, if anything, “pully”. Nearing his teens, the boy began to gravitate more toward tennis, and “if they nudged him at all, it was to stop taking tennis so seriously.” When he played matches, his mother often wandered away to chat with friends. His father had only one rule: “Just don't cheat.” He didn't, and he started getting really good.

The domains Klein studied, in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind” environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid.

…

The environment is kind because a learner improves simply by engaging in the activity and trying to do better.

Kahneman was focused on the flip side of kind learning environments; Hogarth called them “wicked”

In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback if often delayed, inaccurate, or both.

… Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway …

The more information specialists create, the more opportunity exists for curious dilettantes to contribute by merging strands of widely available but disparate information — undiscovered public knowledge, as Don Swanson called it. …

It isn't just the increase in new knowledge that generates opportunities for nonspecialists, though. In a race to the forefront, a lot of useful knowledge is simply left behind to molder. That presents another kind of opportunity for those who want to create and invent but who cannot or simply do not want to work at the cutting edge. They can push forward by looking back; they can excavate old knowledge but wield it in a new way.

… You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don't train people in thinking or reasoning.