HOW TO BECOME AN EXPERT

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HARD IS GOOD, EASY IS BAD

In my opinion, one of the most valid heuristics in life is: “hard is good, easy is bad” – great ‘entities’ are time honored; and becoming an expert is not an exception.

Benjamin Bloom, (one of the pioneers of the psychology of expert performance) carried out a retrospective study probing the childhoods of some expert performers in a wide range of field in the 80s. Surprisingly, his battery of researches indicated that there are no correlation between expert performance and IQ. What tends to correlate with expert performance is the amount of practice – not just mere practice but what is called “deliberate practice”

In the book, Moon walking with Einstein, Joshua Foer gave a great description of what it takes to be an expert (or to be great at something):

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3 stages in acquiring new skills:

Cognitive stage: Here, you are learning the techniques and “tricks”; so you will definitely make lots of mistakes.

Associative stage: Here, you kind of get a hold of the techniques; efficiency increases, with fewer mistakes.

Autonomous stage: You are in the flow. You get rid – for the most part – the conscious control associated with the prior stages. Joshua Foer called this the “OK plateau” “The point at which you decide you are OK with how good you are at something , turn on autopilot, and stop improving”

{For clarity: Think of when you started driving versus now (assuming you are good at it)}

Here is the key to becoming an expert: Stay off the autonomous stage.

How? Let's follow the prescriptions of expert performance psychologists:

 1, Take on deliberate task beyond your competence and comfort. (Focus on techniques)

2, Be goal oriented (laser focus)

3, Get a very robust feedback (which means you have to continuously monitor progress aggressively) And tweak actions based on feedbacks

Psychologists believe that 10,000 hours of this process leads to expertise.

The important point here is – when you are doing this, you get your ass stuck at the cognitive stage! (Which is literally, the art of practicing failing)

By default this is hard - it should be - but remember: Hard is good, Easy is bad.

This is almost like the "Law of gravity" for mastery, even the super-smart don't defy it.

Let me end with this apt quote from Macklemore “The greats weren't great because at birth they could paint, the greats were great because they paint a lot!"

THE SECRETS TO PEAK PERFORMANCE

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MAXIMUM NEURO-HARMONY AND COGNITIVE CONTROL

3 TYPES OF FOCUS

I wrote out some notes from Prof. Daniel Goleman talk at google on his new book: Focus: the Hidden Driver of Excellence. He stated the 3 types of focus anyone with a sphere of influence requires.

Inner focus: The ability to manage oneself.

Outer focus: The ability to read other people effectively and be able to persuade other people.

Systems awareness: useful for strategic thinking – ability to be aware of what is going on in our world with respect to technology, the economy, and so on. For example, if your boss gave you a query at work, that is a threat. So is global warming. However, intuitively, the latter is usually relegated to “nothing”.

INNER FOCUS

Here I will focus on inner focus: the ability to work at one’s best. This is sometimes called Good work, and it occurs when we have “maximum neuro-harmony”. Good work tend to reflect when we fulfill 3 main requirements.

The best set of skills for the job

Love for the job

Perfect alignment of the job with one’s ethics.

To also get to the state of Good work, psychologists have figured out that cognitive control (also called delay in gratification) is non-negotiable.

TWO STUDIES

The famous marshmellow test. Four year olds were given 1 marshmellow, and they were instructed that if they could wait 10 minutes without eating the marshmellow, they will get an additional one. Some grabbed and some waited. About 14 years later, the kids that delay gratification (waited for 10 minutes) had a 200 point average advantage on the SAT.

In a similar study in New Zealand about a thousand 4-8 year olds were tested for cognitive control. 32 years later they were tracked down. The study revealed that their cognitive control predicted health and financial success better than their IQ or the socio economic status of their family.

Hence, there has been a push to teach cognitive control to kids.

KEYSTONE HABITS AND HOW I KILLED 3 BIRDS WITH ONE STONE

 

Last summer I had a plethora of important goals to achieve; I had to quickly recruit some germane arsenals to boost my focus – the subject, which has unarguably become a rare commodity in our world today (You probably don’t have to own an iPhone to fathom this). I did a will-power experiment, scored myself holistically on a weekly basis – as bona fide as I could – just for a sole reason: as a vessel for motivation.

Few months after, I was listening to an audiobook, The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal. In the book, she pointed out to some research that showed how exercise incited several positive habits like eating healthy, increased productivity, smoking less, amongst others.

Hurriedly I stretched for my last summer will power experimental data and to my astonishment, a trend emerged.  Oblivious to me, I had killed 3 birds with one stone – The morning I ran; One, I was more likely to stick to my almost-tasteless oats meal versus a carbohydrate-laden food; two, read an extra 30 minutes; and three, spent less time wasting away on the internet. In short, the positive correlation between my exercise regimen and will power was almost absolute!

Charles Duhigg in his best seller book – The Power of Habit –  calls activities like my last-summer-exercise “Keystone habits”. Here is the book:

“Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything...Keystone habits say that success doesn’t depend on getting every single thing right, but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers...The habits that matter most are the ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns”

Apart from physical exercise, here is another example: Food journaling. Studies has shown that people who kept a daily log of food consumed, has a much higher chance of eating healthy, and consequently lose more weight; only with the use of food journals.

In fact, Duhigg in his book stated that some studies has shown a positive correlation between making your bed every morning and developing apt budgeting skills, a sense of well-being, and increased productivity. Lastly – and more important – is the habit of positive thinking. This will probably have one of the greatest positive ripple effect I can imagine.

The gist is, look for a habit that will give you the ripple effect that you desire: I had guess if you had the opportunity to kill 3 birds with one stone (versus 3 stones), you’ll grab it.

LESSONS FROM A NAVY SEAL: WHY YOU SHOULD STOP WORRYING.




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 Worry (n): to feel or show fear and concern because you think that something bad has happened or could happen. Verily, all of us have engaged in this recalcitrant proclivity. Last year I came across the statistics that 90% of what we worry about never happens. If that is anything to go by, then we have successfully inundated our lives with time-wasting activities, talkless of plausible impairment of our health [Think about it!] Why I believe it is insurmountable to completely jettison worry, a substantial reduction could be a life changer.

Among several other lessons, I was reminded of worry today as I read through the book “No heroes” by Mark Owen. Mark Owen was one of the Navy SEALS who participated in the Osama Bin Laden raid. In a rock climbing drill he relayed in the book, he said after he ran out of camming devices, he got frozen at some 300 foot, up on the rock! [Almost a 100m dash length!!!]  Loss his front sight focus, became nervous, anything that could plausibly define worry.

One of the instructors came around and gave him a quick coaching.... “Just stay in your 3-foot world” he said...“Focus on what you can affect. You keep looking around, and none of that shit can help you right now, can it?...”

Are you focused on what you can affect? Or completely out of your 3-foot world? My advice – better stay in your 3-foot world! Monitor your thoughts, keep busy, and count your blessings. These are simple [simple but not easy] strategies that can be very salutary. In Dale Carnegie’s how to stop worrying and start living [one of my favorite books], he posited a tactic for handling worries – Mentally accept the worst, and peacefully do your best to improve the worst case scenario.

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Final Sentence: STAY IN YOUR 3-FOOT WORLD! 

SUCCESS AND YOUR ENVIRONMENT

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KENYAN’S PRE-EMINENCE IN DISTANCE RUNNING AND WHY YOU SHOULD VET YOUR MILIEU.

...56 medals at the Olympics games, despite boycotting the 1976 and 1980 games. Kenyans continue to astound the world with their sublime performances in distance running. What galvanizes intense curiosity in this Kenyan phenomenon was the fact that about 90% of the top athletes are from a single enclosed area in Kenya – Nandi hills.  

So, what miracle might have happened on the Nandi Hills? Geneticists concluded that although genes cannot be ruled out completely, there is a stronger force in action. In the Book, “Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham and the Science of Success”, Matthew Syed gathered that Nandi Hills are areas of high altitude; and the altitudinal training the inhabitants are subjected to unequivocally boost endurance. But clearly that wasn’t enough, here is a text from the book

“...when you also factor in the remarkable fact that many Kenya’s top runners ran extraordinarily long distances to school, sometimes in excess of 20km per day (because of the non-existence of public transportation)...gives a persuasive explanation of this running phenomenon” 

Clearly the structure of their environment played the major role in this huge success.

Vet your Milieu!

So here is the point: check your environment. Your milieu – social and physical environment – just like in the case of Kenyan athletes, will always determine your success. While you might not bother to run on hills or jog up to 20km every day, you might want to think about your company. Jim Rohn said “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” I have found this statement to be of utmost veracity. Again, is your physical environment riddled with distractions? Drifting you gradually away from your goals, or are you constructing your own ‘Nandi Hill’?  

HOW YOUR BRAIN CAN CHEAT ON YOU

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DOPAMINE AND THE SCIENCE OF ADDICTION

Have you ever thought of why you had to check your email inbox all day long in anticipation of a message you ain’t expecting? Or why about 315 million adults are addicted to illicit drug?

Well, for the most part, there is a great deal of congruency in the aforementioned questions - from behavioral addiction to drug addiction, neuroscientists and psychologists have nailed it down to a pleasure chemical called dopamine.

History first: 1954. James Olds and Peter Milner discovered that the stimulation – by electrical voltage – of certain region of a mice brain engendered a ‘strange’ pleasure that galvanized an experimental mice to repeat the same action for hours – pressing the lever that actuates the stimulation. Further experiments with humans lead to the discovery of the reward system and dopamine.

What the heck does this mean? The reward pathway works like this: 1. Receive a signal 2.Take an action (e.g food/internet/video game....) 3. Achieve your goal and get rewarded for it. And guess what? The cycle continues – creating a ‘compulsive loop’. The reward often come in the form of dopamine release into the brain’s pleasure center, making the action pleasurable, and increasing the probability of behavioral alterations in the future.

Now you can guess while illicit drugs can be more addictive than normal actions like eating – the latter can release as much as 10 times dopamine compared to the former.

But does taking these actions really rewards us? This was one of the theme in the book – will power instinct by Kelly McGonigal, a professor at Stanford University. She opined that the reward dopamine promises or gives is a false one, because after engaging in such actions, we do not really feel better about ourselves. In fact, in most cases its the contrary especially if it’s a habit we battling.

This natural process messes with our will power and explains while most of us struggle with will power challenges. This reminds me of the fact that humans are not naturally wired to be successful and explains while only about 1% of the entire population really ‘stand tall’.

Battling with a bad habits? difficult? Quite understandable. Fathoming the simple science of addiction can help increase our awareness – that our brain is about to ‘cheat’ on us – and maybe that will desist us from taking repetitive unsatisfying actions. Creation of ‘physical walls’ between ourselves and our will power challenges also happen to be a helpful tactic.

WHY AN AVERAGE PERSON WILL LOSE



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MUHAMMED ALI, WILLIAM SISTERS, AND THE NEWTON'S THIRD LAW OF MOTION

I was listening to a talk by Arnold Schwarzenegger few days ago on YouTube, and he mentioned of a question Muhammad Ali answered in an interview at the acme of his career.

Interviewer: Muhammad, can you please tell us: how many sit-ups do you in a day?

Muhammad Ali: Hmm...I don’t know exactly, I can’t really say because I only start counting when I start feeling the pain, when its start hurting.

I bet he answered it the apt way. Legends like Ali wouldn’t be counting sit-ups of course. But why does the pain have to trigger the counting...

At the mention of names like Muhammad Ali, William sisters, and Tiger Woods. Praises of talent and genius fills the air. Little do we hear about the humongous practices they engaged in ‘backstage’. Beware of the media bias and remember Newton's third law of motion – To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

In a book called Bounce by the two time Olympian, Matthew Syed, he relayed an abridged history of the William sisters: because of the love of tennis that engulfs their Dad, he taught himself and his wife how to play tennis so that they would be able train their kids. And for the training lessons, Venus started at four, Serena at three. Surprised? By the time they are twelve and eleven, they got invited by a teaching pro to study at the Florida Academy. They were able to reach ten thousand hour of practice at an early age – the number of hours psychologists believe is required for mastery in any field. No wonder they excelled extraordinarily.

                                                                                                                                  

And for Muhammed Ali, he had to count only at the mercy of pain because it is only then does it count – in order to separate himself from the average. While practice and hard work are just one of the several recipe for success, it is something we can never refute. It is like pure math! John Maxwell put its best – “To win you have to ‘suffer’: if you have suffered and you didn’t win, be rest assured someone will win when you are gone, on the other hand, if have you won and never suffered, know that someone has suffered before you”