On Peak Growth
Have you ever felt like youâve stalled in improving your skills? You reach 20,000 miles driving your car, and you think, âyeah, thereâs nothing more I can do to improve my driving skills.â You feel comfortable clocking in at work, mindlessly going through the actions because youâve done this work a thousand times before, and thereâs absolutely nothing that will shock you. Iâm not critiquing the boredom one could face droning through work. Iâm making an observation that you donât even notice when youâve reached a peak in growth.
At First, How Much
This week, I read Scott H. Youngâs article, âFailures of Intensityâ. In the article, Scott argues for skill acquisition advice to be geared towards how much you should do rather than what you should do. Scott mentions there is lack of information about how much time it takes learning a new skill as well as frequency. Almost all advice columns out there are about what to do to learn a new skill.
If I open the top stories on Medium, youâll find posts titled âThese 12 Habits Are Killing Your Productivityâ, âBuilding your design portfolio? Here are 8 things I wish Iâd knownâ, and âHow to be like Steve Ballmerâ. The last article, it started with the word, âhowâ, but when you get to the meat of the article, you find out its telling you the âwhatâ, as in âwhat do you need to do in order to achieve success like Steve Ballmer.â Iâm not trashing these articles. Iâm sure theyâre all a perfectly good read, but Scott was right. Theyâre focused on telling people the âwhatâ and not of âhow muchâ and âhow frequentâ.
How much is enough to learn a skill? Last year, I read Josh Kaufmanâs book, âThe First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything ⌠Fast!â Like most books, Josh first breaks down the question of what. For this book, itâs the what of of skill acquisition. But unlike other books, the second half is Josh chronicling the first twenty hours of learning a new skill. He breaks down the first twenty hours of learning yoga, programming, touch typing, the game go, the ukulele, and windsurfing. He learned it wasnât worth pursuing touch typing after twenty hours, but it was worth pursuing programming a bit further.
What we can learn from Josh is to give new skills a shot. Give yourself a goal or milestone to reach by twenty hours. At the end of the twenty hours, you take a moment of reflection. Do you continue to put more effort in this skill or let it go?
Reflection Points
If you decide to continue with your skill, place checkpoints to review the progress. All too often, we donât reflect on where we are. If you check in with yourself at fixed time intervals, like every week or every month, you can review the progress youâve made. Then, you can adjust the frequency of how much more practice youâll need.
When you donât have checkpoints for reflecting, you could be comfortable with mediocre skills and stop working on growth. This is especially harmful if you wish to continue growing. I have made this mistake repeatedly. Years into my piano lessons, Iâd practice with an automated mind, letting myself play the music without thinking about timing, about playing the correct notes or keeping good form. Bad habits such as finger slip mistakes creeped in and stuck, in other words, I learned to adapt to hearing the bad note. Before I knew it, I wasted a good 100 hours practicing music that didnât sound great. I stalled on my skills and wasnât going to improve them with more time spent on practice. I had fallen pray to my autopilot mind.
Flow is the balance between doing a task that is challenging while having a high skill level in that task. Deliberate practice is being in that flow state. Regular practice regards all practice, whether deliberate or not. I wonât talk much about flow, as that was the topic of a previous post. If you find yourself in that stalled funk, here are a few tips to help you get out.
Work on something new. In piano practice, this is as easy as playing a new song in a new genre. Last month, I found my fingers tired and sore trying to play improv salsa. It was a genre I hadnât tackled before, and by the end of my practice, I remembered what a beginner felt like.
Write about the process. This past week, I started using Vim as a text editor. After a year of using Sublime and Atom, I put those aside and took two hours to go through a tutorial called vimtutor. The tutorial taught me the basics of how to use Vim. At the end of the tutorial, I wrote up a piece about my experience with the tutorial, mainly to help myself with what I learned, but with a bonus side effect that it may help someone else just starting out with Vim.
Reflect with a teacher. Whenever I feel Iâm not challenged enough, I talk to a teacher, a boss, or a mentor who has a higher skill level. Talking to someone with a higher skill level, you may be able to extract what you could do next. I was at a data visualization unconference two weekends ago and people I talked to pointed me to bunch of new programs to sharpen my toolset.
Be the teacher. If you know the skill well enough, you should be able to teach it to others. A lot of times, you wonât know thereâs gaps in your knowledge or skill until you have to teach it to someone else. It makes you reflect on being the beginner again. During Thanksgiving, I tried to teach my 8 year old cousin how to play a 14 and up card game. When I was explaining the rules to my cousin, I used large words he couldnât understand. Looking at my cousinâs dumbfounded face, I realized Iâm still terrible throwing away large words in favor of shorter ones a 8 year old could understand. Reflecting on this situation, I need to work on communicating more clearly to children.
While Iâve recommended this book in the past, itâs a great book to recommend again. âPragmatic Thinking & Learning. Refactor Your Wetwareâ by Andy Hunt has more tips about getting out of the rut.
Remember skill acquisition takes time, and you should focus on the journey rather than the destination. Perhaps twenty hours utilizing one of these tips might just be what you need to grow into the master you wish to become.