Category: learning

A loose grip

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Novices hold on tight, experts have a loose grip.

That’s because when we’re novices, we grasp for control. New motions are unfamiliar, our minds and bodies are not confident, so we clutch tightly, knuckles white, straining, in an effort to get it right.

Experts, on the other hand, holds their tools—a paintbrush, a pencil, a baton, a racquet, a guitar pick, their breath—loosely. With mastery comes relaxation, ease, and effort expended only where it is needed most.

If you’ve ever gone scuba diving, you know this. When you finish a dive, compare how much air you’ve used to that of the dive master. In my experience, the dive master uses half, or even one third, of the air I’ve used in a single dive.

Think about that: two to three times the oxygen, because it was new to me, because I was tense, because of unnecessary effort.

What’s interesting is that some people get stuck in the white-knuckled phase and some move past it.

I don’t know the skeleton key to get from there to here, but some of the ingredients are an intention to give up control, the comfort with being “not great” for a while, finding places not to grip—in your mind, your body, your breath—and breaking the skill down to smaller, slower pieces so you have time and space to get those pieces right.

The F Chord Opportunity

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been working on playing guitar for about a year.

It is, mostly, harder than I’d expected—given my lifelong experience as a musician—but also extremely enjoyable. Moments of playing a truly beautiful, soulful tune, or of getting my girls to sing while I play, are nothing short of transcendent.

One of the challenges every beginner guitar player will face is learning to play an F chord.

The F chord – image from https://notesonaguitar.com/how-to-play-an-f-chord/

To play it properly, you need to curl and press down firmly with your middle, ring and pinky fingers, and, simultaneously, press down three other strings with your second finger.

Getting it to sound like anything other than a buzzing mess was, at first, impossible. Playing this F in tempo, as part of a song, still seems ludicrous to me.

Each beginning guitar player must decide how to confront this challenge. The natural thing to do is to avoid it: you can do a lot on the guitar without being able to play this awful chord. You can avoid songs that have it. You can play a ‘mini’ F chord, which is much easier. Never learning the F chord, and all the associated bar chords, seems like a viable path.

And yet, there’s not a single “real” guitar player out there who can’t play an F chord.

So how do we handle this as guitar players and in other part of our lives? How do we approach the skills that we could easily dodge and we think no one would notice—skills that are high leverage specifically because the only way out is through.

Skills like learning how to:

  • Sell
  • Write code
  • Coach
  • Negotiate
  • Give honest, constructive feedback
  • Hear honest, constructive feedback
  • Put yourself on the hook
  • Keep your promises
  • Own your mistakes
  • Make strategic choices with incomplete information
  • Disagree productively
  • Develop resilience around our motivation
  • Influence without authority

F chords are everywhere, they’re just not always easy to see.

Spanish in 10 Minutes a Day

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I still remember buying “Spanish in 10 Minutes a Day,” an old-school adult learning book that was never going to keep its promise.

I bought it during college, right after deciding that I was going to take a semester off to live in Spain.

I’d bought the book over a weekend, and the following Wednesday, I found myself on a bus to some volunteer work.

At this point, I’d put in two days’ worth of work—20 minutes, per the book’s lesson plan—and made my way through Chapter 1, which consisted of a dialogue about a lost suitcase (“Hola Señor. Yo he perdido mi maleta.”)

Sitting on the bus, with no smartphone to distract me, I started paying attention to two guys sitting nearby who were having an animated discussion in Spanish.

I started paying closer attention, eavesdropping more aggressively, and trying to get the gist of their conversation.

Of course, I could understand almost nothing. And I was so frustrated.

Think about how silly that is: a week prior to that bus ride, I wasn’t a student of Spanish, and I had no story about my now or future Spanish-speaking abilities.

But armed with my Spanish in 10 Minute a Day book, and—more important—the new story I was telling myself, I’d deluded myself into thinking I was supposed to understand something of this conversation.

The new stories we tell ourselves are powerful. They can motivate us to action, and push us to new heights.

But they also create uncomfortable tension.

I’m eating healthier now. Why haven’t I lost any weight?

I want to learn to swim better. Why am I still breathless after one length of the pool?

I’m resting to give this injury time to heal. Why isn’t it any better.

I’ve promised myself I’ll speak up more. Why didn’t I do it in that last meeting? 

I’m going to invest more in new friendships. Why don’t I have any plans on Saturday night?

I’m starting to learn something new. Why aren’t I better at this today?

 All learning takes time.

The time after we’ve decided to do a new thing, but before we make (much) progress.

The time after we can clearly see the gap between where are and where we’d like to be.

The time living with the tension between what we want to be better tomorrow, and where we are today.

Remember, when we fall short, it is almost never due to lack of skill.

It is because we cannot live with the discomfort of the gap between where we hope to be tomorrow and where we are today.

(Note: it’s easy to see this tension on an individual level. It plays out tenfold at an organizational level. It’s one of the many reasons change is hard.)

Fretting

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

A little more than a year ago, I started playing guitar, to keep up with my daughter who has also been learning.

I didn’t know was how painful it is to play a steel string guitar: pushing hard on the strings was excruciating until I started playing consistently.

I’ve been fully self-taught, using the occasional YouTube video for advice and the Tabs app for the music. But a few weeks ago I came across the online course I’d been looking for. It includes the technique tips I’d been missing.

One tip in particular stood out.

It turns out that you are NOT supposed to put your fingers at the midpoint between two frets: doing so makes you have to push twice as hard (remember: finger pain) and it often makes the strings buzz.  Instead, you’re supposed to place your finger as close to the metal fret divider as possible. When you do this, you need less pressure, and the note comes out clean.

D chord finger placement – notice how his fingers are touching the frets.

So often the difference between the expert and the novice isn’t just skill, it is ease. Experts glide through things, novices sweat.

If you’re at the beginning of something, and things are going slowly, look for an expert who can teach you about the fret bar. New things are hard enough without the wrong mental model.

Sight Reading

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I played classical piano seriously for nearly 20 years. I practiced for a half hour every day when I was a little kid and three hours a day or more when I was in college.

Despite my hard work and commitment, I was a terrible sight reader, which meant I was very slow to learn new pieces. It didn’t come naturally, and over time I resigned myself to this reality: I was good at a lot of aspects of playing the piano, but sight reading wasn’t one of them.

About a decade ago I was talking with my kids’ piano teacher, and I shared how long it took me to learn new pieces. Casually, she said something that unlocked it for me: “I just think about it like reading the words on a page. Words are familiar, as are sentences and paragraphs, and I just think of it like that.”

I don’t know why that stuck with me, but it did, and suddenly sight reading made sense. And, even though I don’t play piano much at all these days, I now can learn a piece at least three times faster than I used to—I’m not a great sight reader, but I’m much better than I was.

Looking back, I can’t help but reflect on what could have been had I figured this out sooner.

By my math, I clocked somewhere around 8,000 hours of piano practice from the time I was 6 until I was 22, enough to become an expert by nearly any measure.

However, I also now see that I wasted a tremendous proportion of these 8,000 hours. Something like one third of all my practice time was spent slowly and inefficiently learning pieces.

Think about that: one-third of the time I devoted—to one of the things I’m best at in the world—completely lost.

What could the fix have been?

While I’d like to think that a more evolved version of my 10-year-old self could have somehow figured this out on my own, I doubt it.

What would have made the difference was if a teacher had said to me, “You have to learn this new piece in a week.”

I’d have struggled and failed, but hopefully she would have said it to me again and again and again.

And at the end of what would have been a miserable year for my young self, I’m sure I would have cracked the code. And then I would have walked a different path, a more productive path, with the remaining 6,000 hours of piano practice that lay ahead.

Imagine all the ways, big and small, we skip the most essential steps and unwittingly undermine the long, hard hours we’re otherwise putting in, including:

Day to day stuff like learning to type, or becoming really comfortable with using and learning new technologies.

New stuff like using AI every day, until it becomes second nature to us.

Hard stuff like, if we say we want to write well, forcing ourselves to write badly and often.

Rigorous stuff like developing a discipline of shipping our work on time.

Personal growth stuff like ensuring we’re getting enough feedback, so we can develop an accurate picture of our strengths and growth areas.

And healthy living stuff, like developing a balance relationship with food or sleep.

These are just some of the many gateways that are precursors to making the time we invest later yield more.

Nothing special needs to happen: we just need to decide to go back to the steps we’d skipped or glossed over, and reconcile ourselves to the fact that getting this important stuff right won’t, at first, be much fun.

Or we can find an accountability partner, someone like my hypothetical teacher to crack the whip and hold us to a high, and temporarily uncomfortable, standard.

And, of course, if we supervise or mentor other people, it might be time to be the whip-cracking teacher, as an investment in the long term.

One way or another, we owe it to ourselves to get the core skills right first, before it’s too late.

Learning from Imperfect People

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We do it all the time. Ariana Huffington, Clayton Christensen, Nandan Nilekani, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala…we have something important to learn from each of them.

And yet, each of them may be flawed in some (or many) ways. This doesn’t mean they have nothing to teach.

And yet, when we encounter non-famous, also flawed people, we are often quick to judge. We instinctively treat them as people we have little to learn from.

They also have a lot to teach us.

There’s something they are great at, something that comes naturally to them, something that makes them special—if we’re open to it.

If nothing else, we can learn from how we find ourselves reacting to them—having a quick mind is one thing, being quick to judgment is something else entirely (and yet they often go together).

Generosity of spirit is a better way to go through the world for so many reasons. One of these reasons is that it helps remove our blinders, allowing us to learn from the person standing right in front of us.

The one who, despite his flaws, we haven’t written off.

Good Enough, Fast Enough, The Right Way

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Every day, every moment, we’re engaged in a dance with ourselves that revolves around three questions:

  1. What’s the best way to do this?
  2. What speed do I go?
  3. How do I know when it’s finished?

1. What’s the best way to do this?

There’s the way I’ve always done this, the way I did this yesterday, the way I know will work well enough.

Then there’s my ongoing tracking of whether this way is good enough, a dialogue with myself about whether it’s time to upgrade. This conversation is an outgrowth of my intuition, knowledge and research.

Every day, I can ask an answer a simple but important question: is today the day I start learning one small part of a better way to do what I do?

2. What speed do I go?

I know I shouldn’t be rushing; I can’t be if I’m going to do my best work.

At the same time, like a runner, I can, over time, get comfortable with faster, get comfortable with leaning a little more forward, get comfortable with a new pace.

While it might be hard to see our own progress in individual tasks, we also know that there are things we do in a minute today that took us five before. This means that there is a pace we can go tomorrow that feels risky, even dangerous today.

The trick here is to decouple the speed itself—the actual pace we’re going, the essential interplay between quality and throughput—and our experience of speed.

If we feel uncomfortable, that might mean we’re going too fast. Or it might be a barometer of our fear.

If our pace feels “just right” all the time, that might mean we’re not pushing hard enough.

3. How do I know it’s done?

This is hardest one of all, because we could always make it a little bit better, because that last finishing touch might be the difference between good and great.

Or it might be where we hide.

Hide from the fear of putting our work out there in front of a colleague or a client.

Hide from the moment when we say, “I did this, and I stand by this.”

Hide in the safety of knowing that “I’m just making it a little bit better” will rarely be criticized, even though the time I’m taking on this thing is taking away from time on the next thing.

How do I track my progress? 

By remembering to ask myself these questions: Is there a better way? Could I go faster? When is it done?

By learning to switch between the dance floor and the balcony: to be in the action, and to see myself in the action. This is how we gain perspective.

But most of all, by regularly asking honest questions of our colleagues:

“This is my approach, how do you do it? Who’s the best at this? Could you, or they, teach me? Can I find a better answer online, in a course, in a community of practice?”

“Do you feel like I generally go the right pace, too fast, or too slow? Can you give me an example?”

“How good am I at following the 80/20 rule? When you get something from me, does it feel ‘good enough’ or ‘perfected’? This is how long the last 20% took me—does that seem like a good use of my time?” 

We never get better in a vacuum.

 

Oh, and if learning to work in this way interests you, you might want to become part of our amazing team at 60 Decibels. I’m hiring an Inside Sales Associate to work closely with me, based in New York. The job posting just went up today, so spread the word!

Playing fast, slowly

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

My father, who is a concert pianist, reminded me and my daughter of this idea a little while ago.

Consider this passage, from Chopin’s Etude Op. 10 No. 5 (‘black note etude’).

This whole section, all 64 notes, goes by in less than four seconds if played at tempo. The question is: how to practice this section, or the rest of the piece for that matter, when you’re just getting started?

The natural, and most common, approach is to play each note one at a time at a reasonable tempo and, over time, increase that tempo.

My dad argues that this is a road to nowhere: there’s no way to play note by note by note and ultimately hit the fast tempo.

Instead, he suggests: play fast, slowly.

This means picking out very small sections, playing them at full tempo, then pausing, and doing the same for the next section. Like this:

In this way, you’re teaching your hand, and your brain, to play at full tempo, and using the pauses to give yourself enough space and time to set up for the next group of notes.

Over time, then, your job is not “play faster.”

Instead, your job is to “shorten the pauses” until they disappear.

This works for four reasons:

  1. You’re exposing and teaching your body the physical sensation of playing at speed. So much of what we learn—in piano, surely, but everywhere else as well—is learned in the body and not just in the mind.
  2. You’re transforming groups of 6 or 12 individual notes—each of which had to be thought of, processed, and remembered individually—into blocks. It’s easy for the mind to think of a 6- or 12-note block as ‘one thing’ after a bit of practice. And since playing the piano is mostly about your mind keeping up with the torrent of notes your hands have to play, any ‘chunking’ you can do of this overwhelming amount of information allows you to speed up.
  3. The breaks, at the beginning, are much longer than the time you spend playing. When doing something new and difficult, we need extra time to recover and reset.
  4. You’re taking something that’s dangerous—in the sense of “if I play this at full speed, it will fall apart”—and making it safe, thereby building confidence and competence. “I can’t play the whole passage at speed (yet). But I can play these six notes at speed, with full confidence that I won’t mess this little bit up.” And then, over time, the little bit grows, as does your confidence.

What’s powerful about this isn’t only the counterintuitive approach to solving the problem. It’s the conjecture that our standard approach must always have a view towards what it will ultimately become.

Is this an approach, or a process, that both works for where I am today and will get me to tomorrow?

Ideal Conditions

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

The experience is familiar: we’re interacting with a piece of software, and it’s clear that the developer didn’t contemplate a wide-enough set of use cases. The result is that the thing we’re trying to get done is hard/impossible to do, and we end up frustrated.

This same thing happens to us as we try to develop new skills and responses: when these new approaches and aptitudes are nascent, we can, at best, deploy them only under ideal conditions.

For example, we may be working on listening harder and responding more slowly and less defensively in the face of criticism.

At the outset, we’ll succeed in doing this only with our coach or our most sensitive and constructive colleague. When someone shows up with too little care, or even aggressively, we’ll revert to our old behaviors

This example help us to add an axis to how we think about skill development.

The more obvious axis describes our overall skillfulness, and it ranges from:

  • (Self) awareness: we can clearly see the gap between our current behavior / skill and our desired behavior / skill
  • Nascent: we show the first signs of being able to deploy the skill
  • Strong
  • Expert

The additional axis contemplates the situations in which we can deploy the skill, which is a window into our skill resilience:

  • None: we can never deploy the skill
  • Highly curated: we can only deploy the skill in ideal circumstances
  • Most: we can often deploy the skill
  • All: we can always deploy the skill

The first axis is the axis of skill development, and the second is of skill resilience.

While they are naturally correlated, they are not one and the same thing. Most important, it is easy to confuse lack of skill resilience with lack of skill development: for example, we might have strong skills but not be adept yet at deploying them in varied contexts, and we might mistakenly use this data to mis-diagnose ourselves as having made too-little progress.

Often, the resilience axis has roots in the things that trigger us — a trigger is something that gets us off our game. Exploring our triggers for any set of skills/situations often leads to more universal insights, and is the first step towards moving us from Ideal Conditions to All Conditions across the board.

What Else is Like Touch Typing?

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In sixth grade, I took a two-week, after-school typing class.

For some reason, it was held in our middle school computer room. We were surrounded by some old DOS terminals, seated a few feet away from a dot matrix printer with green and white lined paper.

Each of us was given a manual typewriter, the kind where you had to push the keys down three or four inches to get them to hit the ribbon. I sometimes wonder if the physical force we had to generate, and the ‘clack’ of the letter hitting the ink and the page, grooved the keyboard layout in our neuromuscular system more than a computer keyboard ever would.

Amazingly, that class alone (coupled, perhaps, with the fact that I played the piano) was enough for me to learn how to type. After the two weeks, I had my ‘ASDF JKL;” grooved, and soon after that I was typing without looking down and gradually increasing my speed and decreasing my error rate.

I can think of few things I’ve learned that have yielded more for my professional life: learning to type 80 words a minute, and not 20, saves me hundreds of hours each year.

Typing, unlike most skills, has a distinct before-and-after and an obvious path to mastery: before, I looked for each of 26 letters (plus punctuation) one at a time; after, my hands stay in the right place, the letters’ location have entered my muscle memory, and I’m 4x as fast.

But nearly everything we do has a slow/manual version and a fast/grooved version, even things that don’t look, at first glance, like concrete skills.

There’s the little stuff: how we get through our Inbox, create a chart, proofread.

But there’s also bigger stuff, which has similar multiplicative properties: the time it takes us to write a good email, to prepare for a 1-on-1 meeting, to think through and deliver feedback.

And there are things that don’t even look like skills, but are. Think, for example, about something that happens in most demanding jobs, having a surge in work and pushing for a deadline. This experience of pushing ourselves (or being pushed) requires us to develop the skills of: focused endurance; staying grounded while managing the stress of (self-imposed/external) deadlines; maintaining quality with constrained time; prioritization; overcoming procrastination; shipping.

Managing through, and eventually thriving amidst, things that are “hard” is just as much a skill as touch-typing, and it has just as much yield.

What it requires of us is the recognition that there’s something here for us to learn, and not just endure, and the patience to allow ourselves to grow, in time, from amateur to novice to expert.