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.
Every day, every moment, we’re engaged in a dance with ourselves that revolves around three questions:
What’s the best way to do this?
What speed do I go?
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!
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:
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
A few weeks ago, on a Friday afternoon, a colleague of mine sent around a great TEDx talk, Shawn Achor’s The Happy Secret to Better Work, which has been viewed more than 23 million times.
I took 12 minutes out of a busy day to watch it. I enjoyed it, and connected to our team’s conversation about it. One takeaway that rose to the top was that to increase our positivity and happiness, we should engage in one random act of kindness each day. What’s not to like?
The following Monday, I came across that same thread in Slack.
I wanted to jump back into the conversation, but I immediately discovered that, outside of the “let’s do more random act of kindness” takeaway, I remembered virtually nothing about the talk.
I watched the talk again, this time taking some simple notes. Here they are.
The talk is about positive psychology
When we focus averages–in education, in economics, in life–we fail to design and plan for the extra-ordinary. This is a mistake.
Our happiness is not objectively determined. If Shawn could look only at your externally-observable world (job, income, family life) he could only determine 10% of your happiness.
IQ does not determine job success. 75% of job success is determined by optimism levels, social support, and seeing stress as a challenge not a threat.
We need to reverse our mental model of happiness and success.
The wrong model is: Work leads to Success which leads to Happiness.
The problem with this model is that whenever we succeed, we move the goal posts (expect a higher level of performance), so we never get to Happiness, which we’ve put out on the horizon past Success.
Instead, our job is to raise our own positivity in the present.
Five things we can do to raise our positivity are:
Practice being grateful for three things a day for 21 days;
Journal about one positive experience per day;
Exercise;
Meditate;
Engage in random acts of kindness by praising on person in our social support network each day.
Now, you should absolutely watch the talk. It’s a thousand times better than my notes, full of wonderful humor, sibling rivalries, and an actual unicorn story.
But if you’re like me, the talk, and this blog post, no matter how much you enjoy it, will slip through your fingers if you don’t take active steps to process it. I, for one, remembered less than 5% of the content.
Document what I’m reading / listening to – by taking notes or writing a blog post.
Retell the story verbally – sharing the content with others strengthens my recall, and it allows me to discover (and then fill in) gaps in my knowledge.
Practice the new behavior.
When I fail to take these steps, ideas skim the surface of my consciousness and leave as quickly as they entered. When that happens, they are nothing more than entertainment.
Whereas when I shift from a passive consumer of content to an active processor of it, new ideas can stay in my brain and, over time, become part of my life.
I can’t resist: I’m training our 6-month old, exuberant, I-must-sniff-and-greet-everything-and-everyone puppy, Birdie, and can’t help but notice a few things.
Positive reinforcement works much better than negative reinforcement.
Catching her in the act of doing something wrong and correcting works much less well than creating a situation in which undesired behaviors are less likely to happen.
If she’s distracted, she cannot learn.
If she’s afraid or triggered in any way, she cannot learn.
Just because she did it right yesterday doesn’t mean she’ll do it right today.
Every new behavior has to be repeated, repeated, and repeated some more.
The distance between “I understand what this is and how to do this,” and “I will do this all the time” is huge. Getting her from one to the other requires extra-ordinary patience.
Things go wrong when my expectations get ahead of where we are, today.
Context matters tremendously. If I want her to demonstrate a new behavior, I have to ask her to do it in the simplest, safest context first. Only once she’s mastered the behavior in that environment can she succeed in a more challenging context.
When my expectations get ahead of where we are, we are both frustrated.
If she messes up, it’s on me.
Of course, I understand that human beings have frontal lobes, that we can practice meta cognition and that we don’t only learn by getting lots and lots and lots of little rewards for good behavior.
But we could set ourselves up for success with a bunch of lessons from Birdie.
To develop or teach a new skill, start small and in a safe environment, and allow plenty of time for practice before moving on to a more challenging environment.
Just because we got it right yesterday doesn’t mean we know how to do it today.
If we’re frustrated, it’s probably because our expectations got ahead of us.
Be patient with yourself or with the person you’re coaching.
Repeat so much that you’re a little bored, and then repeat some more.
Most of all, keep at it and treat yourself kindly. Remember that daily progress is almost undetectable, but that weekly, monthly and yearly progress (when we keep at it) will be remarkable.
It took my youngest daughter longer than her friends to be able to do the monkey bars.
Seeing her now, doing them joyfully, I often wonder why exactly she persisted. How was it that seeing other kids ahead of her was motivating rather than discouraging?
More than most things, the monkey bars are binary. Before you can do them, you’re stuck on one side, hanging and falling, and not really improving. Then, one day, you cross a chasm—from not doing to doing. Once on the other side, it’s deeply self-reinforcing: you’re having a blast with your friends, and you’re getting stronger and stronger.
There are two lessons here:
Most things are like monkey bars: the act of doing the activity itself is the source of improvement, so the best thing you can do is start.
One of the most valuable things we can do is to encourage people who are just shy of the starting line, and help them to believe in themselves.
One of the reasons we don’t acquire new skills in the way we’d like is because, ironically, we take on too much.
It goes like this. We decide one day that we’re motivated to learn something new. Armed with a vague and imprecise understanding of the new skill we’d like to develop, we engage in an (often haphazard) mimicry of that vision. Then, after trying for a bit and seeing few tangible signs of progress, we give up, falling back on a familiar internal chorus of “change is hard” and “I’m never going to be good at this.”
That’s patently untrue. You could be great at this with a different approach.
One way to rewire our ability to learn and grow comes through a clearer understanding of the What, the How and the How Long of mastery:
What to focus on.
How that focus will manifest.
How Long it will take to master the skill.
What to Focus On?
“What” is a massive point of leverage. The most important “what to focus on” rule is to stick to very small things. These are the types of things that, lacking the skill we aim to acquire, we can still learn and master.
This feels counter-intuitive, because we’ve been wired to think about big changes and big skills. Naturally, we fight against the notion of committing to something small, believing it won’t add up to anything. Yet we take for granted that the flawless abilities of any master—musicians, athletes, writers, public speakers—are comprised of thousands of micro-skills brought together seamlessly. Why would it be any different for great people managers, great listeners, great analysts?
The truth is, the only way we learn is with tiny, incremental changes in small things, coupled with enough follow-through to have these small changes accumulate over time. The specific small things we focus on will depend on the skill we aim to master, but a good rule of thumb is to find the foundational skills that have the most connection to the other pieces of the puzzle and go from there.
How to Focus?
The “How” of successful skill acquisition is marked by consistency, concentration and presence.
Consistency is the most important: each and every day, in very small doses, is a far more powerful approach to transformation than once a week on Saturdays for two hours.
This can seem obvious, but we rarely sign up for 15 minutes a day for 30 days straight. We think “that’s not enough time to (write a book, learn to swim better, become more creative),” when, in reality, this sort of daily commitment is transformational.
We should spend these 15 minutes with full concentration and presence, sweeping away both obvious external distractions and the more pernicious internal (mental) ones that hurt us more.
We do this by cultivating the skill of deep mental focus, learning to redirect our attention, every time it gets pulled away, to the task at hand. In this act of re-direction, we can remind ourselves to maintain an attitude of curiosity and good humor, rather than one of self-criticism. Think of it like a moving meditation, and gently bring your wandering mind back to the micro-skill you are working on.
How Long?
“How Long” is the doozy.
BKS Iyengar Photo Credit: Jack Cuneo Yoga
Early on in my yoga practice there was a pose I simply couldn’t do, called Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana: standing up, you grab your big toe of one foot, lift your leg and straighten it in front of your hip.
It was the second year of my yoga practice, and, in the midst of a yoga retreat in which, thanks to 4+ hours a day of practice, I could nearly do the pose, I quietly predicted that I would be able to do that pose in another year’s time.
That was 18 years ago, and I still haven’t pulled it off. While some of this mis-estimation was a failure of the right kind of commitment on my part, mostly I grossly underestimated how much further I had to walk on that journey.
“How long” is the silent killer of improvement: the gap between our expected and actual progress creates a cycle of self-criticism, reinforcing our original, fixed story of ourselves. “This is impossible, for me,” is untrue, but it taunts us daily as we soak in small failures.
Each of us needs to find our own way to banish this demon, but it helps to remember that these things truly take time (18 years!!), and to remind ourselves that the journey is the whole point.
With this in mind, today, we commit again. We find our 15 minutes. We focus on the one thing we’ve committed to. We remember that working on this one thing, today, is the only way to be sure that we are moving forward.
My daughter is working her way through a summer book of math and reading. She got to the end and found this Summer Brainiac Certificate on the last page. She was ecstatic.
After filling it in and cutting it out she asked, “Is this a real certificate?”
Striking to notice how, at just seven years old, she’s already picked up that it might be someone else’s job to tell her if she’s achieved, to decide whether she gets a trophy, a certificate or a gold star.
“Yes,” I told her, “it’s definitely a real certificate.”
This lesson, that someone besides us is judge and jury, holds on tight to us. We started learning it at a tender age, and year after year, our schools and then our workplaces have taught us that a grade is coming from somewhere, that someone besides us decides what the homework is, how we should direct our efforts, what is going to be on the test. If we do it all right, they give us a piece of paper that confirms, to us and to others, that we hit the mark.
Makes me wonder what blank certificates I should be writing for myself for the skills and achievements I’m working towards. So simple to write them out and leave a blank space for my name.
To be clear, I couldn’t be prouder of my Brainiac daughter, most of all that she choose to do the work and then she filled out her own certificate.
It took my youngest daughter longer than her friends to be able to do the monkey bars.
