Tag: learning

The Most Important Part of Wordle

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes, on a long drive, our family will play Wordle in our heads.

One person picks a word (call that person the Puzzlemaster), someone else guesses words. The ‘guesser’ is told, for each letter, whether the color is gray (the letter is not in the word), yellow (the letter is in the word, but in a different spot), or green (the letter is in the word in the right spot).

We have lots of laughs because the Puzzlemaster—especially when it’s me—will inevitably answer incorrectly about one of the letters, sending the person wildly off track (in my defense, I’m often driving the car when we’re playing).

Even when the Puzzlemaster doesn’t mess up, Wordle in Your Head is about a hundred times harder than playing on the screen. Why?

Because the letters you’ve already guessed that were wrong aren’t grayed out.

The power of knowing what we did in the past that didn’t work is hard to overstate.

Imagine it: if we could see, with full clarity, the moves we made in the past; which ones worked, which ones didn’t, with no gaps in our knowledge.

So often, we shy away from looking clearly at ourselves and our actions. It’s hard to admit that, despite our best efforts, we got something wrong.

When we’re courageous enough to do it, and have the curiosity to explore and then internalize what happened and why, the moves that are before us are only the untried ones, and the ones that have a much higher chance of being right.

Quality is Non-Linear

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Imagine a scale for “quality” that goes from 0 to 100, where quality is “anything that makes something good or special.”

As a novice, I look at that scale and trick myself into thinking it is linear: the difference between what it takes to be able to produce a quality of 40 vs a 30 might be the same as the difference between what it takes to go from 90 to 100.

As in: when I started played guitar, I couldn’t reliably pluck the string I wanted to, let alone do it rhythmically.  (0 to 10)

Then, I could find the string most of the time, but I only plucked down, not up and down. (10 to 20).

Now that I can do that well, and now that I’ve mastered ten other plucking skills, I’ve been told that my picking technique has too much wrist, I’m holding my pick perpendicular to the string when it should be at a slight angle, I should be executing a relaxed figure 8 pattern over each string….all this just my first year of lessons. Imagine what next year will hold!

The expert knows that, as we make progress, we learn about nuance and details that were previously invisible.

This is why quality is not linear, it is logarithmic: the closer we get to “great” the more skill, will, and effort it takes to improve a little bit more.

This means that the move from 40 to 41 could take as much time and effort as getting from 0 to 10: because improvement at the beginning was relatively easy, it was the work of going from terrible to OK, and maybe all the way to decent.

But good to really good? Really good to great? Great to exceptional? Exceptional to best in class?

Each of those is a full journey: being open to the idea that better exists; taking the time to understand what it entails; building that new skill on top of your already-strong foundation; having the attention and patience to master the next micro-skill and the one after that.

This is why greatness is both expensive and rare. It’s why, at the 3-star Michelin restaurant Sukiyabashi Jiro, apprentices, who train for 10 years, aren’t allowed to touch the fish for the first few years. The same goes for expert watchmakers, knifemakers, and makers of F1 racecars.

If we’ve had the patience and discipline to develop mastery of any skill in any domain, we understand this intuitively, because we’ve walked that path. We just need to retain the humility to see that each new journey, each new skill, will have as much depth and nuance as the skill we’ve already mastered.

And if we work with people who haven’t yet developed mastery—of other skills or these skills—it can be difficult to communicate clearly about “the distance from here (where you are) to there (where you’d like to be).”

As in: we’ve all met the bright-eyed newbie who “wants to do strategy” as if that’s something that is 6 months away and just requires “good analytical skills”—when the reality is that good strategic decision-making is the accumulation of years analyzing, thinking, putting yourself on the hook, making the tough call, being right or wrong, living with the consequences, and doing it all over again.

The job of the expert, then, is to cultivate curiosity in the novice, to point out all the progress he’s made, and, also, to show, with patience and a commitment to detail, the difference between “90% there” and “100% there.”

And the job of the novice is to have the humility to say “I got to this point quickly, it’s possible that I don’t fully understand what it takes to be great, but I’m willing to keep being curious and keep on putting in the work.”

 

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.

Right Action, Right Results

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It’s that time of year. Employees and their managers are digging into reviews, reflecting on what happened last year: wins, misses, growth, reflection.

I’ve written before about how to write good annual goals. The short version is:

  1. Write them for yourself first, not for your boss. This way you’re unconstrained, and you can be honest about what success would look like, while asking important questions like “what set of accomplishments would make me proud?”
  2. Write SMART goals – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based. Most people struggle with this, focusing on activities rather than results. Don’t fall into that trap.
  3. Think of your goals as an intention you are setting, both for what you can accomplish and how you can grow.

One question to reflect on is: does my supervisor only know what’s in my written goals, or does she also have insight into how I go about my work?

This is a helpful question because how she, and you, respond to areas of meeting and missing goals will be quite different depending on the “how,” namely:

Whether she says it or not, your boss is unconsciously filtering this performance conversation through this 2×2.

  1. In the areas where you both engaged in the right actions and got the right results—hooray! Everyone wins. Celebrate! And keep it up!
  2. In the areas you engaged in seemingly right actions but did not get results—let’s really get under the hood here, because you’re trying your best, but something didn’t line up. We are teed up to partner!!
  3. If you got results despite not doing the right things—we can both agree that you got lucky, and that’s not the foundation for long term success
  4. And, if you didn’t engage in the right actions and didn’t get the right results—well, this one is obvious.

Assuming that all makes sense, now consider something different.

What if the way you engage with your boss doesn’t allow them to create this 2×2? What if they have little to no visibility into your “how”?

Meaning she knows less than she could about:

  • Your week-to-week priorities
  • Where and how you’re spending your time and getting pulled down rabbit holes
  • Where you’re most productive
  • Where you’re getting stuck
  • What hypotheses of yours were right and wrong
  • …

What she’s left with, then, are the results themselves, with little to no information about what led to those results and, therefore, limited ability to really be helpful.

As employees, we often want space and freedom. But to have a productive manager/coach relationship with our boss, we have to give them the information they need to help us diagnose, intervene, and grow…at annual review time and all year round.

Otherwise, the sum total of what they know is: which goals did you hit, which goals you not hit? Check, check, X, X, check.

Without a consistent conversation about “how,” it’s difficult to get underneath goals and into the “why.” And without “why” we cannot learn and grow.

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.)

The Helsinki Bus Station

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I’ve been reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. It is decidedly NOT a book about time management. It is about how to escape the tyranny of time in our lives, in the limited number of weeks (4,000) we spend on this planet.

Among other things, I was taken by this passage attributed to Finnish photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen, about the lines leading out of the Helsinki bus station.

There are two dozen platforms there, he explains, with several different bus lines departing from each one—and for the first part of its journey, each bus leaving from any given platform takes the same route through the city as all the others, making identical stops.

Think of each stop as representing one year of your career, Minkkinen advises photography students. You pick an artistic direction—perhaps you start working on platinum studies of nudes—and you begin to accumulate a portfolio of work. Three years (or bus stops) later, you proudly present it to the owner of a gallery. But you’re dismayed to be told that your pictures aren’t as original as you thought, because they look like knockoffs of the work of the photographer Irving Penn; Penn’s bus, it turns out, had been on the same route as yours.

Annoyed at yourself for having wasted three years following somebody else’s path, you jump off that bus, hail a taxi, and return to where you started at the bus station. This time, you board a different bus, choosing a different genre of photography in which to specialize. But a few stops later, the same thing happens: you’re informed that your new body of work seems derivative, too. Back you go to the bus station.

But the pattern keeps on repeating: nothing you produce ever gets recognized as being truly your own.

What’s the solution?

“It’s simple,” Minkkinen says. “Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.”

A little farther out on their journeys through the city, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond. That’s where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage—the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience.

“Stay on the fucking bus” indeed.

One of the things I see often is people, three years into a job, getting stuck. They find themselves at the point that Minkkinen talks about, when the gallery owner says their work is unoriginal—but instead of the gallery owner, the voice is their own. It’s a voice that’s saying:

“I’ve learned all that I can in this job.”

“It’s no longer new.”

“I don’t see a clear path forward.”

Those reflections may well be true in some cases. However, if a job has been good for a few years, this discomfort might indicate something else entirely:  that you’re on the cusp of deepening.

Having succeeded in the first three years, you’ve mastered a set of skills. These are the core aspects of the first job or jobs, the stuff that’s easiest to describe.

This discomfort arises on the threshold of a new set of skills, the essential “soft” skills that really matter: managing and leading others; dealing with uncertainty; taking initiative; making tough calls; writing (some of) your own job description…

The list is endless.

It is a list full of skills that are harder to describe in a resume, that don’t boil down to a simple job title or a bulleted list of responsibilities.

But these are the skills that make all the difference.

These are the skills you might never get to if you’re constantly taking the taxi back to the Helsinki bus station.

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.

Good Self-Talk, Bad Self-Talk

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Longtime readers know I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with swimming.

I was a terrible, terrified swimmer as a kid. About a decade ago, I decided to learn to swim properly. However, because I don’t love swimming, I haven’t prioritized it. Consequently, I’ve improved slowly.

This summer, due to tendinitis in my arm, I’ve been back in the pool a lot. It turns out that doing something 3-4 days a week leads to much greater improvement than doing it once every few weeks.

That’s not the interesting bit.

The interesting bit is the shadow path accompanying the change in my swimming abilities. This path is the narrative I carry about my abilities. It moves independently of my actual abilities. My chart looks something like this:

Two points of note on the graph:

  1. The point of Delusion: Me sitting comfortably at home watching “effortless swim” videos. I feel like I’m learning from all the talk of high elbows and not lifting my head, but I’m not spending actual time in the pool, so my swimming isn’t improving. To note, this point on the graph is the difference between online education and entertainment. (Hint: if you’ve been using a language-learning app for a year and you’re still unable to order lunch in that language, this spot is for you).
  2. Dragging me Down: The pernicious point on the graph. Since I’ve carried a fear of swimming my whole life, at any moment during a swim, I can start noticing I’m swimming. That noticing leads to negative self-talk (“this is hard,” “will it ever end?” “how is my breathing?”) which can ruin a perfectly good swim. It can even make the next swim worse (“I hope that doesn’t happen again.”).

As we work to increase our skillfulness in any area, we must remember that our story and our reality are always interacting. For areas where we have a positive self-narrative, that story sustains us, even through the dips. For areas that have always been challenging, it can be doubly difficult to improve—because we need to do three things: (1) Enhance our skill; (2) Bravely utilize the new skill; (3) Do all of this, over and over again, despite (sometimes) being dragged down by our own negative self-talk.

Examples:

  • [About to walk on stage] “I’m a terrible public speaker”
  • [About to have a difficult conversation] “I hate confrontation.”
  • [Facing down a blank page] “This is so hard. What if I have nothing to say?”
  • [About to close the sale] “What if they, like the last person, say no?”
  • [Working on listening better] “How do I show them that I’m smart enough to be here?”

Every time we let our old, negative story infect our new reality, we perform a little worse. That’s OK, it’s part of the process. It’s also why all writers’ advice on writing starts with a version of Anne Lamott’s reminder to just put our butt in the chair and keep it there.

If we relentlessly keep showing up to do the new thing, our persistent work will always win the day. Our doubting voice may appear from time to time, but its power diminishes and, eventually, evaporates in the face of overwhelming new evidence.

“I’ve done this so much, it’s clear that I’ve become good at it.”

Next stop, greatness.

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.

1:1 with Me

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There are countless tools and guides out there for having great 1-on-1 meetings. This First Round Review Article is a great place to start (it even has a Notion template with a Question Bank for Better 1:1s).

But I think the tools only work if we show up with the right mindset to these meetings.

This mindset isn’t: it’s my job to update my boss on what I’m up to.

This mindset is: it’s helpful to have a counterpart who helps me stay on track; helps me ensure that I’m prioritizing the right things; and who can help me troubleshoot when I’m stuck.

This framing strips away the trappings of authority that come with the manager:manage-ee relationship.

One way we can do this is by asking: what conversation would I have if I were having a 1:1 with me?

What questions would I ask myself?

What preparation would I do?

What thinking would happen before the meeting?

What sort of feedback would I give me?

Hopefully, your boss has some perspective and experience that you don’t have, and she brings that to the table.

But 70% of the value of the one-on-one is a structured space to have the conversation that you need to have to help you do your best work.

The meeting is for you, not for your boss.