Don't settle for mediocrity!

The key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not live in a shell of static safe mediocrity.
~ Josh Waitzkin The Art of Learning

Failure is easy. In fact, that's the default outcome of everything. If you want to fail, you already know how. Just sit back and watch TV
~ Carl King So, you're a creative genius...Now what?


Mediocrity isn't exactly failure. It isn't that you can't perform a particular skill at all. Rather it is settling for a level of performance lower than you could reasonably attain with a modicum of greater effort.

In Influencer: The Power to Change Anything the authors describe how most of us acquire skills:

...many of the tasks we perform at work and at home suffer from "arrested development." With simple tasks such as typing, driving, golf, and tennis, we reach our highest level of proficiency after about 50 hours of practice; then our performance skills become automated. We're able to exercise them smoothly and with minimal effort, but further development stops...we learn how to make use of a word processor or Web server by mastering the most common moves, but we never learn many of the additional features that would dramatically improve our ability

In my experience, it generally takes me about 6 or 7 weeks at about an hour a day to become reasonably knowledgeable about anything. So 50 hours seems about right.

However, research shows that to reach world class in a particular skill or art generally takes at least 10,000 hours of focused practice. So we give up on learning after 50 hours but the highest level of skills requires 10,000 hours. This opens up a huge scope for finding a level of mastery we are prepared to work towards beyond settling for the mediocrity of the 50 hour point.

This was my experience in learning Microsoft Excel. I reached a certain point where I could do more with it than most of the people around me and I thought I was an expert user. But then I discovered VBA (the language behind Excel that allows tasks to be automated, pop up forms and all sorts of other features) and I realised that I only knew a tiny fraction of what there was to know. And I am still aware that there is an even higher level of knowledge and skill beyond what I currently know and can do.

When we are growing up and learning to walk, talk and perform other skills, we try different things until we stumble on something that will work and then with minor refinements we stick to that pattern. 

As children learning to use our bodies, we try out different methods until one works and then we adopt it. We rarely think to look further for a more efficient and effective way to accomplish results
~ Peter Ralston Zen Body-Being

As Ruthy Alon, a Feldenkrais practitioner says "The disadvantage in selecting from an accidental range of alternatives is an increased chance of error and the trap of remaining stuck with that mistake." And this is what most of us do with most of the skills we acquire: we haphazardly try different things and then settle for the first thing that we find that works.

However this isn't the only approach we could take. In mathematics, when someone manages to prove a new result, it is often the case that the first proof is messy and complicated and doesn't make it clear why the result is true. However what it does is establish what is possible and once it is known that a result is true then it becomes worthwhile to make the effort to find a better proof. So even though the result is already proven, mathematicians continue to search for better proofs that will allow greater insight into why the result works.

And we can do this ourselves in our daily lives. Once we have succeeded in doing something, however poorly, we have established that we can do it. And once we know that it lies within our range of possibilities it becomes worthwhile for us to make the effort to find ways to do it even better. You could call this approach "first succeed then refine".

And the great thing is that it doesn't take that much more to achieve better than average performance. Since most people are prepared to settle for mediocrity, with a little more time and effort you can achieve a level of performance that is perceptibly superior.

Don't take my word for it. Try it for yourself. Do one thing to improve your chosen skill, then do another, then another and soon you will find that you have exceeded what you previously thought was possible for you.

What you know determines what you see

A man takes his car in to a mechanic because of engine trouble. When the man looks at the engine, all he sees is a mass of metal, tubes and wires which don't really make a lot of sense. But the mechanic sees the distributor, carburettor, air filter and so on and also what role each of these plays and how they interact.

The difference is knowledge.

An amateur artist goes to draw something but what they end up drawing looks nothing like the subject. An experienced artist sees the differences in the play of light over the subject, the overlap of contours, and variations of size with distance, and as a result, in drawing what she knows to look for, she captures a much more accurate likeness of the subject.

The difference is knowledge.

Anything you learn will open your eyes to new distinctions and differences that you weren't aware of before. It is as if ignorance is a form of blindness.

When you are learning a new skill, it may at times seem like you are getting worse rather than better, you begin to notice more and more errors and if you aren't careful you may end up becoming discouraged. But the fact is that the errors were already there. It is only with the benefit of increased knowledge that you have gained the ability to detect them, and with that increased knowledge, the ability to correct them.

And this increased knowledge may also open your eyes to new possibilities that were previously beyond your conception and also lead you to aspire to more.

In Body Mind Mastery, Dan Millman tells the following story:

As my freshman on the Stanford gymnastics team became more aware of their errors, they would tell me in frustration how they "used to be better in high school" and were "going downhill." This concerned me -  until I saw films of them the year before, when it became obvious that they had improved radically. Now aware of their errors, they had raised their standards.

Sometimes we tend to think that learning is just putting information into our brains.

But it does so much more:

• it changes what we see,
• it changes our sensitivity to error,
• it changes our standards and
• it changes our sense of the possible and what we can aspire to.

Looked at in this way, learning the right thing in the right way can be life-changing.

Confusion and the skill of backtracking

If you are learning something by yourself it is almost inevitable that you will get to a point where whatever you are trying to learn ceases to make sense.

There can be any number of causes for this. Perhaps you have misunderstood something earlier on and it is only now that that earlier misunderstanding is making itself felt. Perhaps a new concept has been introduced that just doesn't click with you. Or maybe the author is just not that great at explaining things.


In Thinking Mathematically, John Mason describes the experience like this:

In my experience, I have usually been stuck for some time before I become aware of it. At first the awareness is hazy and indistinct. It slowly grows until I am definitely both stuck and aware of being stuck. Only when I feel stuck and I am aware of my feelings can I take action.

Whatever the reason for feeling confused or stuck, one of the most important skills that you can have is backtracking.

What this means is working backwards from where you are, from your current point of puzzlement until you get to a point where everything is clear and then trying to isolate the point at which you ceased to understand.

When I have tutored children, I have used this process in helping them to understand. With one student, who had some difficulty understanding particular kinds of equations, I kept simplifying and simplifying until I reached a point at which he could understand and solve the equations. Then step by step, I added complexity, at each stage making sure that I hadn't lost him and not moving on until I was confident that he was confident, until ultimately we reached the point of understanding where he needed to be.

This is easy in mathematics where each concept builds upon the last, but it is also generally true of most fields. If you are learning how to dance then you can reach a point where you don't understand how to do a particular move. If you have access to a video of the move then you can watch it over and over, and slow it down if necessary to identify the exact point at which your understanding fails and then observe carefully what the dancers do around that point to complete the move. Once you have seen it, you can test your understanding by trying it yourself to see if your new understanding translates into action, and if it doesn't repeat the process until you achieve success.

When I was first learning to dance I had a lot of difficulty with a move called the basket, I always seemed to lift the wrong arm and turn my partner the wrong way. It was only when I slowed down and observed more carefully how the move was done, breaking it down into components I could understand (lift left arm, turn partner anti-clockwise) and then time these components correctly with the footwork that I was able to master this move and then move on to other things.

In Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar, James Marcus Bach describes a similar process that he used:

To learn the computer's language, I must hop from stone to stone. If the material was too hard, there must be a moment in the book (a sentence? a word? a punctuation mark?) where the gap was too wide to leap.

Maybe if I hopped very carefully, I could find a way across....I would study that gap in the stone bridge and maybe find a way past it. I believed I couldn't learn 6502 programming, but maybe I could discover why I couldn't learn it

In the final analysis, the key is persistence and looking at the problem in different ways until you experience the insight that closes the gap in your understanding. If there is no way forward that you can see then you might try using another learning resource as I have mentioned elsewhere for a difference approach.

Whatever you do don't give up: if what you are trying to learn is worth learning then it is worth the effort of struggling through the transient difficulties to achieve genuine understanding.

Mistakes aren't generally fatal

There's a huge difference between not knowing about something that I've never looked at, and not knowing about something I have looked at. Just looking at it is progress, because my ignorance now has a focus
~ James Marcus Bach


When you first start to learn something almost everything you do is likely to be wrong. So if your priority is to avoid mistakes then you will never even take the first step.

In his book Deep Learning, Stellan Ohlsson makes the point that learning is about gaining a more and more precise knowledge of what it is you are trying to learn and eliminating things that don't work:

If the main cause of errors is that the initial rules for a task tend to be overly general, then to adapt a strategy to a task is to gradually specialize those rules by incorporating more and more information about the task environment into them

But the only way to do this is to learn from the mistakes we make:

Errors play an active role in their own elimination; we unlearn errors by learning from them

So the thing to fear is not making mistakes but failing to use them to improve our performance. Mistakes are a signal that you still have something to learn, that there is a gap in your knowledge, that there may be something you have misunderstood. What they aren't is a sign of personal lack.

The fact is that what any single person knows as a percentage of all that is known collectively by humanity is incredibly small, and it is infinitesmally small compared to what remains to be known. All of us have huge areas of ignorance and the point of learning is not to know everything but rather to become competent in the things which are important to us.

The video below illustrates how even great artists make mistakes but by correcting them arrive at works of genius:




The point is to examine what we have done, to see where we may have gone wrong, and then use this knowledge as a platform for advancing further. 

Mistakes are only messengers, not judges; they play a role in advancing our learning but when we succesfully learn we transcend our former errors and leave them behind as we move into new and unfamiliar territory and make higher level errors. If we treat errors as friends who advise us of where we need to look to improve rather than enemies who simply point out our inadequacies, then we will advance more rapidly in anything we choose to learn.

Not easy, but possible

A true process orientation also means being aware that every outcome is preceded by a process. Graduate students forget this all the time. They begin their dissertations with inordinate anxiety because they have seen other people’s completed and polished work and mistakenly compare it to their own first tentative steps. With their noses deep in file cards and half-baked hypotheses, they look in awe at Dr So-And-So’s published book as if it had been born without effort or false starts, directly from brain to printed page. By investigating how someone got somewhere, we are more likely to see the achievement as hard-won and our own chances as more plausible.

~ Ellen Langer Mindfulness

…the reason why I plunged into this project, even though I didn’t know whether I was smart enough to complete it, was because I knew I was smart enough to start. Starting is what matters. I’ll be smarter by the finish.

~ James Marcus Bach Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar


It is very easy to get discouraged when we see someone do something amazingly well that we would like to do. It can seem like we will never be able to achieve what they have achieved and we may give up before we have even started. The problem is that we do not see the hours and days and weeks and perhaps years of practice that have gone into their current performance. We have not seen what they were like when they first started out, how awkward they may have been, the mistakes and missteps they made and the sheer effort that they put into getting where they are.

How I wrote my thesis

When I first started to write my dissertation or thesis after four years of research, I was totally bamboozled and didn’t know where to start. I felt overwhelmed and that I would never be able to accomplish the task. So I took steps to try and make it appear more doable to myself.

I firstly did some investigation and found that the average thesis in my area of mathematics was only about 112 pages long. So OK, I had something to aim for…112 pages didn’t seem like much...

Next I put together a shell of what the chapters of my thesis should be about. I had already had a number of papers published co-authored with others in my field, so I cut and pasted the content into the relevant chapters and then edited them so that they read more like a chapter than a separate paper.

In the process of doing this, I discovered a few more results that looked like they might have been worth investigating while I continued working on my thesis. I worked out what the central focus of my thesis would be and decided to include some additional results in Appendices which were relevant but not part of the central focus.

As my thesis began to take shape, my list of references grew and I also began to write the introduction which described the history of the problem I was working on, previous results and their limitations and how my work fitted in.

In the process of doing all this I taught myself more advanced aspects of Latex (the mathematical typesetting program I was using) and also tracked down a book from the 60’s which contained two key early papers from my field of study.

Gradually, things began to fall into place. My thesis continued to grow and a logical structure emerged that I was able to refine as I continued to edit the work I had done. Finally the day came when I realized that almost all of the work was done and that it had not taken as long as I had originally thought.

By taking things step by step and dealing with the immediate problems I was having and then moving on once they were resolved, I had achieved something that I had previously doubted I could do. My final thesis (after it had been examined and accepted) ran to eight chapters and 187 pages or just more than 50% longer than the typical thesis in my field.

I had done it but it wasn’t easy and I learned a lot by trial and error as I went, so the process of writing it was itself a work in progress.

In the movie Soul Surfer there is a line “I don’t need easy, I just need possible”

A lot of the time we fail at learning either because it looks too hard or because we want what looks amazing to come easily. But if it was that easy, it wouldn’t seem amazing. What we are left with is possible: through honoring the process and applying ourselves we can arrive at excellence – it may not be easy, but it is possible.

---

To view a copy of my thesis in its final form go to my thesis

No Dumb Questions for Smart People

When entity learners run up against something hard to understand or a problem tough to solve, they become early quitters. In contrast, incremental learners chip away at a challenge like a block of stone, gradually making it manageable

~ David Perkins Making Learning Whole



My friend Michelle is one of the smartest people I know but has never had the advantage of a university or college education. What makes her smart is the questions she asks.
 
She is never afraid that asking a question about something she doesn’t know, for fear it would make her look stupid. Her curiosity and desire to remove a little area of ignorance takes precedence over what anyone might think. For example, when I use a word she has never heard before she almost always asks me what it means.
 
And in other areas, the questions she asks seem to target very precisely what it is she doesn’t understand, which implies a finely tuned awareness of when she feels confused and what precisely she is confused about.
 
Consider the following example:

 
• Eight months ago: I gave Michelle some training in VBA (the programming language that lies behind Microsoft Excel). She learned just the basics and there was a big time gap between then and now. She had never programmed before.
 
• Two months ago: I wrote a VBA program for modifying a spreadsheet her team used in its work. When I was debugging it, I was able to quickly see what needed to be fixed just by glancing at the code. Michelle asked me how I could do it so quickly and my answer was that I was used to how the code was structured. But this was an interesting question and one that as you will see sheds light on how Michelle thinks.
 
• A month ago: The program needed to be amended and Michelle decided that she wanted to tackle the task herself and only to ask me if she got stuck. And perhaps not surprisingly with such a can-do attitude, she was able to do most of the changes without any help from me. And the parts that had her stumped turned out to be things that had me stumped as well!
 
• Two weeks later: We were building more functionality into this program and I was showing Michelle how she could use a ‘for loop’ ( e.g. for i = 1 to 100, , next i) to modify some selected values in the spreadsheet. And she asked me what the “i” was for. It was a simple question and a good one yet one I found surprisingly difficult to answer since I had been using such variables for so long that they had become second nature. After a couple of attempts I was able to explain it although oddly enough I wasn’t very satisfied with my own explanation!
   
  And when we were working on a couple of bugs in the program, Michelle was able to pinpoint the problem areas before I could. In effect, her focused work with the program had given her the same sort of familiarity with its structure that she had asked me about only a few weeks before!

  
Now I have a PhD in mathematics, another postgraduate degree in Medical Statistics, and have studied computing in my undergraduate degree. I have around eight published papers in my field. Yet here was someone who had graduated high school yet was able to ask smart questions and to solve programming problems.
 
The question is how?
 
The clue is in the above description of what happened:

 
1. Once she learned the basics, Michelle challenged herself to modify the program herself, rather than getting me to do it. In the process, she gained a better idea of what she understood and what she didn’t. Her drive for mastery overcame any fear she might have had of failing. And in the process she gained an implicit knowledge of the structure of the code. ( Part of this is also that Michelle has a fiercely independent nature and wants to be able to do things for herself.)
2. As she went over the program she became more and more familiar with what different parts of the program did, and was even able to work out for herself the parts she didn’t initially understand. In doing so, she gained greater confidence for dealing with future challenges.
3. Only when she came up against a problem she couldn’t solve did she seek help, knowing that she had reached the limits of what she could do on her own. And yet by stretching herself, those limits were ones that were challenging even for someone who had used VBA for a few years. By challenging herself she was more able to see the current (and temporary!) limits of her knowledge.
4. She watched as I wrote the extra functionality and listened as I explained what I was doing and observed how I troubleshooted problems when some of it didn’t work. In the process, she learned some more about problem solving while programming.
5. She kept asking questions until she got an answer she understood.

Sadly, Michelle is the only person I work closely with who has this level of curiosity and willingness to challenge herself to overcome her ignorance. So many people would rather pretend they understand than risk anyone knowing what they don’t know.
 
And this is why I say that Michelle is one of the smartest people I know. Most people would rather remain in ignorance than admit to it and have it removed, including a lot of people with degrees. (In fact, a few of the people I have known with advanced coursework degrees don’t qualify as smart at all, at least not in this sense.)
 
But Michelle is constantly growing in the things she knows and doesn’t remain ignorant for long about anything because she is prepared to ask and learn. And in this respect, Michelle is as smart as anyone with a PhD because she had the thirst for knowledge and the willingness to try and satisfy that thirst.
 
And it is this learning attitude that qualifies her as truly smart.

Motivated Learning - the Importance of Attitude

In January 2008, I made the following entry in my journal:

My approach to learning VBA last year was pretty much a combination of persistence and experimentation. I'd come up with some cool thing that I wanted to do, have an initial go at coding it, run it and find that it had an error, read some more, try again and iterate until eventually I got it to work. In the process I picked up some of the subtleties of the language. And I was totally focussed while doing it as well as totally confident that I would find a solution

Basically, I saw the thing I was learning (VBA) as a means to a desired purpose (the latest cool thing I wanted to do) and because I kept this ultimate goal in mind, I was able to persist through repeated trials and errors and relearning until the goal was achieved, building my expertise in the process.

Yesterday, I was talking to my friend Michelle about her learning process. Michelle has a powerful learning orientation and has taught herself aspects of VBA as well as how to do complex mail merges with conditional fields in Word. She agreed that for her the motivation for learning these things was that she had very specific objectives that she wanted to achieve and as a result she was able to persist despite the difficulties. And we both agreed that without a reason to learn and something specific to achieve, learning can be difficult, it can be hard to stay motivated or to see the point of learning at all.

The lesson to learn from this is that for anything you want to learn, you need to be clear about why you want to learn it and to see how each step you take is bringing you closer to that goal. Unmotivated learning is just a recipe for boredom and for struggle with yourself rather than struggling with whatever difficulties inhere in what you are trying to learn.

Learning faster using multiple sources

The student's progress may be affected by the limitations of their teacher (whether that teacher is a human being or a book.) Not all teachers teach equally well; all teachers have weak as well as strong areas; teachers have their pet topics and the topics they tend to gloss over. Teachers may also differ in how much they understand what it is like to be a learner and not to know; they may have forgotten how confusing something may be that to them is second nature.

This is something I've noticed across a range of areas.

Example 1

When learning VBA (a computer language), I found that I needed to work with several different books because some books didn't explain some topics very well and just left me confused, other books left out some topics entirely, some had examples that were easy to follow while others had useful exercises to try. If I had stuck doggedly to one source it would have slowed my progress considerably. But by working with different sources, I was able to supplement the weaknesses of one source with the strengths of others.

Example 2

When learning to dance I noticed that my first teacher didn't seem to teach certain moves that I had seen in dances (such as flicks in Jive), but I was able to supplement this weakness by doing classes with other teachers. Similarly in my current style modern jive ( like West Coast Swing, but without the footwork) some teachers focus on complex arm patterns while others focus on dips. By being eclectic, it is possible to learn the best of what many have to offer rather than being held back by the limitations or preferences of a single teacher.

Apart from content there may also be limitations in how well something is explained. As a beginner you may feel that the fault lies with you if you don't understand something. But it is just as likely that the teacher or author hasn't explained it very well and may just not be that good at communicating their knowledge. It may even be that they don't understand it that well themselves and that they take refuge in being obscure or ambiguous.


The lesson to learn from this is that you may progress faster if you seek out the best teacher of a particular part of what you seek to learn, using different teachers or sources for different topics.

You will catch more fish with a net than you would with a fishing pole!

Start Easy

When you look back on your life, you'll see that for every skill you have acquired you have been through basically the same process.

In learning to walk, you started off rolling around on the floor pushing with your legs, learned to push yourself up on your arms, then to crawl, then walk and then eventually to skip, dance, run, jump…In other words you mastered a particular stage and then pushed into what you were now just capable of attempting and tried to master that and so on, each stage setting the stage for further progress.

And similarly with talking, reading, doing arithmetic,…in a series of small steps , building mastery in stages until you gained easy fluency.

This is a life lesson that not everyone learns. Some people will try a new activity and then give up because it doesn't come easy immediately. It is as if they were trying to jump a chasm rather than taking the time to build a bridge. But the reality is that almost nothing worth doing comes that easily and it is only by being patient and serving the required apprenticeship that you can get to mastery.

So how does that apply to your learning now?

Well, suppose you want to learn how to use a computer. Your best bet is to find the easiest book you can and work through it first. This way you will become familiar with all of the basic aspects of computing, the words used and basic functions. This would give you the confidence to try something a bit more challenging, master it…and so on.

The lesson here is to build new competence on existing mastery and in time it will become second nature.

Introduction

Hi. My name is Ian Gray and this blog is about how to become smarter.

Let me say up front that I believe that being smart is a process and an attitude. Anyone can become smarter than they are right now. You aren't born with a fixed amount of intelligence. Rather, your life experiences, your environment, the resources you have had access to have all affected to some degree how smart you are right now.

I was quite smart as a child. I did well in primary school (although in some of the stories I will tell in this blog, you'll see I made lots of mistakes too). However I realised quite early that smart was something I could build.

By the time I hit my first year of high school (when I was about 12) I had already set my sights on finding ways of getting smarter. I read de Bono's Five Day Course in Thinking, Harry Lorrayne' How to Develop a Super Power Memory and taught myself the Trachtenberg Speed System of Mathematics.

And as I progressed through high school, I learned more and more ways of expanding what intelligence I already had. I read books about expanding my vocabulary, studied Polya's How to Solve It, books about memory skills by Tony Buzan, and books about creativity such as Adam's Conceptual Blockbusting. Since I spent five years living in Papua New Guinea with my parents where there was no TV, so I read a lot. When it came to my final year exams in high school I placed in the top 5% of the state (New South Wales, Australia) and in the top 10% in both Mathematics and English. And I achieved this by trying all different ways to expand my intelligence.

Over the years since then, I have completed a Bachelors degree in mathematics, a post-graduate degree in Medical Statistics, and a PhD in mathematics from which I have had 8 papers published in international journals. I also won university prizes in Philosophy, Linguistics and Modern Greek.

And apart from these academic achievements, I have written poetry that has aired twice on the local University radio station, learned to dance in a number of different styles (ballroon, latin, salsa, modern jive) and become a dancer that women enjoy dancing with, have taught myself a computer language and designed some amazing applications, have learned to draw quite well, as well as trying singing and acting.

I don't say this to boast but because I think that with the right process and attitude, anyone is capable of doing what I have done and much more.

I have also tutored high school students one-on-one and found the best ways to build their skills and knowledge, as well as tutoring university classes. And I have spent years reading everything I can find about learning, teaching, expertise, intelligence, creativity, problem solving and many more areas relevant to becoming smart.

In this blog, I will talk about people who I believe exemplify a powerful learning orientation. People like my mother, who orphaned at a young age, left school at 16, yet has spent a lifetime acquiring new knowledge and skills. And people like my friend Michelle, who finished high school but is one of the smartest people I know because of how she approaches learning.

So, I hope you will join me on this journey to find out how you too can become smarter through a good process and a good attitude.