But it didn’t give him the answer that he was after.
What he really wanted to know was what I hoped to get from doing what I do. He was looking to understand what I was doing things for. And you don’t get that by asking, “Why?”

Even phonetically, “why” sounds so much like “whine”!

Asking someone why opens a can of worms as much as it gives them a chance to talk. Maybe you want to know why – it happens. But much of the time you’ll get the information that you’re really after faster by asking “what for”.

Maybe try it out with yourself – notice something that you do. Perhaps something that you’d like to change, but even for something that really juices you and makes you feel great. Then ask yourself, “Why do I do that?”

And then ask, “What do I do that for?”

Notice the difference. You could try it out on someone else too…

He was young and strong and had been training hard for a few months.

Little did he know that I had trained since before he was walking. It began when I was 15, and I loved spending hours in the hall, relentlessly asking questions of my instructor long after the class had finished. So when I hit him, he was pretty surprised

When I step back into one of those same classes today, I remember most of the techniques but my skill level has suffered – perhaps more than I would like to admit. But I’m still not your average beginner.

In my first session back, it’s best if I just watch, or pair up with a beginning student. In my second session back, I can pair up with someone who has been training for a few months. And after a few weeks, I’ll expect to match it with the guys who have been training for a year or more.

But why? Why can we get so much better so quickly?

It’s the same with older experts. After playing at the top of their field, they will stop doing so much deliberate practice. The sportsperson won’t be competing so they won’t be training – at least not as much. The doctor won’t be studying and maintaining their skills through regular patient contact. The linguist will struggle in a language after not having used it for a while. We all get ‘rusty’.

If you’ve been reading much of what I’ve said before, you’ll know that deliberate practice is important for skill acquisition. But deliberate practice is also important for maintaining those skills.

(So if you find yourself competing with someone who seems to be ‘past it’, you might want to check how much practice they have been getting lately.)

It’s like there is a ‘trait’ component and a ’state’ component of skill. The ‘trait’ component is how good you are at your worst – when Lleyton Hewitt plays tennis at his worst, he’s still much better than most of us. But there is also something else: “How good are you today?” We could call that part our ’state’ skill level because it depends upon our state in any given moment. To compete with the best, you might need to have a high level of “state skill” and combine that with being at your best on that day with a high “trait skill”.

As you get better, you not only polish your performance skills, but create mental and physical adaptations. When you start driving, it’s hard work to keep the car in the right gear, to check the mirrors, steer and keep a safe distance from the cars around you. After a while, you just need to think “turn right” and you can. Some of this comes from tasks becoming automated so they require less attention, some of it comes from using a better strategy and having better technique. But even the best of us can have a bad day – so there is a ’state’ component and a ‘trait’ component.

The great thing about deliberate practice enhancing our ‘trait skill’ level is that once you have developed a high level of performance, you can take those adaptations with you without too much effort.

It’s the ‘hard work’ of deliberate practice that creates a context for these adaptations. It’s hard work because we are learning to do things differently. Rehearsal or playing the game can give you ‘experience’ but this polish doesn’t improve the stone. Deliberate practice upgrades the quality of the underlying stone.

So, as you begin 2010, I hope that you can find ways to upgrade your skills, not just getting a little better.

Originally from TheGeniusProject.com: Genius as a choice.

That’s the point of this post – and I’ll get back to that in a minute…

I have been reading Common Wealth, economist Jeffrey Sach’s take on how to make the world a better place. This morning, I came across his chapter on the economic proposition justifying social welfare – how increased taxation with a corresponding increase in social services can be fiscally responsible and yield quantifiable social benefits. While his argument was quite one-sided – after all, it’s his book – it got me thinking how we can use a bit of mathematics to make better decisions. Sachs was asking this sort of question:

If you were in government and thought that you had too much money, would you cut taxes or increase social welfare?

But I was thinking about my everyday decisions.

In the next few months, I have a number of flights scheduled though not yet booked. For example, I am due to fly from Sydney to Brisbane sometime after 7pm on the evening of 28 January. That route is mainly serviced by Qantas and Virgin Blue at that time. So how does one decide which flight to take?

At first glance, Virgin Blue is the easy winner. Virgin Blue’s DJ999 is available at $79 fare while Qantas comes closest with the QF556 is $98. That’s $19 difference.

But when you look closer at the Virgin Blue fare, you find that $79 doesn’t give you any check-in luggage. If you want to check-in luggage, that will be an extra $10 for a total of $89. So we’re down to just $9 difference.

Virgin Blue still gives better deal.

What if we take into account the quality of the experience?

HTC HD2 - my new phone

That’s hard to do, but let’s try. Having flown this route dozens of times, I find the 90 minutes passes very quickly. I have my wonderful noise cancelling headphones and my HD2 to entertain me, and magazines to catch up upon. However, Qantas offers refreshments – Virgin Blue does not. If you’re the sort of person who likes to have a snack onboard, lashing out the extra $9 to fly Qantas seems a really good deal – and I love that fancy fruit juice that they have.

So this is where some judgment is required. If you value the muchies on board, the meal might be worth $10 or so. But even if you don’t value them much, having a drink and some snacks is probably still worth $5 or so. Of course, if you’re just going to sit down and sleep or something, maybe it’s really worth nothing to you.

After all, this is public transport, isn’t it – just a fancy type of bus with acceleration that can really blow your hair back, right?

It is nicer to fly Qantas though. Don’t get me wrong Sir Richard, Virgin Blue is great. But Virgin Blue is clearly a ‘cut price’ or low cost operator in this field and the service standards that you get from Qantas are generally at least a little bit (and often quite a bit) higher. How much is that worth? For a 90 minute flight, for me it’s not really worth too much – but it is worth at least $5.

Does that change things?

Well, we started with the Virgin at $79 and Qantas at $98. If you want to take some luggage, it’s $89/$98. With the deemed value of the food ($5) and general service experience ($5), Qantas has a better value proposition, remaining at just $98 with Virgin’s effective cost at least $99… unless you are just going with carry-on luggage, in which case Virgin Blue still has a $9 advantage.

So fly Qantas when you have luggage and Virgin Blue when you don’t?

Not so fast. What about Frequent Flyer Points? Now I don’t know the Virgin system too well – I tried to sign up for it five years ago but after they lost my application, I never got around to applying again. But I do have a (very) active Qantas Frequent Flyer account. If you have a Velocity account, let me know how much the points are worth and I’ll think about updating this.

That same flight on Qantas would yield 1000 Frequent Flyer points.

Good to know, but how much are they worth?

I’m glad you asked. And the simple answer is, “it depends… but at least $8.50, and probably more like $13.80 for me.” (I’ll explain the messy details at the end of the post)

And THAT in turn brings the effective cost of the Qantas flight down by at least $8.50.
So we have the following value propositions:

Virgin Blue: $79 (without luggage, without food, with cheaper service experience)
Virgin Blue: $99 (with luggage, allowing for the food and service experience deficit)

Qantas: $84.20 (with luggage)

So, Qantas is only $5 more, even if you don’t check-in luggage!!!

For me, the extra comfort and convenience of having some food on the flight and traveling in just a little bit of extra comfort is clearly worth an extra $5.20. And if I’m checking luggage, it’s actually about enough cash saving to cover my Irish Nut Creme from Gloria Jean’s at the departure gate…

Most of the time we don’t make rational decisions.

Much of the time we can’t – there’s too little information and too much uncertainty. But if we can start to use some numbers, we can make the comparisons simpler, less subjective, and give us more of what we want, more often.

For example, I want my son to have the best education – but it’s pretty tough to say where he’ll even be attending school, never mind where the best place for him to attend might be, nor what schools will even be like when he is due to start high school in 2023! Emotionally, I’d love for him to go to State High like I did – I think he’d enjoy being a fourth generation State High student. Yet I put him on the waiting list for a private school earlier today.

On one level, our decisions reflect our values. For some people, all that matters is price. But someone with strong brand loyalty to Virgin Blue might never even consider flying Qantas – no matter what the price. Someone who vehemently opposed private schools might never even consider their child attending one. Most of us have these biases but values are easily left tacit and their impact overlooked and unacknowledged.

Many of our decisions are irrational.
So often, we do things that won’t get us the best outcome, no matter what our values, no matter what our intentions. It’s easy to see why – there’s just so much information that our brain can’t process it all at once. But if you can break down a complex problem into the different components, you might just have a chance to put your own price on something that has no price… and give yourself a chance to make better decisions.

If you’re interested, we can look at the value of those frequent flyer points…

It’s kinda complicated because you need to deal all the different uses that you might have for the points that you generate. But for me, I’m most likely to use points to fly either between Shanghai and Brisbane or Brisbane and Sydney. You’d think that they’d be worth the same either way, but they’re not.

Let’s start with the same Sydney to Brisbane flight. Booking it through points will cost 8000 points plus about $11 in taxes. If we compare that to the Qantas flight, that gives $98-$11=$87 for 8000 points, or $0.01875/point or 92 points/dollar. If you were after the worst value use of those points, you would have to compare that points flight against a luggage-free Virgin Blue flight. There, it’s just $79-$11=$68 for 8000 points, or $0.0085/point or 118 points/dollar. Hence, at a minimum those 1000 points are worth $0.0085*1000 or $8.50.

Using points to fly between Shanghai and Brisbane will cost you 72,000 points – plus about $200 in taxes. Paying cash for the same flight might cost around $1200 (including taxes). Based on those figures, it’s pretty easy to work out that 72,000 points is worth about $1000. At that rate, you’re looking at points being worth $0.0138/point or 72 points/dollar, making 1000 points worth $13.80.

Thus, the value of your points will vary by at least 62% depending on how you use them!

I couldn’t help but ask myself, “How?”

Rather than trying to reassure him that he wasn’t, or denying that he was a failure, I got curious and wondered how he could feel a failure after so much ’success’. And sure enough, the answers were clear too. For him,

“The goal of movie-making is to star in a film where your performance drives the film, and the film is either a soaring critical or commercial success, and I never had that.”

And although he starred in the 1990 action film The Hunt for Red October, which made more than $200m, it was successful because it was based on a popular Tom Clancy novel – not because of his performance.

Damn, people can be hard on themselves!

He feels that his career is a failure not because it “is” – after all, how can we really define whether someone’s career is a success or a failure? But he feels that is is a failure because of how he defines success.

What do you want most? What drives you?

Success?

Happiness?

Joy?

Achievement?

Love?

Money?

Each of us have many things that drive us. Some things that pull us forward – that we want to experience something. And maybe there are other things that we desperately want to avoid.

We all want to experience different things. And that’s great – that’s one of the things that drives the rich and diverse world in which we live. Yet how well are we setting ourselves up to feel good? There are so many ways that we can find to feel bad. And there are so many things in the world today about which we could feel bad if we wanted.

Feelings – good and bad – are a process. We have a mechanism for feel happy or sad, excited or anxious, loving or angry. If you can get to know how you feel the way that you do, you can find yourself back in the driver’s seat.

What could happen if you could feel better more and more often?

When I was small, I wanted a Ferrari Testarossa. You see, I have red hair (well at least it was when I was younger!); when I found out that “Testarossa” literally means “red head”, I decided in the unequivocal way children can, that it was my dream car.

Then I saw one… and I thought, “hmmm… that’s a pretty ugly car” – but it was my publicly stated “dream car” so I held onto the dream.

Shortly after starting my first company, I sat in a Ferrari for the first time. It was in a dealership in Brisbane and I was so excited – finally, I was going to get what I had always wanted. As I sat myself into that hard seat of fine Italian leather, it felt fantastic… For a moment… until I realized, “It’s just a car.”

And it hit me like a cement truck falling at terminal velocity. It wasn’t the car that I wanted. It was the concept that the car represented. It was the feeling that I thought the car would give me. Pursuing the car was great in that it took me closer towards things that I really did want (excellence, achievement, impact, joy, passion…). But it wasn’t about the car.

Whenever I’m getting too attached to a goal – whether it’s doing another degree, making more money or even buying a new mobile phone – I’m lucky to have my wife ask me, “What do you want that for?”

What will it give you?

What will that allow you to experience?

And I find that there’s usually something even more important that lies behind the surface desire. Sometimes what we think we want is the best way to get what we really want; sometimes it’s not…

I wanted to feel strong and able to defend myself. I could have meditated and transcended my insecurities. Instead, I did a black belt. Good plan – but it was just the beginning. I wanted to feel confident running a business so I did an MBA. I’m not sure that was such a good plan

The feelings of what you really want are the destinations… the surface desires are just vehicles for getting there. Make sure you get to the destination by a vehicle that suits you rather than just one that seems to work for you.

Perhaps this is particularly significant for me since my wife is pregnant with our first child. If I don’t live my life true to my heart – giving it my all, pursuing with passion the object of my heart’s desires – what sort of role model will I be for my son? What sort of husband will I be if I am not living with the integrity of being my own man?

And when you can live in the present with passion and purpose, opportunities show up that you could never have prepared or planned for… when you can put your cup of water back into the ocean, you can work with the force of the ocean.

Our friends have an impact on whether we smoke, how much money we earn, our lifestyle… even our happiness itself. For example, an obese friend increases your risk of obesity by 171% – that’s far more powerful than even genetics!

Thank the next happy friend that you think of. Each happy friend increases our chances of being happy by 9%. An extra $5,000 in income only increases our chances by 2% so each happy friend we have is worth about $22,500

And check your profile picture on Facebook. People who smile for their profile picture have 15% more close friends than the rest. Yep, I’d bet that your social networks has a huge impact on your life.

As my mother says, smile and the world smiles with you, frown and you’ll frown alone…

The research shows that the ‘degrees of separation’ effects weaken to nothing after three or four levels (so your friends, their friends and even the friends of your friend’s friend are likely to have an impact on you) – that’s a whole bunch of people you’ve never even met!

So: Who are your closest friends?

(based on my article on TheGeniusProject.com)

Well, at least I have changed.

I looked at the first cafe I remember visiting – the King George Square Coffee Club – and noticed that it was gone, making way for a new bank branch. New buildings were up. Old buildings were gone. And then I walked into Subway.

I would frequently have lunch at the Subway at the top of the mall when I was first in University. The most surreal thing of today was that I saw the same guy running the shop as I remember chatting with so many years ago. The store is larger. The menu was better. He looked a little more bald. But he was still there… even if he didn’t remember me.

It’s going to be interesting to see what happens in the coming months…

The other night, I was playing pool and sunk a ball that I didn’t expect to sink – in fact, it was so surprising that I asked myself, “How did I do that?!” (Actually, I think it was a little more expressive than that simple phrase… but it was a very cool shot!)

But it’s even more obvious when I look at a website that I like. Sometimes, I’ve been known to look at the source code to try to figure out how they did that.

And the cool thing is that when you ask that question, you get smarter.

Maybe you’ll actually figure out an answer, maybe not. I still have no idea how I sunk that ball in the corner pocket at the other end. But the experience of being exposed to uncertainty – The Power of Ambiguity – helps you get smarter.

A recent study published in Psychological Science had people look at the surreal work of author Kafka and film director David Lynch, and found that afterwards, people were better at seeing subtle patterns. Read more about this in Science Daily or the NYTimes.

This is another great reason to visit the art gallery. Another good reason to watch art house movies. And a great excuse for me to continue staring at the complex building sites around here.

Experience the surreal. Have a look around. And when you see something strange, or someone does something unexpected, be grateful – it’s an opportunity to make you smarter.

First published on TheGeniusProject.com – and thanks Kellie for tipping me off to this

It’s a big deal.

And you’ll want to do it every day.

Not just 9am-5pm, Monday to Friday. Not even Monday to Saturday. But every day of the week.

Our good friends Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Romer found back in 1993 found that experts practised the same amount every day, including weekends.

So pick your area and start practising. Every day.

(first published on TheGeniusProject.com)