Yet I noticed something strange: He couldn’t do it.

He thought he could. And he elegantly went through the motions. But seemingly unbeknown to him, his techniques were ineffective – as pretty as they looked, they would work only if his partner knew to fall at the right time in the right way. They were close, but the angles, timing and rotations were clearly wrong. And, since I didn’t know “the rules”, I just stood there watching as he verbally told me to fall down!

This was very confusing to him… as if everybody else had “played along”. Unfortunately, it being only my sixth session with this school, I didn’t know how to. Perhaps I am missing something and his understanding of the techniques superseded the need for their practical application. But it got me thinking.

Top NFL players play computer simulations to improve their skills. Reading Wired this morning, I was informed that “almost everybody” plays something like Madden NFL, and that not only has this enhanced the strategic thinking skills of players, but parts of the simulation has started creeping into the real game.

Now, I’d guess that this is like getting a tennis player or a golfer to do weight training. Just by playing the game, they might get stronger, but by doing specific strength training, you can build “strengths” in ways that wouldn’t normally happen just by “playing the game”, and these strengths can offer a serious advantage… in this case, by exposing players to a much greater number of realistic situations that reward (or demand) heightened strategic awareness, you build better strategic awareness. It’s effectively Deliberate Practice for a subset of the game…

And it’s important to be able to tell the difference!

You can get away with stuff in Madden’s that you can’t do in the real game. Those are the limits of the game. You can get away with things in training if your partner knows how they “should” behave that can undermine your performance when working with someone who doesn’t share those rules.

It’s great to use simulations and training techniques to accelerate our development. And when we can focus on a neglected component of the activity, we can enjoy some amazing improvements in our performance…but you have to remember to take those skills back to the real world. And there, as the best all know, you don’t just need to get the individual techniques “right”: You need to find a way to put it together and make it work for you.

He ends his presentation at TED earlier this year with these words from W.B. Yeats:

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

As I watched Ken reading, I couldn’t help but think of Elton John’s Your Song, a song that the late John Lennon described as “the first new thing that’s happened since we happened”. Just in case you don’t remember the lyrics, here are the first two verses:

It’s a little bit funny this feeling inside
I’m not one of those who can easily hide
I don’t have much money but boy if I did
I’d buy a big house where we both could live

If I was a sculptor, but then again, no
Or a man who makes potions in a travelling show
I know it’s not much but it’s the best I can do
My gift is my song and this one’s for you

So was Your Song original? Or did Elton read a little Yeats to Bernie one night before bed after a few bottles of wine, and have Bernie wake up the next morning with a flash of “inspiration”?

Perhaps Elton and Bernie have acknowledged the inspiration of Yeats in the past or perhaps the connection is only tenuous. Or maybe they came to this idea independently. Even if the ‘idea’ was from Yeats or even someone else, it was Sir Elton John that brought such a sentiment to the world in a form that we could embrace, love and enjoy today.

Creativity is sometimes strikingly divergent from the status quo. Sometimes it is a refinement. Other times, creativity might be more like a renaissance – a rebirth of older ideas so that they can find new life for another generation. This leaves the challenge for us to cultivate those conditions and contexts where those around us can find a way to express their uniqueness. And where we can express our own uniqueness.

Here is Sir Ken Robinson’s presentation at TED from earlier this year. I hope you enjoy it.

If you were like me, you were probably taught that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and that it takes one year – a bit over 365 days – for the Earth to complete one such cycle.

And you probably also learned that we didn’t always believe that.

You might have learned about Ptolemy, who believed that the celestial bodies revolved around the Earth. It seems impossible to believe now, but that was the established wisdom for thousands of years. People were executed for disputing this scientific “fact”.

When Copernicus came up with his idea of the Earth revolving around the Sun, it didn’t make sense. The scientists of the day disputed his claims and showed through “science” that he was ‘wrong’, by demonstrating that his theories couldn’t explain what was happening any better than the established wisdom. In fact, Copernicus’ model offered worse predictions than Ptolemy’s model.

But with contributions from Galileo and Kepler united under Newton, our world experienced a paradigm shift (in the original/ Thomas Kuhn sense of the term). And suddenly our textbooks were rewritten. And so “The Sun revolves around the Earth. The Sun has always revolved around the Earth.” became, “The Earth revolves around the Sun. The Earth has always revolved around the Sun.”

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we of course know that we know the truth.

And yet, do we? Perhaps one abusing ‘Relativity’ might posit that it all depends upon where you are stationed – that from the perspective of the Earth, the Sun does revolve around it and vice versa. And maybe they are both wrong.

Such is the nature of “science”: The perpetual quest to prove oneself wrong.

The special challenge falls on those individuals who lead periods of revolution. Scientific, cultural, social, linguistic. Whether they are the revolutionary leaders of climate change or economics or politics or even intelligence.

You see it in someone like Howard Gardner in positing Multiple Intelligences back in 1983. Or Edward de Bono’s “Lateral Thinking”. Or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow. From ‘ridiculous’ to ’self-evident’ in but a short few years.

If we are going to support and facilitate the development of more of these game-changing Great Minds – people with “capital C” Creativity – what sort of systems, policies, procedures, experiences and opportunities might we want to create?

In the past two weeks, I watched my four-month-old son learn to blow raspberries. Inspired by reading that this would be good for his language development (seriously!), and knowing that his mother can’t blow raspberries, I made the sacrifice and regularly blew raspberries at him. He was surprised at the start, then he started laughing. Then he started trying it out for himself. It took a while, and he ‘fell over’ a bunch of times. Even now, his raspberries are particularly sloppy. But he watched me and he did it – today, he can reliably exit a room and blow me a raspberry!

Interesting skills are usually the most difficult to transfer. We can learn Newton’s Laws, but it’s another story entirely to learn to think as Newton thought. Those tacit and almost invisible skills that sometimes leave behind traces of brilliance are the ones where we lack the language to teach the skills. Often we lack the explicit knowledge as to what is being done at all. Yet an infant can learn without language. They just look out at the world with eyes wide open and a willingness to explore, experiment and experience.

Ultimately, most of what we learn is false. It’s our best guess, but at best it’s almost certainly wrong or flawed. We want to get to those moments of joy and pure experience when we can create genius.

I wonder what would happen if  we would just choose to put our desire to control to the side, and accept the ambiguity, the obstacles and the knowledge that even our best work will probably be wrong. And just keep blowing raspberries.

(originally from TheGeniusProject.com)

Whining doesn’t get us very far itself but it can be a phase that we need to go through until you figure out what you want and start working on how. While you’re whining, you’re not focusing on what you want; when you can get clear, set some targets and at least start moving – even if only with baby steps. And once you’re moving towards where you want to be, the world is a very different place.

Like a rocking chair: Fun for a while without getting you anywhere.

The trick is to break ourselves out of the cycle of whining and complaining. We’ve got lots of good reasons to whine too – life isn’t fair. Yet whining doesn’t make things better. Whining gives us a sense of connection with ourselves and with others when we whine to others – a feeling of self pity is at least a feeling of connection.

Sooner or later, the solution is to stop it. And when you do, remember that there’s a great intention behind that behaviour – that you want things to be better and you want to connect with others. Rather than chastising yourself for having whined in the first place, what would happen if you focused on the positive intent of the behaviour and started connecting positively and working towards what you want?

And seasons change whether we want them to or not.

The question is always how you cope with those changes. Do you lament the end of the sunshine as autumn begins, or do you embrace the beauty of the changing colours of the leaves on the trees?

Since arriving back in Shanghai, my lifestyle has changed a lot. Whereas previously, I was working closely with one company delivering trainings, now I am running my own events. Instead of focusing my energy on just delivering the best that I could deliver, now I am handling most everything myself, learning about all the little stuff that I used to have a team to handle for me.

(So if you’re in Asia and after some great NLP training, you know who to call!)

The last time that I found myself in this season was when I registered my first business in July 1998. It was scary and exciting and wondrous. And it’s been pretty amazing so far this time around.

Stuff happens that doesn’t bring us pleasure. How do you handle that stuff? Do you fight against it? Do you long for the longer summer with the leaves on the trees? Or do you embrace the present and get on with making the most of it?

Be outstanding!

Delivering a presentation that is smooth, insightful and ends right on time can be a big ask. Lots of intelligent people mess it up. One of the speakers who really seems to get it right is Malcolm Gladwell. If you have ever watched him speak (like here on TED), you may notice how he speaks eloquently, even effortlessly, and ends with precise punctuality.

When asked about it once, Gladwell replied, “I know it may not look like this. But it’s all scripted. I write down every word and then I learn it off by heart. I do that with all my talks and I’ve got lots of them.”

It’s great to connect with your audience as if you were just having a casual chat with them. And sometimes that’s precisely what you will want to do. Other times, like maybe when you want to really nail it, you might be interested to discover what happens when you go beyond the bullet points and rehearse, refine and distill the most important information that you are there to share. Focus on the most important stuff; skip the rest. Polish, polish, polish. And you might just find yourself on a level where you have that polish that casual speaking just doesn’t allow.

While memorizing isn’t “the answer”, if you want to deliver a professional-standard speech, you might consider treating your next presentation as a performance.

Bringing deliberate practice into speaking is challenging – hence so many speakers stagnate – though by refining your work, looking for ways to raise your standards, you give yourself a chance of lifting your bar.

That what seems to work for the guy who wrote The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and, more recently, What the Dog Saw.

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!