To be the best at what you do takes an extraordinary commitment. You’ll need to practise – spend hours and hours focused on getting better. You will change the way your brain works by altering the very connections of the neurons, and indeed every cell in your body.
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.
Should we encourage people to be creative? The correct answer is probably “yes”.
Should we reward people for being creative? Again, the correct answer is probably ‘yes’.
The trouble is that rewards don’t work for creative tasks. When we are being rewarded for doing better, we tend to get trapped in our existing ways of thinking and pursue solutions within our perception of the ‘rules’. And creativity is so often about breaking the rules – about thinking outside the box.
In the video clip below, Dan Pink cites researchers from the Fed Reserve finding that while tasks involving only mechanical skill would yield better performance with higher rewards, but where “even rudimentary cognitive skill” was involved, higher rewards led to people doing worse. Low and medium rewards yielded the same level of performance but high rewards led to worse performance.
Higher pay makes you work harder. But doesn’t make you better.
Higher pay leads to worse performance if you have to think.
It might have something to do with functional fixedness. Stemming from gestalt psychology researchers, this looks at how trapped we are at thinking of something as having a single function. Like being able to use a box as a platform rather than just as a box. Functional fixedness, it seems, is exacerbated by extrinsic rewards.
Maybe it’s a good thing that Australia’s Prime Minister has decided to not give himself a pay rise.
High performance comes from work where we enjoy autonomy, where we can experience a sense of mastery, and where we can feel a sense of purpose.
Geniuses tend to be motivated by intrinsic motivators – the sense of mastery rather than the accumulation of money. After all, if you’re focused on the reward, it’s hard to be focused on doing the task in front of you as well as you can.
It’s like the story of the man who was so busy chopping down a tree that he never thought to take a moment to sharpen his axe. And that guy certainly wouldn’t have time to put down his axe and head to the store to pickup a chain saw.
And that’s like the girl with the Rubik’s cube – who struggled whether to give up her completed side that was stopping her from solving the puzzle.
When we’re so busy doing, it’s really hard to do well.
How well does your current work line up?
Are you giving yourself enough time to be the genius that you could be?
Some people say that you just have to work harder to get better. It seems to make sense, and appeals to the virtue of ‘hard work’.
But the truth is that it’s not that simple, is it?
There are some people who work really hard – who spend hours practising or playing – but who don’t get better. Maybe you were one of them.
Sometimes we can do things a lot and not get better at all. In fact, sometimes we get worse!
When I was playing tennis as a child, I would hit the ball and play tournaments and show up to expensive coaching sessions. And at my best I consistently got mediocre results.
The trouble was that I didn’t get feedback. I was practising but I wasn’t doing it the way I needed to if I wanted to actually get better. Instead, I rehearsed the skills I had over and over until I could play ‘well enough’. But I didn’t get better than that.
Nobody told me what I needed to do and I didn’t figure it out for myself. Maybe I could have but I didn’t.
As you read this, you have been walking for a long time. Yet how much better at walking are you today from last year?
Deliberate practicegoes beyond just doing the same things over and over again, and instead is focused on actually getting better. It’s about finding ways to push yourself – to make your best even better – and it’s not always easy.
Sometimes you might need to invent ways to challenge yourself.
Because that is what the best of the best will do.
Sitting on the subway, I watched with wonder as a girl was trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Such a simple invention, yet apparently something like 350 million cubes have been sold worldwide. As I watched her, I noticed that she had managed to solve one of the sides – all one side was yellow.
Yet she had a problem.
Although all that side was yellow, the other edges weren’t in the right place. She had different colours on the adjacent sides. And that meant one thing: The side that was “solved” wasn’t really solved.
And to solve her problem, she would need to rearrange the whole of that side so that the appearance of order would necessarily be replaced with disorder – temporarily if she got it right!
As tempting as it is to hold onto something that is almost good enough, sometimes you need to let go of what you have that isn’t quite right in order to get what you really want.
Years ago, I was inspired with a quote then attributed to Nelson Mandela:
Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us.
It is not just in some; it is in everyone.
And, as we let our own light shine, we consciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
The trouble is that Nelson Mandela didn’t write it. He didn’t say it. And it certainly wasn’t part of his inauguration address.
In the years since, I was quite happy to correct people on the origin of the quote, but you know, I actually hadn’t checked. I had read that it did appear in A Return to Love, but had never seen it there. Amid all the things that have happened in the past year, I picked up a copy of the book. But I hadn’t read it.
Last night I did. And the quote – “Our greatest fear…” is there. Page 165 of the First Edition hardback I have beside me.
Although the quote is actually a single paragraph in the book – not separated into individual lines as if it were poetry – it does read better on a poster when separated out.
Shai Agassi is a pretty inspiring kinda guy. Having been a jet at SAP, he’s shot into space proclaiming the benefits of replacing internal combustion engines with batteries and motors. It’s a pretty cool thought really.
You might ask, “But what about when you run out of power?” And Shai is glad that you did.
In a few years – if Shai has his way of course – it’ll be a simple matter of dropping through the convenient Better Place to swap your old battery for a new one… and with that, cars get an ‘unlimited range’. Well, at least as much as cars do.
Pretty brilliant piece of business design too. Not only does the company answer a really big problem (how to give electric vehicles the range they need) but it could create a massive disruption to the existing oil-based infrastructure network. Things could get messy I guess.
Australia is coming (supposedly)… I wonder when we’ll see it in China. More on this announcement at Wired.
As I was rereading the Introduction of “The Handbook” this morning, it occurred to me how remarkable it is that there is actually a formal domain of expert performance at all.
Being an ‘expert’ is simultaneously honoured and stigmatized in much of the world. In some parts of the world excellence has even been systematically repressed. And yet, we still want to know “what it takes”.
Successful people spontaneously do things differently from those who stagnate. In particular, they have different practice histories. We consistently see that they engage in “deliberate practice” – they work to innovate the way they do what they do.
You can read more about what the lead editor of The Handbook has to say in an interview with Fast Company here.
Being excellent isn’t easy. But it is a lot more simple than you might believe.
We usually trust people who think rationally more than we trust those who rely on their gut feelings. But should we?
Chen-Bo Zhong (from the University of Toronto) decided to find out by asking whether people would lie and screw someone over. Some did and some didn’t.
If they were encouraged to “make decisions based on gut feelings,” they would rip off the other person by lying just 27% of the time.
But if they were encouraged to “think rationally” they would screw them over 69% of the time!
The effect was so strong that they concluded, “Deliberative processes can license morally questionnable behaviors by focusing on tangible monetary outcomes and reducing emotional influence.”
That’s why it’s important to make moral, ethical and strategic decisions without relying upon the numbers. Sure, use the numbers. Check the downside. Make sure you can afford it if everything goes wrong. But ultimately we make better decisions – at least morally better decisions – when we allow our ‘inner goodness’ to shine through.
For me the warning is that the next time I’m making a decision, don’t just rely on the numbers… You gotta listen to your heart.
With only a few months to go, we figured it was about time to check out the child development options around here. Montessori is well known though the implementations can be inconsistent and there isn’t one really close by. So we checked out a local place that is supposedly part of an international conglomerate with 600 or so centres.
I was a little disappointed. Turns out they’re charging ¥240 ($42) per 45 minute class… and you still have to be there. The walls are pretty colours and the leaders are very animated, though the children didn’t seem at all engaged. And I can’t quite call the staff ‘teachers’ since they’re mostly just English majors who did a 2-month in-house course.
Yet what are the options?
The sales guy suggested that Shanghainese parents don’t know how to play with their kids so they bring them there instead. Ouch!
Maybe I had an enlightened childhood but it just looked like the kids were on the set of a second-rate version of the television show, Play School.
Maybe we’ll be looking elsewhere for a place that has a stronger pedagogical foundation than “let the kids play and they’ll learn something”.
Training courses can be expensive. They can cost a lot more to attend than buying a book on the same subject. Earlier today, was asked, “What is the difference?”
And it’s a good question to ask. A book costs a lot less than a training course – and is far more convenient to read – so if you could get the same thing from a book, it would be a much more convenient way to learn. So why do we teach our children in schools and our corporations through training courses when we could just give them books to read? Anyway, I gave an answer like this:
When I was younger, I read books about martial arts. I looked at the pictures and ran through in my mind the exercises and explanations. And it looked really cool! It got me excited and interested so I kept reading.
One day, my parents allowed me to start martial arts training. It was the same – and yet totally different. While I already knew in theory much of what we were learning, training in a class with other people like me meant that I learnt much more than ever before. I realized that I didn’t really know as much as I thought that I did. And I had the experience of really learning. If I had kept reading books, I could become very knowledgeable, but I could never have become a Master.
If you want to learn about a topic, reading books is great. If you want to develop some serious skill, you will want to find the right context for your to explore, experience and expand yourself in ways that you might have never realized possible.
If you want to develop real skill, you’ll want to find the best training opportunities around.
Only you know if it’s the right time. But that you’re asking about this suggests that some part of you believes that you would benefit from some training. If so, we look forward to having you join us.
After growing up in Brisbane, I started getting curious - especially about the nature of genius. This led me to running workshops and seminars, then back to business school and now to Shanghai...
I run The China NLP Society, do some teaching and am completing a doctorate on transferring expertise, genius and NLP.
With only a few months to go, we figured it was about time to check out the child development options around here. Montessori is well known though the implementations can be inconsistent and there isn’t one really close by. So we checked out a local place that is supposedly part of an international conglomerate with 600 or so centres.