I read an average of two books a week, and have done so all my adult life. (Before then, I read even more.) Not only that, but when I really relate to a topic, I write notes in the margins and highlight important parts, and because most of what I read is non-fiction, one would think that I have filled my head with close to 3,000 books worth of information, knowledge, and maybe even some accidentally accumulated bits of wisdom.
The problem is that apparently my mind has been like a river, with a torrent of information flowing through it but very little staying behind in deep pools of knowledge. To give you an example of how bad it can be, on a recent trip I read Roy Baumeister’s book, Willpower. I found the book fascinating and full of good sense, but I also had the strange feeling that some of the stories were vaguely familiar. When I returned home I checked my bookshelves and discovered that I already owned a copy of the book which I had read a couple of years before and filled with highlights—many of them the same exact ones that I highlighted this time!
So, while it’s great to constantly refresh your stocks of knowledge, I’ve learned that there is a huge difference between lifelong learning and lifelong reading.
It’s an illusion of learning. When I read a book and the ideas make sense, it’s easy to fool myself into thinking that just because I get it now, I will still have it when I need it. You probably remember your school days when everything seemed so clear while you were studying but you could not bring it to mind when you needed it for the test.
Like so much in life, things seem easy until you actually put them to the test. That’s when you find the gaps and weaknesses in your understanding, when you realize how little of what you have read or heard has actually stuck in your mind. If you can’t remember it or apply it when you need it, the time you have invested in learning it the first time has been wasted.
Just like a wild river needs to be dammed to capture the benefit of its power, the secret to retention and understanding is testing. Don’t wait for others to test you, or for life to test you, test yourself. Test yourself by trying to explain it aloud, either to someone else or just to yourself. You can also write down a summary of the ideas, and then go back and check yourself.
Researchers have compared various learning strategies, including highlighting, or reading the same material several times, and have found that the single most effective method of really learning is testing. That’s because when we pull something out of memory, it’s not like opening that drawer in our minds where we stuffed the information—the memory is reconstructed each time we need it. The more we reconstruct it, the easier it is. Testing yourself strips away the illusion of learning and exposes what you do or don’t know.
But testing doesn’t just test—it teaches. It teaches in the same way that lifting a heavy weight several times to failure makes you stronger. You have to find your limits in order to exceed them which is why when testing yourself, the best thing you can do is fail. If you haven’t failed you haven’t found your limits. Failure doesn’t cost you anything, except a little extra time—but that time makes all the difference.
How would you apply this? After you read a page or a chapter or even a whole book (depending on the density and difficulty of the information), set aside a few minutes and try to explain the key ideas out loud or on paper. Explain does not mean a bullet-point listing of the key points. It’s an actual description using full sentences that links the ideas together in narrative or causal links. If you have trouble remembering a key piece of information, resist the temptation to check back—really test yourself by trying to fill in the missing pieces to make complete sense. Then, go back and check yourself. When you find you’ve left out a key point, try again.
It can be devilishly hard to do the first few times, but it does get easier. After you’ve done it enough times, you’ll find that the nature of your reading or listening will also change. You will begin mentally organizing the information in ways that will be easier to retain and call to mind when you need them.
I’m writing this article right now because I’m not allowed to do anything else.
It’s a simple and powerful productivity trick called the Nothing Alternative. You can use it when you:
- Have an unpleasant but important task
- Are trying to establish a new habit
- Are prone to procrastination
- Are easily distracted
There are only two rules. First, you have to set aside time in your schedule for the activity. Second, you don’t have to do the activity if you don’t feel like it, but you can’t do anything else during that time.
I learned about the Nothing Alternative from Roy Baumeister, in his book, Willpower. He cites the example of mystery writer Raymond Chandler, who recommended that the aspiring writer had to set aside four hours a day, during which,
“He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks.” (p. 254)
The beauty of the Nothing Alternative is that it’s low stress and it’s binary. Since you’re not forced to write (or prospect, or take that online course you’ve been talking about forever, etc.), your brain does not automatically resist. Second, since there’s no gray area, you can’t rationalize your way out of the activity by pretending that just looking at email for a minute or two is OK, or that scanning a couple of blog posts might give you inspiration. (Although refilling the coffee mug is not only acceptable but obligatory.)
When I determined about a month ago to write daily posts and to finally finish my next book, I figured it would take 90 minutes a day, which I’ve scheduled in my calendar from 7:30 to 9:00 every workday morning that I’m not traveling. Although I haven’t writhed on the floor yet, I have looked out the window a few times, or stared blankly at a flashing cursor on a white screen for a while. But the mind needs activity, and even if I can’t think of what to write, a few minutes of boredom is enough to build up pressure that begins to express itself through the keyboard.
In my own case, I find that the Nothing Alternative is useful during the first few minutes until I get cranked up, and then sometimes after about an hour when I start to lose a bit of steam.
The immediate benefit is a dramatic increase in my writing output. But in addition, I find that crank-up time is decreasing and I can go longer without losing focus.
Incidentally, I wrote this post at 38,000 feet early on a Sunday morning, so it works anywhere. Only the view out the window is different.
Winners drink from both
Which of these teams would you rather be on?
The first is famous for taking on highly dangerous and seemingly impossible challenges. Its individual members are known for their high self-confidence, tough-mindedness, and indomitable wills. They are the ultimate can-do optimists.
The other team obsesses about planning; they envision everything that can possibly go wrong, they build in as much room for error as possible before they try anything, and they do everything they can to stack the odds in their favor before acting. Call them the ultimate pessimists.
Most people, especially readers of this blog, would choose the first. After all, optimism is practically a religion in America. The idea of a positive mental attitude has become so ingrained in American thinking that it verges on political incorrectness to question it. You can never win an argument with someone who says that you can do anything you set your mind to, because they take it on faith. A positive attitude is often based on faith and emotion, and anyone who points out practical deficiencies and obstacles is seen as lacking in the right stuff.
But when you take a closer look at what the experts say about it, the picture that emerges is a bit more complicated. In fact, the descriptions above both describe the same team: US Navy SEALs. It turns out that optimism and pessimism are not polar opposites—they can coexist in the same person or team at the same time, and the right mixture at the right time can be critical to your success.
Optimism and pessimism are not opposite ends of a spectrum. They can coexist in the same person at the same time
In The Positive Power of Negative Thinking
Combine these two attributes, and you’re at the top right of the scale. You have big-picture optimism, but fine-detailed pessimism. You have high confidence not because you ignore the dangers, but precisely because you acknowledge and respect them, and then do everything possible to avert, mitigate, or deal with them. And because you’ve thought about them, your mind is better prepared because you’ve probably mentally rehearsed the situation already. Norem calls this defensive pessimism, but I prefer the term positive pessimism.
The right mixture at the right time can be critical to your success
If you think of a competition or major undertaking as a process, there are three distinct phases. The first is the decision whether to play. The second is the preparation. The third is the actual performance.
Whether to play: You have to be optimistic to take on the challenge.
Most people will not undertake something challenging unless they think they have a chance of succeeding. Po Bronson in his book, Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing
Yet at this stage some negative thinking can also help. Negative thinking is about realizing that it’s not true that you can do anything you set your mind to. Accepting your limitations frees you to focus on the things you can do, and developing those strengths you do have. A positive thinker will take a bad shot in hopes of making it; a negative thinker will help the team by passing to someone who is open or who has a better chance of making it. A coach, or any other leader, will work with the limitations of his individuals to form a better team.
Pessimism and negative thinking during the preparation phase can increase your chances for success.
Bobby Knight, in his book, The Power of Negative Thinking
One of Knight’s themes is that determination and a positive attitude are no substitute for hard work, preparation, and planning. He quite correctly attacks the “don’t worry, be happy” school of success. He tells us that in his experience more most basketball games are not won, they are lost. In other words, mistakes do more to determine the loser than positive thinking and desire and will to win determine the winner.
Negative thinking is similar to Andy Grove’s philosophy that only the paranoid survive. It’s about being fully aware of all the things that could go wrong, and then preparing so that they don’t, or so that you can overcome them when they do happen.
Ironically, when pessimists do their job right, no one notices. Heidi Grant Halvorson tells the story of the Mars Climate Orbiter which missed its target by 100 kilometers, costing NASA $125 million. The fault was traced to a unit conversion error: the NASA engineers worked in metric and the Lockheed Martin worked in English units. Potential errors such as this are caught all the time by people who pay close attention, but “No one says ‘Way to convert those units from inches to centimeters, Bob. You just saved us $125 million dollars and a boatload of humiliation. You rock!’”[2]
During the “game”, it pays to think positive. Playing not to lose can actually decrease your chances of winning.
Once all the preparation is over and you’re in the arena, it’s time to trust your training and preparation and focus all out on the positive aim of winning.
As Bronson says, “The hallmark characteristics of playing to win are an intensification of effort and continuous risk taking. The equivalent for playing not to lose is conservatism and trying to avoid costly mistakes. Under intense pressure, though, having a strategy of avoiding mistakes leads, by itself, to more mistakes. This is the paradox of playing not to lose.”
As evidence, he cites these extraordinary statistics from professional soccer matches that end in penalty kicks to determine the winner. In soccer, the true odds of making a penalty kick are 85%. Yet, when kickers are in the position where their kick will win the match, they make it 92% of the time. When they have to make the last kick to avoid a loss, they make it 62% of the time.
Positive pessimism is not an oxymoron—it’s a highly adaptive, effective and professional response to difficulty and risk. Positive pessimism does not let anxiety prevent action—it harnesses anxiety to produce positive action, when it’s applied at the right time.
Having trained salespeople for twenty years, I’d like to think I know a thing or two about effective training. But having read Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better
By now it’s well-known that the most important factor in mastery of a skill is thousands of hours of practice. Taking this idea one step further, what you need to consistently get better is deliberate practice, which is about repeatedly identifying specific areas that need improvement, practicing to get to a certain standard, getting immediate feedback and then practicing again until you get it right. This book takes the idea of deliberate practice one step further, by showing specifically how to isolate the key areas that need improvement, how to practice, and how to give and receive feedback. It’s organized into 42 rules for “getting better at getting better”.
The key theme of the book is that practice does not make perfect—it makes permanent. If you practice the right things wrong, or the wrong things right, you will permanently encode substandard performance. In other words, practicing the same thing over and over in the wrong way will only make you better at doing it wrong. Or, if you practice the wrong skill, you will get very good at something that will not contribute to your success. So, you first have to figure out what to practice by analyzing the domain you want to succeed in and then identify and prioritize the key skills that will have the greatest impact. Then, devise the proper drills to practice to a measurable standard so that you can encode success.
I judge if a book is worth reading by how many useful and immediately practical ideas I take from it, and Practice Perfect has given me at least a dozen. In a general sense, I plan to incorporate less scrimmaging and more drilling into the skills portions of my training sessions. For example, sales training teaches a variety of skills and then usually culminates in a realistic role play or presentation, after which participants are critiqued and then sent on their way. The problem with realistic training is that each new skill may only be practiced once, if at all. Drilling is intended to be unrealistic, so that it can provide multiple concentrated opportunities to practice each skill. As the authors say, use scrimmaging to assess, and drilling to improve.
While this may sound like common sense, it can actually be hard to sell to potential clients. In a tough economy everyone is justifiably tight with their training dollars and time spent away from the field, so they try to cram as much into shorter training sessions as they possibly can. The question that must be answered by sales executives or training professionals is: is it better to learn a lot of things imperfectly, or a few critical things perfectly?
One way out of that conundrum, as the authors note, is to plan training sessions meticulously, in order to get as much possible effectiveness out of every single minute. They note that in the NFL it has now become common to have “pre-game” meetings to prepare for practices, and that review of practice tapes is as important as game tapes. This idea is actually amazingly easy to follow even for full-time professionals who don’t have the luxury of much dedicated practice time. Almost everyone carries a tablet device or smartphone that takes video, and imagine how your skill level could improve if you would rehearse a sales presentation or questioning sequence before an important sales call.
Another way out of the conundrum is to provide a proper framework and standard for the most important skills and then help managers institutionalize the practice of practice within their organizations. In today’s fiercely competitive war for talent, it may be better to have a strong culture of practice and then hire for coachability and willingness to learn, as opposed to demonstrated skill.
The authors are education experts and have developed their techniques and rules for training classroom teachers, but they also weave in plenty of examples from sports[1] and business, and make it very clear that the ideas and techniques are universal to the proper learning of a skill. The first half of the book is devoted to individual skill improvement, and the second half offers practical advice for institutionalizing perfect practice within the organization.
Whether you are an executive seeking ways to improve the performance of your employees, Little League coach on the weekends, or a motivated self-learner, Practice Perfect is the book for you.
[1] In fact, it appears that the legendary basketball coach John Wooden is their patron saint, and you could certainly do worse than that in a book about practice.
