One Thought

I’ve already written about how to discover what you want.  The basic idea: Try as many things as possible and see what sticks; project yourself into the future and imagine how you’ll feel there.  My advice in that article was mostly philosophical.  This time I’m going to get specific and practical.

Let’s assume the following scenario:  Your life now is okay.  Your basic needs are met and you’re not miserable, but you’re also not satisfied.  You feel something is missing.  You’d rather experience life fully than as a lackluster succession of years leading to death.  You’d rather live with purpose.  The problem is, you don’t know what you want.  Because you don’t, it’s hard to motivate action.  You feel stuck.

So what do you do if you don’t know what you want?  Here’s one solution: Wait.  Keep doing what you’re doing.  Hope inspiration comes suddenly and unexpectedly.  This could work: people have found what they want through luck and happenstance.  But is it likely to work?  I doubt it.  To find what you want, you need to shake things up.  You can’t keep doing the same thing over and over and expect different results.  A laissez-faire approach won’t cut it.  

Take Consistent Action

The key to finding what you want is consistent action.  If you’re not trying new things and gaining experience, you’re not making progress, and if you’re not doing so consistently, you’re not using your time efficiently.

But how do you motivate consistent action if you don’t know what you want?  This is a major problem, and it’s what keeps most people from discovering what they want.  If you don’t know what you want, it’s hard to put in consistent effort.  Self-doubt creeps in, and laziness takes hold.  On any day it’s easiest to do things that won’t challenge you — it’s easier to watch TV, surf the internet, and hang out with friends than it is to press yourself to do something new.  There’s nothing wrong with these activities, but they don’t help you find what you want.

If you don’t know what you want, you may feel blocked by indecision.  Many options will seem appealing, but none will stand out.  It’s easy to get stuck in the big-picture mindset.   In it, you spend lots of time thinking about all the things you could be doing but little or no time actually doing them.  This mindset is attractive: It lets you keep your options open.  It lets you fantasize about all the paths you could take.  It lets you be lazy.  But it’s anathema to discovering what you want.  The big-picture mindset discourages action and encourages equivocation.

To act consistently you need to commit to something.  This is the only way to escape the big-picture mindset.  If you don’t commit yourself, you’ll forever question your motivations.  You’ll undermine your attempts at action.  Self-doubt and laziness will control you.

But how can you decide what to commit to?  Isn’t this decision really important?  Shouldn’t you make sure you get it right?  NO! – if you make sure you get this decision right, you’ll get it neither right nor wrong.  You’ll never make it at all.  A decision to commit yourself to something doesn’t bind you for the rest of your life.  It’s meant to motivate consistent short-term action, not to trap you.  You need only commit yourself for the short-term — at least two months or so.  You can revisit your commitment after this time passed, but before that you need to do what you’ve committed to doing.

Make a Plan and Stick to It

Of course, short-term commitments aren’t easy to fulfill.  They can be quite difficult, in fact — it’s hard to pursue a short-term goal without a long-term picture.  That’s why it’s important to make a plan and stick to it.  This plan specifies what you’re going to do and how long you’re going to do it.  It doesn’t have to be totally rigid, but it should change only with good reason.  Feeling tired, bored, and uninspired aren’t good reasons — you will sometimes feel these ways.  Some days are worse than others.  Remember that your commitment is only short-term, not binding for life.  If you’re bored most of the time, you can decide not to continue when you finish.

Why force yourself to do something when you’re tired, bored, and uninspired?  Because feelings like these aren’t reliable indicators.  Especially when you’re first starting out, they can stem from insecurity and unfamiliarity.  Doing something hard or new makes you feel uncomfortable, and this discomfort manifests itself as fatigue or boredom.  You may feel you don’t like what you’re doing when in reality you just don’t like the discomfort it makes you feel.  That’s why it’s important to commit yourself.  Only by committing to do something for a while can you obtain a realistic assessment of how well it works.

Self-discipline is easiest when only a little of it is necessary.  To ensure you take consistent action, I recommend making and following a schedule.  Schedules aren’t necessary for everyone — in particular, people who know exactly what they want may not need them.  But you, I’m assuming, do not — that’s what you’re trying to find out.  A schedule can be quite helpful when you don’t know what you want.

Isn’t a schedule the type of thing that takes the passion out of your work and makes it feel like a chore?  From my experience, no — I feel plenty inspired and creative while working under one.  A schedule takes some getting used to, but it’s not hard to keep once you fall into the groove.  The self-discipline benefits of a schedule are many: You don’t need to psych yourself up to get started every day.  You don’t worry about how much you’ll get done tomorrow or next week because you know exactly how much time you’ve decided to commit.  You don’t need to “find time” to do things because the time is already there.  (In fact, I’ve noticed that the vast majority of prolific writers, artists, and entrepreneurs I’ve seen interviewed have said they employ some kind of schedule.  Even when you do know what you want, a schedule is still useful.)

I recommend using your schedule to accomplish short-term goals.  Long-term goals are hard to formulate when you don’t know what you want, but short-term ones are much easier.  For example, I don’t know what I want to do with music in a big-picture sense, but I do know that I’d love to produce an album of my own music.  One of my short-term goals is therefore to do just that.  Good short-term goals are ones that strongly motivate you.  They make self-discipline easier.

Wrapping Up

So remember: if you want to find what you want, you must commit yourself and then make a plan and stick to it.  Consistent action is the goal.

I’ll make one last point.  When you’re trying to discover what you want, it’s easy to think only about the future and what’s happening next and to ignore the present.  Don’t do that.  Think about the future periodically, but focus on the here and now.  Life happens in the present only.  Enjoy what you’re doing, and change course (in due time) if you aren’t.  Put your full energy into what you’re doing today.  Pay attention to the details even when they seem inconsequential.  Just as life is a collection of present moments, great work is a collection of small details.  Focus loving attention on every one of them.

Naysayers — you’ve met ‘em.  They’re the people who say No more than they say Yes and who offer discouragement rather than encouragement.  They’re the kings of the worst-case scenario and the queens of the status quo.  To them, change is risky, difficult, and probably not worthwhile.

Most of us have been naysayers at some point.  It’s easy to fall into the naysaying trap — and some never climb out.  We naysay when we fear the unfamiliar, when we’re insecure, and when we’re just plain lazy.  We naysay to prevent change, to preserve our egos, and to avoid work.

If naysayers had their way, nothing would change and no one would rise above the ordinary.  Governments would remain stationary, entrepreneurs would return to their jobs, and aspiring artists would give up.

Thankfully, they don’t always have their way.  I’d like to do what I can to increase the frequency that happens.  In that vein, I offer the following guide to being a naysayer.  If you find yourself doing any of the following, please stop – just say “Nay” to naysaying!

How To Be A Naysayer

1. Assume all good ideas have been tried already.  New ideas are therefore, by definition, bad.  When you hear an idea, recall similar ones that have failed in the past.  Assume that if one attempt failed, all will fail.  Assume things are the way they are for good reason.  Don’t question how they came to be that way or whether they should be that way.
2. Assume the world is a difficult and complex place — so difficult and complex, in fact, that changing it is impossible.  Emphasize how hard it will be to make any change.  Point out all the things that can go wrong, all the worst-case scenarios.  Call yourself a “realist”: in the real world, most changes are impossible so it’s better not to waste time trying.
3. Assume people can’t change.  If they’re not good at something now, they never will be.  Exploit their insecurities to convince them not to try.  Assume abilities are inborn and that no amount of hard work can change that.  Don’t try to change yourself, of course.
4. Discourage risk-taking.  Risks are dangerous, and ideas with risks should be avoided.  Since big changes are always risky, discourage all such changes.  Prefer avoiding loss to seeking gain.  Seek comfort and stability above all else.
5. Do your part to uphold the status quo.  Discourage those who try to change it.  Use any power or influence you have to stop them.  Point out as many problems as you can with their ideas, and don’t bother offering solutions to those problems.  Exploit any information advantage you have to argue down their points.  Don’t listen to them if they don’t have the proper credentials.  And of course, don’t try to do anything new yourself.

Being wrong sucks.  If given the choice, you’d rather hold right¹ views than wrong ones.  Right?  

You hold views that are wrong.  So do I.  The question is: will we discover they are wrong?  And when we do, will we turn them right?

I’m not advocating particular views in this article.  Instead I’m suggesting techniques for ferreting out wrong views and replacing them with right ones.  I’m not a hypocrite: some of these techniques could be bogus.  I’ll add, remove, and update them as I’m convinced is necessary.  Thoughts are welcome.

How to be right:

1. Don’t self-identify with your views.  Your views may change.  Indeed they should if you hear an argument that’s stronger than your own.  Don’t become your views.

   If you call yourself a libertarian, any attack on libertarianism becomes an attack on you.  Attacks trigger a defensive response, which makes it harder to see things clearly.  It’s difficult enough to change your views already; don’t make it even harder by self-identifying with them.  If you become convinced that libertarianism isn’t ideal, you haven’t become a different person; you’ve just heard a better argument.  Your current views are not who you are.

2. Take the middle road.  It’s unlikely that one side of an argument has no valid points.  Recognize valid points when you see them, and incorporate them into your own viewpoint.  Extreme positions are rarely right.  Just because you take one side of an argument doesn’t mean you must believe that everything your side says is right and everything the other side says is wrong.

3. Be concerned with seeing things as they are.  If you’re not consciously making the effort to see things as they are–and to accept them when they are different from how you want them to be–you’re probably wrong more than you know.  You can’t project preconceived ideas or opinions onto the world and expect it to change to fit them.

   Train yourself to accept things as they are.  If you can’t accept reality, you’ll live in denial: half of you will think you’re right, and half will know you’re wrong.  If you see adequate evidence for a point of view, accept it.  Don’t try to explain away things you don’t like.  If you notice yourself wanting things to be a certain way, be suspicious of arguments you come up with in support of that view.  (Of course, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to change things; in fact, once you’ve accepted that they are a particular way, you’re in a great position to change them.)

4. Understand your perspective.  Everyone is not just like you.  Some are a different sex, some are a different race, and some grew up in a different country, some have different interests, and so on.  Your views have been shaped by who you are, and it’s not necessarily reasonable to expect those coming from different perspectives to hold them as well.  Understand your perspective and how it colors your viewpoint.  Try to look at the world from others’ perspectives.

5. Talk to intelligent, informed people.  ”Intelligent” does not mean “agrees with you”!  In fact, if you can find intelligent and informed people who disagree with you, that’s all the better.  Talk to people who will challenge you.  If you’re talking only to unintelligent and ignorant people, you’re likely succeeding only in reinforcing your present views.  Curious people are best.  Look for people who’ve examined their views carefully.

6. Play devil’s advocate with yourself.  Why wait for someone else to disagree with you?  Anticipate counter-arguments, and imagine how you would respond to them.  Make sure to present these counter-arguments as strongly as possible.  If you’re good, you may force yourself to change your views without ever talking to anyone else.

7. Read.  The more points of view you’re exposed to, the less likely you are to adopt wrong ones.  Make sure you expose yourself to all points of view, not just ones you agree with.  Read to understand the background information relevant to your views.

8. Write.  Writing forces you to think carefully about your views.  Holes in your knowledge and flaws in your argument will reveal themselves.  You’ll understand issues much better after you’ve written about them.  You don’t have to publish your writing if you don’t want to–you could burn it as soon as you finish and still reap many of the benefits.

9. Be aware of the cognitive biases.  There’s a wealth of psychology literature on cognitive biases, which are ways people tend to misperceive reality.  If you understand the known biases, you don’t have to re-discover them through your own experience.  They include:

   • Confirmation bias: the tendency to search for and interpret new information in a way that supports your preconceptions (and to avoid information and interpretations that contradict them).
   • Self-serving bias: the tendency to take credit for your successes and deny responsibility for your failures.
   • Hindsight bias: the tendency to see past events as having been more predictable than they actually were.

Footnotes:

1. All my uses of the word “right” in this article could be changed to “less wrong.”  I’m not claiming that in all matters there is a right answer.  It is always the case, however, that some answers are less wrong than others.

Consider the case of Bob:

Bob’s experience is extremely common.  There is nothing special about playing guitar: I could substitute any non-trivial skill–writing, computer programming, badminton, swordfighting, etc.–and the story would be the same.  It’s hard to become proficient at a new skill.  Bob knows that, and you know that if you’ve ever tried something new.

But I want to know more than that.  What actually made Bob’s friends better guitar players?  Yes, it’s true that the obvious factors–starting at a young age, innate ability–play a role in skill development.  But they aren’t the only, or even the most important, factors.  Bob’s explanation is too simplistic.

I’m going to deconstruct the process of learning a new skill.  My goal is to uncover the factors that control progress.  As it turns out, some of the most important ones are under your control, which means you can exploit knowledge of them to accelerate your progress.  And while some of the factors are fairly obvious, others are not.

But first, a note: This isn’t a “believe-in-yourself” article.  There won’t be platitudes about pushing yourself to the edge or stories of 50-year-olds who realized their childhood dreams.  I’m trying to be more systematic than that.

The factors

What factors control progress in learning a new skill?  Let’s start with the ones you don’t control:

1. Your innate ability, or talent
2. Whether you started at a young age

People often get hung up on these ones.  Bob certainly did.  It’s common to get frustrated by things you can’t control, but it’s also useless.  Besides, the factors you can’t control aren’t the only factors, or even the most important ones.  Consider the ones you can control:

1. The time you spend practicing
2. The effectiveness of your practice
3. How you develop related skills

Though these could be subdivided further, this list should cover the important stuff.  I’ll explain the factors as I go.

Time

Proficiency requires time, and lots of it.  Our minds are slow to adapt.  They can be trained to behave differently, but not without prolonged, consistent practice.

You have to put in some minimum number of practice hours to become proficient in a skill.  Talent can, of course, accelerate progress, but there’s no replacement for raw practice hours.  Take a look at proficient violinists, for example: you won’t find any who haven’t put in thousands of hours of practice.

At least as far as practice hours are concerned, there’s probably a “talent ceiling.”  In other words, proficiency has a minimum, per-skill time requirement.  You won’t become proficient without this minimum amount of effort.  Of course, practice hours aren’t all equal.  Practice is generally most effective when it’s spread over the longest time frame possible.  All else being equal, 200 hours of practice are more effective when spread over 100 days than when spread over 2 weeks.  (And 200 days would likely be even better than 100.)

Much of the learning process happens in sleep and in reflection: information is committed to long-term memory, patterns and connections emerge, and muscle memory develops.  And sleep and reflection happen on their own schedule; they can’t be compressed as practice hours can.  Thus, there’s probably also a minimum time-frame requirement.  You won’t find proficient violinists who haven’t been practicing for years.

It’s generally best to spread a given number of practice hours over as as much time as possible.  A simple example: if you decide to study 10 hours for an exam, it’s better to spread those hours over 2 weeks than over 2 days.  You’ll reap the most benefit from sleep and reflection if you spread out the hours.  (Cramming is a waste of time–literally–compared to the alternative.)  Of course, at some point it doesn’t make sense to spread practice hours any further; I’ll discuss that more later.

Practice evenness is also important.  I’ve assumed in my examples so far that practice hours are spread out relatively evenly.  If you’re practicing 20 hours per week, it’s better to spread that time over 5 days than over 2.  You’ll get more benefit from sleep and reflection with an even spread.

Practice effectiveness

Practice hours aren’t all equal.  I’ve already shown how their distribution over time matters.  Practice effectiveness is also very important.  Though strategies differ across skills, some guidelines apply everywhere.  If you do the following, your practice should be quite effective:

• Eliminate distractions.  Don’t watch TV or try to do something else at the same time.  Solitude is usually best.
• Practice in chunks of time that are neither too small nor too large.  It’s hard to get much useful done in under 15 minutes, and fatigue will set in after some amount of time.  It’s usually unproductive to practice anything for more than, say, 6 hours or so at a time without taking a break.
• Be organized.  Decide what you’re going to do and (roughly) how long you’re going to do it before starting to practice.
• Isolate weak areas and focus on improving them.  It’s natural to avoid confronting weaknesses, but often they are what hold you back most.  If you’re a tennis player and your backhand is weak, develop exercises to isolate the motion and practice until it improves.
• Keep practice varied.  Don’t focus on just one part of the problem at a time; mix things up.  The more sub-skills you practice at the same time, the more benefit you get from sleep and reflection, which work on their own schedule.  For example: if you’re a musician, don’t fall into the common trap of thinking you’ll focus on technique now and songwriting later.
• Put everything together often.  If you’re a musician, perform and record music.  If you play a sport, play it.  Drills are great, but you need to do the thing you’re practicing to be good at.
• Enjoy yourself.  If your practice is all pain, it’s easy to burn out and quit–and that isn’t very effective, is it?

Practice is itself a skill, and an effective practicer will tend to progress more quickly in anything than an ineffective one.  That brings us to…

Development of related skills

It’s possible to start with a huge advantage when you take up a new skill.  I’m not talking about talent or innate ability; you aren’t born with this advantage.  Any skill can broken up into sub-skills, and separate skills can share sub-skills.  That means you’ll be advantaged in a new skill if you’ve already practiced a related skill–a skill with common sub-skills.

Let’s look at the guitar example.  Guitar playing has plenty of sub-skills; here are some of the big ones:

• Finger strength, dexterity, and independence
• Left- and right-hand coordination
• Rhythmic understanding and control
• Music theory knowledge
• Compositional and improvisational ability
• Development of the musical ear (the ability to translate heard melodies and chords to notes)

It’s obvious from this list that a person with experience on another instrument will have an advantage on guitar.  An experienced violinist, for example, will have a huge advantage, as violin shares all the sub-skills I listed.  It’s also possible to have an advantage at guitar without ever having picked up an instrument.  If you’ve listened to a lot of guitar music, you’ll probably have a slight advantage–you already have an implicit knowledge of what the instrument can do.  If you’ve spent a lot of time doing something that requires precise and coordinated hand movements like typing you probably also have a slight advantage.

Two general related skills will aid your progress at any skill: self-discipline and internalization of effective practice techniques.  If you’re self-disciplined, you stand to benefit most from the time-related factors: you’ll put in the hours and you’ll do so consistently over months and years, reaping the benefits of sleep and reflection.  If you’ve internalized effective practice techniques (like the ones I listed in the previous section), you’ll make the most of whatever time you spend practicing.  Most people learn self-discipline and effective practice through–what else?–practice.  You carry over any gains in these areas from a current skill to new ones.

Related skills don’t come for free, but they do provide a huge advantage.  This advantage is often mistaken for talent.  Speaking of which–

What about talent?

Talent, of course, does play a role in skill development.  However, its role may be less significant than you think.  Recent research has tended to downplay talent’s role (see, e.g., this article).

I do know that talent’s role is often exaggerated.  Talent is frequently used as a catch-all explanation for differences in ability.  Consider my initial example: if Bob’s friend Joe is making fast progress on the guitar, it’s easier to say “Joe must be talented” (as Bob did) than it is to examine Joe’s practice habits and related skills.  It’s possible–and maybe even likely–that Joe has no special talent.  He may simply be practicing more effectively than Bob.  Or he may have already played piano for 10 years, which would give him a big advantage on guitar.

The easy explanation here is also the lazy explanation.  Learning a new skill is hard.  If you think talent is necessary–and that you lack it–you’re excusing yourself from having to do the hard work.  If you suspect that someone is more talented than you, examine that person’s time commitment, practice habits, and related skills.  You may find that any difference in ability can be explained without mentioning talent.  And I suspect that if you adopt that person’s time commitment and practice habits, you’ll be happy with the result.

Yes, it’s possible that you lack talent.  But it’s also possible you possess latent talent that can only be brought out with effective practice.  Don’t use talent as an excuse to be lazy.

Putting the factors to use

I’ll finish with some advice on how to put the factors I discussed to use.  I’ve already covered the general strategies for practice time and effectiveness.  In summary: practice as much as you can, over as long a time frame as you can, and as evenly as you can.  Follow the effective practice guidelines.

A little more on time: While time is plentiful, consistent effort is, for most, rare.  There’s an enormous difference between doing something casually for a few years and not doing it at all.  Say I spend one hour per week writing in a journal.  After 3 years, I’ll have 150 hours of writing experience.  Even better, I’ll have benefited from 3 years of sleep and reflection.  For those 3 years, writing was on my mind–as I read books, I related them to my own writing; as I waited for the bus, I ruminated on my last piece; as I slept, my brain rewired itself to become better at writing–all for only one hour per week!

Back-burner projects like journal writing are a great way to develop new skills.  They take little time (by definition) but make very effective use of that time.  An ideal back-burner project is one that focuses on a skill that interests you but that is underdeveloped–something you like doing but aren’t that good at yet.

As you improve a back-burner skill, it becomes more realistic to devote more time to it.  It could even become profitable to do so.  The skills you develop on the back-burner may also prove useful in unexpected ways.  Say I’ve improved significantly as a writer after a few years of writing in my spare time.  Now, say I have a fantastic experience: I get lost in the forests of Guatemala and live among the giant anteaters for a year. Naturally, I’ll want to write a book about my experience, and thanks to my writing background, I can start almost immediately.

You never know how the skills you work on now will relate to what you want to do in the future.  Do a diverse set of things and manage your time effectively.  Don’t worry about talent.  Your work will pay off.