Category Archives: Methods of Practive

What Practice Isn’t

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My practice is writing a 250 word essay every day; not a research paper, not a novel, and not a book review.  While that might not seem like much of a distinction, it’s important for me to keep in mind, because if I don’t remember what my practice is I will quickly get lost in what it isn’t.

I want my reading to inform my writing, but not dictate it.  I want my interests to guide my research, but take care that my research doesn’t kill my interest.

One of the pitfalls of deliberate practice is that we can be so concerned about practicing the right way that we lose sight of the practice itself.  That is, I’d rather listen to Dory (Finding Nemo) and keep on swimming than stop swimming because I might not be swimming the “right” way.

The last few days I’ve been trying boil down an enormous tomb of research into a 250 word essay.  It totally put the brakes on my writing.  I want to continue chewing on that tomb, and hopefully it will inform my future posts, but I can’t stop writing just because I haven’t digested it yet.

I have to continually remind myself what the heart of my practice is and make sure I do that core every single day.  One of my favorite books is The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.  He elegantly and hilariously describes this inner struggle with resistance, the greatest obstacle to practice.  And nothing is more important or difficult than sitting down to practice that thing we’ve been called to do every single working day…one of the strangest ironies of life.

Life in the Slow Lane

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When I was a young man I was always in a hurry.  I drove in the left lane, rode the tail of anyone driving “too slow,” and was impatient in traffic.  I got lots of tickets, and paid high insurance premiums.

Now middle-aged, I find myself in the slow lane most of the time.  I give myself plenty of time to get where I’m going, and listen to a book along the way.  When the traffic is slow, I wait.  When it moves swiftly, I go with it.

I like living in the slow lane.  I take time to reflect.  I do work that is deeply satisfying to me.  I focus on the work itself, rather than the status of my particular vocation or job title.

In the slow lane, less is more: less stuff, more relationships; less status, more significance; less travel, more walks in the parks.  It means having enough to share, and enough time for family and friends; it means having enough time to figure out what’s important to you, and making the time to do it.  You learn to find what’s real good for free.

When I lived in the fast lane I was in a constant state of stress.  I felt anxious without knowing what I was anxious about.  I continually measured my own life against the lives of others.

It’s easy to confuse status with doing good work, or living well.  It’s human nature to want the respect of our fellow human beings, particularly our peer group.  So much so that marketers have become expert at turning that need for respect into a desire to buy their product; we’ve come to associate those products with the thing itself.  That is, if we have the right job title, drive the right car, wear the right clothes, and travel to the right places then we must be successful.  If we don’t, then we’re not.

Living in the slow lane is very simple and very difficult.  It’s as simple as being aware of what’s driving your need for status, and as difficult as letting go of it.

The Dilettante’s Tapestry

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How does the dilettante compete with the expert?  How do we turn our depth of experience into something that might provide a viable alternative to a highly specialized and focused expertise?

I suspect that in order to compete with the experts we need to find a way to turn our multifarious interests into a unified whole.

Suppose we consider our dilettante from yesterday, who had 1,000 hours of deliberate practice in each of math, dance, drawing, history, and meditation.  If she tries to compete with say mathematicians on the same single axis who have maybe 5,000 to 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, then she is going to have a tough time keeping up.

But if instead of competing with them directly, she combines her interest in math with her interest in drawing to help those other more specialized mathematicians in her department visualize their work, or turn their abstract concepts into a visual that lay people can understand, now she has a real value-added skill that bridges people who work in one domain with those who work in another.

She can use her interest in history to use examples from the past to deal with problems in the present, or use them as allegories that both technical and nontechnical people can relate to.

She could use her interest in dance to build the social capital of the groups with whom she works.  I mean let’s face it geeks don’t often dance.  But once they overcome their fear of dancing by someone teaching them how to dance in a safe place, not only will they find themselves having fun but will discover another avenue for relating with people.  It builds teamwork.

If she shares her interest in meditation with her group, she could both increase their collective ability to concentrate and to deal with stress, making her team much more happy and productive.

Just look at all the value our dilettante has added to her place of work!  And just by venturing out along each axis of her interests and finding ways to bring them into her work, she has taken leading roles in her company.  By looking for ways to weave the threads of our interests into a desirable and useful whole, we can satisfy the needs of others as well as our own.

The Dilettante’s Practice

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How does a dilettante turn the 10,000 hour rule into a viable practice for herself?  The dilettante’s dilemma is that she is too interested in too many things to devote herself to only one of them.  She is a liberally educated vocational ignoramus.

Take heart, those of you insulted by my last remark; I walk among you, am one of you.

In one of Ericsson’s papers on deliberate practice and expertise, he gives a graph of expertise which looks logarithmic to me.  That is, the levels of skill that result from the accumulated hours of deliberate practice appear to me to be logarithmically related to the number of those accumulated hours of practice.  Intuitively this makes sense to me; our skill level tends to increase rapidly in the beginning, but then begins to plateau.  Even so, the logarithm is a monotonically increasing function.

Suppose that this function is in fact logarithmic.  The base ten log of 10,000 hours is four, while that of 1,000 hours is 3.  In other words, if this relation were in fact to hold true, then 1,000 hours of deliberate practice would yield 75% of the skill level of an expert.  Might this level of skill be competent?

Now consider our dilettante again.  Suppose she were to practice in domains orthogonal to one another; that is, one domain casts little, if any shadow upon another.  For example, math casts quite a long shadow on physics, but hardly any at all on dance apart from rhythm.

Suppose she had four or five of these orthogonal domains of practice in which she was “competent,” that is, had one thousand hours of deliberate practice in each; say math, dance, drawing, history, and meditation.  Consider what her experience of the world is like, its richness and depth, versus the world of the violinist who has given 10,000 hours of her life to the deliberate practice of the violin.  Could it be like the difference between Flatland and the world we live in?

What price glory?

The Measure of a Man

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How do we take our own measure?  Can we build a model of our own well-being?  Is it possible to determine whether our practice makes us healthy, wealthy, and wise?

Time is our most precious and limited resource, so any such measure ought to include how we spend it.  Time on task is the inertia of a habit.  If you’ve been doing something for an hour every day, every year for the last ten years, then that habit has a tremendous amount of inertia and is going to be hard to move, one way or the other.

But time by itself doesn’t tell us what we’ve accomplished during our time on task.  To address this issue I’ve been working on something I call a cycle.  A cycle represents a completed task, or a completed step in a sequence of steps required to accomplish a goal.

A cycle will vary from domain to domain, and perhaps even within a domain.  So for example, Ganpati Kriya calls for eleven minutes of chanting, so one cycle of Ganpati Kriya is eleven minutes.  But Sat Kriya calls for 30 minutes of chanting, which I only do for five.  Five minutes of Sat Kriya translates into about 0.17 cycles.  My goal for a blog post is to write 250 words.  So if instead I write 300 words, those translate into 1.2 cycles.

While this method isn’t perfect, the two measures of time on task and number of cycles completed give me a better idea of how my practice is going than time by itself.

I want to know what kind of impact my practice is having on my physical and emotional health.  So I periodically measure my vital signs, and positivity ratio.

To measure our financial health I periodically calculate a balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement.

These measurements are an attempt to gather feedback from my practice, to make my practice more deliberate, and to insure my practice is taking me in the direction intended.

The Game of Life

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When I was a kid I enjoyed playing the game “Life.”  Looking back from beyond midlife, the game doesn’t seem to teach much about what matters to me now.

How do we play this game we all find ourselves in?  Most games have some sort of set up.  You get a piece, an avatar, which represents you on the board.  You may start the game with a certain amount of money, or maybe you roll the dice for certain talents or abilities.

Real life is like that.  We get dealt a hand we have no control over: our family, certain genetic talents and predispositions, where we grow up, etc.  Apparently much of our personality and character come from these genetic set points.

These set points, combined with the people who enter our life, like parents, teachers, and friends to a large extent determine the domains we choose to play in: athletics, music, science, religion, etc.

Fortunately for us science is learning that many of these set points are plastic.  We can change them through practice.  The game begins; we roll the dice, and begin our journey around the board.

Chance brings challenges of various sorts into our lives.  How we respond to them is determined at first by these set points: our character, our personality, our parents, etc.  But at the same time there is feedback, we learn from these interactions, and we can choose to respond differently as we age.  We can choose to practice, and learn to practice deliberately.

It’s up to us to keep score.  We determine the points on the scoreboard.  We can measure the things that matter to us, or let others measure us by their own standard.  But we are all measured.  Will we find ourselves wanting?  Will we spend the resources we started the game with in a way that leaves a legacy to our children, to our friends and family, to our community, or to the very earth itself?

It’s up to us to envision, to plan, and to play the game.  Play well, all of you.  We’re all depending on us.

Life in Review, a Reflection on New Year’s Day

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New Year’s Day is an obvious time for reflection, to review the results of our practice, to celebrate our accomplishments, and to consider ways to improve.

What do we reflect on; the collected memories of the past year with their accumulated emotion?  Remembered victories and failures?  How we look in the mirror?  How high we’ve climbed the ladder?

This has been the hardest part of my practice: to look myself in the mirror in such a way that brings growth and a sense of accomplishment; to bring my life under a process of review, without blame or shame, accepting who I am yet determined to get better.

I’ve learned to create a vision for my life, to set goals that will accomplish that vision, to make a plan to accomplish those goals, to create a history of those goals, of how I spend my time, and whether a goal was accomplished with the time spent.

But even so, I’ve yet to take all that data and let it tell me who I am, and who I am becoming.  Sure, numbers don’t tell the whole story, but they do tell a story.  Our friends can’t tell the whole story of who we are either, but we want to listen to what they have to say.  And I want to learn to listen to what those numbers have to say.

Deliberate practice requires feedback; without it our practice isn’t deliberate.  Feedback involves measuring in some way how near or far we are from the mark, from executing what we’ve set out to accomplish.

In this coming year I want to take the data I’ve collected, and turn it into summary statistics that can reveal to me the accumulated results, the “wealth” if you will, of my practice.

How do you reflect on your life?  What rituals do you celebrate on New Year’s Day?

My Struggle with Deliberate Practice

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Deliberate practice forces me to hold a mirror to my practice. It requires some form of feedback, whether from a teacher or by way of measureable results.

I find I don’t like being measured. And I don’t have a teacher; at least not one I meet with regularly that observes my practice.

It’s easy to get comfortable with practice; to go through the motions without paying attention to them. At that point it’s probably safe to say we’re not getting better at whatever it is we are practicing. Our practice is not without benefit, but is without improvement.

I’m at that point with what I call my “maintenance practices,” practices where my goal is just to do them.

How do you measure meditation? How do you measure the Five Tibetans? You either do them, or you don’t, right?

I read a fascinating post by Noa Kageyama, PhD on deliberate practice; maybe the best I’ve read. Let me see if I can apply some of his lessons to my own practice.

Suppose I’m doing the Five Tibetans tomorrow morning, and that I’ve done them every morning for the past five years. I’ve got the radio going, thinking about what I need to do the rest of the day, while my body goes through the motions of the exercises. Let’s call this practicing mindlessly.

Now suppose I’m doing those same exercises without any kind of background distractions, like music, an audio book, or television. I focus my awareness on my breath, my body, on counting the repetitions. I’m aware of my posture, balance, and form as I perform each repetition of the exercise. Finally I record the experience of my performance in a practice notebook. Let’s call this practicing mindfully.

See the difference? Even a maintenance practice can lead to improvement if we learn to practice mindfully.

When Life Gets in the Way of Practice

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Life is often turbulent, and the water gets rougher with each passing year. Some days it feels like there is no calm water, that there are only rapids, waterfalls, and hydraulics.

How do you practice when CHAOS screws up your day; or week; or month?

One thing that helps me is that my “maintenance practices” are rather short, so that even when life gets crazy, there’s really no excuse for me not getting them done.  These include:

  1.  ganpati kriya in the morning (11 minutes), followed immediately by the Five Tibetans (about 7 minutes);
  2. around midday I do sat kriya (4 minutes), pray (4 minutes), and some yoga or calisthenics of some sort (5 to 30 minutes);
  3. and kirtan kriya in the evening (12 minutes).

That probably doesn’t sound like much; in terms of “hard work” it isn’t. But it keeps me feeling good, fit enough, and healthy enough; enough for me.

Another thing that helps me is to prioritize my practices. I’m a stay-at-home dad, so maintenance practices come first, then household, writing, the mechanics of blogging (page design, etc.), research, and modeling (like statistical models).

Do first things first, and accept that last things can’t always be done today.

My daughter has had a headache since last Wednesday. As I write, we are at the emergency room at Children’s Hospital. This has definitely been a white water day: doctor appointment, chiropractor appointment, my own appointment, and now the ER. In between I’ve managed to fit in the maintenance practices, organize storage in the basement, and type this post in the waiting room.

Life isn’t all about getting things done. My daughter is much more important than any practice.  But the practices help me be a better father, and getting these small wins in the midst of chaos make me feel confident of a better tomorrow.

How Many Hours of Practice?

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How many hours of practice does it take to be good at something?

Since Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, came out in 2008 the 10,000 hour rule has been quoted more times than Poor Richard’s Almanac.  But that rule refers to the six sigma experts that are on the right hand edge of the bell curve.

What if you don’t want to be an expert at something, just competent?

For example, say you want to learn a new language well enough to be conversant, but not so well that you could write a piece of literature in that language.  How long would that take?

I’ve seen rules of thumb kicked around on blogs and in books, but never any research to back them up, apart from Ericsson’s 10,000 hour rule.

For instance one fairly common rule of thumb seems to be the thousand hour rule: that is, it takes one thousand hours of “practice” to achieve competence at some skill.  I found an article online that seems to confirm this for learning a second language.  The article refers to research done by the Foreign Service Institute, but without an actual citation.

Family Fortunes by the Bonner brothers asserts that it takes 1,000 hours to become competent, and 5,000 to become really good at some skill or other.  But again, they don’t cite any research to support these claims.

There is a graph in KA Ericsson’s article, The Influence of Experience and Deliberate Practice on the Development of Superior Expert Performance, that plots expert performance as a function of experience (see figure 38.1).  It looks logarithmic to me, but the article doesn’t make that assertion.

But suppose expert performance is in fact a logarithmic function of experience.  The log base 10 of 10,000 is 4, while the log base 10 of 1000 is 3.  In other words if this relationship is logarithmic, a person with 1000 hours of deliberate practice would have 75% of the skill of a person with 10,000 hours of practice.

If “really good” is halfway between the competent level at 1,000 hours, and the expert level at 10,000 hours, How many hours of practice does that translate to?  Well 103.5 = 3162, so about 3200 hours to achieve 87.5% of the skill of an expert.