Training: knowledge and skills

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The distinction between knowledge and skills lies at the heart of the difference between traditional paths toward expertise and the deliberate-practice approach.

Traditionally, the focus is nearly always on knowledge. Even when the ultimate outcome is being able to do something — solve a particular type of math problem, say, or write a good essay — the traditional approach has been to provide information about the right way to proceed and then mostly rely on the student to apply that knowledge. Deliberate practice, by contrast, focuses solely on performance and how to improve it.

When you look at how people are trained in the professional and business worlds, you find a tendency to focus on knowledge at the expense of skills. The main reasons are tradition and convenience: it is much easier to present knowledge to a large group of people than it is to set up conditions under which individuals can develop skills through practice.

From the perspective of deliberate practice, the problem is obvious: attending lectures, minicourses, and the like offers little or no feedback and little or no chance to try something new, make mistakes, correct the mistakes, and gradually develop a new skill.

The better approach will be to develop new skills-based training programs that will supplement or completely replace the knowledge-based approaches that are the norm now in many places. This strategy acknowledges that because what is ultimately most important is what people are able to do, training should focus on doing rather than on knowing — and, in particular, on bringing everyone’s skills closer to the level of the best performers in a given area.

Two ways to learn

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The key difference between the traditional approach to learning and the purposeful-practice or deliberate-practice approaches:

The traditional approach is not designed to challenge homeostasis. It assumes, consciously or not, that learning is all about fulfilling your innate potential and that you can develop a particular skill or ability without getting too far out of your comfort zone. In this view, all that you are doing with practice — indeed, all that you can do — is to reach a fixed potential.

With deliberate practice, however, the goal is not just to reach your potential but to build it, to make things possible that were not possible before. This requires challenging homeostasis — getting out of your comfort zone — and forcing your brain or your body to adapt. But once you do this, learning is no longer just a way of fulfilling some genetic destiny; it becomes a way of taking control of your destiny and shaping your potential in ways that you choose.

Getting out of comfort zone

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Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone. This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.

Getting out of your comfort zone means trying to do something that you couldn’t do before. Sometimes you may find it relatively easy to accomplish that new thing, and then you keep pushing on. But sometimes you run into something that stops you cold and it seems like you’ll never be able to do it. Finding ways around these barriers is one of the hidden keys to purposeful practice.

Generally, the solution is not “try harder” but rather “try differently.” It is a technique issue, in other words.

The best way to get past any barrier is to come at it from a different direction, which is one reason it is useful to work with a teacher or coach. Someone who is already familiar with the sorts of obstacles you’re likely to encounter can suggest ways to overcome them. And sometimes it turns out that a barrier is more psychological than anything else.

One caveat here is that while it is always possible to keep going and keep improving, it is not always easy. Maintaining the focus and the effort required by purposeful practice is hard work, and it is generally not fun.

Generally speaking, meaningful positive feedback is one of the crucial factors in maintaining motivation. It can be internal feedback, such as the satisfaction of seeing yourself improve at something, or external feedback provided by others, but it makes a huge difference in whether a person will be able to maintain the consistent effort necessary to improve through purposeful practice.

Deliberate practice

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You wish to climb a mountain. You’re not sure how high you want to go — that peak looks an awfully long way off — but you know you want to get higher than you currently are.

You could simply take off on whichever path looks promising and hope for the best, but you’re probably not going to get very far.

Or you could rely on a guide who has been to the peak and knows the best way there. That will guarantee that no matter how high you decide to climb, you are doing it in the most efficient, effective way.

That best way is “deliberate practice”.

It will show you the path to the peak; how far you travel along that path is up to you.

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Focused and diffuse modes of thinking

Our brains employ two modes of thinking to tackle any large task: focused and diffuse.

Professor Barbara Oakley, is credited with popularizing the concept of focused and diffuse forms of thinking. In A Mind for Numbers, Oakley explains how distinct these modes are and how we switch between the two throughout the day. We are constantly in pursuit of true periods of focus – deep work, flow states, and highly productive sessions where we see tangible results. Much of the learning process occurs during the focused mode of thinking. The diffuse mode is equally important to understand and pursue.When our minds are free to wander, we shift into a diffuse mode of thinking. This is sometimes referred to as our natural mode of thinking, or the daydream mode; it’s when we form connections and subconsciously mull over problems.

Oakley uses evolutionary biology to explain why we have these two distinct modes. Vertebrates need both focused and diffuse modes to survive. The focused mode is useful for vital tasks like foraging for food or caring for offspring. On the other hand, the diffuse mode is useful for scanning the area for predators and other threats.

Both modes of thinking are equally valuable, but it’s the harmony between them that matters. We can’t maintain the effort of the focused mode for long. At some point, we need to relax and slip into the diffuse mode. Learning a complex skill —a language, a musical instrument, chess, a mental model—requires both modes to work together. We master the details in focused mode, then comprehend how everything fits together in diffuse mode. It’s about combining creativity with execution.

So how can we better fit the two modes together?

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Pain + Reflections = Progress

The challenges you face will test and strengthen you. If you’re not failing, you’re not pushing your limits, and if you’re not pushing your limits, you’re not maximizing your potential.

There is no avoiding pain, especially if you’re going after ambitious goals.

Believe it or not, you are lucky to feel that kind of pain if you approach it correctly, because it is a signal that you need to find solutions so you can progress. If you can develop a reflexive reaction to psychic pain that causes you to reflect on it rather than avoid it, it will lead to your rapid learning/evolving.

In other words, pain is an important signal that there is something to be learned, and if you reflect on your pain well, you will almost always learn something important.

– Dalio, Ray. Author, Principles: Life and Work

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Judge your learning journey by your questions rather than answers

Voltaire’s famous quote – “Judge a person by his questions rather than his answers” is so apt for our life. Only thing we need to learn is to ask the right questions and build our own learning agenda. Successful people have all figured out framing the question right.

There are 3 ways to get better at this skill:

The first option, benchmarking, requires you to identify the best-in-class people out there, identifying several parameters to compare, dissecting all of them against the parameters, and get a feel for how best-in-class people do those things.

The second option, building relationship with people who are slightly ahead of you to learn from them. The learning is very contextual and highly experienced, having access to such a group accelerates your learning and reduces significantly the mistakes.

And third option is reading books and blogs, listening to podcasts, and in general being curious about how others have cracked it and you want to do better than the best.

The questions and learning never stop. People who don’t enjoy the process of learning and deciphering the elements of their life systematically will face a lot of difficulty in scaling to the fullest potential.

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Pain perspective

I began to experience painful moments in a radically different way. Instead of feeling frustrated or overwhelmed, I saw pain as nature’s reminder that there is something important for me to learn. Encountering pains and figuring out the lessons they were trying to give me became sort of a game to me. The more I played it, the better I got at it, the less painful those situations became, and the more rewarding the process of reflecting, developing principles, and then getting rewards for using those principles became. I learned to love my struggles, which I suppose is a healthy perspective to have, like learning to love exercising

Dalio, Ray. Principles: Life and Work

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Hitting the rock bottom.

No one wants to hit rock bottom but yet it generally believed that we all go there from time to time, that is the bottom line. It is also believed that there are lessons that you learn while you are at the bottom that no one else can teach you.

But like any good adventure, it’s only worthwhile if you come back having learned some solid lessons and with wisdom to share from having survived the fall. 

My top most lesson? “Hitting the rock bottom” is not the only place to acquire those lessons. Discovering those alternative school that teach this stuff is a work-in-progress right now, but I got some idea about it.

What’s your take on this?