Aging and skills

You have to consider age when you think about skills. Physical and cognitive skills have different perspectives about age. Physical skills like playing basketball have different characteristics than cognitive skills like playing chess. All the statistics about ages are from Michael Mauboussin´s book The Success Equation. It is a good book about skills and luck.

Physical skills

Different physical skills like sports have different optimal ages for peak performance. They are not the exact figures but small ranges of ages. Men and women have small differences between their peak ages depending on the sports. There are no specific ways to determine which physical skills have higher or lower peak ages. A simple answer is that skills that need more fast-twitch muscle fibers have lower peaks and skills that need more slow-twitch muscle fibers to have higher peaks. For example, running fast requires fast fibers, and endurance running requires slow fibers. Peak performance for running fast happens when you are 22-24-year-old male and 21-23 old female. Peak performance for endurance running is 26-28 for both genders.

There are also some other physical characteristics like the visual system and the body-eye-coordination that need to be considered. Visual acuity weakens when you age. Therefore, baseball batters lose their edge after a certain age. Basketball players need both, fast-twitch fibers and great body-eye-coordination, therefore their peak age (24-26) is lower than peak age for baseball (27-29). Athletes that rely only on their body-eye-coordination like golfers (30-35) have higher peak ages than other athletes.

Cognitive skills

Cognitive skills usually mean the ability to make decisions. If you want to make good decisions, you have to be able to understand the stimuli you confront, how it relies on the understanding you already had about the similar or relevant stimuli about the situation, to understand what stimuli to discard and what to use to make a decision and overcoming your intuition if it is needed. Aging has a much slower effect on your ability to use your cognitive skills than using your physical skills. Aging helps in a stable environment and when you have lots of time. Peak age is much lower in an unstable environment with the necessity to make fast decisions.

Cognitive skills can be divided into two different groups. The ability to solve new problems and the ability to solve problems that are related to your experiences. The first group is called fluid intelligence. It peaks around 20 and is in constant decline about one percentage point a year until you die or your brain has big damage like Alzheimers-disease. Your ability to resist your intuition when it is wrong declines when you get older so does your ability to plan for the future. In other words, you cannot change your patterns of thought as well as you were younger. Therefore, the faster speed of change in the modern world becomes harder as you become older. You also have to be younger to create new things.

You can grow your ability to use things you learned before grows until you die, but in your early forties, the growth slows. Your peak when you are old is not much higher than you were in your twenties. It is only about 25 percent higher. Your vocabulary, ability to understand historical events, and geography, all grow until you die. If the current situation is just one of those previous events, you probably understand it better than later generations, especially if you have time to think about it. Your creativity in putting together old information and/or being an experimental creator peak later.

The overall cognitive performance declines after a certain age. The peak age is about 45 years. You cannot fool yourself in any way. You have to accept this. Some things that combine novel and old things like personal finance have later peak ages. The peak in the ability to make good decisions on personal finance is about 53 years of age.

You can read more about aging and skills from Mauboussin´s book. Until next time!

-TT

Conscious and Unconscious actions

Consciousness is not a simple thing. If you say it is, you probably don´t understand it well. I will not go into detail about consciousness. Before you start reading this text, think about consciousness yourself. Do you think you are always conscious of what you do? Have you ever noticed that you did something without acknowledging it at the moment you did it? Think about more questions about consciousness yourself. Conscious and unconscious actions can be separated into five groups:

1. Always conscious actions
2. Actions that can be done either way
3. Skills that are practiced with conscious actions and become unconscious
4. Actions that can be made conscious but are normally unconscious
5. Actions that are always unconscious

The first group means that you cannot function without conscious thinking. For example, you have forgotten something and you know it. Then you have to put a conscious effort to remember what you have forgotten. This is the most uncommon group of these actions, but people think it is the most common one. Belief in human rationality lies in this misunderstanding.

The second group of actions is skills that can be done either way after once they are well learned. This group of actions does not usually require precise timing or fast execution. Driving is one of these skills. For example, you can take a similar journey from home to work every day without thinking about it consciously during the journey. Sometimes you have to consciously change your journey because of a traffic jam or to stop buying some groceries either in a way back home or to work.

The third group of actions is skilled and initially learned with conscious effort. Usually, this means lots of conscious repetitions. These actions move gradually from conscious to unconscious. The harder these actions get, the more conscious effort you need. Finally, this group of actions becomes automated. After the automatization of the action, conscious actions can fail. For example, if you had watched sports, you might have encountered professional athletes failing in easy situations where they had too much time to perform an easy action. Conscious actions are not as effective in those situations than unconscious actions.

The fourth group of actions is normally unconscious. These actions change into consciousness by getting some feedback about their effects. This feedback is usually biological and aims for controlling bodily functions. For example, you can have a sports clock that measures your heartbeats and you can consciously aim for getting your heartbeat higher or lower depending on your needs. You might acknowledge the changes in your bodily functions, but details of how you do it remains unconscious.

The fifth group consists of actions that are always unconscious and mostly spinal reflexes. You cannot intentionally grow your hair or change your blood sugar level. The latter happens at least when you are not consciously eating or you are sleeping. These actions are unconscious. And some survival reflexes are unconscious, too. For example, avoiding a surprising flying object that comes toward you. These actions keep you alive. Therefore, they are necessary. Without these spinal reflexes, mankind wouldn´t exist.

Some actions are performed better with your unconscious mind and some of them are performed better when you put conscious effort. Speed is one variable that separates the need for the unconscious mind and the use of consciousness. As you have noticed, most skilled actions do not require consciousness. When you look at the experts performing their skilled actions, they seem effortless. This is the result of thousands of repetitions done with conscious thought. Expertise is not the most usual way of performing unconscious actions. Habits are the most usual unconscious actions. The quality of your habits is the most useful indicator to see if you will be successful. What this means is that the outcomes of your good habits must be better than the outcomes of your bad habits.

You cannot only perform unconscious actions in life. Big decisions with lots of variables require conscious thought. They require more time. Therefore, if you have no time, you have to rely on your unconscious mind. It is more prone to errors. Separating the unconscious and conscious mind and decisions is not a perfect model. Without the unconscious mind, you wouldn´t make any decisions. You would think about irrelevant things for hours without making any conclusions without it. Therefore, both are very much needed in every decision.

TT

Finding your potential for an edge

This text is about finding your potential to get an edge in a competitive world. To have an edge you need many things. You need most or all the components of an edge: understanding, skills, talent, motivation, and the right environment to have one. These components are interwoven. Anyone can have understanding, skills, and the right environment. When it comes to talent and motivation, you can argue whether talent and motivation are separate entities or not. I would argue that you haven´t enough motivation unless you are blessed with talent. Talent is an essential part of getting an edge in a competitive environment. It is not always needed when the competition isn´t hard. This text focuses on talent which cuts down the hours you need to get an edge. It can also help you stay motivated to get one.

Everybody´s got talent

You have talent, even though you don´t know it. Everybody can do some things better than most other people. You don´t have to be the best in the world to have an edge. You only have to be better than the people you compete with. The best clue for edge is to perform better than most people for a long time. One-hit wonders don´t have an edge. They can just be lucky. Your talents are recurring ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Your recurring patterns can be divided into three groups: striving, thinking, and relating patterns. They tell you what motivates you, how you do or think something, and how you relate with other people. My weakness in life is dealing with people so I will leave this topic into your hands to learn. I will focus only on striving and thinking talents.

There are many clues to find your talents. As I mentioned, long-term success is the easiest clue to find. There are many other clues. Childhood is one of the best clues you can find. When you were young, you didn´t have to so many inhibitions. You did what came easily to your mind. You felt great after doing it. And wanted to do it again and again. Most adults can´t do it. If you don´t know now what feels great, you can try a bookstore test. Go to the nearest bookstore and let yourself flow through it. When you find yourself from some section without having a conscious thought about it, you have probably found your striving talent. Without a striving talent, you won´t probably practice enough, because you have no inner motivation to be good in what you do.

You also learn faster if you are talented. This is one of the most important reasons why being talented helps you to gain an edge over others. You can get an edge by practicing much more than your competitors, but it may not be worth it. I suggest you try something else, especially when you are trying to get an edge in a highly competitive field of expertise, such as professional sports or other popular endeavors like music. When you think these things, you should always compare yourself for people who have done the same practice with an equal or larger amount of hours in the same kind of environment. Otherwise, you just have to guess whether you are talented or not. Faster learning is really about having the potential to perform something at a higher level than your competitors. It doesn´t mean you have an edge or whether you can keep it.

Living with edge

Talent doesn´t mean you can stop learning. Vice versa, many of your competitors are willing to work hard to even up the gap between you and them. If you aren´t willing to improve yourself or widening the edge, you will lose it. Most of this is about motivation. So many people and companies lose an edge because they have no motivation to cultivate or live it. Sometimes they don´t understand what is their edge. And sometimes people just change. Your recurring patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving can change after an illness, some other dramatic life event, the new government, or through another person. These things aren´t always tragedies. They can be positive life events, in which other things become more important.

Some last thoughts: I have changed my view about whether motivation is a talent or not. When I introduced an edge, I didn´t mention anything about the right environment. It is important for gaining an edge.

-TT

Edge / Comparative Advantage

Definitions

I would define a personal edge as ”A possibility to achieve, produce or offer something with less amount of time and better than others.” Comparative advantage can be defined as ”A country should specialize in the goods or services it can produce at the lowest opportunity cost, and then trade with another country. I will concentrate on the personal edge.

Talent+Motivation+Deliberate Practice = Personal Edge

Personal edge is best achieved in the field of competitive expertise, when all the three components are combined. Depending on the competitive field, it is possible to have an edge with two of the three components in place. If you think about professional athletes in sports like tennis, basketball and golf, they need all of them. There are some exceptions, but they are extremely rare. In the less competitive fields of expertise, you can live without one component. It usually is talent or motivation. 

Your brain has almost hundred billion neurons. Each of them have from one thousand to ten thousand connections with other neurons. The amount of possible brain states exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe. The idea that talent do not matter is insane. It is not the only thing that matters when you are trying to gain a personal edge. People relying only on their talent, will have a faster development, when they are young. When time goes by, the edge is gone without practicing enough. When people with talent do the same things as people without talent with the same amount of time, the people with talent get better. When you talk about highly competitive fields of expertise, margins with winners and losers can be small. In these situations, talent makes the difference. You should concentrate on the fields of expertise where you are talented. This may be the only way of competing against billions of people.

Motivation is the second component. To be honest, I am having a hard time to answer the question: ”Is motivation to practice hard a talent or a learned skill?” Some people say it is a form of talent, others say you can learn it. I still haven´t made any conclusions about it. I quess it is a combination of both. Being interested in some field of expertise helps you to gain an edge. All people are not interested in the same things. Some people like sports, others music. In a highly competitive field of expertise, you need a desire to practice. Especially, deliberate practice is almost impossible without intrinsic motivation. The question is how to find a field of expertise, in which we have intrinsic motivation? One way of doing it is think about our childhood and what we liked to do then. All of us do not need intinsic motivation. Outer sources work for them better.

Some people can have a bigger need to please others. They can get motivated by an authority figure like a coach or father. Sometimes you get impulses from around you which can increase or decrease your motivation towards something. The right kind of environment and people around you is important in motivating you. It is even better to have these external factors with intrinsic factors to have a motivation to get better at something. Everything is easier with better motivation. 

Deliberate practice is a last component of the edge. It is probably the most important one. It can be also the most complicated one. In many areas of expertise, there are no established practices for getting an edge or being great at it. Developing skills have the same neurological effects in whatever you are practicing. Therefore, practice is the only obligatory components for gaining an edge. And deliberate practice is the best way of developing skills. 

You are in trouble in the information age without an edge

You live in a highly competitive world. Information age gives more equal opportunities for people around the world. Millions of people get better chances to show how good they are in something. Competition gets tougher every year, especially, in intellectual and creative fields of expertise. Record companies had all the power to decide who could succeed before. Now every singer, for example, can download her performances to youtube. It is a platform in which millions of people compete against each other for viewers. The best singers can reach millions of people. This wasn´t possible about twenty years ago. At least, not in this scale. This doesn´t only mean tougher competition. It also means winners take it all effects. A few people get most of the profits and glory around the world.

Having an edge is necessary in a modern world. You should ask yourself ”When competition gets tougher, what can I do to have an edge? You have to remember that edges are always relative. You compare yourself with others. You do not have to compete with millions of people. You have to remember it is easier to be the best in a niche. Being the best singer using, for example, Dutch is lot easier than being the best singer using English. Being the best Dutch Jazz singer is easier than being the best Dutch R&B singer. You can also have a combination of micro skills to have an edge. When you have a combination of skills which is unique, you do not need to be best at anything. You cannot forget a need for demand. If there is not enough people or companies to pay for the edge, it is not useful.

I am not saying we should all leave our current jobs to get an edge in other. But you should definitely try to get one before it is too late. Without an edge you may get into trouble. My advice to all the younger people is to start developing and edge and think about in which field of expertise they have intrinsic motivation and talent. Then find out what are the characteristics of deliberate practice and design your own ways of doing it if necessary.

Sources:

Poor Charlie´s Almanack, Peter Kaufman, Charles T. Munger
Peak, Anders Ericsson
Drive, Daniel H. Pink

-TT

Deliberate practice

You live in a global, interconnected economy. Anyone can sell anything to anyone anywhere in the world. The average performance is not good enough. Unless you have world-class skills in highly competitive fields or some unique and needed expertise, you are in trouble. When you are truly masterclass, the rewards are magnificent. You need to acquire skills through practice and the general principles of the best way to do it are the same in almost every field. This is called the deliberate practice.

Definition of deliberate practice

Deliberate practice is a highly structured act of rehearsing a behavior or engaging in an activity over and over consciously and intentionally, for the specific goal of improving or mastering it. Deliberate practice has four components:

1. The person practicing has a strong motivation and is focused on getting better in every action.
2. The task is designed to take person´s existing skills into account and be understood by her.
3. There should be immediate informative feedback.
4. There should be a possibility to repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.

Examples

Figure skater is learning a new jump with the help of her coach. The jump should be a little bit harder than skater has ever succeeded in. Coach should give feedback after every jump about how the skater did and what she can improve when she repeats the jumping action. A professional chess player is studying a certain position that he played wrong in the last game with his coach. The study could be consisted of the games played before by the best chess players in history.

Some of the fields of expertise are better for applying deliberate practice

Many fields of expertise have already developed broadly accepted training principles and these can be called deliberate practice. Most of the professional sports, classical music, and mathematics use the principles of deliberate practice. These fields have some common characteristics. First, there are at least semiobjective ways of measuring performance such as evaluation of expert judges. It is impossible to improve performance, unless you are not aware of what constitutes improvement. Second, fields typically have to be competitive enough to have enough motivation to practice for the goal of improvement. Third, the relevant skills of these fields have been developed for a long time, normally for decades. Fourth, these fields have professional coaches who are improving training methods used by the experts. Otherwise it is not possible to increase the skill level of the top performers in the fields.

The four components

It is hard to have an intense focus and a superb motivation, while you practice things you have not yet managed to do well enough. You need to push outside of our comfort zone and stay focused, when you experience the pain of failure or disappointing result. You can do two things to have a better focus. First, you need general maintenance like enough sleep and good nutrition. The second, is to limit the length of the practice sessions for not more than an hour. Humans have a basic rest-activity cycle which lasts about 80-120 minutes. When you are awake, your brainwaves are faster during the first half of the BRAC cycle and you feel alert and focused. Then your brainwaves slow and we start feeling dreamy and little tired and your focus gets lost. You must also have a motivation to get better. Practicing years and thousands of hours and constantly failing is nearly impossible without high intrinsic motivation.

The practice needs to push the person outside of his/her comfort zone. The path of least resistance is not enough. Specific practicing activities, and exercises should be designed to exceed the person´s current skills, adapt to the person´s ways of doing things and get him/her to the next level. A figure skater needs to learn a jump that is harder than the previously learned jump. She should also understand what is the purpose of everything. What are the reasons to do something in a particular way. And what will the results be by doing things that way. For example, in which part of the feet should touch a certain part of the football while practicing a certain kick. And what kind of spin will the ball have after the kicking action is done right. All the practice should have concrete clear goals. What to do, how to do it and why it should be done that way.

You need feedback to improve. In many cases, it is not possible to know what you have done wrong. It is hard to improve in many activities without somebody watching you while practicing. You should get this feedback immediately. It should be delivered in a way it is understood by the person. Most people need some advice after failure. For example, skater needs to know why her new jump failed. Was it because of not enough speed, or was the position of a skate´s blade wrong. Why did it happen? What should she do differently? Practicing without feedback may lead to the strengthening the wrong chains of nerve fibers. Too many repetitions in a wrong way will lead to wrong ways of doing things and practice won´t be useful. The better you are the more you can understand what you did well and what you did wrong. Watching the performance from the videos may be enough for many experts.

All the practice should be repeatable. It is not possible to strengthen the right nerve fiber chains without repetition. These nerve chains won´t get strong without it. If this is not possible, deliberate practice cannot be done. There are many situations where conditions are not always the same. In these cases, the practice can be done through simulations. For example, practicing about flying an airplane in a storm needs to be practiced in a simulator, or practicing the emergency landing is not possible in natural conditions. Repeating things over and over again will achieve unconscious competence. Things become automatic and repetitions need less thinking. When the critical mass of repetition has been done, the unconscious action becomes the new norm.

Deliberate practice creates better mental models

Every skill has its own mental models. To achieve an expertise through deliberate practice happens by developing latticework of mental models in the field. Experts have more developed and accurate latticework than ordinary people. This is true in physical skills too. Most of the practice is done to form a clear mental model of what the action should feel and look like at every moment in terms of moving your body and it´s position. These models are held in a long-term memory and can be used to have a fast and effective response to certain types of situations. Better models make it possible to process larger amounts of information despite the limitations of short-term memory. Complicated activities require more information than your short-term memory is capable of processing, therefore, you are always building mental models. Everyone has their own models. What really makes the difference between experts and novices is the quality and quantity of the models.

Sources:

Peak, Anders Ericsson
Talent is Overrated, Geoff Colvin
The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle
The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin

-TT

Reactions

Definitions

You can find some definitions for a reaction. In chemistry, reaction is defined as ”Reaction is a process that leads to the transformation of one set of chemical substances to another.” When you talk about human reactions you can define it as ”Something done, felt, or thought in response to a situation or event.

Reactions have many orders of effects

Sometimes it is easy to see the effects on a reaction. One reaction may cause a chain of reactions where all of the outcomes are very hard to notice. Any action or behavior has many positive or negative effects or consequences. All the action you take should have more positive effects than negative. This doesn´t happen all the time. When you are making decisions, you should try to understand all the effects they have on your life and to the other people and your environment. Most people focus on the first order of reactions or consequences, but it is too simple. In almost any decisions, there are some consequences of the consequences and you shouldn´t ignore them.

Lets think about practicing a skill. You can assume that positive effect is you get better, when the practice is done well. You can also assume that when you  start from a scratch, you start enjoying the practice more, which is the positive side-effect. The negative side-effect of the first order positive side-effect may be that when you get better, you may need better equipment, which costs money. The Negative effect of practicing a skill may be the need to hire a coach to learn the basics of the particular skill, which costs money. This may have a positive side-effect of learning the skill faster than learning on your own.

Reactions have delays

One reason why people make mistakes in finding causes for some reactions is they see some consequences which are actually consequences of the consequences of things happening way before they can be seen. For example, some doctor prescribes some medicine for the pain in the back of a patient. This will relieve some pain, and a patient may feel fine for a while until the pain comes back even stronger. I am no doctor, but to me this looks like a situation where the real cause could be something like a wrong way of sitting in front of the computer and the effect of the real cause was delayed or formed through time.

The more complicated or bigger the system is the longer the delay can be. For example, most of the countries that have dominated the world with their military or through trading have eventually lost their position. The real causes are hidden beneath the surface of things looking very well, and it may take decades before the position is lost. When youeat the symptoms, things may look good for a while. But the underlying problems are still there and after the delay the symptoms may be lot worse.

A complicated world has many unintended reactions 

When you think about the effects of the effects of reactions, but there will still be some unintended consequences. Youve in a complicated world where it is hard to see how everything relates to each other. Even the smartest people cannot see all cause-effect relationship in their lives. We should keep this in your mind when you are thinking about the consequences of some things you want to do. You should never be so sure about your actions whatever you are doing. For example, developing a habit of working hard for your physical appearance. This can have an unintended consequence of having an unhealthy relationship with food or not spending enough time in recovering phase of your performance cycle, which can cause serious injuries or health problems. The unintended consequences are always there. Most of them do not need serious consideration, but some of them do. For example, in buying some cheap items they do not normally matter, but they probably matter in the expensive ones.

When your latticework of mental models is good, you can find some interactions of the consequences better than without a proper latticework. If you only have some separate mental models, we cannot prepare for the consequences as well as we can with the proper latticework. Improving mental models and understanding their interactions better will give you a competitive advantage

Sources:

Poor Charlie´s Almanack, Peter Kaufmann, Charles T. Munger
The Fifth Discipline, Peter M. Senge
Early Retirement Extreme, Jacob Lund Fisker

-TT

Cycles

There are many definitions of different cycles. The main definition for your purpose is: ”a course or series of events or operations that recur regularly and usually lead back to the starting point. Everything and everyone have their own natural cycles. You can also talk about natural rhytms. The longer the cycle, the less people are aware of its existence. The lengths of the cycles have lots of variation. One of the shortest cycles is breathing. Exhaling and Inhaling is a whole cycle. The longest ones can take decades like longer term debt cycles. There is a lot to say about cycles. And right now, we will cover only basics in terms of personal life, expertise, and other things, through the viewpoint of individuals. In this text, we are concentrating mostly on the daily cycle.

A typical cycle has it´s ups and downs

You can see a one normal sine wave cycle in the picture below. The purpose is not to teach mathematics or physics. The idea is to look at the wave cycle and think about what it really means in terms of individuals. Here is the link for the picture.

Picture 1. Sine Wave Cycle

What you really see is that every cycle has its starting point and the end point. In reality, all the cycles are not the same. Only principles stay the same. The length and the depth of the upper part and the lower part of the cycles vary. For example, focus on the day´s tasks has variation during the day. The wave in the picture is not a perfect description for it. What really happens is that after a good sleep, you probably still function below the mid point of our ability to focus. Without sleeping you would definitely be in the bottom of the focus cycle. There is no way of maintaining the highest focus throughout the day. If you try to do it too long, the fall from the top to the bottom will be faster and the recovery will be longer. The bottom of the cycle will also be deeper. The most important thing about performance cycles is that you need to maximize the usefulness and the lenght of the upper part of the cycle and minimize the damage done in the bottom of the cycle and it´s length. There are certain limits you cannot overcome and we need to be aware of them.

The upper part of the cycle is for the most important things, sleep is the exception

The length of the upper part of the cycle matters, but you cannot keep ourselves in the upper part of the cycle forever, no matter what you are talking about. Going too far in lengthening the upper part of the cycle will create the worst damage. And the bottom part of the cycle will be much longer. Practicing will make the upper part longer and the lower part shorter. Temporarily, you can stay longer in the upper part of the cycle. For example, you can work overtime for days or sometimes even longer. Eventually, the quality of the work will be so poor that you have already moved to the lower part of the cycle. You may have not noticed it and there is the danger of going too far. The result of this is lots of damage.

You need to maximize the good things during the upper part of the cycle. You should reserve the times for the most important things for it. The most important tasks at work should be done during the highest part of the cycle. The biggest decisions should be made only during this time. Buying a house or other big expenses should be considered then. Practicing a new skill should also be done only during the best hours of the day. The right nerve fiber chains need to be strengthened. The probability of this happening is the greatest during the best hours. If it is not possible during these hours, you should improve our skills during the next best hours like early in the evening after having a break from work.

The lower part of the cycle is for the less important things and recovery

You need to minimize the bad things during the lower part of the cycle. The lower part of the cycle is also for the less important things. You shouldn´t start anything important after utilizing the full force of the upper part of the cycle. Eventually, you will move to lower part of the performance cycle. You have some less important things to do during the day, or you are lying to yourself. When the ability to perform have diminished, you can start doing things that do not really matter, like watching TV, surfing the web, or checking our mails. You should do these things when we are not efficient. For most of us, this means during the last working hours or the evenings.

The lower part of the performance cycle should also be used for recovering from the performance of the upper part of the cycle. It is not the question of ”should you do it?” You must do it. The upper part of the cycle has a limited length. It depends on your mental and physical abilities, but even the people with the greatest abilities have their limits. Ninety minutes of full concentration is the natural limit. Then we need to have a break. It should be used for recovery This ninety minute cycle is called the Basic Rest-Activity Cycle (BRAC). People with greatest abilities need shorter breaks. Ability to recover faster is one of the clearest signs of an expert in any physical field. This works well with mental expertise too, but it is harder to notice.

The best way to recover is sleeping. You cannot always do that, but you should at least aim for it. Top performers sleep a lot. Especially, in any physical expertise like in sports. They need to sleep more to recover after their work outs. Most of the top performers in physical fields take naps and sleep longer hours than normal people. It is a necessity for them. Sleeping enough is good for you. Whether you are an expert in physical or mental field. It is one of the less well used tool for achieving better performance. Some other ways of recovering is getting your glucose level optimal by eating a correct amount of good nutrition and getting some fresh air during the day while doing some kind of exercise. Latter may not be possible, but the former is for everyone.

Planning your days by optimizing your daily cycles

This plan is for the people with normal daily cycles. Sleeping well and enough should be our top priorities. It is the best way to recover after yesterday´s loads. It is actually the only way. It boostsy our performance during the next day. You cannot be a top performer right after you have woken up. Your most productive hours are probably 2-4 hours after that. Before getting into the most productive hours, you should prepare yourself for top performance and you can also do some less important things, whatever they may be. You should use your most productive hours for the most important things. And you should have at least a small break or a lunch after ninety minutes of working with high intensity and focus. Then you can repeat the high intensity work for another 90 minutes.

Some people can still manage the high intensity work for a while after another break. For most people, the daily limit of productive high intensity work is only three hours. Most people do not really believe this and they think they can work longer with the same intensity and focus, but it is a lie people tell themselves. They can still work by doing the less important things, but the intensity won´t be the same. It is not so important what you do after working as long as it is not destroying the recovery period. The optimal way is to accelerate the recovery by exercising, relaxing and sleeping enough. Doing things that feel great is the best way after sleeping to recover from the working day´s efforts.

Sources:

Power of Full Engagement, Tony Schwartz
Be Excellent at Anything, Tony Schwartz

Principles, Ray Dalio

The Fourth Turning, William Strauss, Neil Howe

Take care,

-TT

Skills

Human skills are created by chains of nerve fibers carrying electrical impulses. A simple skill involves a chain of hundreds of thousands of nerve fibers and synapses. The faster and stronger the signals, the more automatic is the skill. There is a matter called myelin, which insulates the chains of nerve fibers. Myelin keeps electrical signals from leaking out from the chains. There is always an optimal way of doing things. When you repeat an action in an optimal way, you add some myelin around the right chain of nerve fibers. The more you do it in the right way, the thicker the layers of myelin come and the faster and more accurate your movements or thoughts become. There is a downside of myelin. If you practice in a wrong way, you add myelin into the wrong chain and you get better at doing the things in a wrong way. This doesn´t mean you cannot make mistakes while you are learning. But it means you should avoid repeating them.

All movements are made of chains of nerve fibers and all the chains grow according to certain rules. The chains decide the timing and the strength of each muscle contraption. A fast, synchronous chain produces a fast, synchronous movement. The more you develop a chain, the more automatic it will become and the less you are aware of the chain. It takes a long time to learn a complex skill. You have to remember the opportunity cost in learning a complex skill. While your brains can probably handle any changes in the nerve fiber chains, you don´t have enough time to improve all of them. When you practice one skill, you cannot practice another.

Myths about developing skills

There are two common myths about developing skills. First, you imagine some people have an innate talent and without it, it is impossible to develop a skill to the level of expertise. Second, when you practice enough in the right way, we you be a top performer in any skill. Both of these myths are partly right. The first one is more wrong than the second.

Lets start with the first one. Truth is, a person with a mediocre talent, with a good process will eventually beat the more talented person with a mediocre process. What happens here, is that more talented person will first beat the crap out of the less talented. Less talented person will practice a skill with a better process and his nerve fiber chains will eventually get stronger and faster. The reason for this is that less talented person will eventually have enough more high quality repetitions, which equalizes the difference. The more talented has an advantage of needing less repetitions, but he will eventually fail to use it for his/her advantage. There are some practical skills, in which expertise can be achieved only by some people. There are some natural properties of the body that cannot be improved. If you want to be a good baseball hitter, you need to have a certain level of vision.

The second myth could be called the myth of 10,000 hours, which was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. His rule basically says, everybody needs at least 10,000 hours to achieve a top performance in any competitive field. He has found that rule from Anders Ericsson who has done research on expertise. Gladwell´s problem is the interpretation of the research. When Ericsson said you need on average 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve expert performance. Gladwell talks about minimum. He basically says, that everybody needs about the same amount of time and the same way of practicing to achieve expertise. This is not true. What Ericsson´s research really means, is the amount of practice varies depending on people´s talent, when other factors are the same. Less talented people may need 20,000 hours of same practice to gain the same skills as the world class talent may survive with only 5,000 hours. I am not denying that you need to put thousands of hours into practice, or saying that the right kind of practice isn´t needed.

Better mental models, better skills

When I introduced a latticework of mental models, I mentioned a need to have two latticeworks and combine them. First is a general latticework of mental models and the second one is specialized to some area of expertise. It is hard to have any expertise in practical skills without having more detailed and accurate mental models in moving your body. Experts in physical fields, have proper mental models to establish a clear picture what the action should look like at every part of the movement. You need to be able to think how it feels to perform the action part by part. Mental models are held in long term memory and can be used to get fast and effective responses in certain patterns of information like a movement in opponents body while playing tennis. You always have to hold on to and process lots of information simultaneously. Any complicated action requires building mental models of one sort or another.

Experts develop highly complex and detail-oriented mental models of the different situations they are likely going to encounter. They have an ability to see patterns in a collection of things that would seem random or confusing for the less skilled performers. In some physical actions, experts may use movement that novices do not even see happening. Experts have mental models that let them consider more things at once. They have a better understanding, which enables them to separate the more important data from the less important. They can see the relevant data as larger pieces of larger patterns, not as some isolated bits of information. They can select the best solution from the larger amount of possibilities than less skilled people.

Choose your expertise wisely

You dont´have enough time to learn everything. There is always an opportunity cost between having a skill and time used for acquiring it. It costs less to achieve an expert level in any competitive skill if you are talented. 10,000 hours is almost 3 hours/day for 10 years. If you have no talent, you will probably need at least 20,000 hours and it is too much. And because you need to be concentrated while you are practicing, there is not much possibilities of speeding up the process. Physical and mental skills are different in this, because mental skills do not deteriorate as fast as physical. All people need to practice to achieve expertise and the best way to do it by following the principles of deliberate practice.

Sources:

Peak, Anders Ericsson
The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle
Mastery, George Leonard
Talent is Overrated, Geoff Colvin
Bounce, Matthew Syed