Critical Mass

Definition

In nuclear physics, critical mass is the minimum amount of a given fissile material necessary to achieve a self-sustaining fission chain reaction. A subcritical mass is a mass of fissile material that does not have the ability to sustain a fission chain reaction. You can think subcritical mass as a waste, in a sense that you didn´t achieve the reaction you wanted. A supercritical mass is a mass in which there is an increasing rate of fission. In your purposes, you should understand that all the excess material or effort after the critical mass is reached is wasted. Sometimes supercritical mass can cause more troubles than good results.

Critical mass can be described as a point at which something, for example, an idea or a virus, is dominant enough to grow, or sustain, a process, reaction or adopting new technology. Critical mass has many other names like, the tipping point, the minimal effective dose, break-even point, etc.

Hard to know when critical mass is achieved

It is pretty easy to know when you have enough critical mass in physical reactions before they happen. When it comes to real life everything is much harder. Most often, these moments can only be determined afterwards. When the critical mass is reached, the reaction will accelerate quickly. Most often, it is hard to stop the reaction until the acceleration changes into deceleration of the reaction. For example, the flu is unstoppable in every flu season. After the critical mass of people become sick, the flu is unstoppable until it has reached its peak. This point of no return is very hard to define, if not impossible in many cases.

Critical mass (Tipping Point) in social epidemics

Malcolm Gladwell has written a book called Tipping Point, which describes the three rules of social epidemics which are:

1. The law of the few: All the social epidemics have some people with the special set of social skills involved. These people have vast social networks, are trusted by others, and willing to share their information with them.
2. The stickiness factor: All the sticky messages have some common characteristics: they are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and are told through stories.
3. They are spread through the right environments: These environments are usually optimal for spreading epidemics.

When all these three rules are working at the same time, you have better possibilities to spread your ideas for other people. If one of these things are missing, reaching the critical mass of people is improbable. To reach a tipping point, social epidemics are spread through the combinations of many psychological tendencies like social proof and availability bias.

Critical mass of expertise/skill

Critical mass of expertise or skill is reached only after you have had enough deliberate practice. On average, this takes thousands of hours and many years, depending on the amount of competition and talent you have. In highly competitive fields, like popular sports, for example tennis, most people will never reach the critical mass of skill. This point can be enough income from tennis to be a professional. In working life, critical mass of expertise may help you to get into the point where you become irreplaceable. Then you can have a possitility to choose how much you work, when you work and to whom you work for. At this point, we have many choices to choose from and no one else to tell us what to do. Most people never reach this point.

Minimum Effective Dose (MED)

The minimum effective dose is the amount of work, medicine, and resources, that will produce the desired outcome. In medicine, all the extra dose may produce unintended and unwanted consequences for the human body. If you look at the packaging of the medicine, you see many warnings about side-effects like headache from the medicine you use for feeling or getting better. Without reaching the MED, you cannot get better and using medicine becomes a wasted effort. You can also have many things you really don´t want to do, but you have to, like cleaning the house. MED is the amount of cleaning needed to have your house clean enough for you to live in. The amount of cleaning should be the amount that the most vulnerable of the people who live in the house can stay healthy.

Critical mass is one of the most important models in the latticework. But, in order to understand it better, you need to understand more models.

Peak, Anders Ericsson
4 Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss
Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

-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

Simplicity

Simplicity

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

• Steve Jobs

Definition

It is basically impossible to find one definition for simplicity. Most of the English dictionaries offer different definitions. You need to define it many ways. First, simplicity can mean something that has no complicated parts or complicated details. Second, the quality or condition of being easy to understand or do. Third, it can be defined: The quality or state of consisting as few parts as possible.

Everything should be as simple as possible, but no more simpler.

People are the most smartest living things in this planet and also the most complex ones. The world is so complicated that even the smartest experts have trouble in understanding their own discipline. Complexity has created enormous amounts of waste to everyday life. To reduce the waste you have to simplify your life. Simplifying should not go too far, because some of the complexity is necessary to be as effective as possible. Increasing complexity has a critical mass, in which the cost of added complexity exceeds the usefulness of extra complexity. Everybody needs to find this point in what they want to achieve.

Oversimplifying is not going to give us the results you want. You cannot be depended on one thing only, not in any part of your life. Keeping things too simple, believing there is only one solution or factor that has an effect on any bigger thing is a major cause for many failures. You can see lots of experts with excellent reputations believing in a single factor in big things like growing multibillion dollar businesses, for example, technological competitive advantage as an only source for growing Apple.

You should simplify with using simple rules and systems. You can add simple rules into your life, like do not eat after 10 pm. There can be rules for anything in life. It is pretty easy to invent the rules, but it is harder to apply them all the time. Therefore, you need systems like habits, skills, or some decision making systems, which make complex things simpler. Systems have normally less waste. You have to remember that systems are created from different parts. The amount of parts should always be minimal for the reason the system which is created and these parts should also be as simple as possible.

Multitasking: doing a shittier job, and being happier about it

People live in societies where the myth of doing many things at once is a sign of success. This is a wrong assumption and has no scientific base. Brains can do only one task at a time. What really happens is that when you are ”multitasking” you are rapidly changing from one task to another. Every time you do it, there is a cost. You get less efficient every time You change your task. What really happens in your brain is that multitasking creates a dopamine addiction feedback loop. This loop rewards your brain for losing focus and keeps it looking for external stimulation. Because of this loop, you get empty rewards from getting hundreds of small tasks done. The opportunity for multitasking is enough to harm your cognitive performance. What really happens is that you get more satisfaction for doing a shittier job.

You have also some metabolical costs from multitasking. Changing tasks makes your brain to burn up oxygenated glucose which is the same fuel for keeping your focus on tasks. Fast and continual changing from one task to another causes the brain burn the glucose so fast that you feel disoriented and exhausted after a short while. You have used all the nutrients in our brain. Your cognitive and physical performances suffer from this. You use a lot less energy, when you are focusing on one task at a time. All the changes in your tasks are also decisions. In multitasking, you don´t even recognize it. Decisions deplete your neural and physical resources too. Little decisions appear to use as much of your neural resources as the big decisions. You should arrange our environments in a way that your possibilities for distractions are as small as possible, especially, when you are doing the most important tasks of the day.

Information overload comes with too many parameters

There is always a maximum amount of information you can process within a period of time. Increasing the amount of information over this limit, you cannot function in the most efficient way. Human brains evolved in an environment, in which the amount of information was minimal compared to the World you live in.The capability of your brains is limited. The maximal amount of parameters, which can be either attributes of choice or the number of alternatives, is ten. After that limit, the quality of the decisions gets weaker. There is not so much difference after ten paramaters have been reached. It doesn´t really matter if there are over ten or even twenty different parameters or alternatives. There are many ways to reduce this number. For example, you can apply systems, in which the amount of alternatives have been reduced before, we even start making a decision.

All this is just a tip of an iceberg about the power of simplicity. It is hard to simplify your life and all the other related actions to an optimal level of simplicity. Everyone would do it, if it were simple, but it is easier to have too much simplicity or complexity. All the masters of their fields of expertise are able to get close to optimal level. Most people cannot do it and they live their lives with lots of waste, whether it means about using their time or efforts. Reaching an optimal level of simplicity should be goal to all of us. It is a skill you should try to learn.

Sources:

Poor Charlies Almanack, Peter D. Kaufmann, Charlie T. Munger
Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz
The Organized Mind, Daniel Levitin
Insanely Simple, Ken Segall

-TT

Inertia

A definition of inertia: An object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by a force to change the direction or starting a movement.

Objects, persons, and organizations resist changing their direction or resist changing their ways to act. Non-profitable organizations will probably stay below zero unless there will be a change in the company culture or its business and overweight persons will probably eat too much crap and exercise too little in the future unless there will be a force which changes things like a doctor who tells the patient he/she will die soon if there is no change in the exercising and eating habits.

Resistance to change conserves energy

You are naturally resistant to change. It is your brain´s way of conserving energy. It is programmed that way, because when brains were developed, people lived in a hostile neighborhood and survival was the only thing that mattered. It probably still is in your genes, but your survival is not a big deal every day anymore. Conserving energy was one of the best ways of staying alive. Most often, you do the same things again and again, day after day and week after week. All of this is happening in your unconscious mind. What actually happens is that your brain is fighting the change all the time. It does not want to make any changes, because the energy needed stays lower. Change is your brain´s worst enemy. It fights it any way they can. Your brains sabotage your change until you have succeeded to overcome the resistance on the whole. You need to push the change through with a lot of conscious effort or you will fail.

Changing how you work and improving in it need to be fought through your consciousness. Otherwise, chance of changing is low. You hear and think ”this is the way you have always done things” explanation when you or somebody else want to change things to the better. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is one mental model all of us have that should be changed. All people should remember that the only lasting thing is that things change around you and doing the same things in the same way all the time doesn´t help you in adapting to change. The best time to overcome the resistance to change is when you are on top of our performance cycles. The worst time is, when you are at the bottom. New year´s resolutions have probably the worst possible timing to overcome the resistance to change.

Discipline is nothing, habits are everything

When you are relying on discipline instead of habits, your brain is using more energy. This is a reality you cannot change. Discipline is harder in the long run than having habits. Brains have a certain amount of energy to use for the day. It is basically impossible to stay disciplined through the whole day without having any habits to conserve energy. Discipline can be improved, but there are some natural limits even for the most disciplined people. Energy conservation through habits helps you to focus on the most important things and execute them better.

Habits have the same kind of chains in your nerve fibers than skills. The more you execute the habit the more powerful the chain of nerve fibers becomes. The more repetition you have the harder it comes to change our habits. Each repetition compounds in your brains. Most of your habits are executed through your unconscious. You don´t even realize we do things. Depending on the sources, 40-90 per cent of your actions are habits. This means habits have a bigger role in your life than you think. Getting better habits leadsyous to better success, better ways of life, and a greater well-being.

Habits basically have three components: Trigger, Routine and Prize. You have no habits without the whole chain. Your habits are combinations of these three components. You have just conscious actions. Trigger or a clue is anything from stress to the clues in your environment like logos of a chain restaurant. Routine is the action itself like eating a hamburger. Prize is the real reason why you execute the action. It can be anything from a hormonal change to a strong emotion. If you were watching a brain scanner, you would see a small spikes in our brain waves it while seeing the trigger for the habit and a lot bigger spike during having the prize. After the habit has developed fully, there is no way of getting rid of it. The only thing you can do is to avoid the trigger or change the routine if the trigger cannot be avoided. This will take lots of conscious effort and time. It is not impossible, but the time varies from weeks to months depending on how many repetitions we have done.

The ability to overcome our natural resistance for change and good habits are two building blocks for a great life

Without the ability to overcomey our natural resistance to for change, you do not succeed as well as you could. The only permanent thing in the world is change. You have trouble in adapting this fact. Your world will definitely look different in ten years, but you may have not changed at all. It is not easy, but necessary. All the great performers in their own fields have adapted to change. Good habits conserve energy and lead to better skills and better life, when their effect is bigger on you than your bad habits´. Think about your habits and try to figure out which kind of effect they have on your life.

Sources:

Superhuman by Habit, Tynan
The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg
The Compound Effect, Darren Hardy
Be Excellent at Anything, Tony Schwartz
Better Than Before, Gretchen Rubin

Have a great week!

-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

Data utilization: Information -> Understanding -> Action

My definition for the data utilization is the act of making practical and effective use of things known, or information or both of them, that are assumed as facts. This definition is not perfect, but is close enough for what I am thinking. Anyone who has better words for the name of the mental model or it´s definition, is welcome to give better ones. The purpose is to describe the whole chain from acquiring information to last piece of the chain, which is the action. The problem with the data utilization is that most of the people cannot use the whole chain effectively or cannot get enough useful information.

Information

This word may not be the best one to use, but what I mean about information is all the messages, gossip, impulses and facts we receive from our environment or from some other medium. You live in the information age. You have better possibilities to acquire useful information than any time before. The problem is you get more information our brains can handle and the quality of the most of it is really poor. At least, ninety per cent of the information you receive has a poor quality. And at least ninety per cent of the high quality information is never used, because of distractions or a lack of understanding about which information has the highest quality. I am probably very optimistic about these figures, because I read at least one non-fiction book every week and take notes from them. And until now, I have never taken notes that are even close to the amount of five per cent of any book. I have no doubts, that this blog will be the same for the readers. It is not a sad fact, it is a law of information.

Most of the information received is never consciously noticed, even though, your brains is actually processing it. What happens is that your brains make a decisions all the time whether something is useful to you or not. All the decisions consume energy. All the unnecessary decisions should be avoided by arranging our environment in a way in which the amount of unnecessary decisions are minimized. And you can focus on only things that are important to you. This gets more important all the time.

Understanding (Knowledge)

One can use the word knowledge, instead of understanding. The former word is more complicated to me and I prefer the latter. Understanding can be theoretical or practical. You can get understanding from content and experiences. For example, you can find understanding about how gravity is influencing your smartphone by reading physics books or by dropping the smartphone from your hand. You will never be excellent unless you have some theoretical understanding about what you are doing. You will never be excellent in anything without knowing the factual principles about it. You will probably never be excellent in anything untilyoue have collected enough practical understanding through your experiences. The combination of the theoretical and practical understanding will give the best results.

The problem with the amount of understanding is not the excess of it like with the information. In contrast, there is not enough understanding in the world. Understanding is getting harder, because the amount of information we are exposed to has sky-rocketed. At the same time, the processing of the information has diminished. It is easier to find a solution for a problem by searching it with Google than actually thinking about it. To get better results in life, there is a need to actually understand the solution you are given, because most of the solutions you find are not based on facts. Instead, they are based on beliefs and misunderstandings. The single biggest mistake in understanding great results is believing you can explain them with a single factor. This is a reason why it is important to understand a latticework of mental models.

Action

Action can be defined as ”process of doing something”. This definition is good enough for me. This is the last piece of the chain, but not the least important. This is the part where I have the biggest problems. You can have the best quality information and a complete understanding about it, but still fail. It is very probable that you fail when you are not able to repeat the high quality actions consistently. You cannot have high quality actions by only learning theory. High quality actions need repetitions whether the action is a decision or a movement of the body part.

When you talk about movements and decisions, you are talking about a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons, which is a circuit of nerve fibers. Neurons are connected with each other by synapses. A simple action like kicking football goes through a circuit of hundreds of thousands of synapses and nerve fibers. The same circuit gets stronger when we repeat an action.The more repetition we have, the less aware we are about using the circuit. The more wrong repetitions we have, the harder it comes to unlearn or change the action. We will go further into details in the next mental model, skills.

You should divide actions into conscious and unconscious actions. I have seen many different evaluations about their proportions in each person´s life. Depending on the source, unconscious actions are working from 40 per cent to 95 per cent of the time. Reality depends on a person and truth lies somewhere in between those numbers. Conscious actions are important in improving unconscious actions. It is harder to improve unless you are thinking what you are doing. Well learnt practical actions are automated and do not require consciousness. This is actually a requirement for expertise in them. It saves energy, which is necessary.

Habits are probably the most important unconscious actions. Developing the high quality habits are the best way to get better success in your life. Bad habits may destroy all the good ones and do the damage you cannot outdone without changing them. Consciousness is a hindrance in practical actions. It can be very useful in decision-making. At least when there are many things to consider and enough time to make a decision.

All the parts need to have a high quality

The quality of the chain is equal to its weakest link. Unless you cannot focus on a high quality understanding of the high quality information, you have no chance to act wisely. To do the right things, in the right order, in the right time is hard. Lets think about a simple looking action like passing a ball in soccer. This is a very simplified version of the chain. This is about one way of passing the ball.

First, player needs high quality information. The pass has at least ten parts. And player needs someone who is able to show all the different parts and the whole action to a player. All the information about the different parts and the whole action should have high quality. Then, the player needs to understand how all these parts function together and what are the consequences when some parts are not performed as they should be. Player should also understand, for example, what is the optimal power to perform the passing action in different situations in the game or where to direct the pass. Then comes the passing action, which should be repeated all the time in the right way to improve the skill.

-TT