The Truth Curve

Writing, for me, is very much like getting into a cold pool.  Every cell of my body resists.  I dip my toe in and it’s way too cold and my body screams to turn back, to go home where the temperature is comfortable.  My body wants warmth and pleasant sensations, not extreme experiences.  I watch how others just dive right in.  I rationalize that they are not as sensitive to the cold as I am.  But I stand in the shallow end, first with just my feet, then up to my knees, then waist, chest, and finally, I dip my shoulders under and begin swimming.  Once I begin, I wonder why in the world I didn’t just dive in.  Swimming is so exhilarating and I get angry with myself for wasting ten minutes getting in.  I then resolve to dive in next time.

But next time, it happens again.  No matter how many times I go through my ten-minute pool acclimation procedure, it doesn’t get any easier.  Every single time, I experience resistance.  For me, writing is the same way.  Writing is scary, boring, and hard.  I don’t know why I do it when I’d rather be curled up in bed, reading.

William James said in The Varieties of Religious Experience:

Sometimes no emotional state is sovereign, but many contrary ones are mixed together.  In that case one hears both “yeses” and “noes,” and the “will” is called on then to solve the conflict.  Take a soldier, for example, with his dread of cowardice impelling him to advance, his fears impelling him to run, and his propensities to imitation pushing him towards various courses if his comrades offer various examples.  His person becomes the seat of a mass of interferences; and he may for a time simply waver, because no one emotion prevails.  There is a pitch of intensity, though, which, if any emotion reach it, enthrones that one as alone effective and sweeps its antagonists and all their inhibitions away.  The fury of his comrades’ charge, once entered on, will give this pitch of courage to the soldier; the panic of their rout will give this pitch of fear.  In these sovereign excitements, things ordinarily impossible grow natural because the inhibitions are annulled.  Their “no! no!” not only is not heard, it does not exist.  Obstacles are then like tissue-paper hoops to the circus rider–no impediment; the flood is higher than the dam they make.

I say this: when the desire to do finally outweighs the desire to not do, you do it.  I don’t know how or why this push happens but eventually it happens.  And I’m always glad in retrospect that it happened… both when swimming and when writing.

What are you resisting doing? 

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Tags: Laziness, Procrastination, Psychology, Writing by Julie
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At one point in my life, I dabbled in pottery making.  I fell in love with pottery making before I even knew how to do it and decided that this was going to be my craft.  So I bought a book on pottery making.  But there, in the chapter on throwing pots, the author said something about needing to throw a hundred pots before you can even master the first shape (the cylinder).  A hundred pots just to master one shape?  This clearly didn’t apply to me.

So I learned how to throw the clay onto the wheel and form a cylinder.  It was hard and messy and the results were predictably amateurish: a bowl that I made had a thicker wall on one side and a thinner wall on the other; the teapot that I made out of coils of clay was lopsided and reminded me of a gnome’s hat for some reason (not an effect I was going for).  So I dropped pottery making and moved on to yet another hobby that would surely be easier to master.

I used to believe that if you have talent, then it’s easy to create the piece of art you envision.  If I could only find the perfect medium — clay or watercolors or stained glass or whatever — I would create the beautiful pieces of artwork I saw in my mind.  But every medium that I tried proved to be horribly flawed: Clay was messy, stained glass was brittle and unforgiving, watercolor was… well, watery.  Twenty years and twenty abandoned hobbies later, I’ve begun to realize that my premise was not true.  Mastering a craft or a hobby is anything but easy and talent plays but a small part in the process. 

So, what is the key to a perfectly thrown pot with even walls?  Or a perfect golf swing?  Or becoming a world chess champion?  Not surprisingly, it’s practice.  But not just any kind of practice.  Ericsson calls it “deliberate practice.”  Just practicing for many years and gaining experience doesn’t guarantee a better performance.  There are plenty of people with decades of experience in their fields who don’t outperform novices.

Deliberate practice involves specifically practicing the hardest skills in a structured manner meant to stretch you beyond your current abilities.  For athletes or musicians, the coach might set lessons that get progressively harder.  The figure skater must practice the same jump 200 times until it is flawless; the pianist must practice each piece until the nuances of the music are just right. 

It’s always tempting to practice what you’re already good at but experts resist doing that.  Instead, they practice the skills that will push them to the next level of performance.  What separates the experts from the amateurs is the way in which they practice.  Amateurs either don’t practice in a way that would constantly push their skills further and further or they focus on perfecting that which they are already good at.  Experts, on the other hand, practice the most difficult skill over and over again, each time pushing the practice further. Ericsson says that the practice should never get easier; if it does, it means the person is coasting, not improving.

Why don’t more people do this kind of deliberate practice?  Because it’s hard.  It’s the kind of practice that requires a lot of exertion, leads to repeated failure and the reward is perhaps a 1% improvement.  A lot of people don’t want to work for a 1% improvement.  But it’s that 1% improvement - a tenth of a second faster for a swimmer or an extra jump for the figure skater — that will separate the gold medalist from the silver medalist.

What hobby or craft or sport are you trying to master?  Realize that it’s not talent that will get you to the top.  Instead, it’s practice… deliberate practice.

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Tags: Goals, Growth, Psychology, Work by Julie
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