How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

 I’m re-listening to “Peak” by Anders Ericsson (spelling may be off on that name) which is why I’m late to my Monday blogging. As with the article/book I’m reading on acquiring deep smarts from experts, this is part of my dive into how to get the most out of my apprenticeship/mentoring this year. School proper starts up next week.

If you haven’t already read it, I highly recommend the book, if you are interested in mastery or even optimal learning, in any field. Ericsson has done a lot of groundbreaking research and this is his gift to the general public, a more comprehensible and quicker way to access the findings that he’s come across than cracking open an academic volume or paper. It’s very engaging reading too, I’d say.

I realize that I have, since I was very young, had a great fascination with masters, mastery. I always wanted to have some kind of mastery myself, but I didn’t know what I should devote that kind of time and energy too, and I didn’t know how to focus and discipline and motivate myself to do it. So this is a book I craved before I knew it existed.

I suppose when I decided to become a teacher, that was my answer to the question. Unfortunately, unlike sports or music, teaching is not something you can easily get a coach for. The gold standard for mastery is something Anders calls “deliberate practice.” Which involves a well established field of mastery, following a skilled coach who knows the steps necessary to achieve mastery. This exists for sports and music and dance and such, but not for most other fields. I wonder why. Perhaps it is more difficult to come up with objective measures of skill, like with sports, but they seem to have done so with music. Perhaps there isn’t enough competition and interest, for thousands of people to have tried their hands at being the very best. Teaching is not an Olympic sport. There are no world tours.

Perhaps deciding on the criteria to measure is more fraught with politics and opinion. Sports is clear: follow the rules, win or loose, score or miss. Music is less clear, but still much clearer: hit the notes at the right time or not. Though there is also an artistic element to it. Is it played with feeling, does it move you? 

Various people have tried to come up with measures of success for teaching, and some seem pretty clear as well: how do the students perform on tests, on academics? Though some of the most important measures have been ignored, perhaps because they take more work to follow and measure: are the children happy? Do they go on to lead fulfilling lives? Are they successful, professionally, personally, ethically, spiritually?

Another element of fields where mastery is achieved is the practice required to get there involves immediate or very quick feedback. We need to know how we’re doing. If you only get that years later, when you see the children as adults, it’s too far away to be useful for your practice. Instead of improving day by day, it would be decade by decade.

Yet, there are master teachers. Teachers that get better results than others, teachers who’s classes are peaceful and focused. Teachers that students remember, that change the course of lives. Maybe not everybody’s life, but many.

I’m running out of time, so I’ll go to the point that is echoing loudest in my head from my reading (listening, technically, though I’m planning on going back through the book in physical form so I can notate it for later use, allowing me to get back to the most pragmatic or important morsels.)

Deliberate practice, or it’s next best cousin, purposeful practice, requires a few key elements, and one of them is going a bit outside your comfort zone, when you practice. This is one of the keys to why some people practice for years and never improve. This is key. In any field, physical, mental, spiritual, if you want improvement, you must continually go a bit outside your comfort zone, pushing yourself. That is the only way to stimulate adaptation and change, which is what is required to get better at something. If you keep jogging every day, the same amount, the same intensity, you will stay at the same level. Perhaps there will be an initial change, but then it will level off. If you stay in your comfort zone, you will stay where you are. You can’t improve past the initial quick gains, if that’s all your doing.

There are other important elements: you need feedback, on how your doing, regularly and quickly after doing it. Preferably immediately. You need specific goals. Large skills like playing tennis, are broken down into a bunch of micro skills: how to hold the racket, how to serve, how to anticipate and counter, how to put top spin on. And each of these needs to be looked at individually and worked on, when a weak point is identified.

If you want to be a master at something, you can. You really can. But it’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to be fast. And you need to make sure  you’re practicing in a way that is actually effective.

Given that, what would you like to master? A fun question.

OK, my time is up.

Isaac  Out

Walking treadmill/standing desk. Current goals. Love and self-discipline. Happiness for others sake.

I'm currently on a walking treadmill, typing this at my standing desk. I'm quite pleased with this for two reasons. One, I'm finally using the equipment, which for months was functioning as nothing more than a normal desk with an inconvenient slab beneath it making me sit several inches higher. I didn't want it to get dusty, when I wasn't using it, so I put a sheet over it, but that made it too much of a bother to take the sheet off and start using it, so it just never got used. One of the problems with things that are expensive: you worry about breaking it so much that it never gets used at all.

It's interesting how a simple thing like that can lead to the adoption or non-adoption of a much bigger habit. The simple act of reducing the resistance to flipping on the treadmill, reducing it just a tiny bit, was enough to trigger the habit of walking, often for up to an hour, while doing what would be otherwise sedentary computer related tasks.

People think little inconveniences like that are not a big deal, and ignore them, but the truth is those little resistances can make or break good (and bad) habits. I often find myself unable to explain the importance of little things I want to do or change, to other people. They think, "why can't you just use the old X thing, or way of doing things." and I know that if I I don't change it, the habit won't get adopted at all, but I can't explain it to them because they haven't paid enough attention to habit formation to understand that it actually will very possibly make or break the habit.

I sat down and thought for a little bit and wrote out a priority card for myself. I wanted an easy way to remind myself of the top few things I was focusing on these days, to try and help myself let go of other potential projects. If you try and do too many things, you don't have the time/energy to do any of them well.

Here's my current list:

Main areas of focus:

Transformation:

- Time/priority management

-Becoming an excellent, inspiring, transformation-creating teacher/guide

-Enlightenment (this one is the perineal one, always on the list, so I need sub-goals to be focusing on:)

   -Sense controle/sacrifice

   -Happiness

   -(which together I'm calling Love and Law, a principal someone mentioned as how to deal with children and discipline, which is also part of point 2 with becoming an excellent teacher. These points are all interconnected and interrelated.)

Maintenance:

-Relationship

-Job

That's it, and that needs to be it, because I don't have time for more. "Maintenance" is just as much energy as transformation, possibly more. If something is not growing it's decaying. But I make the distinction in that with transformation, I'm trying to learn stuff that I don't feel like I've got a good grip on yet. Maintenance is stuff that, if I put the energy in, is going well. (though job is related to the teaching goal, but I'm doing a sufficiently good job at work that I'm not going to get fired or reprimanded. I'll need to be growing as a teacher for my job too, but the teaching goal goes well beyond that,. They want the kids safe and learning, and recognize that as a new-ish teacher, I still need help making sure the kids are making sufficient progress. I need to make sure they're not hurting each other or themselves, and doing their school work. I want to learn the competencies of a master teacher, how to create a thriving community of enthusiastic inspired learners, and internally motivated moral, happy, loving, service-minded, self-confident humans. Something they are certainly not expecting, though I'm sure they'd be happy if it happened.

The Love/Law, Sense-controle/happiness dichotomy is another, perhaps lesser challenge. I just need to figure out the... not sure what to call it, or what exactly it is... the way of thinking, that allows for vigorous sense-controle, and happiness. I can't just refuse myself the second dessert, I have to be happy about it too. Which means I need to practice the mindset that doing what feels right is always what is for my own best interest as well, in the long run. That way, giving up certain unhealthy pleasures doesn't feel like a contracting, embittering sacrifice, but a greatful, courageous, uplifting one. 

It's interesting, happiness, my main motivation for seeking it is external at this point. I'm seeking happiness because people in my life who care about me, want me to be happy. I suppose I should be very grateful that is what they want from me, rather than, say, becoming a high-paid, long-hours doctor, or something.

OK, time to move on to some of the other tasks I wanted to do tonight. Love to you all (as I now know it really is just friends and family who read these :D )

-Isaac

Critical Knowledge Transfer, Watering Seed-Habits, Lazing About

 OK, these may be some of the last posts before the old email service stops working... Actually, it may already have stopped working. I think I had to stop it, to allow the new service to work.

I'm currently back home from my trip. Something about vacation where I'm just lazing about, puts me in a lazing about mindset, and when I get back and it's time to work, like now, it takes some time to get back into the working mindset. I like the working mindset. It's not about unpleasant work, it's just about getting things done. If I'm doing it right, it's about getting the things done that are important to me. So far I've done some cleaning, tidying, putting stuff away in it's home, finding homes for things, and ordering some essentials. bandaids, air purifier filters, stuff that's been on my list for a while, but I haven't had the time to sit down and plow through. Finally got most of it done now, except for a list of Ikea stuff that I want to get.

Most of the stuff I like getting at Ikea is about space, not stuff. I like nice shelves and containers. I just want things to look tidy and have a tidy home I can put them in. You wouldn't know it, if you looked at my desk, which is plastered in sticky-notes and crumpled papers with chicken-scratch on them. But thats... The papers are there because I look there, and the papers that are there are important. I want them to be seen. If I don't leave them right in the front of my desk, the chance that I glance at them and am reminded of them goes down significantly. If I want to change that I need to be better in my habit at looking at my planner. Which I'm reasonable at... well, ok, kind of bad at, especially the calendar. Just haven't' gotten into the habit of it... but I need a whole separate section, where I just write stuff that would otherwise end up on my desk. One more good idea in need of the time/energy/focus necessary to take it from a seed into a sprout and then a mighty tree. I have many of those good ideas, but only 24 hours in which to allocate my attention water. That being the case, pruning becomes more important than planting. Or thinning the seedlings, to follow the analogy better.

Not the best analogy really, you can broadcast plant seeds and water all of them at the same time, but if you want to water new habits, you can only do that one at a time. Generally speaking, you shouldn't try and adopt more than 3 at a time, max, for best results. Or even just one, if it's a particularly hard one.

School starts up again tomorrow, and I'll be without my mentor teacher, so the class is bound to be a bit more rowdy. My current reading is "Critical Knowledge Transfer." The book that the Harvard Business Review article was based on. I want the details, the specifics of how to do this. It's written for managers, and I'm trying to use it on myself, so not a perfect match, but it's what I should be focusing on now. the next 6 months are a unique opportunity to gain expertise from an expert that I effectively paid for with maybe 2 years of my time, so I'd better make careful and thorough use of the resource I've now got, or I'll be wasting those years.

I think that's enough for one post. I've got to do two to make up for missing this last week (I suppose being on vacation is my excuse?)

See you in a few minutes

-IO

Imaginary People

 This week with Isaac: Technical stuff! And a much longer-to-make than normal post.

You see, the widgit (gadget? whatever they call it) that I've been using to send you emails of my blog posts if you sign up, is now dead. It stopped working. Google stopped supporting it. Wasn't making them enough money I guess? So I had to find a new service. So, you will see a very similar widgit on the right hand side of the screen (or I don't know where, if you're viewing this on a phone) but it is a totally different service. Accordingly, though I was able to transfer over the active emails (interesting story on that in a moment) you may have to re-confirm that you want to be getting these emails, and there may be a little self-plug from the company I'm now using. They're called "follow.it" so if you see that, don't be alarmed.

Now for the funny thing I discovered (with pictures!) as I was spending the.. hour and a half I believe? To find and then transfer things over. I had always been surprised by how many people seemed to be following my blog, when I looked at feedburners numbers (for email subscribers.) I chose to ignore it and pretend I was just writing to the few people I know personally who read my blog.

Rather than the apparently 1,170 who were getting emails of my blog posts each time I posted 😯

I looked to see who these people were, but I didn't recognize any of them. Rando's who stumbled on me somehow via facebook?

But then as I looked at the downloaded .csv of all the email addresses, I saw the pattern clearly:

Clearly these were some kind of bot. Most of them were grouped in easy to see patterns, with the same first few letters the same followed by a string of other stuff, spread throughout the alphabet. Computer programs assigned to randomly create email addresses and sign up for things, for some unknown but probably nefarious purpose. Curiously, the email addresses were all outlook. Microsoft, being lax with it's email security, I assume.

In any case, I combed through the list and took out only the people I knew, who conveniently were none of them outlook users, so it was easy to spot. And the number of subscribers went down to a much more likely number, 9. I would say I was humbled and brought low, but I already thought something was off about that number so it simply confirmed what my common sense had assumed.

I'd love to talk more about my thoughts on my mentor, where my current analysis of what she is doing is at, my upcoming (tomorrow) wedding anniversary, and such, but I already have spent close to two hours on this, and I really need to be getting on to some other things for the week. So I'll make it quick:

Three day weekend because of independance day, woo! Final week of vacation coming up, during which I will get on a plane for the first time in a year and a half and visit my parents and have a wedding reception for all the east-coasters (and anyone else interested in making the trek) who weren't able to attend in person (because we were having a super small in-person guest list, due to covid). Less of a vacation really. I think of vacation as time to rest and recuperate and catch up on chores and errands and work that I don't have time for during a normal work week, but this will be travel, which is tiring, and spending time with family, which is important and good, but does not catch me up on todo's. And my nieces will be there, which is certainly not restful, if I'm going to play with them. (But still important and good.)

When I get back, my mentor will be gone for a week, and then I think it's only one more week before school proper starts up again. Time continues to flow so quickly. At least I feel good about what I'm doing and learning now, in that fast flow of time.

Until next time, you 9 people who read this ;-)

-I Out.