Archive for the 'High Performance' Category

Iconoclast: What does it take to be extraordinary?

Published on 1 February, 2011 in High Performance. Closed

In the pursuit of excellence and freedom, there are a few domains to consider. One is the field of expertise, a major contribution of which, Deliberate Practice, I have discussed elsewhere. Yet what about those unique individuals who really change things? Those people (‘freaks’ – in a good way!) who change the world. What is different about them? How do they do it?

Gregory Berns calls them Iconoclasts in his book of the same title, where he notes that they “see things differently than other people. Literally… because their brains do not fall into efficiency traps as much as the average person’s brain.” Berns argued that one way is to “bombard the brain with things it has never encountered before.” And Adam Dachis was saying much the same thing when he suggested doing things that make you feel uncomfortable. When we have rich experiences, we are able to access a more profound heuristic to understand the world around us, being less constrained by the examples that happen to be before us or the ways of thinking that we grew up with.

Berns also noted that these individuals are less subject to the desire for social approval, which reminded me of my old friend Wayne Dyer speaking of self-actualized people being “independent of the good opinion of others.” Robert Greene pointed out that thinking for yourself can be dangerous, and suggested that one should, “Think as you like but Behave like others”. Perhaps that might be a good start though it might be more rigorous to refer to the importance of social intelligence.

Being able to think for oneself is challenging. It is hard. It is scary. And it must be done carefully.

The results can change the world.

Delusions of Competence

Published on 22 June, 2010 in High Performance. Closed Tags: aikido, competence, deliberate practice, football, simulation.

Recently I was training with a black belt in my Aikido class. Having trained for many years, he appears an expert. His moves appear polished. He easily recognized and replicated the techniques that we were to practice like he had done it hundreds of times before.

Yet I noticed something strange: He couldn’t do it.

He thought he could. And he elegantly went through the motions. But seemingly unbeknown to him, his techniques were ineffective – as pretty as they looked, they would work only if his partner knew to fall at the right time in the right way. They were close, but the angles, timing and rotations were clearly wrong. And, since I didn’t know “the rules”, I just stood there watching as he verbally told me to fall down!

This was very confusing to him… as if everybody else had “played along”. Unfortunately, it being only my sixth session with this school, I didn’t know how to. Perhaps I am missing something and his understanding of the techniques superseded the need for their practical application. But it got me thinking.

Top NFL players play computer simulations to improve their skills. Reading Wired this morning, I was informed that “almost everybody” plays something like Madden NFL, and that not only has this enhanced the strategic thinking skills of players, but parts of the simulation has started creeping into the real game.

Now, I’d guess that this is like getting a tennis player or a golfer to do weight training. Just by playing the game, they might get stronger, but by doing specific strength training, you can build “strengths” in ways that wouldn’t normally happen just by “playing the game”, and these strengths can offer a serious advantage… in this case, by exposing players to a much greater number of realistic situations that reward (or demand) heightened strategic awareness, you build better strategic awareness. It’s effectively Deliberate Practice for a subset of the game…

And it’s important to be able to tell the difference!

You can get away with stuff in Madden’s that you can’t do in the real game. Those are the limits of the game. You can get away with things in training if your partner knows how they “should” behave that can undermine your performance when working with someone who doesn’t share those rules.

It’s great to use simulations and training techniques to accelerate our development. And when we can focus on a neglected component of the activity, we can enjoy some amazing improvements in our performance…but you have to remember to take those skills back to the real world. And there, as the best all know, you don’t just need to get the individual techniques “right”: You need to find a way to put it together and make it work for you.

Treat it as a performance

Published on 17 February, 2010 in High Performance. Closed Tags: Malcolm Gladwell, performance, practi, public speaking, TED.

Delivering a presentation that is smooth, insightful and ends right on time can be a big ask. Lots of intelligent people mess it up. One of the speakers who really seems to get it right is Malcolm Gladwell. If you have ever watched him speak (like here on TED), you may notice how he speaks eloquently, even effortlessly, and ends with precise punctuality.

When asked about it once, Gladwell replied, “I know it may not look like this. But it’s all scripted. I write down every word and then I learn it off by heart. I do that with all my talks and I’ve got lots of them.”

It’s great to connect with your audience as if you were just having a casual chat with them. And sometimes that’s precisely what you will want to do. Other times, like maybe when you want to really nail it, you might be interested to discover what happens when you go beyond the bullet points and rehearse, refine and distill the most important information that you are there to share. Focus on the most important stuff; skip the rest. Polish, polish, polish. And you might just find yourself on a level where you have that polish that casual speaking just doesn’t allow.

While memorizing isn’t “the answer”, if you want to deliver a professional-standard speech, you might consider treating your next presentation as a performance.

Bringing deliberate practice into speaking is challenging – hence so many speakers stagnate – though by refining your work, looking for ways to raise your standards, you give yourself a chance of lifting your bar.

That what seems to work for the guy who wrote The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and, more recently, What the Dog Saw.

Higher pay leads to worse performance

Published on 29 September, 2009 in High Performance. Closed Tags: creativity, excellence, motivations.

Should we encourage people to be creative?

Most people would say ‘yes’.

Should we reward people for being creative?

Again, most people would say ‘yes’.

The trouble is that financial incentives don’t work for creative tasks. When we are being rewarded for doing better, we tend to get trapped in our existing ways of thinking and pursue solutions within our perception of the ‘rules’. But creativity is so often about breaking the rules – about thinking outside the box.

In the video clip below, Dan Pink cites researchers from the Fed Reserve finding that while tasks involving only mechanical skill would yield better performance with higher rewards, but where “even rudimentary cognitive skill” was involved, higher rewards led to people doing worse. Low and medium rewards yielded the same level of performance but high rewards led to worse performance.

Higher pay makes you work harder. But doesn’t make you better.

Higher pay leads to worse performance if you have to think.

It might have something to do with functional fixedness. Stemming from gestalt psychology researchers, this looks at how trapped we are at thinking of something as having a single function. Like being able to use a box as a platform rather than just as a box. Functional fixedness, it seems, is exacerbated by extrinsic rewards.

Maybe it’s a good thing that Australia’s Prime Minister has decided to not give himself a pay rise.

High performance comes from work where we enjoy autonomy, where we can experience a sense of mastery, and where we can feel a sense of purpose.

Geniuses tend to be motivated by intrinsic motivators – the sense of mastery rather than the accumulation of money. After all, if you’re focused on the reward, it’s hard to be focused on doing the task in front of you as well as you can.

It’s like the story of the man who was so busy chopping down a tree that he never thought to take a moment to sharpen his axe. And that guy certainly wouldn’t have time to put down his axe and head to the store to pickup a chain saw.

And that’s like the girl with the Rubik’s cube – who struggled whether to give up her completed side that was stopping her from solving the puzzle.

When we’re so busy doing, it’s really hard to do well.

How well does your current work line up?

Are you giving yourself enough time to be the genius that you could be?

Doing whatever it takes

Published on 10 September, 2009 in High Performance. 2 Comments Tags: deliberate practice, excellence, state, training.

Being the best demands a lot from you. You need to invest a lot of time, energy and effort in the domain, not just playing around, but focusing your mind on how to get better.

Day after day. Week after week. Month after month. Year after year.

But the people that get really good don’t like doing the deliberate practice any more than you do. And they don’t get better faster than you do. Nobody “likes” doing deliberate practice: To be successful, you just need to do it.

And the people who get really successful are the ones who will often do more practice than you do to get to the same standard.

Weird, eh?

So it’s really important to be able to master our state. To master our emotional, physical and mental condition – so that we can perform at our best when we need it.

The good news: That’s something we can train for.