Hello Dear Friend,
Welcome to Things I Wish I Knew Earlier (TIWIKE), Sunday!
Here are three ideas on mastery for you to ponder in the coming week.
TIWIKE #1: The secret key to mastery is forming mental representations in short-term memory and transferring them into long-term memory through repetition
My Dad took me to my first Brazilian Jiujitsu (BJJ) class in 2003, when I was 13 years old.
I’ll never forget it. This was in the early days of the UFC, when the sport of mixed martial arts was looked down on by many. John McCain famously called it “human cock fighting.” People lumped it in with pornography, something not to be discussed by good, Christian folk.
There were no kids classes back then. The next youngest person in the room was 22 years old, a man named Marcus Brimmage (who would later be Conor McGregor’s first fight in the UFC). I quickly learned everything I thought I knew about defending myself was wrong.
The instructor was named Chris Conolley, a purple belt in a lineage that traced back to Helio and Carlos Gracie themselves.
If I remember correctly, there were a couple of blue belts on the mats that day along with four or five other beginners like me. For context, there are only five belt rankings in BJJ. You are a white belt the first day you step onto the mat. After a couple of years of dedicated training, you progress to blue, then to purple, brown, and finally black.
I was helpless against them all.
It was so confusing. We would slap hands, grab each other, and begin working to submit each other (the official version of yelling “uncle” in surrender). And I had zero chance of submitting anyone in the room.
I got submitted with arm bars and guillotine chokes, kimura locks and triangles.
I remember leaving that first session humbled.
I was an athletic kid, having played sports of all kinds since I was old enough to walk, and I was helpless to defend myself against these people. I made the decision that day to do everything in my power to never feel that way again. Dad drove me an hour one way multiple times per week for the next five years so I could attend classes.
Looking back, I think Dad’s decision to put me in BJJ classes (among other martial arts) was the single greatest gift he ever gave me.
My time in BJJ was my first exposure to mastery. After a couple of years, I had gathered enough knowledge and experience to easily subdue any non-trained person regardless of their size or strength. But there are levels to BJJ, just like there are levels along the path to mastery in all skills.
Rickson Gracie was the greatest martial artist and grappler of this early era.
He would famously teach seminars where he would invite all the other black belts to line up, then he would tell them in advance how he was going to submit them, then he would count backward from 10 to tell them when he would submit them. He never lost. If you’re curious to learn more about this legend, I highly recommend the documentary Choke.
How is it possible for a kid of just 15 or 16 years to physically subdue grown men?
How is it possible that Rickson Gracie could line up a group of other experts in the field and systematically dismantle one after another?
It wasn’t until I read Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson, more than 15 years after this time, that I could answer these questions.
Surprisingly, the secret key to mastery is found in how human memory works.
The reason I could consistently detain untrained men was the same reason Rickson could destroy every other black belt on Earth, which happens to be the same reason Gordon Ryan is the consensus greatest grappler of all time today.
It all comes down to something Ericsson calls “mental representations.”
“A mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about. A simple example is a visual image. Mention the Mona Lisa, for instance, and many people will immediately ‘see’ an image of the painting in their minds; that image is their mental representation of the Mona Lisa.” Peak, p. 58-59
Fighting is like chess with your body.
It is made of moves and counter moves. The best fighters in the world have developed mental representations for how large strings of moves and counter moves fit together and react to one another. Whoever has the best mental representations wins.
The secret key to mastery is the formation of mental representations in the short-term memory that are transferred into the long-term memory through repetition.
Ericsson calls this process of repetition deliberate practice.
TIWIKE #2: The difference between expert performers and everyone else lies in the quality and quantity of their mental representations
Grappling with a true BJJ black belt feels like drowning.
Everything you do pulls you further under. The harder you fight against it, the faster it happens. Each move you make is countered by a superior technique that whisks you inevitably toward submission.
Black belts, just like grand masters in chess, are always many, many steps ahead of you.
When you are thinking about something simple like pushing the hand away, the black belt can see multiple branches of possible pathways to submission made of moves and counter moves. He will simply allow you to walk down whichever one you prefer until the altercation is over.
But how is this possible?
The BJJ blackbelt has spent thousands of hours drilling specific moves and counter moves until those patterns transfer out of their limited short-term memory and into their unlimited long-term memory.
This is the most direct pathway to mastery in every skill.
“Any relatively complicated activity requires holding more information in our heads than short term memory allows, so we are always building mental representations of one sort or another without even being aware of it. Indeed, without mental representations we couldn’t walk (too many muscle movements to coordinate), we couldn’t talk (ditto on the muscle movements, plus no understanding of the words), we couldn’t live any sort of human life.
So everyone has and uses mental representations. What sets expert performers apart from everyone else is the quality and quantity of their mental representations. Through years of practice, they develop highly complex and sophisticated representations of the various situations they are likely to encounter in their fields…These representations allow them to make faster, more accurate decisions and respond more quickly and effectively in a given situation. This, more than anything else, explains the difference in performance between novices and experts.” Peak, p. 61-62
The difference between expert performers and everyone else lies in the quality and quantity of their mental representations.
TIWIKE #3: Masters move large swaths of information about their craft into their long-term memory through thousands of hours of deliberate practice to create a vast database of mental representations to call upon
The reason you aren’t good at something in the beginning is because you have little to no mental representations for how to do the thing, just like me in that first BJJ class.
The only way to change that is through deliberate practice over a long period of time. Here are some shared features of deliberate practice for every skill:
- Deliberate practice is focused. During your practice session, getting better at your skill is your only task. The biggest barrier to this in the modern world is your phone. Learn to use Do Not Disturb. (If you’re REALLY brave, turn your phone off *GASP*)
- Deliberate practice is consistent over a long period of time. Malcom Gladwell popularized the 10,000 hour rule in his book Outliers: The Story of Success. This rule turns out to be overly simplistic because the equation is Time on Task multiplied by Focus on Task, but you get the idea. You can’t get good at anything without practicing for a long time.
- Deliberate practice takes place outside one’s comfort zone and requires a student to constantly try things that are just beyond his or her current abilities.
- Deliberate practice involves well-defined, specific goals and often involves improving some aspect of the target performance; it is not aimed at some vague overall improvement.
- Deliberate practice involves feedback and modification of efforts in response to that feedback. Early in the training process much of the feedback will come from the teacher or coach, who will monitor progress, point out problems, and offer ways to address those problems. With time and experience students must learn to monitor themselves, spot mistakes, and adjust accordingly. Such self-monitoring requires effective mental representations.
These are some general rules.
If you want to understand deliberate practice at a deeper level, I highly recommend Anders Ericsson’s book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise.
Masters move large swaths of information about their craft into their long-term memory through thousands of hours of deliberate practice to create a vast database of mental representations to call upon.