The Most Valuable Class I Ever Took: Lessons on Exponential Versus Linear Growth

The most valuable class I took in college was Keyboarding 101. It was an entry-level typing class. I was a terrible typer, entering the class with zero knowledge or ability on the correct typing form. With maybe one or two exceptions, I was the worst in the class. 

The class was 15 weeks long. After we learned the correct finger positioning and first started recording our typing, I was around 18 words per minute, which is really slow. Each day we were assigned a homework assignment which always consisted of practicing lines on certain keystrokes. For weeks I saw little to zero progress. Half way through the course, at around the eight week mark, I was typing in the low twenties for words per minute. Again, not very good.

Then something funny started happening with about four weeks of class to go. I started seeing drastic improvement. All of a sudden I was increasing my speed and improving my accuracy at a remarkable rate. I remember thinking to myself, “wow, this is amazing.” It truly was an incredible change, seemingly out of the blue. I went from the worst in the class to one of the best in the final four weeks, tripling my words per minute from the beginning of the year.

I learned two important lessons from this:

One, I need to be patient. Whether it be exercising, learning a new skill, or simply adjusting to a change, one of the biggest mistakes is expecting results too quickly and then giving up when they do not occur in a rapid manner. Second, growth is not linear; it is exponential. I often expect the former, but it is almost always the latter. This look like the difference between the blue line and the red line:

The keyboarding class was useful because I now type every day. In addition, I’ll never forget going from frustrated to amazed as I saw little results the first ten weeks and a tremendous change the final five weeks. I can’t stress enough the importance of this takeaway and how much it resonated with me. It would be well-heeded to keep it in mind. 

Change: The Three Areas to Make It Happen

For several reasons I decided to make some changes and get back to the fundamentals in the month of July: exercising consistently, eating a healthy diet, spending more time outside and less time on social media, consistent meditation, writing in my journal on a daily basis, reading books every day, zero frivolous spending, and not drinking any alcohol. During the final few days of June I mapped out a specific plan with specific goals on each of these objectives. The next step was to figure out how to make these changes happen.

There are three main ways to change oneself:

1. Change one’s daily habits or routines.
2. Change one’s environment.
3. Change the people one surrounds him or herself with.

Outside of these three change is improbable, if not impossible. In fact, without some combination of all three, it is not likely to happen either. Real and permanent change requires one take deliberate steps in all phases. For example, if I wanted to lose ten pounds, but I kept visiting the same bar (number 2) with the same group of unhealthy friends (number 3), the weight loss would never happen. It might in the short term, and if I have great self-control I might even be able to keep it up for a full year, but ultimately I would revert back to my old self. Point being, significant and lasting change requires not one or two adjustments, but mindful adjustments in three specific aspects of one’s life: one’s daily habits or routines, one’s environment, and the people one spends time with. As Darren Hardy notes in The Compound Effect, “Small, Smart Choices + Consistency + Time = Radical Difference.”

Deliberate Practice

I just finished reading Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer. It was excellent. This passage really caught my attention:

In the 1960s, the psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner attempted to answer this question (on plateauing) by describing the three stages that anyone goes through when acquiring a new skill. During the first phase, known as the “cognitive stage,” you’re intellectualizing the tasks and discovering new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. During the second “associative stage,” you’re concentrating less, making fewer major errors, and generally becoming more efficient. Finally you reach what Fitts called the “autonomous stage,” when you figure that you’ve gotten as good as you need to get at the task and you’re basically running on autopilot. During that autonomous stage, you lose conscious control over what you’re doing. Most of the time that’s a good thing. Your mind has one less thing to worry about. In fact, the autonomous stages seems to be one of those handy features that evolution worked out for our benefit. The less you have to focus on the repetitive tasks of everyday life, the more you can concentrate on the stuff that really matters, the stuff that you haven’t seen before. And so, once we’re just good enough at typing, we move it to the back of our mind’s filing cabinet and stop paying it any attention. You can actually see this shift take place in fMRI scans of people learning new skills. As a task becomes automated, the parts of the brain involved in conscious reasoning become less active and other parts of the brain take over. You could call it the “OK plateau,” the point at which you decide you’re Ok with how good you are at something, turn on autopilot, and stop improving.

But what if we are not OK with how good we are at something? What if we still want to improve? What if we still want to get better?

The secret to improving at a skill is to retain some degree of conscious control over it while practicing - to force oneself to stay out of autopilot.

This is what experts do.

What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled “deliberate practice.” Having studied the best of the best in many different fields, he has found that top achievers tend to follow the same general pattern of development. They develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they practice by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on their performance. In other words, they force themselves to stay in the “cognitive phase.”

Overall, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything is a worthwhile read. In addition, another book on my list regarding this same topic is Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport. The bottom line is this: in order to learn on a expert level, we must literally think about how we think.