Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Expertise Understood

One of my big take-aways from Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow is the simple fact that we are not passive receptors of information. All of our sensory data is incorporated into a complex web of emotional/rational/irrational/biased processing systems. I'm still coming to terms with the fact that I'm largely unaware of this processing. Kahneman's book is a guided tour through his research into understanding these processing systems and how they impact our behavior.

At one point in the book Kahneman suggests that expertise is really nothing more than a highly refined data processing system. Experts have intuitions about a problem in their specialty area that less skilled practitioners may not reach even after considerable deliberation. These expert intuitions are attributed to an extensive network of associations built up in the memory from prolonged exposure to the area of expertise. The expert recognizes a problem and identifies a solution based on previous exposure to a similar problem.

The expert sees that part of world in which they are expert differently than those who have not cultivated that same expertise. How does an expert see what others overlook? The submersion in a topic required to achieve expertise allows the expert to "code" a problem in an manner that allows a solution to be identified. The expert knows what to look for.

Part of my obsession with understanding expertise is rooted in the desire to find ways to get better at what I already do well. This concept of expertise suggests a very clear way to improve my skills as a problem solving chemist. Find more problems and work on solving them.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Hunting Fear

I read this short little ebook that offered some tips on how to handle that uncomfortable feeling you get when you're about to do something unusual. It's the feeling that prevented me from approaching girls in high school. The Flinch, what the author of the ebook labels the physiological response to the psychological anticipation of physical or emotional discomfort, should  be taken as a sign that you're about to do something meaningful and significant. Push through it, we're urged. Once you've talked to that girl you'll see that there really wasn't a good reason to be scared. The ebook offers a number of suggestions to arouse The Flinch so you can start building up a tolerance to it's influence. Follow their plan and you'll start flinching into challenges rather than away from them.

Don't follow this advice. Rather than forcing yourself to simply push through your instinctive fear, embrace the discomfort of activities that fall outside of your status quo. Plunge into the rationalizations you automatically generate when you want to stop running before you reach your target. Those feelings are nothing more than a threat response. You can't identify the threat, or at least identify what some part of you perceives as a threat, if you simply charge ahead.

Instincts bubble up into our awareness from the deep recesses of our mind. They are defensive automatic responses generated well outside of our awareness. Don't waste an opportunity to delve into your darkest fears by simply pushing past The Flinch. Stop, look around. Get the thinking part of your brain to take in every detail of the situation. Why do you feel threatened? What outcome would make the pain you're anticipating a reality? Simply taking that step will probably prevent that outcome by short circuiting whatever deleterious automatic response you would have in that situation.

A pheasant hunter doesn't cower when a bird bursts out of the grass. He calmly assesses the situation and shots the bird. We can't hunt down our instinctive fears if we run around the field getting birds to take flight. If we don't kill them, they'll just go back to their hiding place. Instinctive fears built up to protect a fragile ego deserve to be destroyed. Don't miss an opportunity to take one down so you can mount it as a trophy.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

You can, but will you do it?

I was about 20 minutes into a 30 minute run on Friday when things started to get a little uncomfortable. I started wondering if I should slow down, but then I remembered that I've run this far at this pace before. There is no physical reason why I should stop. My body can handle the stress. Can my mind? I realized at that moment finishing the run wasn't a matter of whether or not I could do it. It was a question of whether or not I wanted to do it. Was I willing to put in the effort? That choice was up to me.

It was easy to keep going when I recognized that the only thing preventing me from finishing my run was my ability to tolerate the discomfort. It's so easy to build all kinds of excuses and rationalizations around why we can't do something. All too often, the only barrier between success and failure is the willingness to put in the effort. It's just a matter of facing whatever excuse we've developed and realizing that it's nothing more than our of fear of change trying to keep things the way they've always been.

I was terrified of talking to girls when I was in high school. I managed to ask one girl to the homecoming dance when I was a senior. That was the extent of my high school dating life. Fear held me back. What was I afraid of? The obvious answer would be rejection, but I think I was really afraid of what would happen if I talked to a girl and she was interested. What would I do then? I would have to do all kinds of new and different things. Those new and different things was what I was really afraid of. It was easier to just stay who I was and invent all kinds of excuses for why I was happier by myself.

Those excuses were all external of course. There was no way I was going to recognize that I was simply making the choice to stay a lonely loser. I had bad acne until Accutane finally cleared me up during my junior year. All those years of hating the way I looked were a convenient excuse for why I was unable to approach a girl. I'm an introvert. That made it easy to convince myself that it's against my nature to talk to people I don't know well. Anything to spare me from the recognition that the only thing standing between me and a date was the choice to talk to a girl.

Sure, we all face legitimate limits on what we can accomplish, but how many of us are actually held back by issue of can not? Most of us are held back by issues of will not. We choose to take the easy route rather than make the decision to change. Sticking with what we know is easy. Sure, we may hate being fat or lonely or being stuck in a crappy job, but it's what we know. Recognizing that making the decision to change is ultimately the only thing preventing us from overcoming whatever barrier we've put in our way is much more difficult.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Explore, discover, and share

I've been having a tremendous amount of fun writing album reviews. When I gave myself this challenge, I thought it would get to be a little bit of a drag after the novelty had worn off. Diminishing enthusiasm was actually the point of the endeavor. I wanted to force myself to stick with something that wouldn't be my first choice for a leisure time activity. It was supposed to be training for writing a research proposal and teaching philosophy.

I'm 11 reviews in and feel like I'm just warming up. There are no signs of waning enthusiasm (I expected to be bored with the process after the first 5 reviews). I only just realized why I'm having so much fun reviewing these albums. The music has been really tremendous, I've discovered some really good artists that I never would have even thought about checking out before starting this process, but what I've learned about how I like to work has been the really eye-opening discovery.

Writing a research paper or a development report or even these blog posts require me to mold my thinking to conform to the conventions and expectations of the medium. Science papers must be written in a particular vernacular to be taken seriously. Documents that I prepare for work are similarly restrictive. I resist writing informal blog posts (kind of like this one) for the simple fact that it's harder to write from a third person perspective than to simply jot down whatever I may be thinking at the moment. These album reviews basically have no restrictions. Other than my self-imposed rule to not say a particular band sounds like some other band, there are limits on the images that I can use to describe the listening experience of a particular album.

I can write whatever the hell comes to mind, in whatever form I think will work best, using whatever language I find most fitting to the situation. This freedom to work as I choose is intoxicating. The practical part of my mind thinks its crazy to spend my time writing these album reviews rather than working on something with more potential to further my stated career objectives. These concerns are easy to disregard. I don't want the career my practical nature thinks I should be pursuing. Why should I aggressively pursue promotion to a more senior role for the simple reason that's what you're supposed to do when you get hired by a big company. I really have no interest in joining the management ranks of my building. There are too many expectations of what needs to be done and in what matter it needs to be done. I want a career where I get to work on the problems that I find interesting using the approach that I have determined will work best.

I want the freedom to explore, discover, and share what I learn. That's how I want to spend my time. That's my ideal job description.

Monday, January 16, 2012

A one sentence explanation for a huge chunk of life

"Because you have little direct knowledge of what goes on in your mind, you will never know that you might have made a different judgement or reached a different decision under very slightly different circumstances." Daniel Kahneman in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (page 225 of the hardcover).

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Step One

I wanted to start the year with an ambitious and audacious goal, but the more I thought about setting a goal, the more I wondered why I should spend my year pursuing something that sounded like a good idea way back in January. Besides, too many of my goals feel more tactical than strategic. They give me the impression that I'm staying on top of my business, but very little in the way of change seems to happen when I manage to achieve one.

I tend to set up my goals as little projects that distract me and keep me busy by using skills that I already possess in slightly different contexts. My law school application cycle is a good example. It took a year of my time and not an insignificant amount of money, but taking tests and writing essays are things that I can already do well. The exercise simply confirmed that I was good at those things. My MBA classes have given me better insights into the relationship of R&D to the rest of the organization, but I have not developed new skills while taking those classes. School was an easy development choice for me because it is virtually risk free. Taking classes does not challenge my limits or push me toward The Edge. There is nothing scary about it. That's pretty true of most of the goals that I pursue with any kind of enthusiasm. 

So I want to make purposeful steps towards something Unreasonable. Applying the tips and tricks that I pick up in my readings is worthwhile, but to what end am I applying those skills? Why bother? I've been talking about the flaws in my organization for well over a year. It's time to be a leader and do something to change it. It's time to stop playing by the rules. It's time to stop treading water and work to make meaningful change. I know the position that I want. I'm going to ask for it. I know the role that I desire. I'm going to take it. I know that I'm sick of being what I've been. It's time to make that change.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Organization saves energy...who knew

I've learned to accept my lack of organizational skills. I marvel at the organized binders that some of my colleagues keep for the paperwork associated with their projects. I have a single folder that I chuck papers into so they don't get lost amidst the other papers on my desk. Another friend of mine has a complicated email filing system that he uses to keep his inbox clean. I just rely on the search function to find the messages that I need. I get by, but I know I waste way too much time looking for things that are scattered all over my desk or computer hard drive.

My utter lack of organization finally got the best of me last week. On my first day back at work after the holiday break, I decided that I needed to prune back my extensive collection of paper piles. I came across this manifesto in one of those piles. The manifesto is a reminder to all creatives (a cohort that I am quick to identify with) that your ideas are worth nothing until they have been made into something that can be shared. It goes on to say that organization allows those ideas to be transformed into something real in the most efficient way possible. Organization saves energy for the creative pursuits that really matter.

The reality of this point came crashing down on me as I took the bias towards action recommended in that manifesto to work on my manuscript. After getting my papers organized by topic, I found a couple of ideas that proved very useful to improving my draft. I would not have found those papers if I hadn't gotten everything into shape first.

That manifesto was written by the founder of a company that runs a website that posts very helpful articles like this one. I need the occasional reminder to just work on something. My paper is almost finished. After getting started, getting a manuscript in shape for submission to the journal is the next hardest part of the process. I keep finding myself working on anything other than the paper. I need to move onto other projects. The sooner I finish up the paper the better. Hopefully, improving my organization will get me to the finish line.

Saturday, January 7, 2012

The Key to Success - Exceptional Automatic Responses

My week has been flush with forays into how our unconscious mind determines, well, pretty much our entire life. I've been reading a book intended for a popular audience, David Brook's The Social Animal, a short ebook on how to increase the probability that we'll succeed in achieving a particular goal, 9 Things Successful People Do Differently, and an academic paper proposing that conscious thought evolved to support the cognitive demands of a social existence. (Now that I can buy books again, I have Thinking, Fast and Slow right next to me. If I could have found it on the shelf at Barnes and Noble, that would have been the first book on my 2012 reading list.) While sitting in my living room trying to corral my stampeding thoughts into either a coherent blog post or review of Brook's book, I had an encounter with my unconscious.

The result of that encounter is the title of this post. The content of my reading has been swirling around in my head, mixing with my obsession with Ericsson, a desire to understand the origins of my behavior, a sense that I want to accomplish something Important, and a discontent with my professional situation. Parts of my brain that I am not aware of have been reconciling all of these various threads. When I started trying to pull all my various thoughts together to write something vaguely intelligent, the aware part of my mind stumbled over this nugget that has been sitting on my mental bookshelf patiently awaiting discovery. I'll delve into the insight before I wander off into my new perspective on how I came to have this idea.

When a musician lies in bed thinking about their ultimate goal, it more than likely involves playing a very difficult and beautiful piece of music in a prominent venue. From that moment, he can start having a very detailed simulation of that experience as a fantasy (this idea comes from the academic paper). There are also steps that he can take to ensure that his skill will rise to the point that he will be able to perform whatever piece of music he aspires to perform (see the ebook, or the HBR blog post). If this musician achieves his ambition, his focus during the performance will not be on making the music. Making the music will be automatic. His fingers will feel like they are acting of their own accord. His mind will be focused on some other aspect of the performance.

Making the music, playing the correct notes at the appropriate time, will be automatic. That's what I mean by exceptional automatic responses. Playing the music isn't something the musician has to think about, like how you and I don't have to concentrate on our fingers when we button a shirt or tie our shoes. Our fingers just know what to do without our input. Playing music automatically basically relies on the same system. It's just a little better developed. Developing the skills required to perform a complex composition automatically are years in the making. The process of the musician's brain that is aware of what it is doing has spent a long time over that part of the brain that controls how to perform music. By spending 10,000 hours focusing on the connections in that part (or, more likely, parts) of the brain, our musician is able to achieve his dream.

Exceptional performance in sports, music, surgery, or other activities that have well defined and predictable standards comes about when somebody commits to developing highly developed automatic responses. What are these automatic responses? They are merely neural networks. Well-defined, honed, and efficient neural networks, but that's what they are (at least that's my understanding). A football player doesn't consciously think about which cut to make or how to respond to a particular situation. They just react unconsciously. Their brain sends a signal to their muscles, but a conscious input is not required to achieve that input. What if you don't compete in an arena that has predictable challenges? How do you practice for an unknown situation? If your job is to solve problems, how to you get better at solving problems?

You work on solving problems, of course. The more you work to consciously solve problems, the better you will be able to resolve them. Eventually, solving a problem won't require conscious effort. You'll be thinking about something else when the solution to your problem suddenly becomes clear. That aha moment came from some part of the brain that was operating while your awareness was on what you wanted for dinner or a conversation with a friend about somebody a mutual friend just started dating. By deliberately working to solve problems, an automatic problem solving function was installed in your brain. Our entire brain does it's thing wherever our awareness is at a particular moment. The problem solving parts work on the problems even when you're not thinking about that problem. Our brain may solve the problem well before we're aware that we've found a solution.

The better we are able to train our brain to work on things when we're not thinking about, the better we'll be able to rely on our associative memory to go deeper into our storehouse of knowledge to find related facts, try a few combinations of those facts, and present us with a solution to a problem that we stopped focusing on hours, days, or weeks ago.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Finding a new path

Seeing that I started this blog because I thought it would be interesting to record how I went about achieving my New Year's resolutions, it should be about time for me to comment on my 2011 progress and update the banner at the top of the blog with my 2012 aspirations. I have no plans to write a post with a detailed update on whether or not I bought any new books in 2011 (I didn't) or whether or not I look better naked (my wife and I agree that I do). Whether or not I can check off a particular goal before moving on to the next batch belittles what I was trying to accomplish with the resolutions in the first place.

Merely moving onto this year's goals after reviewing last year's entirely skips delving into whether my original motivation for choosing a particular goal was advanced. So I look better naked. Why did I want to look better naked in the first place? Getting more fit would improve my health, but there were elements of vanity and male pride involved as well. I wanted my wife to see me and think about how sexy I looked. I didn't want to look like the other schlubs walking around the neighborhood pool. Plenty of people start off the new year wanting to lose weight, but my choice to write about achieving a particular goal took all the soul and spirit out of writing about the process.

I wrote 80 post last years. Early in the year, I basically wrote about my thinking on various topics with plenty of references to myself through excessive use of the personal pronoun I. By the end of the year I had dropped the personal pronouns for a more general presentation (this was a conscious and deliberate action). I was trying to emulate other blogs. Part of this was just to see if I could do it. Writing from the personal perspective has always been my default writing style when I'm thinking about something. Could I drop that style for something less self-referential? I feel that I managed to do that switch reasonably well, but I don't really like writing blog posts that have the flavor of a textbook.

I've also recently found that there are numerous blogs focusing on the kinds of things that I've been writing about for the last couple of months. Taking risks, pushing your limits, the kinds of actions you should take to reach expert levels of performance, these are very popular topics in leadership and self-improvement blogs. Despite the wealth of general advice on what research has found results in achievement, I haven't found much that actually puts these recommendations to the test (The Dan Plan being a notable exception). I read an ebook last week that was long on tips for overcoming the primitive fears that inhibit deviating from our safe and routine behaviors, but the entire thing felt empty. It was a good pep talk. Nothing more.

I think my recent posts have been in that vein. I've been emulating other writers while writing about topics that are addressed in many other places on the web while offering little more than a dry musing that is really little more than a pep talk. The emotional resonance that The Edge has for me is lost when I don't put the idea in a context of action and application. It's actually pretty easy to write about The Edge as an idea, but it's much more complicated to convey how central The Edge is to a complex web of associations and motivations in my pursuit of something beyond mediocrity.

As easy is the fastest way to an empty mediocrity, I'm going to use this blog to share more than ideas. I'm going to share my efforts to make academic ideas live. Rather than merely write about the skills of disruptive innovators, I'm going to put them into action and see what happens. What does it mean to have a bias against the status quo and how does that manifest itself in somebody's professional life? How will following the advice of Tony Schwartz or some other expert impact my performance? These are not going to be mere experiments for the sake of experimentation. They are going to be purposeful steps in the pursuit of something UNREASONABLE.