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May 5 - May 21, 2024
After poring over more than a century of evidence on progress, cognitive scientists Wayne Gray and John Lindstedt observed a fascinating arc. When our performance stagnates, before it improves again, it declines. When people’s skills stalled in tasks ranging from Tetris to golf to memorizing facts, they didn’t usually ascend again until after they had deteriorated. When we reach a dead end, to move forward, we may have to head back down the mountain. Once we’ve retreated far enough, we can find another way—a path that will allow us to build the momentum needed to reach the peak.
In a study of over 28,000 NBA basketball games, researchers investigated what happened to teams after their star players got injured. As expected, teams got worse. But once the star returned, they won even more games than they had
We need to embrace the discomfort of getting lost.
To find our way, we need scaffolding in the form of some basic navigational tools. The bad news is that a perfect map won’t exist. The exact route hasn’t been plotted for us—there may not even be a road. We might have to pave our own way, figuring out the route as we go, one turn at a time. The good news is that to start moving, we don’t actually need a map. All we need is a compass to gauge whether we’re heading in the right direction.
Depending on the skill you’re trying to learn, you might discover a compass in a book, on the web, or in a conversation. A good compass signals when you’re going off course and orients you in a better direction.
For years, as part of his repertoire, RA had occasionally hurled a strange pitch—he named it the Thing. His coaches recognized the way he was holding the ball: it was similar to the grip for a rare pitch called the knuckleball. They encouraged RA to develop it and make it the centerpiece of his game.
Those two knuckles stick up in the air, giving the pitch its signature name. That unusual grip takes the rotation off the ball, allowing it to zigzag erratically in the air and befuddle batters.
The knuckleball is so unpredictable that catchers wear oversized mitts to snag it.
The drawback of a compass is that it only gives you direction—not directions. It can help you back away from the wrong path and point you toward a better one. But to navigate that path effectively, you need a guide.
But the data showed the opposite: students who took their initial class with an expert ended up with poorer grades in the next class. The pattern was robust across fields: students learned less from introductory classes taught by experts in every subject. It held across years—with over 15,000 students—and in courses with tougher as well as easier grading. And the experts were especially bad at teaching students who were less academically prepared.[*]
That was Einstein’s curse in the classroom. He knew too much, and his students knew too little. He had so many ideas swirling in his head that he had a hard time keeping his lectures organized—let alone explaining to a beginner how gravity bends light.
But when it came to getting promoted to partner, what mattered was being guided by multiple mentors. Different mentors were able to share different tidbits on how to advance.
When I asked R. A. Dickey how he found his way, one of the first things he mentioned was the number of guides he had to enlist.
There wasn’t one expert who could unlock all the mysteries of the knuckleball or one coach who could give him all the directions. He had to become a sponge in finding credible sources, filtering out the tips that weren’t relevant to him, and adapting his approach accordingly.
RA learned to picture himself standing in a doorway and executing the entire throw without letting his body touch the doorframe. It restricted his arm to the point that he felt like a Tyrannosaurus rex, but it became a pivotal turn.
“Without talking to people who walked a mile in my shoes, I would not have been able to trust that there was a turning point in the future,” RA told me. “Hope is incredible fuel. I had people to help me sustain that hope.”
You’re not seeing enough progress to maintain your motivation. There’s a name for that feeling: it’s called languishing. Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness.
Languishing is the emotional experience of stalling. You may not be depressed or burned out, but you definitely feel blah. Every day starts with a case of the Mondays.
I’ve realized that languishing is more than the feeling of being stuck. It also keeps you stuck. Research shows that languishing disrupts your focus and dulls your motivation. It becomes a Catch-22: you know you need to do something, but you doubt whether it will do anything.
Hobbies have similar benefits. In another study, when people took on serious hobbies at home, their confidence climbed at work—but only if the hobbies were in a different area from their jobs.
My first step was to reset my expectations. I wouldn’t crack the whole chapter in one sitting. Instead of waiting for the perfect map, I should just start making one small turn at a time.
By the time the Mets recruited him in 2010, at age 35, RA was a solid big-league pitcher. But he still hadn’t reached the top of his mountain. If his fast knuckleball didn’t zig or zag enough, batters would crush it. To keep moving forward, he needed something more in his tank. He decided to refuel by finding a new mountain to climb.
In the winter of 2012, RA decided to climb Mount Kilimanjaro—Africa’s tallest peak.
Upon reaching the Kilimanjaro summit, “I somehow feel smaller than I have ever felt in my life,” he wrote. “It is intoxicating.” That year, RA had the best season of his baseball career. Stretching beyond his comfort zone of the fast knuckleball, he developed one that was extremely slow, changing up speeds to leave batters guessing about when to swing as well as where. They would sometimes burst out laughing at how badly they missed the ball.
He pitched back-to-back games in which he only gave up a single hit and set a Mets record for pitching 32 straight scoreless innings. He led the entire league in strikeouts and became the first knuckleballer ever to win the Cy Young Award for best pitcher.
To observers, the breakout season looked as if it came out of nowhere. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. It took RA seven trips down to the minors and seven years of knuckleball effort to become an overnight success.
When you get stuck on your way up a mountain, it’s better to shift into reverse than to stand still.
I believe in pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. I believe it is possible. I saw this guy do it once in Cirque du Soleil. —Stephen Colbert
When they arrived for officer training, the Black candidates were in their own cohort, segregated from the white sailors. They endured racial slurs and demeaning comments from the very instructors who were assigned to teach them.
To make matters worse, with the country at war the training period was cut in half.
To prove they hadn’t cheated or benefited from grading errors, the men had to retake some of their exams. They ended up scoring even higher, finishing with a collective GPA of 3.89 out of 4.0. Years later, they would learn that they attained the highest marks in Navy history.
As the first group of Black men in America to wear gold stars and stripes, they’re known as the Golden Thirteen. Instead of succumbing to the forces of gravity weighing them down, the Golden Thirteen managed to rise above them.
The Golden Thirteen got something right that the rest of us often get wrong. In the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, it can be tempting to give up. It’s just too hard; the forces against us are just too strong. At times like this, we’re advised to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. The message is that we need to look inside ourselves for hidden reserves of confidence and know-how. But it’s actually in turning outward to harness resources with and for others that we discover—and develop—our hidden potential. When the odds are against us, focusing beyond ourselves is what
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Bootstrapping is using your existing resources to pull yourself out of a sticky situation.
But if they wanted the extra credit on one question, they had to find out who knew what. So instead of cramming solo, they opted to study together. They started meeting in small groups to synthesize the key concepts. The students had created their own scaffolding. A later class took the collaboration to the next level: they created a giant map of the content from the entire semester. One student reserved a room for Saturday afternoon studying and invited the entire class to join and pool their knowledge. Others jumped in to share their own reading summaries, study guides, and practice quizzes.
The physicist John Preskill learned quantum computing by signing up to deliver a course in it.
We should listen to the advice we give to others—it’s usually the advice we need to take for ourselves.
Whereas high expectations offer support for us to climb, low expectations tend to hold us back—it feels like our boots are made of lead. It’s called the Golem effect: when others underestimate us, it limits our effort and growth.
There are times when you can turn others’ low expectations to your advantage. They don’t have to strap you in place—you can grab on to them and pull yourself forward.
Samir calls it the underdog effect. Being doubted by novices is a challenge. It fires you up. They’re clueless, so you don’t internalize their low expectations—but you don’t ignore them either. You become driven to defy them.
Maya Angelou wrote, “I do my best because I’m counting on you counting on me.”
After many long weeks, Alison made it back to the point where her climb had ended eight years earlier. She was running on empty and starting to doubt herself. Then she heard someone scream her name: “Hey, Alison . . . I need you to promise me that you are going to go farther than this.”
“I felt this weight come off my shoulders,” she told me. She trusted him, because he was a knowledgeable believer: “Mike had summitted Everest multiple times. If he thought I could do it, I could do it.”
She shook Mike’s hand and kept going. When she reached the top, Alison didn’t just achieve her goal of summiting the tallest mountain on the planet. Scaling Everest was her last step in completing the Adventurers Grand Slam. Alison became one of only a few dozen people on earth to climb the tallest peak on all seven continents and ski to both the North and South Pole.
Resilience is a form of growth.
The Golden Thirteen knew they were representing something far bigger than themselves. “We recognized that we were plowing new ground,” George Cooper remarked.
They were pulling future generations up by their bootstraps.
Dalton Baugh got a master’s degree in engineering from MIT and became the Navy’s first Black chief engineer. Dennis Nelson rose to lieutenant commander and ran a literacy program that educated thousands of sailors and enabled many to vote for the first time. Reginald Goodwin ran the Navy’s selection office. Samuel Barnes earned his doctorate in educational administration and became the first Black officer of the NCAA. Syl White served in the Illinois governor’s cabinet and became a judge.
It’s more important to be good ancestors than dutiful descendants. Too many people spend their lives being custodians of the past instead of stewards of the future. We worry about making our parents proud when we should be focused on making our children proud.
Despite their historic achievements, the Golden Thirteen went unrecognized by the Navy for many years. When they completed officer training in 1944, there was no graduation ceremony or celebration. They were banned from the officers’ club at Great Lakes.
