Kindle Notes & Highlights
Ballet, I knew, never gets easier; if anything, it gets harder, for as you advance as a dancer, you develop both higher standards for what counts as excellence and an enhanced ability to evaluate your skills, finding flaws that previously went unnoticed. Just as in Plato’s dialogue the Apology, where Socrates is wise because he knows he is ignorant, it is the capacity to recognize where there is room for improvement that allows expert dancers to reach great heights.
Although practice may be hard work, it is widely supposed that great performances, in ballet and elsewhere, are intuitive and effortless: like water running downstream, once experts achieve mastery, their actions are thought simply to flow.
Although I have told myself time and time again to stop fretting and just get to work, this was more of a call to cease the needless lamentations over how I will never be able to accomplish my goal, rather than a command to ease up and let it happen; for me, letting it happen would have led to nothing happening.
Be that as it may, writing, whether it is about topics new or old, is never easy for me.
I write not because it engenders moment-by-moment pleasure—the kind of pleasure you get when putting on clothes straight out of the dryer or locking eyes with that winsome stranger across the room—but rather because it leads to the type of happiness that results from looking back over your life and accomplishments with a sense of fulfillment,
There are three rules regarding dinner-table conversation: no politics, no religion, and no questioning whether your host’s lifework has any value.
Whether or not this is true it is a trivial matter to find conscious college students—their typical blood-alcohol level notwithstanding—who are willing to participate in psychology experiments in exchange for a measly $10 or course credit; finding experts who are willing to trade in their time for such rewards is near impossible.
Depending on their respective expertise, whether they are in or out of the lab, experts can putt a ball, play a sonata, or choose the next move in a chess game. But they will not be on their mettle; that is, they will not be roused to perform at their best.
What exactly ecological validity amounts to is an open question; nonetheless, if what an experiment tests differs significantly from the activity of interest, it is reasonable to question whether the results apply to performance out of the lab.
What I question, however, and ultimately reject, is the maxim that expert action—whether of the more cognitive sort, such as chess, or the more physical sort, such as soccer—proceeds better with relatively less thought and less effort.
I argue that the type of extended analytical training that experts partake in, as well as the relatively higher stakes involved in expert action, make quotidian tasks (such as everyday driving) different enough from expert-level actions (such as professional race-car driving) so as to not warrant extrapolation from the former to the latter.
A theme of my research is that this manner of training enables experts to perform while engaging their self-reflective capacities without any detrimental effects; it allows experts to think and do at the same time.
What can we infer, for example, about expert performance given that experts practice in a thoughtful, analytic manner?
First-person reports of what goes on in one’s own mind should be accepted as (defeasible) evidence for the truth of the report unless we have good reason to question them.
expert batters in baseball and cricket think that they are consciously aware of the ball in flight, yet eye-tracking experiments, which show that eye-gaze often lags behind the ball and is not on the ball when it makes contact with the bat show that this cannot be so.
an expert should be understood as someone who has spent around ten years or more engaged in deliberate practice of their skill, which is practice with the specific aim of improving, and is still intent on improving.
Of course, as it is often assumed that one’s most heartfelt views come out naturally and without deep thought, some might see thinking during a debate as indicating that one is searching for words that will please the public. Socrates seems to accept the general idea that one’s natural effortless discourse reveals one’s honest views, for in the Apology he tells the jurors that, in contrast to his accusers who use “embroidered and stylized phrases to deceive, he will be expressing the
truth … [by using] the first words that come to mind” (2000, 17c). Whether extemporaneous discourse reveals one’s true thoughts better than studied words can be debated (perhaps thoughtful speech can also provide an opportunity for revealing what you really think).
And in any event, neither Socrates’ comments about his accusers nor the analysis of the politician’s poor showing decry thinking or effort per se, but rather allude to the idea ...
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we learn in the Zhuangzi that for the accomplished artisan, actions are not guided by the self but just flow.
For whilst a man retains any portion of the thing called reason, he is utterly incompetent to produce poetry or to vaticinate.
“talent is that which is in a man’s power: genius is that in whose power a man is”
Fitts and Posner (1967), for example, in their urtext on the psychology of skilled performance, see an expert’s performance as automatic and performed without attention. Thus they tell us that “if the attention of a[n expert] golfer is called to his muscle movements before an important putt, he may find it unusually difficult to attain his natural swing” (p. 15); this is, they explain, because expert performance is automatic or “autonomous,” by which they also mean that it does not require control by the conscious mind.
As Gabriele Wulf (2007) tells us, “there is little disagreement that once an individual has reached the autonomous stage, in which movements are usually controlled automatically, paying attention to skill execution is typically detrimental” (p. 6). And in her own estimation, research on skill “clearly show[s] that if experienced individuals direct their attention to the details of skill execution, the result is almost certainly a decrement in performance”
For Dreyfus (2004), experts proceed without attention to what they are doing; they do not calculate or compare alternatives but rather act spontaneously and without deliberation
Though he targets everyday types of decisions, Kahneman has written persuasively about how our intuitions mislead us and that at least at times better decisions occur when we employ more of our rational minds. However, there is also a large body of psychology literature about the superiority of intuitive ways of thinking over rational ones and about the superiority of intuitive action over thoughtful, deliberate action.
the “gift” metaphor does not readily apply, but perhaps we can say that the gift of expert athletic performance, on this view, is simply a result of having well-developed neural pathways; as such, somewhat like how you would not be responsible for what you would do were you to suffer a seizure, the expert is not responsible for her automatic action.
For experts, when all is going well, optimal or near-optimal performance proceeds without any of the following mental processes: self-reflective thinking, planning, predicting, deliberation, attention to or monitoring of their actions, conceptualizing their actions, conscious control, trying, effort, having a sense of the self, or acting for a reason. Moreover, when all is going well, such processes interfere with expert performance and should be avoided.
On this view, expert action, at its best, is entirely bereft of mental processing: not just conscious mental processing, but any mental processing whatsoever; their actions are drawn out of them by external forces, at times without the experts even being able to recall what occurred.
For experts, when all is going well, optimal or near-optimal performance proceeds without consciously monitoring one’s own bodily movements. Moreover, when all is going well, conscious monitoring interferes with expert performance and should be avoided.
proponents of just-do-it don’t maintain that experts, when doing their best, never think. On their view, if faced with an out-of-the-ordinary situation—an unusually slippery surface or an equipment malfunction—an expert may need to think to perform optimally (given the situation). The qualification
“when all is going well,” therefore, is meant to proscribe circumstances that involve unusual problems or errors.
For experts, when all is going well, thinking interferes with expert performance.
For experts, when all is going well, optimal or near optimal performance frequently employs some of the following conscious mental processes: self-reflective thinking, planning, predicting, deliberation, attention to or monitoring of their actions, conceptualizing their actions, control, trying, effort, having a sense of the self, and acting for a reason. Moreover, such mental processes do not necessarily or even generally interfere with expert performance, and should not generally be avoided by experts.
This is not to say that the cognition-in-action principle implies that there is no unconscious thought in expert action. It allows for unconscious thought. However, the principle concerns the more controversial position that experts think consciously as well. In contrast, I formulate just-do-it to encompass both conscious and unconscious processing since there are some who see expert action as entirely “nonminded,” and I want the unrestricted principle to encompass even this extreme view.
For example, the fact that a professional pianist may finish her best performance feeling exhausted indicates that her best performances are not necessarily effortless. The fact that a ballet dancer can focus on details of the movement indicates that the best performances are not necessarily ones in which the performer is not aware of the mechanics of her movements. And so on.
I would still count this as an example of acting for a reason and having the ability to justify one’s actions. And it stands in contrast to the idea that anything one might say to justify one’s actions would be a mere retrospective rationalization.
For example, someone might habitually walk with his toes slightly turned out; such an individual may walk proficiently, yet since walking in this way may lead to joint problems and is generally less efficient than walking with parallel feet, it would be advisable for this individual to change his habitual way of walking, and changing habits such as these, Shusterman argues, requires deliberate focused attention. Such deliberate focused attention, may impede the flow of movement; nonetheless, according to Shusterman one ought to employ this type of attention in such a situation.
Specifically,
according to Shusterman, our everyday actions ought to proceed without thought “until they prove problematic in experience,” and when this happens, “the unreflective action or habit must be brought into conscious critical reflection
I shall touch upon the topic of everyday performance again in Chapter 4, where I suggest that when our interactions with others are guided by stereotypes, thinking rather than just doing would be beneficial.
For example, one can know quite a bit about performing a gymnastics routine on the balance beam, yet not be able to do it even if one’s life depended on it. And that ability to perform the routine, some will say, is essential to our conception of expertise.
one might think that the best definition or account of what it is to be an expert is simply that an expert in a domain is someone who is recognized by peers as being an expert in that domain.
To be more precise, I hold that experts are individuals who have engaged in around ten or more years of deliberate practice, which means close to daily, extended practice with the specific aim of improving, and are still intent on improving.
Apart from the modicum of studying drivers do in order to renew their licenses, most everyday drivers don’t aim to hone their skills (that is, if the studying for the driver’s test is to count as skill-building at all). Most everyday drivers, for better or worse, just do it.
Deliberate practice,
in this sense, covers any type of activity that is done with an aim, at least in part, to improve, or to learn, or figure something out.
On this view, sometimes referred to as “distraction theory,” high pressure draws attention away from the task at hand and to irrelevant aspects of performance, such as worries over how performance will be judged and the possibility of failure
Though small-scale, the study indicates that a common method of dealing with stress involves redoubling both effort and attention and that such methods are perceived as more effective than other methods.
To be sure, there are limitations to diary studies, as Nicholls points out. For example, as is common in longitudinal studies, diary studies typically have a high dropout rate, and some research suggests that diary methods inspire subjects to report only concrete and discrete events and ignore more complex problems
