So I’m Not Alone

I was reading a blog post in the Harvard Business Review that I saw on LinkedIn that talks about how to continuously improve and keep discouragement at bay.  This part made a lot of sense to me in the context of my attempt to learn to play golf…

 

When systems behave linearly and react immediately, we tend to be fairly accurate with our forecasts. This is why toddlers love discovering light switches: cause and effect are immediate. The child flips the switch, and on goes the light. But our predictive power plummets when there is a time delay or non-linearity, as in the case of a CEO who delivers better-than-expected earnings only to wonder at a drop in the stock price.

That’s the problem with my swing.  I can never predict what changes or effort will bring results.  Was it the new thing I started last week or was it that I finally got competent at something I’ve been working on since the beginning?

In complex systems like a business (or a brain), cause and effect may not always be as clear as the relationship between the light switch and the light bulb. There are time-delayed and time-dependent relationships in which huge effort may yield little in the near-term, or in which high output today may be the result of actions taken a long time ago. 

The writer also talks about Dan McLaughlin a commercial photographer who quit his job at the age of 30 with the goal of spending 10,000 hours of deliberate practice so he could become a professional golfer.  He’s a third of the way into his 10,000 hours, 27 months of training and has a 5.9 handicap.  If only I can get somewhere near a single digit handicap.

Here’s a chart from the blog post about moving toward mastery.

 

As we look to develop competence within a new domain of expertise, moving up a personal learning curve, initially progress is slow. But through deliberate practice, we gain traction, entering into a virtuous cycle that propels us into a sweet spot of accelerating competence and confidence. Then, as we approach mastery, the vicious cycle commences: the more habitual what we are doing becomes, the less we enjoy the “feel good” effects of learning: these two cycles constitute the S-curve.

I have never felt like my golf game has achieved the period of hypergrowth depicted on the chart.

And the results from my progress chart don’t show it either.  Unless those cycles only last 2 weeks and I end up not too much ahead of where I started.

 

I’ll keep plugging away and continue my quest for competence….and follow Dan to see what “all in” looks like.