How to be better at almost anything

Earlier we talked about why the fast-talking guy sounds smarter than the guy who understands more than he can say. We talked about how wrong that is, and how if the glib always win, we all lose. But the more important battle is not between articulate vs. less-articulate people... it's between the articulate vs. non-articulate parts of your own head. Your brain has both a quick-talker and a quick-thinker, but the good-talker "know-it-all" gets the glory. In other words, there's a smart part and a dumb part of your brain, and the problem is...the dumb part talks.

If we can get the dumber part to STFU, we can learn much faster and perform much better at just about anything. The dumber chatty part is hurting us.

It's the part that makes you self-conscious:
"Do I look OK? Am I going to say something stupid?"
"Am I overlooking something in this code?"

It's the part that criticizes:
"DOH! I can't believe I just did that. Idiot!"
"This code is inefficient... you need to fix it."
"That paragraph reads like a six-year old wrote it. It's dull.

It's the part that gives you "helpful" instructions:
"Make eye contact for three seconds. Watch your posture, don't look at your slides."
"Look for a design pattern to apply. Don't duplicate that code over there."
"Stay close to the fall-line. Don't lock your knees. Turn quicker!"
"It's safer to use formal terminology than risk looking silly."

While your brain is chatting away evaluating, judging, instructing, criticizing, directing, etc... the smarter parts sit in the corner, ignored. Alan Kay--often called the father of object-oriented programming and one of the greatest thinkers/researchers/designers/teachers/engineers of our time-- talks about the implications of this for education... something we talked about earlier.

But Alan Kay was inspired by the work of Tim Gallwey, whose work arose from one simple question, "... is all this inner dialogue really necessary? Is it helping...or is it getting in the way?" Until I heard Alan Kay talk about it (and explain some of the cognitive science behind it), I had always thought Gallwey's "inner game" thing was just one more bit of 60's self-help new-age nonsense. I was dead wrong.

Gallwey showed that the parts of our brain that learn from experience are far more capable than the parts that learn from talking through it. We think we need to tell ourselves things like, "keep your weight over your front don't press so hard on the violin bow..." when we're trying to learn something new or improve our performance, when that's exactly the thing that inhibits learning and improvement.

We did learn to walk, after all. And we did it with virtually no explicit "talking" instruction. Nobody compared our first steps to the steps of an expert (i.e. a parent) and "told" us how to adjust. Nobody outside or inside our head was evaluating, judging, or correcting. Think about times when people are telling you what to do when you're trying to concentrate and you finally yell at them to STFU. All we need to do is take that attitude we have to people outside our head and apply it to the chattering inside our head.

Easier said than done, of course. Gallwey makes the point that most of us can't turn off the talking parts with brute force will, although that's the basis for so many ineffective self-help or creativity books that tell you to change the way you talk to yourself or "silence your inner critic" simply by telling yourself to do so. (pretty tough to tell yourself not to tell yourself...)

For Gallwey, the answer is focus of attention. In tennis, for example, he has people learn to focus on the ball--the seams turning, the way it bounces, and the moment at which someone hits it. Bounce-hit. Bounce-hit. Nothing about feet, arms, rackets, weight shifts. Nothing talking to--or about--you. (Yes, technically your brain is still 'talking' through this "here's the bounce, there's the hit, etc." but the point is that it's not annoying and influencing you.)

Example Techniques

* Art
Nobody does a better job of this than Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, a program created by Betty Edwards. I'd recommend it to everyone whether you ever care about drawing or not, just for the way it changes your brain. Betty (and a zillion students) demonstrate that the part of your brain that talks is also the part that draws like a three-year old. That part talks its way through, say, what a car or horse or human looks like, and it does a really lame job. But if you get your brain to stop saying, "this is a horse, and they have four legs and..." and instead focus on seeing shapes and lines, the better-performing parts of your brain can kick in.

* Writing non-fiction
If you plan a book by making outlines, you're indulging the talking (linear, step-by-step, rational) part of your brain. The focus is on what you do and say and when and how you say it. With our books, we do not use outlines--we do everything from storyboards. By focusing on the story of the learner's journey, it keeps the brain focused on the learner's experience rather than what WE do/say/write. This is not a trivial thing--last week our books represented 25% of the O'Reilly Top 20 bestsellers. And we're not all that good at writing. It really is about focusing on the reader instead of focusing on what the reader will think of us.

* Design
Mind-mapping--if you do it quickly--stops the talking parts from jumping in and evaluating what you're writing, so the creative parts can do things. That's what makes mind-mapping so powerful and fun--after you're done, you look at the paper and find things you'd never thought about... things that wouldn't have come out while talking your way through an outline.

* Programming
Pay attention to Code Smells, which is another way of saying a gut "bad feeling" that tells you something is wrong even if you can't yet say why.

* Everything
Read Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink, which I talked about in this post. And while you're making sure that glib people don't always win, try to do the same within your own brain.

Listen to the comments of our readers, who I'm sure will have suggestions for other resources : )