Disclaimer: This post is not cleaned up thoroughly.

Introduction

A summary of the book “Talent is Overrated” was written in September 2019. The crux of the book is:

There is path that exists, that runs between your current abilities to that of the greats. It is hard, extremely long and demanding. Not many will follow it all the way till the end. But if you do…

But if you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they (1st world) can’t stop you, then you become something else entirely… Which is … Legend Mr Wayne!

Laszlo Polgar, a Hungarian Educational Psycologist, married a woman with the understanding that he would have children with her and on whom he would conduct an experiment. The experiment being, to test his claim that “He could nurture Talent into his kids”. He had 3 children, he chose chess as the space where he was going to train his children as it had a lot of material on it, and it was “relatively easy to measure” progress (said some people).

All 3 of his daughters were home-schooled. They practiced “hours and hours” of it everyday. At the age of 17, Susan was the first woman to qualify for what was called the Men’s World Championship. All three at ages 19,14 and 12 respectively, competed in a Women’s Olympiad and scored Hungary’s first-ever victory against the Soviets, becoming national heroes.

Under the guidance of an STM I later went on to use the Benjamin Franklin Method and did a couple of practice sessions. With this post we discuss, What DP looks like, how to do DP, and also investigate the past DP attempts.

Characteristics of DP

There are 5 characteristics of DP, the kind that leads to Greatness given by the acronym DRFMF.

  • Designed specifically to improve performance

    Tiger Woods has been seen to drop golf balls into a sand trap and step on them, then practice shots from that near-impossible lie.

    Here Tiger, is trying to improve his performance, for the 2-3 shots that happen in the season, where the ball is in sand.

  • It can be repeated a lot.

    Ted Williams, baseball’s greatest hitter, would practice hit- ting until his hands bled.

  • Feedback on results is continuously available

    When practicing shooting the ball from the free-throw line, we can measure how many balls went in, how many balls went in without touching the ring, how many balls hit the right side of the ring, etc… So constantly, we are able to look at performance, for example, percentage of shots made without touching the ring etc…

  • It is highly demanding mentally

    A Berlin Study of the best violinists reported practice of 3.5 hours in 2-3 sessions, roughly 1.5 hrs at a time. And other top musicians report 4-5 hours as an upper limit of DP that can be done.

  • It isn’t much fun

    A few moments with a calculator tell us that by an extremely conservative estimate, Arakawa’s road to the gold medal involved at least twenty thousand derriere impacts on an unforgiving surface.

    There’s nothing enjoyable about running to the point of exhaustion or lifting weights to the point of muscle failure. But these were centrally important activities.

    On the days when I do Biceps, I need to do 9 supersets of 3 exercises each. Somehow each superset has something related to the Bicep (either a dumbell or barbell curl). I am trying to lift the max possible weights with each set. By the end of the first superset, when I am at the 5th rep of curling a 10kg dumbbell, I want to tap out, and having to go 8 more supersets is just so painful mentally. I keep looking at how far the end is constantly to motivate myself to just finish it at max intensity.

    It’s not fun!

Measuring and improving performance

Say there is a quiz with 10 different types of questions such as 2x2, 2x79, 25x79 etc… the number of digits increasing with each question. Let’s say I got right, the first 3 questions out of 10. 2x2 aka single digit multiplication is very easy and I can do at the back of my head without paper. For 2x79 it will take some more time but I should still be able to manage single digit multiplied by 2 digits. But further than that, it seems like it will take more time and I might make mistakes as well.

Working on single digit multiplication doesn’t seem to improve my score, at best, it will keep my score where it is. Where as working on double digits and triple digit multiplication seems to give the possibility to improve score.

So the next time I do the test again, say I score 6/10. In that case it appears that I have improved my performance and that there is still scope to improve in the places where I failed, aka, higher digits multiplication. I should continue to do two things, maintain the score for multiplication questions 1-6 and then focus on improving 7-10.

A study of figure skaters found that sub-elite skaters spent lots of time working on the jumps they could already do, while skaters at the highest levels spent more time on the jumps they couldn’t do, the kind that ultimately win Olympic medals and that involve lots of falling down before they’re mastered.

Tiger Woods, one the greatest golfers of all time, is known to work on his failures. Golfers typically face a ball buried in sand only 2 or 3 times a season. Yet, Tiger Woods is known to step on the ball in the sand and practice these shots (which are a near impossible lie).

What I am doing currently

Recently, I have been working on DP of this thing called “concrete thinking”. For this the goal is to identify claims and come up with one example for those claims. For example:

Claim: People in Venezuela are desperate for food

Example:This video shows examples of how people are rummaging through garbage for food.

Am I improving? Frankly, I don’t know if I am improving. Up until yesterday, I don’t think I knew how to measure my performance.

Not sure if Designed to improve performance

It appears that it is designed to improve the ability to check a claim against atleast one example. I don’t know if it improved performance.

It is repeated a lot:

I have done 5-8 exercises amounting to about 200 hrs and 400 claims (roughly).

Feedback seems to be continuously available

Initially I used the BF method where I look at a piece of text, make a summary and later rewrite the text based on the notes. Then the work is compared across dimensions such as “examples given, claims identified” etc… We understand across how many dimensions we have failed and that is our feedback. I would get feedback from an STM in addition to this, within a week. My earlier practice is shown here. It shall be noted that NO ACTION was forcefully taken to apply the feedback the next time I write.

In the last 5 exercises, the BF method was not used, instead the claims were identified and it was attempted to give examples for these claims. The feedback I got, appears to be primarily from my own “feelings” or the “lack of confusion being clarified” of something. For example, there was this document from my work, which I didn’t “understand”, which I took apart using the above process. This allowed me to have a conversation “on my boss’s level” about the document. Furthermore, I looked at how many phrases I give example for and keep track of that with every hour.

In addition to the “feedback” during the excercise, an STM gave his feedback within a week. He pointed out many mistakes over each session. I would read the feedback and start writing another 100 claims. I didn’t take effort to make sure I didn’t commit those mistakes again. I remembered one or two suggestions he made such as “when you give an example, a lay person must be able to say if I have answered the claim”, and “tried to implement them”.

Over the feedback from the most recent article an STM pointed out that I had been repeating the same errors and that I should keep a note of it. To sum up, I get feedback, but I seem to be doing very little with it.

Works seems to be mentally challenging

The work seems to be mentally challenging. Working on 6 hrs of DP per day, took me >9 hrs. It was quite a challenge to sustain concentration for 1.5 hrs at a time.

To keep the challenge level high I look at “claims/phrases per hour” written and force myself to meet something like “10 phrases per hour”. But it has been very hard to meet it, as there are large variances in the difficulty of text from one paragraph to the other, from one article to another. For example, if I worked on 80khours article I usually gave examples for 5 phrases within an hour. With articles I had written in my blog, it was easy to meet 10 claims per hr. And even within the 80khours article, there was variances with me completing 2 to 7 claims every hr.

It was not much fun.

There are 1000 other things I’d rather be doing like sleeping watching TV, going to the gym or hanging out with friends.

What is the plan now

So far, we have seen that there are certain characteristics of DP which I have been failing on meet. E.g., getting continuous feedback, and designing to improve performance. We have also seen that we measure claims per hour and leave out something as critical as measuring the “true performance”. Furthermore, the greats seemed to have focused on their mistakes.

Why do we fall?

Why do we fall sir? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up. —Alfred J Pennyworth

Working on 2x2 doesn’t seem to help anything other than keep the performance level the same. Whereas working on 34x79, seems to be allowing to tackle new scenarios which will improve the above defined performance.

So in my case, I should be identifying different scenarios where I fail. For example (as was pointed in the last feedback round), I suck when I am looking at claims in 80k articles, and trying to come up with examples (as exposed here) where I didn’t identify that the claim (“There is no doubting the force of the arguments…”) was empirically false.

Over the next 100 claims I work on, I should—with every claim—identify what type it is. If it is something like 2x2, I skip it. If it is 45x709 I will work on it. If it is something like infinity x infinity, I will add it to the scenarios and work on it. Overall in the end measure statistics of how many I got right in each scenario that has been classified as “I will work on it”.

Another important aspect about this is where these claims originate from. For example, this could be from my own life, 80khours article or other discussions or presentations I make. They seem to be quite different in its handling. Yesterday an STM said “Concrete Thinking allows for understanding by seeing not the labels but an actual example with it” and immediately I agreed with him. But I didn’t have an example to go with that claim. The origin of the claims also seems to be important and I should also take claims from different places, not just 80khours.

Regarding “getting feedback continuously”, from the next time, I shall be checking each claim and example, against a list of previously seen mistakes and make sure I don’t make the same mistakes again. In addition an STM will also overlook the work and give feedback.

Summary

In summary, there seems to be a new way of working aka doing DP, one that seems to be measuring progress and one where we focus on our failures.

We seem to only want to pick ourselves up when we fall.