nebslp wrote: »

@themedalist Your post is so meaningful! And, after reading @77tes poem, I was wishing for a LOVE button!

Denise, I think you've just labeled my behavior during the past couple of my photography "work" sessions. It's so much easier to edit and organize my photos than it is to learn and then to remember so many new things about my camera. I've been doing necessary things, but definitely taking the easy route. My OK Plateau has got to go! There are videos I can watch but there's so much information I don't know what to start with and I feel overwhelmed. I will systematically break it down into sections and then take notes and then practice, practice, practice. I've got this...it just hasn't sunk in yet!!

I completely understand feeling overwhelmed, @nebslp. I’m trying to learn just one thing a day about GarageBand and I’m writing these one things down. That way I can see progress. It’s a lot like losing weight. Take it slow and steady. Focus on just today. Keep at it and it will happen.

Since our group is focused on building new habits and skills, I thought I’d post a few excerpts from Moonlighting with Einstein by Joshua Foer. It has really changed my thinking about skills building and practice.


Deliberate Practice and the OK Plateau

In the 1960s, the psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner attempted to answer this question by describing the three stages that anyone goes through when acquiring a new skill. During the first phase, known as the “cognitive stage,” you’re intellectualizing the task and discovering new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. During the second “associative stage,” you’re concentrating less, making fewer major errors, and generally becoming more efficient. Finally you reach what Fitts called the “autonomous stage,” when you figure that you’ve gotten as good as you need to get at the task and you’re basically running on autopilot. During that autonomous stage, you lose conscious control over what you’re doing. Most of the time that’s a good thing. Your mind has one less thing to worry about. In fact, the autonomous stage seems to be one of those handy features that evolution worked out for our benefit. The less you have to focus on the repetitive tasks of everyday life, the more you can concentrate on the stuff that really matters, the stuff that you haven’t seen before. And so, once we’re just good enough at typing, we move it to the back of our mind’s filing cabinet and stop paying it any attention. You can actually see this shift take place in fMRI scans of people learning new skills. As a task becomes automated, the parts of the brain involved in conscious reasoning become less active and other parts of the brain take over.

You could call it the “OK plateau,” the point at which you decide you’re OK with how good you are at something, turn on autopilot, and stop improving. We all reach OK plateaus in most things we do. We learn how to drive when we’re in our teens and then once we’re good enough to avoid tickets and major accidents, we get only incrementally better. My father has been playing golf for forty years, and he’s still—though it will hurt him to read this—a duffer. In four decades his handicap hasn’t fallen even a point. How come? He reached an OK plateau.

Psychologists used to think that OK plateaus marked the upper bounds of innate ability. In his 1869 book Hereditary Genius, Sir Francis Galton argued that a person could only improve at physical and mental activities up until he reached a certain wall, which “he cannot by any education or exertion overpass.” According to this view, the best we can do is simply the best we can do. But Ericsson and his fellow expert performance psychologists have found over and over again that with the right kind of concerted effort, that’s rarely the case. They believe that Galton’s wall often has much less to do with our innate limits than simply with what we consider an acceptable level of performance.

What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled “deliberate practice.” Having studied the best of the best in many different fields, he has found that top achievers tend to follow the same general pattern of development. They develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they practice by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on their performance. In other words, they force themselves to stay in the “cognitive phase.”

Amateur musicians, for example, are more likely to spend their practice time playing music, whereas pros are more likely to work through tedious exercises or focus on specific, difficult parts of pieces. The best ice skaters spend more of their practice time trying jumps that they land less often, while lesser skaters work more on jumps they’ve already mastered.

Deliberate practice, by its nature, must be hard. When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend. In fact, in every domain of expertise that’s been rigorously examined, from chess to violin to basketball, studies have found that the number of years one has been doing something correlates only weakly with level of performance.

Regular practice simply isn’t enough. To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes. The best way to get out of the autonomous stage and off the OK plateau, Ericsson has found, is to actually practice failing. One way to do that is to put yourself in the mind of someone far more competent at the task you’re trying to master, and try to figure out how that person works through problems.

The secret to improving at a skill is to retain some degree of conscious control over it while practicing—to force oneself to stay out of autopilot.

The most important lesson I took away from my year on the competitive memory circuit was not the secret to learning poetry by heart, but rather something far more global and, in a way, far more likely to be of service in my life. My experience had validated the old saw that practice makes perfect. But only if it’s the right kind of concentrated, self-conscious, deliberate practice. I’d learned firsthand that with focus, motivation, and, above all, time, the mind can be trained to do extraordinary things. This was a tremendously empowering discovery. It made me ask myself: What else was I capable of doing, if only I used the right approach?

PackerFanInGB wrote: »

Log every bite:
3/2: 😊
3/3: 😊
3/4: 😊
3/5: 😊
3/6: 😊
3/7:
3/8:
3/9:
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11 days with no added sugar! I am starting to find tangerines to be almost too sweet. That is incredible to me.

This is great to hear, @PackerFanInGB. I like your observation the tangerines are almost too sweet. I think our taste buds get used to a level sweetness or saltiness in the foods we eat. They get habitualized to that level of sugar or salt. Dialing down the level of sugar and salt has helped me a lot. It’s my new normal. I used to love jelly beans. Now I can’t eat them at all. The fire hose of sugar that gushes into my body from a handful of jelly beans makes me instantly jittery and feeling sick. Just not worth it.