Make excellence an unconscious habit
/By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.
Summary:
"First you make your habits, then your habits make you."
Put in the (short-term) effort to make something effortless (in the long term)
Overview
Scholars of expertise have described four stages of learning:
unconscious incompetence (you don’t know what you don’t know),
conscious incompetence (you know what you don’t know),
conscious competence (you can do something but only by thinking about it), and, finally,
unconscious competence (you can do it automatically).
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. ” —Aristotle.
If I want to get good at something I try to figure out 'what habit I need to build'.
Then I build systems to make sure I do the action until it becomes an 'unconscious habit'.
A good habit is an ‘upgrade’. A bad habit is a ‘downgrade’... some habits are obviously bad… but the worst are habits you think are good, build into an ‘unconscious habit’ and then spend years doing only to realise later that you now feel the habit has been counterproductive (ie a downgrade masquerading as an upgrade)!
Taxonomy of trying:
L1: No upgrade you are trying to make
L2: Upgrade you trying to make but not understanding the action you need to cultivate to make the upgrade an ‘unconscious habit’.
L3: A system to turn the desired action into a habit
Jingle: Make excellence an unconscious habit. Hoping that you will change is not a strategy!
“Your mind is a place for having ideas, not stories ideas.”
I have many different systems for outsourcing memory. The goal is to never need to remember anything. This is one of the best gifts you can give yourself, freedom from the anxiety of ‘is there something I needed to do?’
The simplest system I have for setting a new habit is simply a Google / Apple reminder each morning to ‘do activity x’.
No one gets to tell you what you like, you get to choose.
I think you can choose your habits.
Making sure I’m cultivating 1-2 habits at a time I’ve found to be one of the best ways to build the life I want and attempt to become the person I want to be.
How much of a difference can cultivating 1-2 habits at a time make? IMO this is actually 10-50 new habits a year, this is a F@#$ ton! The effect of habits also compound. Eg IMO 5x of the right habits over 50 years likely make the difference between a stupendous life and a sh1t one ;)!
Don’t be a slave to your impulses, don’t be a run by your external environment… build an effortless wonderful life (ie one full of unconscious healthy habits)!
I used to find building new ‘subconscious habits’ very hard, now the bigger problem is ‘what habit to build’... and undoing some habits I built in the past when I thought they were a good idea (eg working too many hours).
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Example 1: metacognition - thinking about one's thinking
"You do not learn from your experiences, you learn from reflecting on your experiences."
Problem solving is itself a problem to solve… IMO problem solving is the biggest problem to solve there is.
After each problem solving session that is 0.5 hours + I now reflect on how I went about solving the problem (ie not the conclusion, but how I came to the conclusion).
It's more important to me to understand how I got to a solution and thereby be able to upgrade 'problem solving' than what the actual solution is.
I do this by writing a reflection on metacognition after each significant problem solving session. There are infinite ways to do this, here is a recent framework
How to build metacognition reflection into an ‘unconscious habit’?
Occam’s Razor: the more simple a solution the better :)
I simply set a reminder at the start and end of each day saying “have you reflected on metacognition?”
After a while it becomes an 'unconscious habit', I automatically reflect on metacognition at the end of problem solving sessions.
Once this has happened I kill the 'daily reminder'.
How many times have you had thought ‘that is a good idea, I must remember to do that in the future’... then promptly just moved on? Instead of promptly moving on I try to build a prompt (reminder) to cultivate an unconscious habit!
Example 2: No direct brain mouth connection
I’ve seen two types of problems when people are part of a discussion: 1. Don’t say something when they should have or 2. Don’t consider things before they say them there by saying things they shouldn’t have (ie a direct brain-mouth connection).
My process for figuring out what to say = 1. Try to disqualify thought * 2. Articulate thought with the appropriate length
1. Try to disqualify thought = In a discussion I try disqualify any thoughts before I say them. As a general rule of thumb if I’d like to be disqualifying well more than 50% of the thoughts I have from being said.
2. Articulate thought with the appropriate length = should this be a Small (1-2 sentences), Medium (~1x paragraph) or Large (get up and draw something on a whiteboard).
IMO the point of a discussion is not to hear your thoughts aloud, it is to help improve an idea as a team.
How to build ‘no direct brain mouth connection’?
I simply set a reminder at the start and end of each day saying “no direct brain mouth connection”.
After a while it becomes an 'unconscious habit', I automatically reflect on metacognition at the end of problem solving sessions.
Once this has happened I kill the 'daily reminder'.
That’s it people!