Good Life Project - Why the Best of the Best Always Have Teachers

Episode Date: August 11, 2016

What does it ACTUALLY take to be great? Over the last decades, we’ve learned that practice, alone, isn’t enough. You need to make your practice “deliberate,” with a fierce focus on assessing and improving. In this sense, becoming mesmerizingly good might have more to do with being purposeful than obsessed. Thing is, this type of […]The post Why the Best of the Best Always Have Teachers appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

so it's been a little while since i've done a good life project riff and we've slowly been shifting the schedule around you probably noticed it so that we're doing actually fewer episodes and now we're gonna make that final shift and this is in response to a survey that we gave to you guys a couple months back where you said hey hey, this is what we really want. So we're going to move over to a once-a-week format with a riff and a once-a-week with a long-form conversation. And that's going to keep rolling as of today.

Today's riff is entitled, You're Never Too Good to Ask for Help. And it unfolds in four acts. Act one, Stripped Bear. So I'm standing in the middle of Michael Port's pretty cavernous living room in New Hope, Pennsylvania, with vaulted ceilings and a towering wall of windows open to the woods behind it. And Port is in his typical jeans and black t-shirt, and he's sitting in a chair silhouetted

against the glass, glasses on and facing in. I am in no uncertain terms, completely and utterly on display, which is also exactly where I've asked to be with great unease. He watches my every move, listens to my every word, notepad in his lap, observing and scribbling. And I flail about and fumbling for words, awkwardly moving, working desperately to maintain even a modicum of respect. And he stops me over and over and over and over. Look out, not down. Don't move unless you have a reason. Stay here for just a moment longer, then move slowly, stage or kitchen right. What if we told it this way instead of that way? Good, good. Wrap your arm around that

imaginary person. Let it drop once you begin to talk. No, no, say it more humbly. Slow down. Okay, now give it a moment. Back to the beginning. And again, and again, and again. You know, I want to say, I am a professional. I'm normally better than this. Yet here I stand, a complete and utter spaz, stripped bare. And it's exactly what I hoped would happen. Every uncomfortable moment, it is in fact pure gold. Act two, at what cost? Mastery. So I'm sitting in my hideaway recording studio at Good Life Project HQ on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. And Professor K. Anders Erickson, a man whose work has literally fascinated me for years, my guest, and the mics are on. Erickson's research is the source material for what's become known as the 10,000-hour rule.

It's the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to become world-class at pretty much anything, which I'm about to be told is wrong on so many levels. It's a misinterpretation and misapplication of his work. He actually details all of this in his recent book, Peak Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. So this isn't news to me, by the way. What intrigues me, though, is something different. It's the question I've wanted to ask Erickson since I read his original research more than a decade ago. Regardless of the time it takes to become extraordinary, what is clear to me, what's clear to everybody is that we're still measuring in units of thousands, if not tens of thousands of hours, not just doing, but practicing in a very specific, focused, iterative, and critical way. Deliberate practice, Erickson calls it.

Jamming with the band, the weaker poker game, getting lost in a canvas or playing doubles on the weekend. That's nice, but it's not what he's talking about. What he's talking about is practicing with the intent to analyze and improve. Focusing on one specific thing, doing it, repeating it, critiquing it, trying to do it differently in a way that's better ad nauseum, day in, day out, for years, if not decades. Deliberate practice, Anders offers, is not often fun. It's hard, slow work, experienced by many as anywhere from grueling to unforgiving, regardless of the domain. This, he says, is what it actually takes to be great. And my question, the one I've been so keen to ask is this. If this practice is so often experienced as unforgiving, bordering on times as brutal,

what makes someone keep doing it long enough to reach a level of mastery, to become world-class great? Beyond some kind of masochistic impulse or domineering parent, what keeps the best of the best bleeding onto the page or the canvas or the strings or the court long enough to be mesmerizingly good? Act three, the teacher. So nobody gets there alone, especially to the top. Time served is definitely one piece, as Erickson says, but the critical skill of figuring out what's working and what's not working, how to do it better, that's a brutally hard thing to do in a vacuum. From the inside

looking out, you're always kept by both your own skills of perception and the constraints of the data set that you've accumulated along the way. An accomplished teacher not only changes practice into deliberate practice, she makes it what Erickson calls purposeful practice. She not only changes practice into deliberate practice, she makes it what Erickson calls purposeful practice. She not only sees what you can't, but is able to draw from a vastly larger set of experiences and models and solutions. And this lets her help you progress in three distinct ways. One, it removes blindness. So she makes your blind spots visible. She lets you see what you previously could not. Two, she installs new models. So she's better resourced to share entire approaches and methodologies, ideas, strategies, tactics, nuanced shifts, and tweaks that can

shortcut the path to expertise, often leapfrogging past the time it would have taken you to figure out the same by experimentation, if you ever could have at all. And number three, she blends process with progress. And here is where the answer I sought for years begins to take shape. She creates and eases you through an incremental process designed to offset the angst of deliberate practice with a small series of meaningful wins, stoking those embers of what Harvard Business School Director of Research, Teresa Maboulet, calls the greatest motivator of all. What is that? It's progress. So this last bit, the number three, is a thing that it's not often covered in literature or popular press, the quiet progress approach, you know, guided by a generous and wise teacher, often seeking not the limelight but the shadows,

and leaving a lineage of masters in her wake. These are the Mr. Miyagis of the world, with their elusively simple yet profound and progressive demeanors and methodologies. And though they may be all around us, we don't actually often hear about them all that often because they don't seek to be seen, and they don't provoke attention or sell clicks or gather eyeballs on the level of the maniacal teacher tyrant

who breaks down and torments disciples, only to watch them inevitably implode under the weight of the teacher's oppression and their own self-mutilation. The right teacher or collection of teachers can be a powerful catalyst for action, even when that action is hard and must be sustained for a seemingly impossible amount of time. And let's take it home to our final number four here, school. So if a teacher is so important, why don't we continue to seek them out for life?

Truly extraordinary teachers, just like truly accomplished people in any field, they're often not easy to find. Once found, they often have extreme limitations on access. So when you can help people accomplish what nobody else can, word travels. And still, that's not the main barrier for most of us, though. So then what is? Well, two words, fear and hubris. It's not just about finding a teacher. It's about being willing to be taught, being a student again, owning our own ignorance, being the novice, being vulnerable to criticism. We've worked our whole lives to become the person who knows something. Surrender, the further we get into life, well, it's a brutally hard pursuit.

And few of us stand bare with grace, me included. Yet it's the place that our next best selves take root. We've all heard the proverb, when the student is ready, the teacher will arrive. I still don't actually entirely buy that. The teacher may never arrive. You may have to go out and find her. But what I've come to believe is this. Until we open to the possibility of being taught, until we surrender to the notion that as far as we've come, we need help to take the next step, until we are willing to not just ask for, but also receive help. Whether the teacher arrives

or not is irrelevant because until that moment, we will not see them. We will not invite them in. We will not allow ourselves to step into the discomfort of surrender and rebask in the gift of growth. We'll continue on closing ourselves to possibility and wondering when and why everything started going sideways. So I've been told probably many of times that the best of the best always have a teacher. Now some 50 years into life, I'm actually finally beginning to understand why and learning how to drop my own shields

bit by ego band-aid ripping bit. Is it easy? No, not at all. But it is essential to who I yearn to become and what I want to create. So my question is, what about you? Are you ready to not only ask for, but to receive help? Something to think on as we wrap up this week's Good Life Project Riff. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. Hey, thanks so much for listening.

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