I've previously written about the problems of trying to be done before you put something out into the world. But sometimes it can be very difficult to convince yourself to let go of that, especially when you know the thing you're releasing may be imperfect, incomplete, or just not good enough. Today I'd like to share a technique I've found very helpful, which is running dress rehearsals for the release process.
A while back I made a short guitar song for a friend. I'm by no means expert-level at either guitar or singing, but I can make something I wouldn't be offended to have associated with my name – which I figured was good enough. However, even after a couple hours of practice at the song I wasn't at a point where I felt confident to record it and send it. I basically knew what I was doing, but the practice hadn't really come together to make a complete performance.
So I set everything up like it was a performance, and I did a dress rehearsal while recording. Predictably, I wasn't happy with it at first, but after only two more tries I had something that I thought was good enough to send. What I'd done was remove the distinction between "this is a practice run" and "this is a performance run". The two were identical, and I only chose after the fact which it would be.
This might not be possible in every case, of course, but I've found it particularly useful for my (mostly digital) needs. You just act as if you are releasing your work, but with some very minimal safeguard at the end that prevents it from being a real performance.
When the time is right, you just remove the safeguard.
I've recently been thinking about the difference between knowing about doing something, and knowing how to do something. You can read all about badminton from the internet, learn all the rules, join badminton forums, watch badminton games, argue about important badminton-related issues with other fans. Badminton could become your life without you even being able to actually play the game.
This sounds pretty obvious when we talk about sports or other physical pursuits, but we're happy to ignore it when it comes to learning. Consider language education in schools. You are tempted with the delicious bait of learning how to communicate in a new language, but then hit with the switch: grammar. Grammar isn't how to use language, it's about language. All of a sudden you're memorising arbitrary tables of information which, of course, don't help you to actually communicate. I suppose it's no coincidence that immersion learning, widely considered the best method, is built around actual doing.
One of the best books on this is Timothy Gallwey's The Inner Game of Tennis, which describes that exact phenomenon as applied to tennis. Gallwey argues, long before any of the serious work on dual process theory, that you should consider yourself as being made up of a logical reasoning self and an associative, intuitive self. Most people, he argues, teach tennis to the reasoning self, when it's the intuitive self who has to actually play. And isn't that silly?
I'd go a step further and say that most of the time we don't even acknowledge the existence of the associative self. Your reasoning says "I have realised I am eating too much, I will stop doing that", then later there is food in front of you and you eat too much. You are confused. "I knew I didn't want to eat too much, but I ate too much anyway. Maybe I am dumb and broken!" Maybe. But the more likely culprit is trying to use reasoning on your associative self, who simply doesn't understand it. You thought about not eating, you didn't think of how not to eat.
So I think that there is a big gap waiting to be filled along those lines. If the techniques we use for teaching are too rational, too abstract, too about-ish for our associative brain to deal with, then we need new techniques. And I imagine they're going to look totally unlike the way we teach the reasoning self.
There's a really cool kind of error correction called an erasure code, which gives you a super-durable version of a message that, as long as you recover at least some minimum number of bits, you can recover the whole message. It doesn't matter if the bit you're missing is all at the end, all at the start, or randomly spread throughout the message, you can still get it back.
I find the idea of language as error-correction code fascinating, but I don't think anyone is claiming language works anything like an erasure code. Some important words, if you lose them, just mean the sentence is a bust and you have to repeat it. But not all kinds of language are made equal, and there's one particular kind of speech I think deserves particular recognition for its sophisticated error correction, and that's political speech.
The issue with political speech is that you might be taken out of context and your message corrupted or used against you. In official media this is limited to the occasional out-of-context quote, but blogs can do what they like, and people's memories are even worse. There's every chance someone will pick out a few important words they have an issue with and completely forget the rest of your speech. Which is to say, if you want to make robust political speech you need to use something like erasure coding to avoid being misinterpreted.
So, for example, you wouldn't say "I don't believe that children should be made to work in coal mines" because if someone isn't paying attention to the first half they just get "children should be made to work in coal mines". Much better to say something like "I believe that children shouldn't be made to work in coal mines" - no sequence of removed words there can make a sentence that paints your position poorly. I think this is the reason why you see politicans tread so carefully when it comes to speaking about their own positions on issues.
Though actually what's going on is a little more interesting than straight erasure coding. English is by no means comprehensive enough to always guarantee your message will make it through intact but, if you're careful, it can be comprehensive enough to get some other message through. You can say something like "we've seen a massive redistribution of wealth to the top 1% of earners in the last half-century". If you only hear "redistribution of wealth" you think this person supports socialism. If you only hear "top 1%" it makes you think this person supports Occupy Wall Street. Maybe for the right speech, both of those misinterpreations are good enough.
As far as I know, there's never been any serious research into any kind of erasure multi-code, that could resolve into anything in a set of acceptable messages depending on which parts are erased. Presumably that's because for most engineering purposes you want to recover the actual message, not something else. But for politics, well, saying different things to different people with the same words seems to be the holy grail of communication.
I've often heard that to really train effectively and improve at something, you need to be working hard. The Deliberate Practice paper, in fact, suggests that you should be working so hard that you can only manage it for a few hours, and maybe considerably less than that. This is a sort of supreme effort, pushing at the absolute frontier of your current capabilites in order to expand them.
By contrast, I've come to believe that really creative, playful and fun work only happens when you are not working too hard. That is, when your current efforts are below your capabilities. When you're giving everything to the inherent difficulty of your current task, there is nothing left over for unnecessary difficulty. Adding frills to your garment, flourishes to your magic trick, a garnish on your meal; these frivolous things aren't possible if you're struggling just to get it done at all.
I think there's a lot of value in that frivolity. Perhaps the most famous example is Feynman's wobbling plates, which he started messing around with for fun and ended up winning a Nobel Prize for. But even if your fun doesn't score you a meeting with the King of Sweden, it can still be valuable. Being able to play in the space you care about strikes me as inherently meaningful and I think the act of creation is itself meaningful in proportion to how creative that creation is.
But you can't get to that place where you can have fun with it if you never practice hard enough to make it easy. And people who are truly great manage to be creative even at very hard things. Is that a contradiction? I don't believe so. Rather, what you consider hard has become easy to them. When they practice, they are doing even greater uncreative work that you don't get to see.
So it seems to me that easy mode and hard mode, far from being opposites, are in fact complements. The easy mode provides creativity, fun, and new directions for the hard mode, and the hard mode is what allows the easy mode to exist at all.
In a conversation today one of my favourite topics came up: Aeroplane Problems. I don't mean problems with aeroplanes, but rather problems that are like inventing the aeroplane, where there are lots of different factors that all have to go right before you ever get off the ground.
An Aeroplane Problem is often poorly understood, which makes it difficult to solve because you can't tell exactly what's going wrong. "It's still on the ground" could be caused by any number of failures. If you think you've fixed the failure but nothing's moving, it could be that you haven't actually fixed it, or it could be that you have fixed it and there are still more issues. Worse still, maybe when you fix that next issue this one will un-fix itself again.
Aeroplane Problems are often deceptively simple to explain. "I want it just like it is now, but flying" is an easy thing to say, but actual flight requires mastering complexity far out of proportion to the simplicity of that goal. It can be a very long time between defining an aeroplane problem and even seeing something that resembles success. This can be enormously demotivating.
And to me, the classic (non-aviation) Aeroplane Problem is motivation, or maybe something closer what Covey called effectiveness. To consistently get good work done requires a lot of different things: meaningful work, good working habits, discipline, enjoyment, and probably more I don't know about. When these things fail and we stop wanting to do work, it's easy to assign labels like laziness or procrastination, but those are just synonyms for "not working". There's no reason to think they're any more meaningful than a bunch of different words for "plane crash". The plane's still crashed, and we still don't know why.
So how do you solve an Aeroplane Problem? Well, the only way I can think of is to break it down until it's a bunch of smaller, more tractable problems. The issue is that doing that requires theory. Now that we (basically) understand aerodynamics, aeroplanes are no longer an Aeroplane Problem. Chemistry got rid of the Aeroplane Problems of alchemy. And maybe someday motivation will have a theory complete enough to solve it too.
