In Pursuit of Mastery: The Four Stages of Competence
TLDR; Here’s a Notion Template for Tracking your Progress through the 4 stages of competence
👋 Hey friends,
I’ve always been fascinated by the process people take to become exceptional. I’ve never cared what specific skill someone’s taken the time to build, I’m more interested in what it takes to achieve mastery. So, today I want to talk about a framing for the skill building process that’s helped me demystify the art of mastering difficult things.
The first time I wanted to get really good at something was the Christmas of 2010. I was 12. The skill — Call of Duty. Prior to this, I’d always striven, but there was an air of extrinsic motivation. I wanted to be good at Taekwondo so my instructor wouldn’t yell at me. I wanted to be good at guitar because I wanted to make my parents proud. Call of Duty was the first time a skill was mine and mine alone. It’s funny, but the lessons I learned in the pursuit of the highest Kill to Death Ratio in Call of Duty Black Ops 1 have served me in everything I’ve done since.
Last week I was accepted into my PhD program of choice. In preparation, I’m reflecting on my processes and asking myself the question: How can I master the skill of doing great research? So here’s the route through this blog, I’m going to tell you the stages I went through to become rank 2000 in Call of Duty Black Ops 3 (yeah, I know, weird flex but we’re rolling with it). Then we’re going to generalize the process and discuss how I plan to apply it to academia.
Stage 1: Unconscious Incompetence
⁉️ You don’t even know what you don’t know
When I first started playing, I had no aims, no goals, no plans. When I died or lost I didn’t know why and I was woefully ill-equipped to discern the cause. This is the state of Unconscious Incompetence. Identifying what differentiates a good player from a bad player, is one of the toughest problems you face in a journey to mastery. When you don’t know what you don’t know, how can you improve? I could have continued to wander aimlessly in game, hoping to intuit what actions lead to good outcomes, but as a 12 year old eager to impress his friends, I needed a faster route. This is when I turned to the experts.
My strategy was to learn by contrast. I became obsessive about watching call of duty youtubers before and after school. But I didn’t just observe, I analyzed. I sat down, notebook in hand, and listed all the ways I noticed these masters played the game differently than I did. I found that they kept their crosshairs higher so that they had a shorter distance to move when they came across an opponent, they navigated the periphery of the map instead of the center, they chose specific weapons and equipment. All of this went into my notebook, and then into my practice that evening.
💡 Learn by Contrast: What do your heroes do differently than you?
Nothing about this process is unique to me. What I was doing was uncovering expert behaviours and practices by observation. Left to my own devices, the sheer number of options I could have tried and assessed in the hopes of improving my skill would’ve taken forever to explore. Analyzing the experts is a meta-heuristic — a way to narrow down the number of options to just the things most likely to solve your problem — getting better at Call of Duty. I think this is the best way to escape complete novice-hood — the fastest route to becoming Consciously Incompetent.
So how do I apply this to research? In much the same way. I’m starting by assuming I am unconsciously incompetent — that I don’t even know the skills, knowledge, and habits I need to build to become a great researcher. To address this, I’m picking a few of the greats and analyzing how they do research differently than I do. The quickest way to do this is to pick researchers in my field — in this case Human Computer Interaction and Computer Science Education — and break down their papers. I’ll do an in depth post on the way I do this later, but for now these are my general steps. I ask:
- Within the context of the work around them at the time, how does THIS research question fit in? What about it is novel? How did they argue that it’s novel? How did the literature they review lead them to that conclusion?
- How did they answer that research question? More specifically, what methods did they use? How do those methods compare to other methods they could’ve used? How did they execute this specific method better than others in the field?
- How did they craft their writing to present their work in the best light possible? What’s the structure of the paper? How do the sections come together to form a coherent argument? What is the purpose of each section? How do they build up those sections well? What are the words and phrases that feel most compelling?
There’s plenty more questions but that’s what I’m trying to get at when I decompose someone else’s work. I want to learn not just WHAT they did but HOW they did it. How is the key. I want to know how so that I can do it too. This is how we move to Conscious Competence — identifying *HOW *experts do great work and trying to do it ourselves.
Stage 2: Conscious Incompetence
⁉️ Knowing WHAT makes an expert, but not knowing **HOW **to act like on
Great, so at this point, I’m 12 and demoralized by the mountain of little skills and behaviours I don’t have that the best call of duty players do. At this point, I knew what needed to change but didn’t know how to start.
This became a case study in reducing scope to stay focused. I picked a handful of skills at a time and reduced them to heuristics. I’d give myself two or three things to try out for a week. This included things like: When you’re navigating the map, stick to the outskirts so that there are fewer lines of sight on you. When you’re entering a room, check your corners for enemies. When you’re using a weapon with lots of recoil, pull down slightly as you fire to counteract it and stay on target.
Notice the form of these prompts “When you’re perform ”. This simple analysis does a few things to help. When you’re in the middle of a game, overloaded with sounds, sights, and the desire to win … or at least suck less … it’s difficult to think about the entire list of things I SHOULD be doing better. Instead I picked a handful and listed specific scenarios that trigger the action a skillful player would take.
💡 Pick a few things at a time and give yourself Concrete Cues for skillful action
The state of Conscious Incompetence is knowing what you’re doing wrong and not knowing what to do about it. Escaping it is all about building an actionable plan. You can’t implement every good behaviour all at once or you’d freeze yourself trying to recall all the right moves. Instead, we take 2 to 3 at a time and make them really obvious. “When I see X do Y”. Simple as that. You can dig a little deeper later, but at this stage the most important thing to do is give yourself followable rules for calling on good behaviours.
As for my academic pursuits, it’s a little more broad but I think the same approach still works. I use cues like “when I’m writing a related works section, try to establish the gap your research is attempting to fill and similar solutions in adjacent areas of research” or “Before I design software, CLEARLY identify the problem I want to solve”. More generally, I’m creating a list of behaviours, mindsets, habits, etc. that great researchers have and giving myself concrete cues to remind myself of when to act on them.
Stage 3: Conscious Competence
⁉️ When doing the right things is effortful
Okay, so now I’ve built up a reasonably sized list of behaviours that I’m *actively *thinking about in game. But there’s only so many things I can keep in my working memory at a time. As an aspiring Call of Duty leaderboard topper, I can’t hold every good behaviour in my 12 year old brain all at once. Consciously noting “okay Nathan, you’re entering a room … remember to check both corners for bad guys! That’s what Hutch would do!” doesn’t scale. There are just too many behaviours in expert play to consciously recall them all at the right times. So what do I do? Practice until it becomes first nature.
I noticed that after a couple days of practicing my little trios of skills and behaviours became automatic. I no longer had to consciously recall them — they were engrained. This freed me up to take on a new set of behaviours that I could consciously recall while the rest went on effortlessly.
This was the process:
- Pick 3 new behaviours to actively recall during game
- Consciously call out the stimulus (entering a room for example), and the behaviour (check your corners)
- Repeat this for a few days until it becomes automatic
- Repeat steps 1 to 3 until your Kill Death Ratio is lunch table bragging rights worthy
💡 Automate good behaviours through repetition
So Conscious Competence is the state of knowing what the good behaviours are, being able to do them, but having to actively recall them. Escaping Conscious Competence requires repeating those behaviours until they became automatic. This is how we progress to Unconscious Competence — when you’re so good, the good stuff *just happens. *
How do I bring this in to academia? I think this is about internalizing the process. I want to bring this into my writing first. I believe the focus should be, first and foremost, on crafting a rock solid argument and designing great science around it. But, there’s no getting around the fact that good writing is a big part of whether or not I get published. So, I want to automate the skill of writing well by repetition. That’s why I’m writing these blog posts. I want to think about the science and the argument and trust that I’ve internalized and automated the skill of writing about it well. That’s not to say I won’t take the time to revise and edit later, but as a computer scientist first, writing doesn’t come easy to me. I often get tripped up or am hesitant to begin writing. I need to feel fluent enough that writing isn’t a barrier to getting my ideas across. Pretty writing can come later. First, effective writing.
Stage 4: Unconscious Competence
So, 12 year old Call of Duty player, Nathan Laundry, has gone from bewildered fawn on the battlefield to a respectable opponent. He’s identified what behaviours separate him from the greats, come up with cues to get him to act on them, and automated the most important ones ie. turned them into habits.
At this point, I was unconsciously competent in a lot of ways. But I was frustrated — I still wasn’t quite as good as the greats. What was left to do?
This is where I turned my attention away from automating good behaviours, to de-automatizing bad behaviours. I went back to basics. I started re-analyzing the players I looked up to, this time looking for all the things they weren’t doing that I was. I noticed things like: they wouldn’t enter particular buildings under certain conditions, they wouldn’t take fights unless they were in their favour from the start ie. they didn’t rely on their mechanical skill being greater than their opponents, they avoided situations with multiple enemies.
So there I was, returning to square one but with a different goal: identify things you’ve unwittingly automated, come up with cues for those, and remind yourself to avoid them. It went like this “When you see an enemy, you usually just go for it, instead assess ‘would you still win this fight if your opponent had better aim than you?’ Only take the fight if so”.
💡 Repeat Stages 1 to 3 with a new perspective
So what was I really doing here? I put myself back in stage 1 on purpose. I had built up a stack of great habits that made me really good, but to be great, I had to kill the bad habits I’d built up. I was Unconsciously Incompetent about my bad behaviours so I switched perspectives: instead of identifying the skills that made the experts different from me, I was looking for the poor implicit decisions that made me different from them.
The general cue here was “When you usually do , instead do <Analysis Z or Good Behaviour Z’>”
So how do I apply this to research. There’s probably a million little ways I’m doing things sub-optimally. I bet I could review literature more effectively and come up with better ways to extract the key concepts. I’m sure I could be spending my time more effectively or studying topics that are more impactful to my career, or selecting more pressing research questions to address. My plan, while fairly vague, is to constantly assume that I am Unconsciously Incompetent in a myriad of ways, and always be looking for the ways I can reduce bad behaviours, not just ways I can build good ones.
Cheers,
Nathan Laundry
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