Background Ops #3: Entrainment
NOTHING CRITICAL
“While being trained, the student is to be active and dynamic in every way. But in actual combat, his mind must be calm and not at all disturbed. He must feel as if nothing critical is happening. When he advances, his steps should be light and secure, his eyes not fixed and glaring insanely at the enemy. His behavior should not be in any way different from his everyday behavior, no change taking place in his expression, nothing betraying the fact that he is engaged in mortal combat.”
— Bruce Lee, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, 1975
***
FREEFALL
“The jump master gives the nod and yells “Go!” There’s a sucking in of breath, then you step out and whooom. Reflex wants you to close your eyes and wait until it is all over before you open them again, but you fight it and win. The first moment out of the plane is like being in a washing machine. You get a sensation of being yanked and dragged around. Finally you relax, you reach terminal velocity, and the wind current cradles you.
Suddenly you become conscious of your body. You look at your buddy’s face and it’s going blu-blu-blu, shock waves of air hitting skin at 130 miles an hour. We perform our rehearsed routine then clear away from one another.
I look down at my altimeter, 2,500 feet, no problem. Waving off, I look up; nobody is ahead of me, no one is to the side of me, and, most importantly, no one is above me. I reach down, find the main parachute’s ripcord, and pull my chute.
Nothing happens.
I say to myself, You’re supposed to pull it no more than three times. I lock on to the ripcord once more. I pull.
It doesn’t release. Oh, man.
I say, Okay, this third time I’m going to make this thing release. At this point I retract the hand I was using to keep myself stable in the air so I can use both hands to pull. But what’s happening to my head? It’s going straight down to earth. I’m picking up speed dramatically. Where is my parachute? On my back. Where are my feet? Directly in line with the parachute when it opens.
Bad mistake. A beginner’s mistake. A dead man’s mistake.
Wham! And I jerk the parachute free. Suddenly I can feel it — my chute wraps around my foot. And I’m just thinking, Oh God. This is a bad parachute malfunction for one reason: I can’t pull a reserve parachute, because if I pull my reserve parachute, I know what happens. It goes up in line with the first one. If my reserve gets tied up in my main parachute, I’m steak tartare. There’s no doubt about it. It’s crystal clear.
Before I can cut away the first parachute, I have to clear it off my body. I can feel it flapping around on my legs, on my back, doing everything but opening.
That’s when it attacked me: The Panic. Decision making, rational thinking, start to shut down…”
— Richard Machowicz, Unleash the Warrior Within, 2000
***
TSR’S SERIES ON BACKGROUND OPS, ISSUE #3: ENTRAINMENT
There’s a challenge in front of me.
Could I reason through it with you?
I have a subject matter here that is useful — incredibly useful — it leads to thriving. It is life-affirming. It is the basis of the majority of truly great deeds and works throughout history; at the same time, it is the root of tranquility and freedom.
And yet…
Hmm.
I have something that, if I could get truly burn the validity of it into your mind and emotions, if it was felt viscerally, would become something you craved the utmost and pursued doggedly to develop it.
It’s not the only key to unshackling yourself from whatever things which have a grip on you, but surely, it is one of them. Everyone is changed who viscerally gets it — to greater or lesser extent.
But I have only words. Words that might be intellectually convincing, maybe, if I craft them adequately. I can certainly point in the direction of this power source, but so much the better would be to be scalded and seared by it, to have it burnt into you. To have it felt such that it can’t be un-felt.
That — sadly — I suspect I lack the ability to do.
Perhaps no one has that ability.
As such, perhaps the depth of this lesson — even if I can harness whatever skill in documenting it — perhaps the depth of this lesson can only really touch someone who has already experienced it.
Certainly — some people have experienced it.
The soldier who thought they were going to literally die during basic training — only to later find themselves in a surreal calmness when shots were ringing out on patrol in foreign and hostile lands.
The athlete who had to dig deep into their bone and sinew to complete the competition; the athlete whose mind was already half-ablaze and near-insane from the pain who, still running, somehow finds themselves drenched in exhaustion at the finish line — and what else could not be overcome?
The person who, on the verge of seeming disintegration after personal loss and hardship accumulated to an unendurable degree — who discovered that time had passed and they had, in fact, endured. We never so much appreciate the calm, as when we realize that the seemingly endless storm has passed. Sometimes a tear comes to the eye.
If you’ve experienced it, it will resonate right away —
Training is freedom.
The stakes are no more or less than that. But while this might be easy to grasp intellectually, to even be excited about for a brief flash of hot determination — but could we burn this coldly into our hearts and eyes?
***
ORGANIZED DESPAIR
The first three sections of Bruce Lee’s posthumous Tao of Jeet Kune Do are pleasant enough: the section headings are “Zen,” “Art of the Soul,” “Jeet Kune Do.” There’s nothing particularly objectionable in the first three sections.
The fourth section, though…
Organized Despair.
I laughed when I read it. I figure, everyone reacts to that heading — it demands a response. You’re either going to laugh or cringe. (Or, perhaps, both.) Lee –
“In the long history of the martial arts, the instinct to follow and imitate seems inherent in most martial artists, instructors and students alike. This is partly due to human tendency and partly because of the steep traditions behind multiple patterns of styles. Consequently, to find a refreshing, original, master teacher is a rarity. The need for a “pointer of the way” echoes.
[…] Instead of facing combat in its suchness, then, most systems of martial art accumulate a “fancy mess” that distorts and cramps their practitioners and distracts them from the actual reality of combat, which is simple and direct. Instead of going immediately to the heart of things, flowery forms (organized despair) and artificial techniques are ritually practiced to simulate actual combat. Thus, instead of “being” in combat these practitioners are “doing” something “about” combat.
[…] When you get down to it, real combat is not fixed and is very much “alive.” The fancy mess (a form of paralysis) solidifies and conditions what was once fluid, and when you look at it realistically, it is nothing but a blind devotion to the systematic uselessness of practicing routines or stunts that lead nowhere.”
Lee’s writing is persuasive. You read it, you think: “Oh, this makes sense.”
He continues in that vein — “In martial arts cultivation, there must be a sense of freedom. A conditioned mind is never a free mind. Conditioning limits a person within the framework of a particular system.”
It’s convincing. Conditioning and concentration are fundamentally exclusionary. Reality is not static. Convincing, indeed.
But then, at just about the moment you’re convinced that systems are “organized despair” to be abandoned, Lee comes at you with things like –
“Well-executed movement means the nervous system has been trained to the point where it sends impulses to certain muscles, causing these muscles to contract at exactly the proper fraction of a second. At the same time, impulses to the antagonistic muscles are shut off, allowing these muscles to relax. Properly coordinated impulses surge with just he exact intensity required and they stop at the exact fraction of a second when they are no longer needed.”
Hmm.
***
THE PANIC
Machowicz –
“That’s when it attacked me: The Panic. Decision making, rational thinking, start to shut down. I’ve got one thing going for me: I have been trained by the best in the world. The better your conditioning, the better your training, the quicker you get through that moment when panic seizes you. But that split second it takes to recognize fear and move past it feels like eternity.
Then, the rush kicks in. “Okay,” I quickly say to myself. What do I have to do? The answer: Get this parachute off. How do I do it? I slowly reach down with my right hand toward my leg so I can get the parachute off from where it’s wrapped around my foot and my shin. I have to be careful because if I flip over into the parachute then I’m wearing the whole thing, completely tied up, going headfirst straight to the ground. I’ve got to be meticulous and focused. Everything in my world is focused on clearing my leg and staying in balance. Just for a second I see the ground, but tear my eyes away. I know ground rush, that hypnotic pull of gravity, just sucks you right in.
Finally it comes free. The parachute deploys and all of a sudden I feel it clear. Now I’m traveling anywhere from 150 to 180 miles an hour, with the chute deployed. The next two seconds seem to take minutes. Even though the parachute is released and it’s slowing me down, I’m still headed to earth head first. My body is going in one direction, the parachute is going in the other direction, and then —
Whip! It finally catches and hurls me upright. The only thing I can do is just go limp. If I had kept my body tense I would have gone right back through the risers of the chute and been caught like a dolphin in a tuna net. I look down at my altimeter. Five hundred feet left, time to guide my parachute and land on the ground.
Dirt never felt so good.”
Years later, back in civilian life, Machowicz would reflect –
“Fear is by definition defensive and reactive. During my bad jump, the thought that kept repeating was, What do I have to get done? What do I have to get done? What do I have to get done. . . . The more you think about fear, the more you start to shut down your thinking. We know that a thought precedes every action, so if I’m spending thoughts on fear I’m reducing the availability of thoughts needed to take effective action. As a result, the less ability you’re going to bring to solving the situation presented to you.
There’s a well-known saying among men who have been in the military: In combat, a man’s brains turn to water and run out his ears. Warriors train at such an intense level exactly for this reason — if you don’t know how to handle it, fear will shut you down.”
***
BACKGROUND OPERATIONS
We are in the midst of exploring Background Operations. As we investigate, Sir Alfred North Whitehead’s quote rings in our ears –
“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
As with civilization, so too with individuals.
“Individuals advance by extending the number of important operations which they can perform without thinking about them” — yes, that’s still a true formulation.
This is where entrainment comes in. It’s a slightly non-standard usage of the word, but I never found another word without baggage that did the job better. “Conditioning” has a variety of unnecessary and undesirable connotations, “habituation” is part of it but not all of it, and simply “training” by itself can be effective or ineffective, and does not always lead to successful entrainment.
Even in the most routine and simple situations, the average person makes far more decisions than they realize — some of these are explicit and reasoned-through; the majority are not. You can’t get through a single day without making hundreds if not thousands of decisions of varying sizes.
The upper-bound on human action seems to be somewhere in the hundreds-per-minute range — we explored the concept in the past Limit Breaks series, noting that high-level Starcraft players regularly clock in at 300+ Actions Per Minute.
In real life, high-level counterterrorist operators regularly make dozens to hundreds of high-precision life-or-death decisions in the span of 2–3 minutes, in crowded and confusing environments, during an operation.
Our everyday lives, thankfully, are not such high stakes as counterterrorism.
But we can learn from elite soldiers, and likewise martial artists, and likewise high-level athletes, and likewise, those who perform the best in finance or the sciences or even competitive gaming.
So what would happen if you realized you were, at times, making thousands of implicit decisions per day?
It might occur to you that if you were to make even a small percentage of better decisions in those situations, your life would unfold much differently.
This leads to another question –
How do you automatically make more-correct-than-not decisions?
As far as I can tell from the analysis of people who regularly make decisions under the harshest and most unforgiving of environments, there is an answer –
Entrainment.
***
THE FIRST TWO CUTS
I know it’s possible to entrain useful behaviors across one’s life — you can study and design your future actions to systematically do hundreds and later thousands of individual little actions in a smarter way, to gradually encode smarter responses to however many of the infinitely varied stimuli that appear in your life.
This in and of itself is valuable and worth-pursuing. However, I believe it’s only the tip of the iceberg. The real gain, the real magic, is in entraining a series of universally adaptive behaviors that make one more fit to approach any stimuli conceivable.
But we should first look at why people don’t do it. The first and largest two cuts might be said to be rigidity and ignorance.
Rigidity is straightforward enough. As Bruce Lee wrote,
”The fancy mess (a form of paralysis) solidifies and conditions what was once fluid, and when you look at it realistically, it is nothing but a blind devotion to the systematic uselessness of practicing routines or stunts that lead nowhere.”
Examples of this type are always specific — a person is unable to improve their performance because they are attached to a current way of doing things, and are past the point of questioning fundamental assumptions. For instance, in regard to fighting and martial arts, Lee writes –
“Western boxing is too over-daring because of restrictions on illegal and “unfair” tactics as compared to the over-protectiveness of the Oriental martial arts caused by the no-hold-barred, full bodily target. In addition, the no-contact practice of stopping the attacks several inches in front of the target in the Oriental martial arts creates a habitual false sense of distance.”
This is easy enough to understand intellectually — perhaps harder to recognize when we are in the grips of fundamental assumptions. It is something to note and be aware of, but I think it is the less common of the two big problems that would permit a maximal training regime and healthful entrainment.
The second big nasty cut, I think, is the more common. Machowicz, during his near-fatal parachute malfunction in training –
“That’s when it attacked me: The Panic. Decision making, rational thinking, start to shut down. […] I’ve got to be meticulous and focused. Everything in my world is focused on clearing my leg and staying in balance. Just for a second I see the ground, but tear my eyes away. I know ground rush, that hypnotic pull of gravity, just sucks you right in.”
“Rigidity” is easy to name, and often easy to recognize — at least, in other people.
This second thing… is harder to name and harder to recognize.
I’ll grudgingly call it “ignorance” but I think that’s the not quite the right word for it. Some of the time people are making bad decisions, it’s because of ignorance or obliviousness — they either didn’t know there was a better way of doing things, or didn’t know they were blundering at all.
But that’s not quite it. Machowicz described it, I think, quite well — under the stress of the moment, his decisionmaking and rational thinking started to shut down. And then, this –
“Just for a second I see the ground, but tear my eyes away. I know ground rush, that hypnotic pull of gravity, just sucks you right in.”
What is that? “Fixation” perhaps. It’s possible to become fixated on an unpleasant stimuli to the expense of one’s capacity for action.
Obviously, most situations are not as pressing as a parachute malfunction during free-fall. But I think the same phenomenon that could have led to Machowicz failing to right himself happens, to a less extreme extent, in many bad situations. In the face of pain or unpleasantness, we get stuck in the hypnotic pull of gravity… instead of reasoning how to avoid hitting the ground at maximum speed.
***
THE THIRD CUT
You can fail to do better in a situation by either avoiding the problem, being ignorant of it, or by fixating on it excessively on the problem to the exclusion of thinking about our potential responses.
Lee: “To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.”
We also would do well to not be too confident in what we already know, and to periodically see if our current way of doing things could be improved.
Lee: “When you are uninfluenced, when you die to the conditioning of classical responses, then you will know awareness and see things totally fresh, totally new.”
These are common issues — they block potential advances for many people — but with an awareness of them and occasional introspection, they are likely to fall aside.
The third cut, I think, is devastating in particular to intellectually-inclined people.
At this stage, we’re dealing firmly with problems in a real-world sort of way. This leads to the first piece of guidance, then — simply study any unstudied behavior of yours, think what the ideal behavior would be in that type of situation, and design a training regime so you gradually adopt that behavior and it becomes gradually automatic.
But this is where many people fail — particularly smart people. There are actually universal best practices to learning and training, most people do not know them, and most people violate them.
Therefore, most people don’t get anywhere near as much as they could from their training. It underperforms if it doesn’t fail outright.
It’s remarkable when you read the work of anyone who was both a teacher and a practitioner of a physical pursuit — they all say extremely similar things. In martial arts, in marksmanship, in basketball, in piloting an airplane — it’s remarkable how similar the guidance of teacher-practitioners are across fields.
Bruce Lee was obviously a skilled martial artist and a skilled martial arts instructor. Likewise, Machowicz was an elite soldier in the U.S. Navy SEAL Teams and, later, both a sniper instructor and martial arts teacher.
They said remarkably similar things about designing one’s training.
Lee –
“Speed of perception is somewhat affected by the distribution of the observer’s attention — fewer separate choices, faster action. When the cue to be recognized is likely to be one of several, each of which requires a different response, the time is lengthened. Choice reaction takes longer than simple reaction. This is the basis for training the tools in terms of neurophysiological adjustment towards instinctive economy. Instinctive movement, being the simplest, is the quickest and most accurate.”
Machowicz –
“Combat requires the ability to focus like nothing else. In combat, action has to be simple and it has to stay simple. Under the life-or-death pressure of an attack, even the slightest complexity will lead to confusion, and confusion can get you killed.”
If you read through their works — or indeed, any sound guidance on coaching or learning — you start to see patterns. Both emphasize correct fundamentals first. Lee admonishes the reader to train precision before power; Machowicz’s Training Pyramid goes “Correct Fundamentals, Concentration, Consistency, Accuracy, Speed” — in that order.
Both emphasize good form, simplicity, and economy of both motion and effort.
There are best practices to learning and training. You need to learn them.
Smart people, in particular, seem often prone to mostly grasp the basics of something quickly and excitedly move on to intermediate and advanced materials — with a shaky foundation. This leads to either failure or much more effort later to unlearn the bad foundational behaviors that have been heavily built on top of — which is more expensive and unpleasant than just taking the time early on to get the fundamentals down.
Likewise, smart people seem to often get bored easily — perhaps a function of excess mental RAM — and thus make things excessively and unnecessarily complicated. This nearly always leads to failure — in fact, it’s probably the most common reason that otherwise smart and hard-working people fail. If you’re doing something simple and fundamentally sound, if you’re doing it with basic competence, and you’re working hard at it — then you should be getting good results. People who are smart and hard-working often fail by making excessively complicated, nigh-unwinnable situations for themselves.
(I don’t say this flippantly or dismissively. I did it for years. It’s one of the few regrets I have — all the excessive intellectual complexity seems very silly and pointless in retrospect.)
In any event, we can’t do justice to everything related to setting up a training program in this one brief piece — do pick up Machowicz’s Unleash the Warrior Within or Lee’s Tao of Jeet Kune Do or really any work by a high-level practitioner that covers learning and guidance. Read their rules. Study them. Apply them.
***
GUIDANCE ON BUILDING TOWARDS MAX-THRIVING ENTRAINMENT
You make at least hundreds of implicit decisions every day.
Often, thousands.
You can make many of those decisions better.
To do that, you need to study a particular behavior that happens in your life, identify the best way to do that behavior, build a training program for yourself to do the behavior, and run the training until the new behavior becomes automatic.
Last issue, Background Ops #2: Keystone, lays out one key piece of keeping track of everything you’re working on. As long as you’ve got a keystone — you could use a Lights Spreadsheet, but any type of keystone will do — then you simply slot any new behavior to do into it, and go from there.
After that, here is my core recommendation, then, and it might sound counterintuitive –
Build the general skill of studying, designing training regimes, and running the training for yourself on easy, near-automatic stuff.
It’s common — for obvious reasons — for people to start working on the general skill of permanently changing their behavior by attempting to change whatever is most painful to them.
I think that’s risky, because it gives you two points of failure. You can fail at the general skill of designing and running training for yourself until it sticks, or you can buckle under the pain or difficulty of whatever the issue is.
Take, for instance, someone who is great at sales but who manages money poorly. Probably, money management is hard for him or her. It would be much easier to start by taking a behavior that operated more like sales — such as making a better protocol to stay in touch with old friends regularly with a quick catchup call or email — and to study and refine that behavior, rather than by diving into whatever issue is painful and loudest immediately.
There’s hundreds of simple behaviors you can build small trainings around, entrain the behavior so it happens automatically, and then forget it with the new behavior entrained. Simple things related to cleaning up as you do them, restocking supplies as they’re used, putting things away faster, sequencing your morning better — these are easy to adopt, give some tiny utility right away, and — most importantly — build the generalized skill of identifying an implicit decision, choosing the right action to entrain, and training until it becomes automatic.
If you decided one day that you were going to quit every unhealthy food, I’d always recommend you start by quitting whatever unhealthy food you eat sometimes that you like least. A couple years ago, I started gradually quitting unhealthy foods. In December 2015 in Hong Kong, I ate my last cookie — presumably ever. Fact is, I never really liked cookies and always felt stupid when I ate them. My favorite junk food, ice cream, I didn’t quit — still haven’t. I quit pastries and candy forever in Spring 2016 — ice cream was still on the menu — then potato chips in Boston sometime in the summer of ’16. I was happy with those cuts, and stuck with them without further additions to the quitted-forever list for about a year. Earlier this year, I had bread and pizza for the last time — I don’t miss ’em, but I’d worked my way up to that. I still eat ice cream sometimes.
What I was doing was building the generalized skill of quitting. It’s a lot easier to quit something you don’t particularly like than your favorite thing, but it requires the exact same skills — which can then be practiced with a high likelihood of success.
Dumb little stuff like folding your laundry promptly and making your bed add up; likewise, cleaning up immediately after you cook something and before eating; likewise, taking inventory and never allowing yourself to run out of key supplies. They’re not the biggest changes, but they force you to think through edge cases, analyze your behavior, and build up the general skills at self-modification of behavior over time.
***
UNIVERSALIZATION AND THE FOURTH CUT
The holy grail is universalization. You make little implicit decisions constantly. By building training programs for yourself, debugging errors and mistakes, and learning how to master little details, you’ve got the building-blocks to build medium-size skills and behavior changes, and from there…
It’s possible to reach a generalized, universally skilled level of ability to entrain core healthful, adaptive, thriving behaviors. Here’s one of them from Machowicz –
“Fear is by definition defensive and reactive. During my bad jump, the thought that kept repeating was, What do I have to get done? What do I have to get done? What do I have to get done. . . .”
Did you notice it?
Asking constantly, “What do I have to get done? What do I have to get done? What do I have to get done?” — this is an entrained behavior. It’s how you survive a crisis, yes, but it’s also how you get anything unusual done.
Fear is a common human emotion — we all experience it. You can entrain a general response to fear. Clarification of what the problem is, rapid analytical evaluation of options, and decisive action — these are not natural behaviors, but can all become entrained behaviors over time.
Ambiguity and uncertainty are things we all experience. You can entrain a general response to ambiguity and uncertainty. You can learn some basic probability and rapid estimation tools like what Tetlock describes in Superforecasting, generate options, and pick from them. These are not natural behaviors, but all can become learned and entrained over time.
You can set baseline responses to conflict, discourtesy, failure, rejection, greed, ambition, fatigue, anger — these are all emotions that are generated due to some mix of internal and external stimuli. With practice, you can entrain your default response to any of these emotions. It’s incredibly powerful.
The fourth cut, though?
It’s hard.
Coming into contact and eventually navigating all of oneself at one’s worst… this is incredibly difficult. Most people never quite crest over the plateau where a framework of entrainment and mastery pervades their life.
And this is where I wish this lesson could be burnt into your heart — not into curiosity, not into intellectual agreement, not even into merely a hot determination, which so often fades… but into a hardened and deeply-embedded certainty.
I believe that “mastery anywhere is mastery everywhere” — because the principles of mastering any discipline do carry over, to some extent, to all disciplines.
Once you get a taste of it, it’s something you can’t be without. Everything can be navigated — and overcome.
But it’s hard.
Lee, for the last time –
“To become a champion requires a condition of readiness that causes the individual to approach with pleasure even the most tedious practice session. The more “ready” the person is to respond to a stimulus, the more satisfaction he finds in the response, and the more “unready” he is, the more annoying he finds it to be forced to act.”
That’s the fourth cut. Curiosity, intellectual agreement, and even the greatest of temporary enthusiasm doesn’t surmount that final barrier — until one crosses that last boundary, everything is a chore and an annoyance; afterwards, the path of universal mastery becomes intensely pleasurable — even the annoyances become sort-of oddly enjoyable.
Most people, sadly, won’t get there.
Will you?
Until next time, yours,
Sebastian Marshall
Editor, TheStrategicReview.net
###
This is the third of our series on Background Operations. If you found it useful, is there someone you know who would benefit from reading it? Of course, also hitting the “Clap” button and commenting lets us know you dig this on here. Next week, we’ll turn more to the business and organizational side of Background Ops.
The books by Lee and Machowicz are both recommended. You might also like this talk Richard Machowicz gave to the Oakland Raiders. Note: the language on that video is not safe for work.
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