How to make difficult things easy
(and why you should want to do that)
Being good at doing something is a consequence of practicing doing it. So how to make practice easy?
Most skills can be broken down into a collection of sub-skills.
If you can identify what the component sub-skills are, then those sub-skills can be practiced in isolation from each other. This saves you from having to get good at 20 different new things all at the same time.
“There was an old sailor my grandfather knew,
Who had so many things that he wanted to do
That, whenever he thought it was time to begin,
He couldn’t because of the state he was in.”
~A.A. Milne“Whatever Fortune brings, don’t be afraid of doing things.”
~A.A. Milne
Why you want to practice difficult things, and why you should be suspicious if you’re practicing something that you find easy
The article below is a response to this one on qz.com:
When the authors say, “if it isn’t difficult, it isn’t working” (or equivalent things), I think the authors need to distinguish two kinds of “difficult”.
It seems like the evidence is pretty conclusive that if you want to get good at recalling things from memory, you need to practice recalling the things from memory that you want to be able to recall from memory. — Doh. Who’da thunk it. :-)
Also if you want to get good at recognising patterns, you need to practice recognising patterns.
That doesn’t mean that practicing recall, or practicing recognition cannot be done in a way that is enjoyable. Comparing with practicing sport — your muscles ache sometimes, but a lot of the time it can feel great.
So “yes, you need to practice doing the thing that is difficult” … that’s how you get good at doing the thing that is difficult.
But if you’re going to be effective at practicing doing the thing that is difficult, you need to figure out ways to make it easy to practice doing the thing that is difficult.
Make practicing difficult skills easier by breaking skills down into sub-skills
My Emily started learning how to play tennis this year. One thing I noticed the coaches did with beginners was that they didn’t go straight into playing games of tennis. Instead they got them to do a bunch of things that break tennis skills down into sub-skills which they could practice separately from other skills.
For example you bounce the ball on the ground and then you bounce it upwards with a little tap with your racket, and then you let it bounce on the ground again, and then you give it a little tap upwards with the racket. This is a much easier thing to practice than immediately being able to get your body in the right place to return a shot. This allows me to practice ball-racket-eye-coordination separately from all the other things I need to learn before I’m going to be able to play tennis.
Instead of struggling with trying to learn 50 or so sub-skills all at the same time, I’ve isolated a single sub-skill which I can practice fairly easily. It doesn’t take long to get good at it, because in isolation from all the other things you need to be good at, the skill you learn by doing this is quite easy to get good at quickly.
So we can make the difficult easy by breaking it down into sub-skills and practicing those sub-skills separately before putting them all together.
I noticed the same thing in swimming lessons, when Emily came to learn a new swimming stroke. First they practice the leg-kick with a float, sometimes on their backs, sometimes on their fronts. Then they practice the arm-stokes. Then they practice putting the arm-stroke together with the leg-kick and coordinating doing them at the same time.
How to apply <breaking skills down into sub-skills> to studying
This free course on Coursera called “Learning how to learn” does a good job of summarising just exactly how to do this — and incidentally I believe it has for a while now been the most popular course on Coursera! (which may give us a hint about how useful it is):
And one of the key accesses is habit.
Large portions of human actions— almost anything you are good at — runs without you having to think about it. You drive to the shops in your manual geared car — somehow you managed to change gear 50 times without giving it a single thought.
In order to practice the sub-skill parts of things we are doing without even noticing, I need to be able to bring my attention to each of those sub-skills. That’s why when it comes to being good at learning conceptual information, a visual thinking tool like Thortspace is so useful.
Thortspace enables you to bring attention to the thinking that you take for granted “without even thinking about it”.
Skills are “transparent” and so are sub-skills
One of the elusive things about skills is that skills are “transparent”.
Skills are not so much things that you “know-that”… they are mostly things that you “know-how”… you know how to do them, in the sense that you can do them. You know how to ride a bicycle, for example. This probably doesn’t mean you could say articulately with any accuracy what it is that your body does to stay balanced on a bicycle while you ride along.
Typically after the aquisition of a skill you have only a little more theoretical understanding of how you can now do the thing that you didn’t used to be able to do. Both the absense of the skill and the aquisition and presence of the skill tend to remain mysterious. And a slightly alarming side-note to this is that it applies even to cognitive skills like reading, writing, thinking and problem solving.
Practice for improving practice:
(1) What is the problem I want to solve? (go straight to 3 if you don’t want to solve any problems)
(2) What skills would I need to have to be someone who could solve that problem?
(3) What is the skill I want improve (or acquire, if I have no skill in the matter whatsoever)?
(4) What sub-skills can I identify that go to make up that skill?
(5) Which of any of those sub-skills can be isolated and practiced independently of the others?
Notes:
1.
2.
The roles of deliberate practice (DP) and innate ability (IA/WM) in developing expertise: evidence and implications: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/medu.12260
3.
4.
5.
Next read:
