Tag: contemplation

On Speaking

Akshat Rathi1 Comment

I have a fear of public speaking. It is not a debilitating phobia, but when I have to speak to an audience I prefer to have time for preparation (not just for practicing but also to gather some courage). Even with that preparation, it turns out, I say “um” a lot and get a little thrown off by unintended pauses.

As a writer, I decided that I need to get better at speaking. Any effort put into bettering my speaking abilities will only help me improve my writing skills, I thought. After reading Paul Graham’s essay on Writing and Speaking, I have changed my mind. I still want to get better at speaking but not as much as I want to get better at writing. Here’s why:

Having good ideas is most of writing well. If you know what you’re talking about, you can say it in the plainest words and you’ll be perceived as having a good style. With speaking it’s the opposite: having good ideas is an alarmingly small component of being a good speaker.

Getting better at speaking needs improving your showman skills more than your thinking skills. It is true that remarkably good speakers don’t memorise their speeches. They have few points, written down or mentally noted, on which they expand while speaking. To do that the speaker relies on ideas that he has previously thought of in some depth. A certain amount of clarity in thought is needed to be able to speak well, but it would be rare to refine ideas and rarer to think of new ones while giving a speech.

It is more important for a good speaker to engage the audience which can be done through not just good ideas but also anecdotes and jokes. The speaker can tap into mob psychology which make jokes seem funnier in an audience than alone. Graham hasn’t taken it too far when he says:

As you decrease the intelligence of the audience, being a good speaker is increasingly a matter of being a good bullshitter. That’s true in writing too of course, but the descent is steeper with talks.

So are talks useless? Graham says:

They’re certainly inferior to the written word as a source of ideas. But that’s not all that talks are good for. When I go to a talk, it’s usually because I’m interested in the speaker. Listening to a talk is the closest most of us can get to having a conversation with someone like the president, who doesn’t have time to meet individually with all the people who want to meet him.

Talks are also good at motivating me to do things. It’s probably no coincidence that so many famous speakers are described as motivational speakers. That may be what public speaking is really for. It’s probably what it was originally for.

This lamentation has been about public speaking, of course. One man talking others listening without much engagement from the audience. I’m a fan of another form of speaking which involves engagement – conversations, that is. Many of which have led to the most fascinating learning experiences. With the right set of people, conversations can go to bizarre places and still feel familiar.

Some of the best conversations are those without structure. They tend to flow with an aim to seek the truth, but remain content in not reaching the end. They can sometimes feel like a mental dance involving two or more. Rhythm is set by the pace of thoughts, music by the ideas and notes by the words.

Conversing, like public speaking, requires the ability to communicate with clarity, but beyond that it also needs additional skills such as engaging conversational partners without being overbearing, redirecting the flow of ideas but allowing others to do the same, and creating an atmosphere that encourages new ideas.

Good conversations leave me with the feeling that I get after enjoying a fantastic meal. Instead of a good aftertaste, I am left with some very satisfying thoughts. They also come with a bag of goodies that contain new ideas and new perspectives.

Even with all that love for conversations, I don’t treat them as my way out of a difficult problem. Sometimes two or more brains with the same amount of motivation are able to solve problems that either brain alone would find unsolvable, but synchronisation of that kind leading to synergistic effects rarely happens in conversations.

So when a friend of mine said, “I think by talking about things”, I had my eyebrows raised. She tends to use another person as a mental stage to begin the thought process. Speaking to her, it seems, is thinking. I find that odd and limiting, but that might be an extreme case.

Therapists ask patients to ‘speak’ their mind. Talk therapy is powerful and is known to release chemicals in the brain altering, very literally, the state of a person’s mind. Therapists enable a conversation with oneself by removing mental blocks and/or directing the flow of thoughts in the right direction.

Speaking may be a good way out of difficult emotional problems but it isn’t the best tool for problem solving. Speaking can be uplifting to the depressed and invigorating to the dull. It can be a motivational tool or a way to admire heroes. It can also be a thinking tool in difficult scenarios, but for problem-solving and a daily dose of new ideas writing is a better option.

On being creative

Akshat Rathi1 Comment

This week’s Brain Picking’s newsletter brought to my attention this gem of a talk on creativity by John Cleese of the Monty Python fame. Of particular interest to readers of this blog should be a quote from the talk:

Keep your mind gently round the subject you ponder. You can daydream, of course. But keep bringing your mind back [on to it], just like meditation. Because – and this is the extraordinary thing about creativity – if you just keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious self. Probably in the shower later or breakfast the next morning, but suddenly you are rewarded and, out of the blue, a new thought appears mysteriously. If you have put in the pondering time, first.

In short, persistent contemplation is very important to be creative. The importance of creativity in any profession cannot be overstated and such nuggets of gold should not pass through our mental sieves. Thinking about something with purposeful intent requires effort but with practice it becomes a habit.

Cleese says, “Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.” Persistent contemplation is one way to operate to be creative, but that alone may not be enough.

In another fascinating talk that John Cleese gave on creativity, almost two decades later, he reminds us, in a rather funny way, that our ideas come from our unconscious. He calls our unconscious mind a tortoise – one that hides in its shell unless the right conditions are created to allow it to come out. To create those conditions, Cleese asks us to create boundaries of space and time. By space, he means, not just the physical surroundings but also the mental ones which allow the tortoise to come out and play without distractions.

The most profound insight to be gained from the talk comes right at the end when Cleese reveals a profound discover he made about life. He says, “To know how good you are at something requires the same skills as it requires to be good at that thing.” Applying which he finds that those people who have no idea about what they are doing have no idea that they have no idea about what they are doing.”

A smart excuse to not put in the effort

Akshat Rathi4 Comments

At some point in our lives we seem to find ourselves in a kind of ‘flow’ where we find our work effortlessly enjoyable. All the knobs in our heads have been tuned just to the right extent allowing us to feel this rare but satisfying feeling of being in the flow. Unfortunately, despite the amazing feeling that one experiences in this state, it doesn’t really help us get better at what we do, warns Cal Newport of Study Hacks.

Once we experience ‘flow’ we are tempted to seek it out. I have experienced this state of flow a number of times, and I admit to have fallen trap to the temptation. When in flow, it feels that I am on a cognitive high, able to make the connections needed to construct an argument, able to draw on the data that I need to plan my next step, or even to grasp exactly what I want to learn. When in flow, I feel extremely productive, and it is tempting to want to feel like that whenever I work.

When Newport first brought up this issue on his blog, he found there to be a lot of discussion among his readers mostly because of the lack of clarity in the understanding of what, exactly, flow means. To the rescue came Anders Ericsson, a psychologist at Florida State University, who introduced the idea of ‘deliberate practice’ which is what really makes us better at what we do. He says:

It is clear that skilled individuals can sometimes experience highly enjoyable states (flow) during their performance. These states are, however, incompatible with deliberate practice, in which individuals engage in a (typically planned) training activity aimed at reaching a level just beyond the currently attainable level of performance by engaging in full concentration, analysis after feedback, and repetitions with refinement.

In short, as Cal Newport puts it, the feeling of flow is different than the feeling of getting better. There is no avoiding working on our weaknesses if we want to get better at doing something. When in flow, we tend to capitalise on what we are good at and make it work to our advantage. On the other hand, when we need to get better at something by overcoming our weaknesses, we need to put in deliberate effort to improve. This needs to be done in the face of feeling ‘you are not good enough’, which clearly cannot be enjoyable.

No more making smart excuses such as, “I need to hit that plane, and once I’m there I know I can get a lot of work done and get better at doing what I do.” Ericsson’s warning should be given due to attention:

The commonly held but empirically unsupported notion that some uniquely “talented” individuals can attain superior performance in a given domain without much practice appears to be a destructive myth that could discourage people from investing the necessary efforts to reach expert levels of performance.

Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers claimed that what made exceptionally successful people exceptional was that they had put in 10,000 hours of work into bettering themselves at what they do. But Ericsson warns that there is only a weak correlation between the mere number of years (or hours) of experience and the performance.

In other words, putting  in the raw number of hours isn’t enough. Those hours needed to be dedicated to doing the right type of work. Newport claims that understanding this “right type of work” is perhaps the most important (and most under-appreciated) step toward building a remarkable life.

Newport quotes Geoff Colvin, an editor at Fortune Magazine who wrote an entire book about this idea and surveyed the research literature to expand the definition of deliberate practice:

  1. It’s designed to improve performance. “The essence of deliberate practice is continually stretching an individual just beyond his or her current abilities. That may sound obvious, but most of us don’t do it in the activities we think of as practice.”
  2. It’s repeated a lot. “High repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice of a task and performing the task for real, when it counts.”
  3. Feedback on results is continuously available. “You may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was flawless, but your opinion isn’t what counts.”
  4. It’s highly demanding mentally. “Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it ‘deliberate,’ as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in.”
  5. It’s hard. “Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands.”
  6. It requires (good) goals. “The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but rather about the process of reaching the outcome.”

A lot of the studies done on exploring this subject of deliberate practice have, not surprisingly, involved sportsmen and musicians. These professionals have objective measures of success which makes studying them easier. But what about the rest of us who don’t have such clear structures in place? How do we invoke deliberate practice to get better at writing, or marketing, or research?

Calvin argues that in most scenarios the fundamentals of fostering great performance are unrecognized or ignored. If indeed that is the case, the payback of putting in any amount of deliberate effort would be huge. Why? Because, as Newport suggests, unless you’re a professional athlete or musician, your peers are likely spending zero hours on deliberate practice.

Most professionals will get better at what they do with experience and will reach an acceptable level of performance. But to become remarkable, there is no other way but to put in the deliberate practice needed to get there. There are no obvious answers to what constitutes deliberate practice in a particular field, and that is probably what differentiates those who lead remarkable lives from those who don’t.