When you’re able to learn something at will, nothing seems impossible. Your confidence swells and any feelings of fraudulence recede. Your knowledge is completely authentic because you’ve lived it, earned it, claimed it. Whenever you take on a new subject or skillset, your brain reconfigures itself to accommodate the new knowledge. You’re literally a different person than you were before. “New ideas capture and possess the mind that births them,” said Robert Grudin in The Grace of Great Things. “They colonize it and renew its laws.”
A 30-year study published in 1999 by the National Institute of Mental Health found that people who take on new and difficult problems tend to perform better than people whose jobs require less thought. Most of us assume that learning difficult subjects requires a higher IQ, but it’s more likely that a higher IQ comes from confronting harder problems. In a way, we don’t solve problems—problems solve us. They help us complete the puzzle of who we are, asking us to stretch beyond our boundaries and confront what we don’t know.
The joy zone
Erik Demaine became MIT’S youngest-ever professor at age 20. If you think this is an accomplishment, consider that he was homeschooled by his single-parent father, started college at 12, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science at 14. A few years later, after getting his PhD from the University of Waterloo, he was awarded a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, an honor that comes with a $500,000 grant to work on whatever strikes you as amusing. For Demaine, it was the mathematics of origami. “I fold paper because it’s fun,” he says. “That’s the driving force.” But now he’s tackling one of the toughest problems in biology: learning how protein molecules fold themselves into the shapes that dictate their individual functions.
“If you look really close at any living thing, deep inside are lots of little proteins running around, making life happen. Each type of protein folds into a special shape. When proteins fold into the wrong shape,” he says, “you get a disease, like Alzheimer’s or Mad Cow.” The problem for science is that protein folding has been impossible to observe in real time. By developing a mathematical model based on his deep knowledge of origami, Demaine hopes to make the design of synthetic proteins possible.
What kind of person does this? “I’m a geek,” he says with a grin. His interests read like the to-do list of a precocious ten-year-old: card magic, juggling, string figures, video games, paper folding, improvisational comedy, and glassblowing. “I blow glass because it’s fun. I do improv because it’s fun. I fold paper because it’s fun. Initially, I did it because the mathematics was fun. Now when I get time I fold paper, because, actually, folding paper is fun.”
So here’s the $500,000 question: Does Erik Demaine get time to play because he’s a genius? Or is he a genius because he gets time to play? The MacArthur committee clearly believes it’s the latter, since they referred to Demaine as “moving readily between the theoretical to the playful” in his effort to coax scientific insights from his personal interests.
This is what some would call ludic learning, or learning by playing. What makes it so effective is the space it allows for positive emotions. Emotions drive attention, and attention drives learning. “Learning,” said Richard Saul Wurman, “is just finding out more about what you’re interested in.” Wurman has worked variously as a cartographer, architect, graphic designer, author, publisher, and founder of the TED conferences. “I look for subjects that I find particularly interesting but don’t completely understand.”
Renowned circus juggler Serge Percelly said much the same thing. “I’m just trying to do the act that I would have loved to see.”
Filmmaker Jane Campion put it this way: “Playing in your work is the way to find your energy.” There’s a reciprocal relationship between playfulness and joyfulness. Creative play is thought to release endorphins, those little molecules that put you in a good mood. Conversely, studies have shown that when you’re in a good mood, you’re usually more creative. Happiness and creativity are therefore mutually supportive. You enter a joy zone in which learning accelerates, sometimes by a factor of five or ten. The time seems to fly by, and before you know it you’ve learned something that becomes deeply embedded in your psyche.
The joy zone is traditional education’s best-kept secret. After all, if it were widely understood that learning is a product of passion and not test taking, society would have to embrace a more difficult educational model. Schools would have to become facilitators of passion instead of directors of course material. Their efforts would be unmeasurable by current standards, since individual passion can’t be standardized. The only measurement of any importance would be the happiness, achievements, and sense of fulfillment of graduates over time.
Pipe dream? No. I believe this is exactly the model we’re moving toward. But for many people it’s too late. They’re either fully occupied in the workforce or just completing their formal education. If this is you, your best bet—which is still a good one—is to take control of your education from here on out. To realize that every day is opportunity to enter the joy zone, the place of autotelic learning, where the thing being learned is its own reward. All this requires is that you know what you love to work at, that you embrace “what you’re interested in.”
When you’re in your element, mastery becomes a simple formula: practice × passion = skill. It takes both factors to produce deep learning. If you remove practice from the equation, all you have is aimless enjoyment. If you remove passion from the equation, you’re left with shallow learning. While you can still acquire a certain amount skill with one of these factors absent—think of kids who are forced to play the violin—it takes much longer, and your skill will be in some way lacking. But practice and passion together? Magic. Your learning accelerates, your joy shoots off the charts, and over time mastery is inevitable.
Let’s go back to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (ME-high CHEEK-sent-me-HIGH-ee, remember?). Professor C. is the acknowledged expert on flow, a term he uses to describe the mental state of being truly creative. It’s a state of optimal experience—the feeling of being in control of your actions, master of your fate. It happens in the narrow space between boredom on one hand, and anxiety on the other. If a task is too easy, what happens? You lose interest. If it’s too hard, what happens? You give up. The space in the middle—where a task is neither too easy nor too hard—is the joy zone.
Most of our optimal experiences occur with activities that are goal directed, not aimless, and are bounded by rules. They require an investment of psychic energy, and can’t be done without the right skills. They can be competitive, but only if the competition is a means to perfect our skills; when competition becomes an end in itself it ceases to be fun.
The best moments, he says, are when your body or mind is stretched to the limit in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. “It is what the sailor holding a tight course feels when the wind whips through her hair,” he says. “It is what a painter feels when the colors on the canvas begin to set up a magnetic tension with each other, and a new thing, a living form, takes shape in front of the astonished creator.”
The optimization of creative experience assumes freedom—the freedom to find the right balance between challenge and personal ability. This kind of freedom is not likely to come from a standardized curriculum or test-based educational model. You have to give it to yourself. You have to find your strengths, discover the right medium in which to express them, and allow yourself the necessary time to experiment and push the limits of your understanding. As Joseph Campbell said, you have to “follow your bliss.”
What’s the mission?
Passion is powerful, yet not always strategic. We live in a society where competition often determines winners and losers in accordance with the Competitive Exclusion Principle. This is the Darwinian rule that says when two or more species compete for a limited resource, one of them will win, eventually squeezing the others out of the picture. It’s a cruel world. But it doe
sn’t have to be if you apply the opposite lever—the Strategic Differentiation Principle. This is the principle of dominating a valuable niche that’s unavailable or uninteresting to others.
“I’m not the sort of person who likes a lot of competition,” said Jack W. Szostak, a Nobel Prize winner who’s now researching the origins of life. “I particularly don’t like the feeling that if I weren’t around doing certain work, it wouldn’t make any difference. If it’s going to be done anyway,” he said, “what’s the point?” Exactly. Why invest so much time into your skills if you have to fight everyone else for the privilege of applying them? And why work hard at something the world doesn't need?
At the beginning of the book, I hinted at the potential of purpose to drive personal success. My view is that we’re not born with a purpose, but that nature has equipped us with goal-seeking minds that perform better in the context of purpose, or the sense that life means something. The American Psychological Association defines learning as the natural process of pursuing one’s personal goals, in which we construct meaning by filtering information and experiences through our unique perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. According to Professor Csikszentmihalyi, “The age-old riddle—What is the meaning of life?—turns out to be astonishingly simple. The meaning of life is meaning.”
Yet meaningful purpose, even when fueled by passion, is not enough to ensure success in the face of serious competition. Purpose needs to be coupled with strategy, a deliberate plan to own and defend a niche that matters. The world doesn’t really need another software designer, artist, actress, economist, athlete, attorney, food writer, activist, or TV host. But it does need Jack Dorsey, Ai Weiwei, Viola Davis, Muhammad Yunus, Buster Posey, Almudena Bernebeu, Amanda Hesser, Camila Vallejo, and Stephen Colbert. These are people who have found a unique mission to express their life’s purpose. Some have stumbled into it, some have simply followed their bliss, and others have designed a deliberate path.
A mission, simply stated, is a plan to fulfill a purpose. Having a mission doesn’t guarantee success, but it does make it more than an accident. A mission isn’t permanent. It can change as you learn more about your discipline, your competition, and who you are in relation to the larger world. Its value doesn’t derive from rigidity but from focus. It keeps you from running off in a hundred directions at once in the mistaken belief that more is better.
“There is no evidence that quantity becomes quality in matters of human expression or achievement,” said Jaron Lanier. “What matters instead, I believe, is a sense of focus, a mind in effective concentration, and an adventurous individual imagination that is distinct from the crowd.” When you’re focused on a mission, your mind becomes magnetized. It collects only the information and experiences you’re likely to need, arranging them into a flexible hierarchy. The purpose determines the mission, the mission determines the strategy, the strategy determines the tactics, the tactics determine the tasks.
But what is the mission? What should I do? Where do I start?
These are important questions, but they don’t have to tie you in knots. The liberating answers are “you decide,” “whatever you like,” and “start anywhere.” The reality is, you can’t know the ultimate shape of your mission. You have to begin the journey someplace and correct course as you go. But it does help to set off with a rough map of the territory.
Your map can be as simple as two overlapping circles. One circle represents the world, or, more precisely, what the world values. The other circle is you, including all the passion and skills you can bring to it. Where the two circles overlap is the most fertile area for growth. It’s the place where your mission can most easily take root, and where you’ll find the success and appreciation you’ll need to thrive. You may long to be a musician, for example, but the world doesn’t need more musicians. It needs certain kinds of musicians, with certain skills, who can make certain kinds of music, and address certain audiences. Finding out where these special areas are, and which ones overlap with your passion and skills, is the biggest challenge.
Once you’ve found the overlaps, you can decide where to focus your energies. My advice is to choose a direction that lets you work with your whole heart instead of a divided heart. In today’s fragmented world, wholeheartedness confers a distinct advantage upon those who can offer it, because it turns ordinary work into extraordinary work.
Psychologists Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon led a collaborative effort to discover the key properties of extraordinary work. Members of the GoodWork Project conducted 1200 interviews in nine professional spheres, and came up with what they called the three Es. “Good work is excellent,” said Gardner. “It meets the technical standards of the relevant profession or craft. It is personally engaging. Carrying out good work over the long haul proves too difficult unless that work remains inviting and meaningful to the practioner. The third E is ethical,” he said. “The good worker constantly interrogates herself about what it means to be responsible.”
Whenever you engage in good work that aligns with your mission, your progress accelerates. You can see firsthand that your work matters. You learn more quickly, and you learn more deeply. You get the short-term rewards of being in the flow, and you get long-term rewards of eudaimonic well-being, the happiness that comes from fulfilling your potential.
A theory of learning
The talent of learning is a form of metacognition, or knowing about knowing. It’s the self-awareness that comes from observing what you think while you’re thinking it. It tells you when and how to use a particular strategy to solve a problem or address a challenge.
We learn skills in a predictable sequence. We begin with the cognitive phase, in which we intellectualize the task and invent tactics to accomplish it with the fewest number of errors. Then we move to the associative phase, in which we worry less about errors than applying our skill to a specific task. Finally, we reach the autonomous phase, when we’re just about as good as we need to be. Our skills have become habits—foundations on which we can build new skills.
William Edwards Deming was the American statistician and consultant who taught Japanese manufacturers how to compete with the rest of the world. Remember Toyota’s advertising tagline? “The quality goes in before the name goes on.” This was more than a boast. It was the reason Americans began buying Japanese cars instead of those made in Detroit. When Ford Motors finally got around to analyzing the difference between Japanese cars and American cars, they found that the only variation lay in the tolerances of the parts. The Japanese simply put more effort into precision and efficiency. That was the influence of Dr. Deming, whose advice had fallen on deaf ears in his own country.
Yet Deming was no bean counter. He was a teacher who understood that the most important things in life couldn’t be measured. Profound knowledge can’t be taught, he said, only learned through experience. While many people would agree that “experience is the best teacher,” he believed that experience by itself teaches nothing. You need to interpret your experience against a theory. Only then can you understand learning in the context of a system.
A theory is a model of reality that can be used to explain, predict, or master a particular phenomenon. It provides a framework for experience, so you can understand what happens, not at the event level, but at the systems level. It helps you answer the question: What does this mean? Becoming an autodidact requires that you develop your own theory of learning, a personal framework for acquiring new knowledge. While everyone’s framework is unique, here are 12 timeless principles you can borrow to construct it:
Learn by doing. First-hand experience offers the richest fuel for creativity. We learn better and faster when we use our senses, our hands, and our whole bodies in addition to our brains. You can certainly read about dancing, but there’s no substitute for getting out on the floor.
Find worthy work. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Make sure the first one, and each one thereafter, offe
rs new and valuable lessons on the path to your purpose. Try not to settle. It’s too hard to work with one hand holding your nose.
Harness habits. The brain forms habits when routines are shoved from the frontal cortex down to the basal ganglia. They allow you to perform familiar tasks with very little conscious thought, freeing up mental resources to concentrate on new challenges. Consistency and repetition recruit your neural networks to turn experiences into automatic skills. Of course, habit works both ways.
Focus on your goals. Of the eight conditions for creative flow, five are concerned with focus. You must be able to 1) define clear goals for yourself, 2) concentrate on the task at hand, 3) become so deeply involved that 4) your sense of time is altered, and 5) all concern for the self disappears. You’ll find that with practice you’ll develop a ready capacity for intense focus.
Learn strategically. You can learn anything, but you can’t learn everything. Read specifically on your subject. Appreciate great ideas with felonious intent. Keep a file of every idea you wish had been yours, and you’ll begin to absorb the lessons of your heroes. Über-restaurateur Reed Hearon said, “If you read two books on a subject written by knowledgeable people, you will know more than 95% of the people in the entire world know about that subject.”
Cultivate your memory. Memory is like a garden. It you don’t tend it, your knowledge will wither from a lack of nutrients, or starve from a lack of light. While general knowledge is readily available online, knowledge that’s specific to your craft or discipline needs to be available right when you need it. This is possible through neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to connect new ideas to old ones. “Nerve cells that fire together wire together,” says educator Stephanie Marshall. By the same token, you need to continually weed out obsolete knowledge by forgetting.
Metaskills- Five Talents for the Robotic Age Page 21