Vision Improvement
Vision is the greatest of talents, because it looks so much like magic. We see it in sports, when a basketball player surprises an entire arena by delivering a last-second pass to a waiting teammate. Or in business when a smart investor spots a tiny, vital pattern and leverages it to a massive advantage. Vision dwarfs other talents like accuracy, persistence, and strength because it operates on a higher plane. It changes the game by creating new opportunities where none existed.
When we see someone demonstrate great vision, we usually chalk it up to some innate quality. You have it or you don’t. Wayne Gretzky and Warren Buffett have it — they look at the world and they find a gap to exploit. (And I, who am equally unspectacular at hockey and investing, apparently don’t.)
But is that true? Are we stuck with the vision we’ve got? Or is it possible to improve?
One intriguing answer comes from new branch of sports science called perceptual training. These are scientists who spend their days putting special goggles on athletes with world-class anticipation and comparing them to normal folks, in order to see what’s different.
Their findings are fascinating, and consists of two simple facts: it’s not about reflexes (it turns out pros and amateurs have roughly the same reaction times). Rather, it’s about reading cues. The best athletes are skilled at decoding a set of signals that allow them to anticipate what’s going to happen. As this story in Wired puts it, regarding tennis:
What separated the pros from everyone else was the ability to pull directional information out of the early stages of a swing and therefore to predict a split second earlier where to head…. This means that an expert, who doesn’t have to wait until contact, has twice as long to move, plant his feet, and swing.
What’s more, the research shows this skill is learnable. Tennis players who spent a single day learning to read cues improved their success rate by 5 percent — quite a significant number for a few hours’ work. And like any newly built neural circuit, it soon gets stashed in the unconscious. As researcher Dr. Damien Farrow puts it, “they don’t even know that they’re doing it.”
This idea — that vision is learnable — makes a lot of sense. When you look closely at the biographies of people with great vision, you see a similar pattern. When Wayne Gretzky watched hockey on television as a kid, he used paper and pencil to make a record of where the puck went in the course of a game — a perceptual map. When he was older, he practiced alone with a set of rubber cones, imagining the game and making passes to invisible teammates. He built his perceptual circuitry, bit by bit (just as Warren Buffett did by reading thousands of annual reports). This is why many good coaches, including John Calipari of Kentucky, have added perceptual training (like this program) into their programs.
I was thinking about Gretzky and Buffett the other night as I was reading The Big Short, the compelling new book by Michael Lewis. It’s the story of a handful of investors who, unlike everyone else in the world, actually anticipated the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. At a time when 99.99 percent of investors zigged, they zagged. They had vision, they made the right move, and they made billions of dollars as a result.
What gave these guys the vision? Two answers. First, their backgrounds had provided Gretzky-style training. These were not normal childhoods: one investor’s idea of youthful fun was combing the Talmud for errors; another was an obsessive loner who far preferred numbers to people. Second, they had the ability to read large meaning into small cues. When they encountered a tiny but vital data point — like the Mexican strawberry picker who had obtained a loan to buy a $750,000 home — they knew what it meant for the larger picture. And they acted.
Obviously there are differences between making a brilliant hockey pass and earning billions in the stock market. But I think there are some similarities, too. Specifically, three lessons:
- Define the perceptual component of a skill, and train it separately. One reason so few people have good vision is that they lump it in with all other skills. By breaking it out and working on it by itself, you enable yourself to train that decision-making circuit exactly as you would any skill.
- Make long gazes, not short glances. In their research on rugby players, experimenters found that better players tended to look longer at potential targets. Interestingly, Lewis’s investors did the same thing. Instead of trying to take in every tiny piece of data, they stared deeply at a few and found out what they really meant.
- Keep track of results. This seems titanically obvious, but it’s the kind of obvious thing that most people don’t actually do. Developing vision is about trying to predict the future. If you don’t record the data — how each of your predictions turned out — you won’t have the feedback it takes to improve.
Identifying Talent: What Really Matters
At my recent trip to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, I spent a lot of time talking to coaches about a small but profound question: can we identify talent?
In other words, can we assess a bunch of young performers when they’re 14 or so, measure certain qualities, and figure out who will likely succeed and who will likely fail?
To our conventional way of thinking, the answer seems obvious. Of course we can. It’s what coaches do – spotting the magic spark, the X-Factor.
But here’s the surprising answer the Olympic coaches kept giving me: No, we can’t.
In fact, the vast majority of the coaches said they were reliably surprised by who made it and who didn’t in the long run — at how inaccurate their first, second, and third impressions often turned out to be. I should point out that these are not average coaches. They are world-class experts, with decades of savvy and experience, employing every diagnostic tool known to sports science, observing these athletes on a daily basis. And the closer they look, the more mysterious talent seems to be. And as the casino-like hits and misses of the NFL and MLB drafts faithfully confirm each year, the Olympic coaches are far from alone. So the question grows: when it comes to spotting talent, what do we look for? What qualities matter most?
I think part of the mystery can be illuminated by a small but revealing data point: A handwritten 1979 letter from a 14-year-old guitarist named Saul Hudson to his girlfriend who just broke up with him.
The letter’s not all that interesting, really, except for one fact: Saul Hudson would grow up to be Slash, the lead guitarist of Guns N’ Roses. And the letter captures some key qualities — the vital intangibles — that helped grow this kid into one of the better rock guitarists of all time.
Back to the letter: Young Saul is writing to Michele, who has just broke up with him via letter. The key passages are in bold.
Tuesday
Oct. 2. 79
Dear Michele,Your letter scared me, upon first glance, I hadn’t any idea what it was about, but when you told me, it struck in a strange way, I hadn’t any idea that I talked about my guitar so often, I’m going to have to change that, no matter who I talk to.
It’s a drag that it screwed up our relationship, you should have told me sooner, but I don’t think that’s the only reason, you just don’t like me that much, and I can see why, because I’m a hard person to get along with at times.
But any I’m glad we got that straight, thank you for not lying to me. To get off the subject, you look really nice today, you get prettier & prettier every day. My weekend was pretty good. Steve came by and we went to a couple parties, and we went to the Starwood, I spent pretty much of my weekend on cloud 9 if you know what I mean.
I had never been in the Starwood before, like, we hung around outside, but I’ve never been inside. It’s not such a hot place, I mean the Bands are alright, the girls are pretty (I still think you cuter than any of the girls there) the drugs are cool but it’s not a place I would want to waste my life at. The most exciting part of the night was, a guy mouthed off to this black guy, and the black got a hundred friends and chased him around all Hollywood. It’s a pretty crazy place. I’m going there next week to see Quiet Riot, because I hear there pretty good. One of these days I’ll play there.
Love you
Saul
[Saul draws picture of a marijuana leaf -- and adds the following postscript]
This leaf was perfect untill I put the f*****g lines in it
I think this letter is fascinating because it gives us a peek into the invisible dimension of talent development: the mindset. Saul gives us a look into his core motivations, which contain three important ingredients:
- #1: Obsession. Young Saul has just lost his girlfriend (whom he clearly likes a lot) because he talks too much about his guitar.
- #2: A vivid vision of future self. In talking about the Starwood club, Saul declares that he’ll play there. It’s not some hazy dream – it’s more matter-of-fact, a statement of fact.
- #3: A keen eye for making small improvements. His scrawled commentary about the leaf is small but telling. Saul wanted it to be better, and he’s emotional about it. It’s the same attitude he shows earlier in the letter when he writes, “I’m going to have to change that.” It’s not a big leap to imagine that same sort of self-talk on the songs he’s learning. Play it again, again, and again, until it’s perfect.
These qualities — which make up Saul’s mindset and his identity — are more important than any measured skill level, because they operate on a higher plane. These qualities fueled and channeled the thousands of hours of intensive practice that built Saul’s circuitry. At the moment he wrote this letter, there were probably dozens of 14-year-old guitarists in Los Angeles who could play far better than Saul (who had only started guitar two years before). In a conventional tryout, he might have been completely overlooked.
All of this is a roundabout way of making a simple point: we fail at talent identification because we’re looking in the wrong place. We instinctively look at performance (which is visual, measurable) instead of mindset and identity, which are what really matter, because they create the energy that fuels the engine of skill acquisition. They are the nuclear power-plant for the 10,000 hours of deep practice. They are the the ghosts in the machine.
I’ve found that good teachers and coaches often dig around for mindsets, sort of like doctors looking for subtle symptoms of a disease. They inquire about long-term goals, they watch for telltale signs, they try to penetrate the glossy surface to find out the answer to that tiny but titanically important questions: why are you here, really? How much do you care? What are you prepared to give?
For example: one highly successful college basketball coach, who shall remain nameless, uses a simple litmus test in his recruiting: if the recruit makes an excuse for anything – for instance, their performance in a certain game, or their grades in math – the coach crosses them off his list, no matter what physical skills they may possess. Why? Because they have the wrong mindset.
Which makes me wonder: how else can we measure mindset? Is there a way to replace “Talent Identification” with “Mindset/Identity Identification”? And more important, how do we create cultures that help ignite these kinds of mindsets?
PS — For more good reading on this topic, check out Carol Dweck’s book — called Mindsets, naturally.
Learn Like a Baby
Several readers recently forwarded me this video. Not only because it’s deadly cute (man oh man, is it ever), but also because it provides valuable insights into increasing our learning velocity. There’s more learning per second going on here than almost anything I’ve ever come across.
On the surface, Li’l Edward tumbles around like a dervish, creating a perfect chaos. Beneath that chaos, however, there’s a pattern worth noting — a clinic on how our brains learn best and fastest. Since after all, evolution has built to learn by playing.
Three things Edward does that might be worth copying:
- 1) Create lots of pure action. This kid is firing his circuitry. He’s not interested in observing or communicating — he’s all about doing, firing an action and experiencing the response. It’s pure action-feedback loops, with brief pauses for orientation. Watching it reminds me of being in Brazil, watching a futbol de salao game — which is essentially the same thing, lots of neural action in a tiny space.
- 2) Zoom in and out. Edward has a pattern — he checks out a toy, then he rolls on his back to check it out in a deeper way (he even tries to do it to the big tricycle). It’s probing; he’s zooming in and out, from the small details to the big ones. This reminds me of watching good musicians practice, as they hone home in on a few notes, then step back to see where those fit in the big picture.
- 3) Get totally absorbed. There are lots of names for good practice mindsets — “Flow,” “Relaxed Focus” — but I’m going to go with a new one: “The Baby.” This kid is open to new things, investigatory, and resilient. His emotional thermostat is not too hot, not too cold. He shows us that all good practice is a kind of exploration. In short, Edward is learning because he’s not caught up in himself, but utterly caught up in his world.
(Well, at least until the end of the video, when he gets stuck under a chair.)
So the question becomes: how do we create more moments like this in our own lives? What kinds of “skill playpens” can we build?
The Power of Play: 3 Tips
I spent last week at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, giving a few talks. It was big fun on a lot of levels. For one, the Olympic team is in good hands–as proven by the medal-haul of Vancouver. For another, the coaches are a friendly, hard-working, and deeply knowledgeable bunch. (The cafeteria food’s not too bad, either.)
The big surprise of my visit was this: most Olympic coaches want to coach their athletes less. A lot less. They want fewer structured drills, and more invented games–particularly for younger athletes. Fewer circumscribed workouts, and more intensive play. Less work, more fun.
To conventional thinking, this discovery ranks as a fairly big surprise. Free time? Play? Aren’t coaches supposed to, you know, coach? It’s a bit like attending a gardening convention and discovering that everyone is trying to figure out how to grow dandelions.
But that’s exactly what they’re doing, and here’s why. Look beneath any talent hotbed, and you’ll find simple, intense, player-invented games. Venice Beach skateboarders riding inside an empty swimming pool, Brazilian soccer players on the futbol de salao court, cricketer Don Bradman learning to hit by bouncing a golf ball off a dented water tank, or baseball players trying to hit a flying yogurt lid — neurally speaking, it’s all the same story. A small, simple, concentrated game controlled and played by the kids. They play when they want. They get tons of reps. They create ladders of competition, always reaching upward. They get obsessed. They combine deep practice with the power of identity to earn myelin in excelsis; they grow superfast neural broadband.
(BTW, this all makes good evolutionary sense, as this article in the new Atlantic magazine on the power of play points out.)
[Play] seems to have multiple functions—exercise, learning, sharpening skills—and the positive emotions it invokes may be an adaptation that encourages us to try new things and learn with more flexibility. In fact, it may be the primary means nature has found to develop our brains.
So the question is, how do we help make that kind of play happen? A lot depends on the culture, of course — with the right set of motivational signals, even multiplication tables can be an addictive sport. Here are a few interesting ideas that came out of the discussion — useful tips for growing dandelions in any sports or education culture.
- Use Ritual: Most practice sessions begin when the coach tells players to warm up, or a school bell rings. Why not have a few ritualistic games that can be played as the players arrive? U.S.A. Volleyball coach John Kessel (who writes a marvelous blog) has created a culture of play where his arriving players dig, set, and spike against a stripe drawn at net height. As more players arrive, more join in — and hopefully take the game home with them.
- The Google Method: Google encourages its employees to spend 15 percent of their working hours pursuing their own projects. Why shouldn’t coaches do the same? Putting athletes in charge of their workouts — for instance, asking them to design a handful of small games — would increase their investment in practice, and avoid the workaday, clock-punching mentality that coaches and teachers dread.
- Build in Open Time: These invented games happen on the margins; in the loose, unstructured times before and after practice, when kids are doing that crucial work of fooling around. Smart coaches should leave out the equipment, walk away, and watch what happens.
In Curacao, I remember watching baseball players feverishly playing a strange little game where every hitter had to bunt the ball and race around the bases. I asked the coach, Norval Fayenete, what they were doing, and he smiled.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But whatever it is, it’s working.”
What works for you?
PS — This idea can be summed up in a single golden quote: ”To systematize is to sterilize” — from Common Sense About Soccer, a long out-of-print book by Nils Middelboe. Read more about how different nations are growing soccer talent here. (Big thanks to Mr. Kessel for the tip.)
How to Read
We all know that world-class writers write differently from the rest of us. What I didn’t know — at least until recently — was how differently some of them read.
Check out these links to the private books of two pretty fair writers: Mark Twain and David Foster Wallace. They’re worth exploring, because 1) it’s as thrillingly close as you’ll get to the engine room of their minds; and 2) because they provide a vivid (and for me, utterly humbling) lesson on how to truly read.
For most of us, reading is a “lean-back” experience; a warm bath. Not these guys. They’re on the balls of their feet, swords drawn. DFW and Twain challenge, criticize, scribble new ideas, tease, steal, improve, admire. They fully engage with the work. It’s like a writer’s version of a vigorous athletic workout. Because, I’d like to suggest, that’s precisely what it is: an intense firing of their circuitry; deep practice in excelsis.
On the surface, this seems like a small shift — after all, scribbling a quick note versus thinking a thought. But the act of writing is profoundly different than thinking because it forces precision and it creates a record that can be linked to other scribbles. These notes are a kind of playing field where thought happens; without the marks on the page, the thoughts float up and disappear.
In most circles, particularly schools, marking up books is discouraged, even forbidden. But should it be? With the possibilities of e-books, could this sort of sharp-pencil dueling be encouraged, even taught?
The Uses of Madness
When I was in grade school, my ironclad bedtime routine included setting out the next day’s clothing. I didn’t fold the clothes, but laid them carefully on the floor exactly as I would put them on: pants next to socks, socks next to shoes, and so on. An unsuspecting passer-by would assume either 1) a small child had suddenly evaporated; 2) I was maybe a bit obsessive/compulsive.
The link between talent and neural disorders is fascinating. The list of world-class performers who have been diagnosed as bipolar, obsessive-compulsive, or autistic is staggeringly long: Hemingway, John Nash, Nijinsky, Van Gogh, Faulkner, Orwell, Nabokov, and Glenn Gould, to name a tiny handful.
We usually think of this link in poetical terms. According to this way of thinking, certain people are gifted with an innate superpower (genius) that carries a terrible price (madness).
This view is tempting. The only problem: it’s not true. Almost nobody – including the crew listed above – has been found to be exempt from the rule of 10,000 hours. Even savants, according to Dr. Michael Howe in his insightful book, Genius Explained, achieve their skill through intense practice. They aren’t different; they are simply better at doing what we’re all trying to do: to focus, to practice deeply, and to build superfast neural circuitry.
Consider:
- OCD creates precise repetitions and elaborately organized behavior.
- Autism creates focus, sensitivity to detail, and repetitions.
- Manic-depression creates periods of high energy.
All of these processes are key elements of the skill-building process – which is all about repeating, making connections, and which requires large amounts of energy. (Perhaps that’s why these disorders exist; after all, if they had no benefit, why would evolution have selected for these traits?)
Which leads us to an interesting idea: what if geniuses aren’t geniuses because of innate ability, but rather because of the way their disorders equip them for highly motivated practice? I don’t want to be flip here – I’m not saying it’s an advantage to be depressed or autistic. And surely there are some rare synesthesic savants like Daniel Tammet who are wired differently from birth.
But I’d like to suggest that for most of us, the connection between genius and neural disorders holds two lessons.
- The majority of geniuses are building their brains using the same tools as the rest of us.
- We should align our talents with our disorders. Seeing as many of us possess mild, garden-variety versions of neural disorders, we should funnel those behaviors toward the practice that will grow the skills we desire.
When I think about my own life, I can see how I’ve done this almost unconsciously. While I no longer lay out my clothes the night before, I do have a ridiculously baroque system for organizing my notes. It’s obsessive, to be sure, but it works pretty well when it comes to capturing and arranging ideas for a book or an article. (My sock drawer? Don’t get me started.)
The Rule of Limits
I love this video, first because of the kid’s uncanny resemblance to Young Forrest Gump. Second, because of the reaction of the other kids – they’re stunned, thrilled, and ignited by his performance. (If he can do it, why can’t I?)
But the main reason is that it holds a useful strategic lesson. This kid has memorized a massively impressive number by breaking it down in three- and four-number chunks — and then linked those into larger chunks (check out the pauses as he moves from one string to the next).
We instinctively think these kind of barrier-breaking feats are accomplished with overwhelming force — a superpowered “photographic” memory. But that’s an illusion. In fact they’re accomplished by small, flexible efforts, repeatedly and strategically applied.
We think it’s Goliath. But underneath, it’s really David.
ps — Do lots of schools do this pi contest? It strikes me as a fun, simple way to get kids amped about math, not to mention the power of their brains.
pps — Speaking of limits, check out WNYC’s RadioLab show this week. It’s about what happens when we get close to the edge of physical and mental performance. (Yep, I’m on it.)
What Shape is Your Talent?
Spiderweb? Loop? Or Funnel?
Let me back up a second and start with a simple idea: Skills are really circuits in your brain.
I think this is a cool and useful idea, first because our brains are plastic and changeable. And second, because it leads us somewhere even cooler and more useful. Shapes.
All neural circuits have shapes. In fact, I’d like to assert that those shapes come in three basic types, into which pretty much every talent in the world can be sorted, and which might hold important lessons for us. Here’s why: if we know the shape of the circuit, we also can know the best way to grow that circuit to make it faster, stronger, and better.
(Note to science-minded readers: I’m not saying the circuits are literally structured in these shapes. Rather, that it’s useful to think of them this way.)
Spiderweb
- Examples: stock trading, quarterbacking, debating, social skills
- Description: This circuit is all about pattern recognition and fast response. You perceive something (a set of stock prices, a blitzing linebacker, a smiling stranger) and you respond swiftly and accurately. It’s about perception, flexibility, and navigating a matrix by making quick, accurate choices.
- How to Build It: Set up a grid of if/then propositions. If Event A happens, you respond with B, C, or perhaps Z. The key is to take input, generate responses, and track their effectiveness.
Loop
- Examples: playing a musical instrument, ice-skating, gymnastics, spelling
- Description: This circuit is about precision. It isn’t trying to be flexible or responsive; rather, it’s trying to create (or re-create) an Ideal Performance; to achieve timing, speed, and power.
- How to Build It: Break the task down to its elemental chunks, polish them, and piece them together in many different ways. You should play with time — slowing and speeding. Pay particular attention to the first repetitions, since they’ll be the tracks in which the rest of the circuit grows.
Funnel
- Examples: poetry, design, business innovation
- Description: This circuit is about slow, creative thought; connecting ideas that were not previously connected.
- How to Build It: Practice making unconventional connections; linking ideas that have never been linked into larger frameworks. Speed doesn’t matter (in fact, as this remarkable new study shows, creative thought happens more slowly). Find a container in which to collect ideas, the better to create a jostle of possibilities. (In her terrific book, The Creative Habit, choreographer Twyla Tharp recommends a shoebox.)
Most talents involve a mix of shapes. For instance, when a jazz pianist plays a solo, he’s reacting to the music and the band (spiderweb), hitting precise notes (loop), and perhaps even noticing some new wrinkle to explore (funnel). When a comedian does her routine, she’s delivering precisely-worded jokes with timing (loop), tuning her delivery to that of the crowd (spiderweb), and trying to come up with new jokes (funnel). And of course we are all familiar with people who are great at one part of the job but terrible at another (like those rocket-armed college quarterbacks who are marvelous at the loop-circuit skill of throwing while also being hopelessly bad at the spiderweb-circuit skill of reading NFL defenses).
The emerging lesson here is simple: the shape of the training should match the shape of the circuit. And that’s what I observed at the talent hotbeds like Meadowmount (where loops ruled), Brazilian futsal (home of fast, reactive spiderwebs), or the Bronte household (spiderwebs and funnels).
So in sum, if you want to build spiderweb circuits, train like this:
If you want to build loops, train like this:
And if you want to build funnels, train like this:
Yo-Yo Ma to the Rescue
Yo-Yo and Aidan
Returning from a spring break trip to Montana, my 14-year-old son Aidan and I were minding our own business, walking among the weary hordes of travelers at the Chicago airport. Then we noticed a slight commotion twenty feet ahead of us. A middle-aged woman had accidentally dropped her boarding pass, but since she wore an iPod, she was unable to hear the voices of people calling out. So the woman strode briskly on, unaware.
Behind her, about a dozen people were doing what people usually do in those kinds of situations: they were yelling louder and louder, trying futilely to get iPod woman’s attention. Others (including us) were instinctively slowing so we could see how this would play out. In sum, nobody was doing much of anything — except for a dark-haired guy in a black turtleneck.
The dark-haired guy jumped out of the gathering crowd, snagged the fallen boarding pass and, calling “excuse me” in a loud voice, dashed up to deliver iPod woman’s boarding pass. Then the dark-haired turtleneck guy turned around, and — you guessed it – it’s Yo-Yo Ma.
As in, Yo-Yo Ma the cellist. The six-time Grammy winner. The man who’s considered by many to be the most talented musician in the world. (Also, the guy I wrote about briefly in The Talent Code.)
This is a tiny moment. Perhaps it’s meaningless. But on the other hand, perhaps it raises some interesting questions about Ma’s mindset — and ours.
In the few seconds after the boarding pass fluttered to the ground, thirty people had the chance to act. Only one did, with an urgency and directness that seemed almost unconscious. In that brief time, Ma could have easily kept walking and let someone else take the lead. But that’s not how his mind works. He wasn’t thinking about himself or the crowd’s reaction. He was noticing a problem, and solving it.
I think that Ma’s mindset — outward-focused, perceptive, action-oriented — is no accident. Being a great performer, in the most profound sense, is not about the individual — rather, it’s about the music, or the athletic move, or whatever intricate series of thoughts and movements that are being connected. In truly great performances, the performer disappears.
We instinctively think geniuses are successful because they can get lost inside their private worlds, but I think this shows we might have it upside-down. Yo-Yo Ma isn’t successful because he’s lost in his own world. Rather, he’s successful, in part, because he is so deeply attentive to ours.
(Also, as the photo shows, he’s deeply warm to two strangers who chatted with him a few minutes later.)
P.S. — Apparently Yo-Yo isn’t the only one with this habit. Shinichi Suzuki (founder of the Suzuki Method) was once giving a concert when he suddenly ran offstage and down the aisle. The reason? A woman had accidentally left her purse behind; Suzuki wanted to return it.
(Thanks to Kimberly Meier-Sims of the Cleveland Institute of Music for sharing that memory.)
The Importance of Being Unpredictable
This time of year our family happily geeks out on the Iditarod, that legendary 1,049-mile sled dog race from Willow to Nome. We tape a map on the fridge and follow our favorites — Lance Mackey, Ally Zirkle, our old neighbor Jim Lanier, and, this year, Jamaica’s own cool-runner Newton Marshall.
This year’s race has been completely great, with what looks to be a familiar ending. As of today, Mackey looks like he’s set to win for a record fourth-straight time.
The interesting question is, how does Mackey do it? More specifically, what makes him different? Because the truth is, everybody’s tough as nails. Everybody’s got super-fit dogs — and several top mushers have more resources than Mackey (who prefers living in a broken-down trailer to a house). And this is where the story gets interesting — because it’s where you can draw a line between Mackey, LeBron James, and the world’s top young violinists.
The difference with Mackey — his killer app — is his supreme flexibility. While others are grinding out the miles, Mackey changes strategies all the time. Sometimes he blows right past checkpoints, preferring to camp on the trail. Sometimes he pretends to fall asleep, and then, when his unsuspecting rivals doze off, slips out of the checkpoint. Mackey was one of the first mushers to run the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest race a bare two weeks before the Iditarod, a strategy which most race observers thought insane at the time, but which is now being emulated because it works so well. In short, Mackey wins because he is the best innovator, both strong and flexible.
So how can Mackey do this? The answer is, he trains that way.
From musher Joe Runyan’s blog at Alaska Dispatch:
“[Mackey] begins in August by training his dogs to expect uncertainty by harnessing them innumerable times. Day or night, he will harness his dogs to his four-wheeler, train with them on dry-land trails, rest, and then go again. The distances and the rests can be long or short and are completely random. The result, Mackey likes to report, is that his dogs develop a calm confidence in his unpredictability. Mackey’s move Saturday out of Kaltag may have been the moment he trained for so deliberately for in the fall.”
Training for unpredictability is an interesting idea. Because when we start to look at other talented performers, we see a similar pattern.
Like basketball, for instance. Trainer-to-the-stars Idan Ravin — whose students include LeBron James, Chris Paul, Carmelo Anthony, and others — is famous for the tennis-ball drill, where he has his clients dribble with one hand while they catch tennis balls with the other. He takes a skill they’ve got (dribbling) and then uses distraction and randomness (in the form of tennis balls thrown at their heads) to let them practice overcoming distraction.
And golf. While training his son, Tiger, Earl Woods loved to tip over a golf bag or shout unexpectedly during his son’s backswing.
And music. Violinists learning the Suzuki Method are routinely asked to play a song while lying on their back, or turning the bow upside down, or walking in a circle.
The desired quality here is focus, which we can define as the ability to maintain concentration and control emotions in the face of unpredictability. We usually think of focus as something that’s innate, part of your character.
But the lesson here, I think, is that our instincts might be wrong. For Mackey, James, and the violinists, focus is a kind of skill, one that requires a training regimen all its own.
In fact, we can go further and divide all training into two basic types: 1) the training that builds the fundamental skill (a.k.a. the fast, fluent neural circuit); and 2) the training that field-tests that circuit, whacking it with all kinds of real-world randomness and distraction, in order that it become stronger, more reliable, and capable of handling surprises. Sort of like a good dog team.
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