On Study, Practice and Expertise
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Whether you want to take your hobby to the next level, add a string to your bow for your career, or perhaps learn a new language, the way you go about it from the start will make the difference between a real learning experience and a passing whim that yields little or no results.
Method and planning work, but without knowledge, you cannot build or plan.
It isn’t about research, but preparation.
Of course some research will always be necessary. But it isn’t central. Research can lead to piles of information, and most of the gathered information will be unnecessary.
Study is a more adequate word for the information phase, because studying will lead to understanding. Understanding prepares you for the challenge, while knowledge will better suit shallow conversation than real progress.
Tim Ferriss calls this preparatory study phase deconstruction, and applies it to linguistics. Read his quick post on this and you will see the difference between research (buying vocabulary and grammar books, and digging in for 10 000 hours), and actual preparatory study method. He applies similar principles to sports competition and describes this in his book, The 4-Hour Work Week
Deconstruction applied to weight loss.
The weight loss plan (see above menu) is the result of the very same principle: understand first, applied to fat loss biology. I actually ran into Tim’s site for the first time while checking my Google rankings for fat loss, and found his post on this subject in the first three results (Understandfatloss.com was on page 5).
The conclusions are practically the same, and the results: deconstructing and understanding has led us both to our target weights whereas most people (myself included, years before) give up on weight loss because they put too much practice (restriction, workouts) into poorly thought-out methods (eat less and exercise doesn’t work!).
Then comes practice and learning, but also luck and opportunity.
Once you’ve understood enough on the mechanics to build a method, the gaps to fill in with knowledge have dramatically shrunk, and that is the whole point of the operation.
That doesn’t mean to say that there is no practice and learning involved, just that the requirement has shrunk enough to be much easier to plan and evaluate. And evaluating a project’s cost in time, effort and sometimes financial investment is crucial to determining whether or not it is worth the benefit in comparison with other project ideas.
Dustin Wax puts more emphasis on the actual practice in his recent post on luck, success, and 10 000 hours, but does not forget the preparatory phase which he refers to as absorbing the rules.
A jet fighter pilot will definitely need thousands of hours of flight to integrate essential reflexes that can save his life, deconstruction or not. And this will require luck as well. If he is unlucky he will run into that demanding situation after only 500 hours of flight, and never have the opportunity to put in the 10 000.
Yes, there will be learning, and how good a shortcut you can find will depend on the goal, but also the amount of thought and creativity (creative thinking, problem solving) you put into the deconstruction. A challenging but worthwhile process to master, which requires some deconstruction, learning and practice of its own.
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