A Second Guitar Lesson: The Six Month Rule

What happens if there’s not enough time to do this?

This post is about the neuroscience of learning. And I will get to that. But first, a brief interlude about delays, stops, and starts. Jinxed by my last blog entry about learning the guitar, I just went through a month when I really didn’t practice. Three weeks of being super-busy, then Thanksgiving holiday week travel when I couldn’t bring the instrument.

Delays can be fatal when you’re trying to make a change or when—like me—you’re trying to learn a new skill. It’s pretty easy to find examples of projects and change efforts that were delayed in an attempt to kill them off, as far back as ancient Rome and as recently as the Wall Street reforms under Dodd-Frank.

So what does a delay mean for learning a new skill? Maybe something like my slowly developing musical dexterity? Studies in neuroscience, and specifically neuroplasticity, suggest that it all depends on how long you’ve been at it. There’s pretty good evidence that once you’ve been working on a new skill for more than six months, your brain is much more tolerant of delays.

Guitar Lesson: No Such Thing as a One-Way Door

I’m learning to play guitar. Definitely a humbling experience. While I’ve gotten to the point of plucking a few melodies that I actually recognize (who knew Beethoven’s Ode To Joy would be fun played on a cheap folk guitar?), about half the few chords I play sound like dying cats.

As a child, my parents thought it would be a good idea for me to do something musical. So, I chose the trumpet. (I think I saw the instrument on TV somewhere.) I spent about five years going to trumpet lessons and at times pretending to practice so my mother wouldn’t nag me. Despite all my puckering in the mouthpiece, it just never sounded that good.

For many years, I’ve wished I’d learned to play the guitar as a kid instead. But there was an essential trap in my thinking. In my mind, deciding on something besides the guitar all those years ago was like a one-way door. Once I had gone through, I could never go back. The fact that I hadn’t learned guitar back then meant it would never happen. I could even think of all the reasons why: Kids learn to play instruments so much easier than adults, I could never hope to reach a high level of proficiency, I didn’t feel like I had time for lessons and practicing, and on and on from there.

Capsized: Learning From a Crisis

Something to hold onto

If you had asked me a month ago what I would do during a potentially disastrous boating accident, I would have probably said: “Panic. Definitely panic.” Well, it turns out I’m wrong.

During a weekend with friends on the Connecticut coast, I made a series of mistakes that left me in a small, tipsy kayak, separated from my kayaking partners, trying to paddle home while fighting rising winds and waves with whitecaps. That’s when I sagged sideways into a wave and capsized. Out of the boat, I began bobbing up and down 100 or 200 yards out from an inlet. My life jacket – an old model powered by compressed air – failed to inflate. So I grabbed onto the kayak with one hand, casting about for what to do with the other. My flip flops floated away as I grabbed my orange baseball cap out of the water (easier to spot me from a distance). I also took hold of the paddle, which was just beginning to drift away.

That’s when things could have gotten really bad.

Dropping the Fiction of Multitasking

While I like variety in my work, I’m a lousy multitasker. I’m at my best doing one thing at a time. Plus I need to build in a quick pause when I shift my brain from one kind of task to another.

Those characteristics should make me precisely the wrong kind of person to thrive in the modern working world. We’re told in a variety of ways that being able to multitask is the norm. You should be able to write memos while perusing a research report and checking email. It’s hard to have a meeting and not hear the click, click of people texting while they’re listening. And it’s hard to find a job posting that doesn’t ask for someone who is a multitasker (in addition to being a self-starter and entrepreneurial)

Well, multitasking is a crock.

Financial Crimes: One Reason There's No Justice at Justice

Three years after the financial crisis, not one of the big financial sleezemeisters that created the subprime mortgage machine has gone to jail. Plenty of people have lamented this basic fact. Sure, complicated financial crimes can be hard to prove, and weasel’s like this guy have money, but it’s hard to see that as much of an excuse. One major factor – one that doesn’t really get a lot of attention – is that the way prosecutors organized themselves to investigate the crimes set them up to fail.

Here’s how it worked: Despite the fact that the Southern District of New York (think Wall Street) had the most experience ferreting out accounting fraud, the Department of Justice basically handed out big cases as plums to different U.S. attorneys offices. Countrywide (the shady mortgage company now owned by Bank of America) went to Los Angeles; Washington Mutual went to Seattle, A.I.G. went mainly to Washington. Even Lehman Brothers was split like a pie with the Southern District getting just one slice. According to George Packer of the New Yorker:

Given the targets in question – huge banks, well-insulated executives, intricately structured financial products, tens of millions of knotty documents – it’s unlikely that a federal prosecutor’s office, staffed by generalists and operating under standard procedure, which is to wait for cases to come in, could have made serious headway.

What the Department of Justice needed to do was organize itself as a knowledge-based organization rather than merely an investigating organization. Knowledge-based organizations put a premium on building up knowledge in core areas that they know will be critical to their success, and then develop systems to share that knowledge. (This field is sometimes called knowledge management.)

Measurement Has Its Limits: The Cookie-Radish Effect

 No willpower needed

I recently wrote about how measuring your own activity, using something as simple as a stopwatch in the shower, can pay off big time in behavioral change. (It can speed you up on tasks you tend to do slowly.) That said, I’ve recently run into a few people who take that concept much further. They schedule tasks for themselves in 10-minute intervals and constantly check to see whether they’re on time and on task. I’ve even talked to one colleague who suggested I do something similar.

Yikes! I can’t imagine being a slave to the stopwatch in that way. But I want to have a clearer reason why such a thing makes no sense for me. Something more than it just doesn’t feel right. So here it is:

When you force yourself to do something that takes a lot of effort or willpower, what you are actually doing is using the rational part of your brain (the part that handles executive functioning) to take over from the more emotional and instinctive part of your brain (the part that wants to do what feels right). Well, there’s a lot of research that suggests that most people have rational effort/willpower in limited quantities. Use too much of it and you’ll begin to run out.

Measurement Drives Behavior, Even in the Shower

A tool for behavioral change?

Sometimes lasting change comes from very small adjustments… and a little understanding of how our brains are wired.

My natural pace in the morning is slow. I’m one of those people who always seems to take a good long time picking out clothes, showering, getting dressed, etc. And this used to make me late a lot. But in the past year, I’ve turned the situation around. The new element: wearing a waterproof watch with a stopwatch function.

By starting the timer when I step into the shower, I’ve completely changed my dynamic. I haven’t made any conscious effort to speed up (seriously, none), but that’s what has happened anyway. The only effort has been to look at my watch from time to time. That’s where my brain’s wiring takes over. It can’t see a sequence of times, day in and day out, without looking for patterns. I developed a pretty good idea for how long I should take at the various tasks: showering, toweling off, getting dressed, coming down to breakfast, etc. (A five-minute shower is about average, and eight minutes is slow.) Now I can’t help noticing when I take longer than usual; I find myself taking corrective action without much thought. Slow at one step, and suddenly I speed up at my other tasks. Now, when I have everything laid out the night before, the whole sequence of getting out of bed and out the door is less than 25 minutes.

There’s a basic idea that underlies this change: Measurement drives behavior. Just by the act of measuring something and paying attention to the results, people begin to change what they do. This idea is critical in the business and management world. But there’s no reason it can’t work at the level of personal change, too. The hard part is picking the right things to measure and getting the whole process started. That seems to be what’s going on with my morning stopwatch. Looking at a timepiece was not hard to turn into a habit.