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What’s the best way to learn or to teach something new? A few recent studies suggest some surprising twists on the received wisdom. Speakers, teachers, and leaders take note.
First, and perhaps most intriguing, comes a study that explains something that has long mystified me. In a couple of very high-octane areas—world-class athletics and Nobel Prizes—the winners have a very high percentage of people with an unexpected background: They didn’t start their specialty at an early age. The athletes and scientists who did something else first, and came to their field at a relatively later age, often outpaced those who began early and stayed within their fields.
How could this be? What the study found was that mere repetition is not the best way to improve at something. Better is to mix it up—try different approaches, different techniques, even different philosophies. This is particularly well studied in musical performance, where whole books of technique have been written on the importance of approaching a piece of music by playing it in chunks, in different ways, with different tempi, approaches, and practice techniques. Just playing a piece from start to finish seems to practically guarantee you’ll always make the same mistakes.
The second study takes on the idea of willpower or self-control as a path to diligent work and therefore success. It turns out that self-control is not useful because it waxes and wanes. What you need instead is a deeper psychological trait that remains pretty steady throughout our lives: conscientiousness. Conscientious people do better than everyone else because they plan ahead and adhere to those plans. They may even have to exert less self-control than the rest of us mere mortals because they are so busy sticking to those plans that they don’t get tempted to stray all that often. It’s all about being able to envision a future and then consistently working toward that. That comes from a habit of mind, not willpower. Conscientiousness is the key.
The final study, from almost a decade ago, found that it is better to plan to cheat on your diet—one day a week, say—than it is to attempt to stick to it fixedly. Apparently, diet fatigue sets in, and the strain is likely to become too much if you try to go for 100 percent adherence week after week. But if instead, you take a day off your grapefruit diet to eat chocolate cake, you’ll have an easier time of it than if you had tried to be forever good.
Note that planning to take a day off from your diet is quite different than getting stressed, going home late one night, and eating a quart of ice cream. That’s not the approach recommended by the diet experts because then you’ll beat up on yourself as a failure. Whereas, if you plan to take a day off, then you are still on track.
We can put all this wisdom to work as speakers, teachers, and leaders by varying our approach to our subject matter, introducing purpose or a reason for what we are proposing early in the talk (or term), and by not taking ourselves too seriously. Allow the team to have a bit of fun occasionally, and you’ll find that they work much harder the rest of the time.
Remember, variety is the spice of life.