Two Books: State of Flow & Expert Performance

Hello and welcome to The Daily Larb I am Larry G. Maguire, your host here on the show.

Today being Sunday it means it's Sunday letters.

In today's episode, I'm discussing two books, the first one is called Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and is an exploration into what makes us happy.

The subtitle of the book is “the classic work on how to achieve happiness”, but I believe that was chosen for marketing purposes.

The book is more about getting into a creative state where we can produce our best work.

That's what the book is about for me.

The second book I want to talk to you about today is called The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in The Arts and Sciences, Sports, and Games, by Anders Ericsson.

It's a very chunky piece of material and incorporates studies by many different scientists and psychologists, Ericsson is the editor and he draws on his wealth of experience in the study of expert performance and in particular deliberate practice.

In today's episode, I speak specifically about his paper titled; “The Role of Deliberate Practice in The Acquisition of Expert Performance”.

It's not that I pick holes in it or even that I'm in a position to pick holes in it, but I do kinda pinpoint elements of the material that I don't agree with.

I think that's important because for you and me to simply take an expert’s opinion and blindly agree with it is somewhat short-sighted.

In digesting any material,  be it academic material or otherwise, I think it's important for us to hold a healthy degree of skepticism about the validity or the truth in what we read.

So let me read some from both books, and encourage you to check out these titles for yourself.

Extract from Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Chapter 3; enjoyment and the quality of life.

Pleasure and Enjoyment

When people ponder further about what makes their lives rewarding, they tend to move beyond pleasant memories and begin to remember other events other experiences that overlap with pleasurable ones, but fall into a category that deserves a separate name; enjoyment. Enjoyable events occur when a person has not only met some prior expectation or satisfied a need, or desire, but also gone beyond what he or she has been programmed to do, and achieve something unexpected perhaps something even unimagined before.

Enjoyment is characterized by this forward movement, by a sense of novelty of accomplishment. Playing a close game of tennis that stretches one's ability is enjoyable as is reading a book that reveals things in a new light, as is having a conversation that leads us to express ideas we didn't know we had. Closing a contested business deal or any piece of work well done is enjoyable. None of these experiences may be particularly pleasurable at the time they were taking place, but afterward, we think back on them and say “that was really fun” and wish they would happen again.

After an enjoyable event, we know that we have changed, that the self has grown. In some respect, we have become more complex as a result of it. Experiences that give pleasure can also give enjoyment but the two sensations are quite different. For instance, everybody takes pleasure in eating. To enjoy food, however, is more difficult. A gourmet enjoys eating as does anyone who pays enough attention to a meal so as to discriminate the various sensations provided by it. As this example suggests, we can experience pleasure without any investment of psychic energy whereas enjoyment happens only as a result of unusual Investments of attention.

A person can feel pleasure without any effort if the appropriate centers in his brain or electrically stimulated, or as the result of the chemical stimulation of drugs. But it is impossible to enjoy tennis game, a book or a conversation unless attention is fully concentrated on the activity. It is for this reason that pleasure is so evanescent and that the self does not grow as a consequence of pleasurable experiences.

Complexity requires investing psychic energy in goals that are new, that are relatively challenging. It is easy to see this process and children; during the first few years of life, the child is a little learning machine, trying out new movements, new words daily. The rapt concentration on the child's face as she learns each new skill is a good indication of what enjoyment is about and each instance of enjoyable learning adds to the complexity of the trials developing self.

Unfortunately, this natural connection between growth and enjoyment tends to disappear with time. Perhaps because learning becomes an external imposition when schooling starts, the excitement of mastering the skills gradually wears out. It becomes all too easy to settle down with the narrow boundaries of the self developed in adolescence. But if one gets to be too complacent, feeling that psychic energy invested in new directions is wasted unless there is a good chance of reaping extrinsic rewards for it, one may end up no longer enjoying life. Pleasure becomes the only source of positive experience.

Buy: Flow; The Classic Work On How To Achieve Happiness on Amazon

The Role of Deliberate Practice

The next piece of material I'd like to read for you is an extract from the paper titled “The Role of Deliberate Practice in The Acquisition of Expert Performance”, a paper from 1993 by Andrews Eriksen. Subsequent to the publication of this paper Ericsson published book titled,  the road to excellence the acquisition of expert performance in the Arts and Sciences sports and games. in this book Alex and puts together numerous papers discussing and investigating the role of deliberate practice and other means of achieving expert performance. this next extract is from the paper the role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance.

The Role of Deliberate Practice in The Acquisition of Expert Performance, by Anders Ericsson

Comparison of deliberate practice to other types of domain-related activities

Consider three general types of activities namely; work, play, and deliberate practice. Work includes public performance, competitions services rendered for pay and other activities directly motivated by external rewards. Play includes activities that have no explicit goal and that are inherently enjoyable. Deliberate practice includes activities that have been specially designed to improve the current level of performance. The goals, costs, and rewards of these three types of activities differ, as does the frequency with which individuals pursue them.

Now, I have a problem with this because Ericsson suggests that work, play, and deliberate practice are separate, almost siloed and this is inaccurate for me, because for me, these three overlap and can never be completely isolated. Play is involved in work almost all the time. Deliberate practice is involved in work, work is involved in play, this to me no differentiation although you can isolate them in attempting to simplify the process, to me, they are all the same thing.

Performance and competitions are constrained in time. These activities as well as rendering a service for pay, require an individual to give their best performance at a given time. The distinction between work and training (deliberate practice) is generally recognised. Individuals given a job are often given some period of apprenticeship or supervised activity during which they are supposed to acquire an acceptable level of reliable performance. Thereafter individuals are expected to give their best performance in work activities and hence individuals rely on previously well-entrenched methods rather than exploring alternative methods with unknown reliability.

Ok, no problem with that per se, but the next bit is really off the mark for me.

In contrast, to play, deliberate practice is a highly structured activity the explicit goal of which is to improve performance. Specific tasks are involved to overcome weaknesses and performance is carefully monitored to provide cues for ways to improve it further. We claim that deliberate practice requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable. Individuals are motivated to practice because practice improves performance. In addition, engaging in deliberate practice generates no immediate monetary rewards and generates cost associated with access to teachers, training environments. Understanding of the long-term consequences of deliberate practice is important.

Buy: The Road To Excellence on Amazon

The above sentence; “we claim that deliberate practice requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable” is downright wrong from my perspective.

I have engaged in deliberate practice in the area of physical fitness, training for marathons and other sports, and I found it to be almost immeasurably enjoyable even though the training was a significant challenge.

It might have been a significant physical test, a pushing of myself to the boundaries of my physical capabilities. However, in the physical pain of the moment, there was an enjoyment of sorts.

I know other athletes, amateur as well as professional, that will assert the same thing.

Long story short, There's no way we can ultimately box this creative thing in, and although in attempting to do so we learn more about ourselves we can never truly know.

The very nature of our being can never know itself.

And that's the whole game and its meaning right there. So, why not just go for it, do your best from where you are. Pursue excellence in the understanding that you'll never catch it.

Fo if you did, the game would be up, and in that discovery, you would cease to exist.

Listen to the entire episode here