A quick guide to getting better at things when you’re not primarily trying to kick a ball
If you wanted to learn to kick a football in one hour, what would you do?
Would you (a) stand in front of the football considering the right angle, force, and point of contact for 59 minutes, then in the final minute kick the ball or (b) spend an hour kicking the damn ball.
Obviously most people would choose B. We know that football is a skill and skills are best learned through practice. By standing there and worrying over all the finer details you only waste time. Action beats inaction and practice makes perfect!
You’ve probably heard this before.
Action over inaction. Don’t become paralysed by analysis. So far so self-help. But the example above is a bit straw man isn’t it … Obviously we’d choose B over A! We know that physical skills are best learnt through physical practice, not mental arithmetic. The example is taking an obviously inappropriate strategy and applying it to something we as humans are very familiar with – physical skills (talking, walking, tying your shoe laces).
So let’s take a different example. What if you were a football manager and wanted to learn the best positions for your players in a given situation. Would you go out and play 100 games of football yourself? Would you study 100 previous games of football? Maybe both would be effective? Maybe neither?
This is the key point I want to discuss. When we talk about “action vs inaction” it’s misleading. It’s never about action vs inaction, or even a try-first-think-later mentality.
It’s about finding the right strategy.
Learning a physical skill is easy. We already have a very strong, inborn feedback loop to help us acquire physical skills. You throw the ball at the basket. It falls a little short. You feel the force you put into the throw and increase it slightly. It goes too far. You decrease. A little left, a little right, and so on. We do this without even thinking about it and when we fail we immediately understand what adjustments we can make to improve our next attempt.
With almost every other human activity, we fail by default.
Writing a bet selling novel is hard. You sit down and write each day, or you study a course on writing technique, or you read lots of authors you want to imitate. Then you fail. How do you adjust your strategy? What did you do wrong?
It’s impossible to know because we have no inbuilt feedback loop to guide us.
This is where the confusion I think comes in. The argument goes “just start doing” and this gets misunderstood as “action is better than planning” or “you learn by doing”. But this is wrong. If I asked you to sit an exam on a subject (quantum computing?) that you’ve never done before, you could do it 1,000 times and never see any improvement except by pure chance. There’s no feedback loop to guide you to the right answer.
So what’s the best approach if we want to learn something new, and that “something new” isn’t football? Well, the answer is probably to “just start doing it”. Yeah, I know, anticlimactic. But the difference in meaning should be clear now.
If you want to succeed at something you must first know what your successful strategy for succeeding is. How do you practice? When you fail, how do you make adjustments that lead you closer to success? This is the key. Action beats inaction not because it leads to success, it beast inaction because you can cycle through strategies until you find the one that works.
So next time you’re starting something new, keep in mind to always be thinking about your strategies. Once you have the strategy in place to improve, then everything you do really does become easy.
George Seed 