Our Brains Know More Than We Do: Trusting our Mind’s Ability to Learn Automatically

A formidable skill is one that is related to a high level of expertise, surpassing the norm. It is one that is difficult to acquire, requires significant effort and dedication. Formidable skills are ones that are largely automatic.  The automation comes from the mind figuring things out in ways we don't understand. So much of honing a formidable skill is learning which parts are automatically handled by the mind, and which parts require our deliberate attention.  To get really good at something, we need to actively let go/trust that our minds can figure things out (better than we can).

Transcript

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So a formidable skill is one that is related to a high level of expertise, something that surpasses the norm, right. If you have some sense of what normal performance in a given area is, if you can surpass that, then you can consider that a pretty formidable skill, right? Obviously, if the norm is being established by maybe the general population or maybe a classroom or some group, I guess it could also just be the norm that you've established over life and you want to rise above that. A formidable skill is one that has the ability to stand out and is particularly strong. I think our lives can be filled with all kinds of different skills, ones that are kind of innate, right. We're born with and then ones that we've maybe honed over time but didn't necessarily excel at. Maybe it's just a hobby, things we like to do, but there's probably a few that we are particularly good at. Again, whether those are innate or something that we've worked on, right? A formidable skill is one that's difficult to acquire, right? Unless it's innate, I guess. But if it's something that you've worked on, a technique or approach over the years, it's something that takes a lot of work, a lot of effort, a lot of dedication. And if it's related to your work or an industry or a particular vocation, then typically it's going to be impactful in that field. It doesn't have to be the case. It might just be doing something on your own and you excel at it and you're really good at it. But maybe not that many people know about it. I think that's fine, but it could actually play a role in your everyday life as well. So as an example, imagine an expert tennis player who consistently outperforms his or her competition, right? So that tennis player is obviously going to rise above normal performance. They have exceptional performance. If this is someone who goes into competitions and they rank high, then they have kind of a level of consistency. Obviously they would need to to what they do, right. And that would be an exceptional type of performance, a skill, something that took them a long time to achieve. Now, the thing about it is they're probably not that aware of how it works either, which sounds kind of funny, because if you were a tennis player, you obviously have a coach and you spend a lot of time looking at the different, I don't know, angles of shot and maybe some of the mental work you have to do and obviously how to put curves on the ball and how to serve and how to control speed and on and on. But a lot of that, even though you're making a lot of deliberate or bringing rather a lot of deliberate attention to what you do, I think once the skill level reaches an exceptional level, there's a lot of unawareness there. And, and as I'm going to talk about throughout this episode is because the mind is doing something automatically. It's taking over. It's kind of like I think it was in the last episode I talked about piano playing, and you can put a lot of deliberate effort into it, and then all of a sudden it becomes automatic and you don't even know how you're doing it anymore. Maybe it was the previous episode, but it's that idea of you start deliberate, you start kind of mechanical, and then you achieve this kind of synthesis. And in that synthesis is where real exceptional skill comes from. And at that point, your brain is kind of taking over. It's kind of doing things that you can't really articulate anymore. It'd be very hard to teach others. It would be hard to describe to yourself what's happening. Right. So you kind of pass that threshold where now you're not even fully aware of how things work, but, you know, they do. And as opposed to kind of deliberately going after, let's say, anchors that are on your technique, by that, I mean, let's say you have an approach to doing something. Maybe the tennis player knows they're supposed to kind of supinate or turn their hand as they bring the racket up towards the ball. That's a very deliberate kind of aware thing. Eventually, they probably aren't even thinking that anymore. It kind of becomes second nature and the mind is presumably coordinating that supination automatically. Right. But you're not really thinking about it anymore. I like to kind of say the mind is doing what we cannot. Right. I titled this episode our brains know more than we do. It sounds kind of funny, but it's like that point where your mind takes over and it's doing something that we cannot do deliberately. Right. And there's this kind of separation between what we deliberately focus on and what the mind does automatically. And that's what I want to get at in this episode. In developing exceptional skills, you have to kind of know what you should focus on deliberately, and then you have to have a kind of trust to step away and say, you know what? My mind is able to take over. And I think it's important to realize that because I think a lot of us can get caught up in trying to remain too focused on the deliberate actions. And when you start getting good at something, there should be less and less of those deliberate actions. Your technique should be more sparse. It should be more kind of stepping away from what is happening automatically in the mind. Right. In any example, I usually like art or music or social program. Whatever it is you're building, whatever it is you're creating, whatever it is you want to be good at, right? Reading, speaking, running, could be physical. The things that you are deliberately doing to get good, they get updated, they might get new because maybe you're learning more advanced techniques, but they should be sparse, right? There should be fewer and fewer things because what you're doing is you're starting to shift kind of ownership over to the mind, which is taking over with that automatic synthesis. I think this comes down to at first, we kind of move in accordance with our deliberate actions, and it's kind of naive because we don't really know what we're doing. But eventually it becomes adaptive where you start to trust adaptation to fill the gap. What I mean by that is, what can we do about this? Well, you kind of take on the behaviors, but eventually you just start behaving in accordance with the skill. And you know that wherever the gap is between your current ability and where you want to be starts to just get filled automatically as an adaptive process. I'll talk a little bit more about that. So formidable skills are ones, I would argue, that are largely automatic. Okay, so using that tennis example again, think about the ability to consistently deliver powerful and accurate serves. Right. Over years of practice and training, a professional, I guess, right player, would have to refine their serving technique to the point where it really becomes automatic. They're probably not thinking about it that much anymore. I'm sure there's still a decent amount of thought. Like if you look at a professional tennis player's face, they look like they're very concentrating, but it's not necessarily on all the specific moves they're going to do. They might be concentrating on a mind state eventually, right. It becomes more high level, ephemeral, a little more ephemeral, a little more abstract, right. Because their mind is taking over the technical details, if you will, and it's more about just maintaining that mindset. It's kind of like you're chasing an emotion as opposed to chasing a specific technical detail. When you get really good at something, that tennis player, the intricate coordination of body movements, the precise timing of the toss, the controlled power exerted on the ball, that would eventually become what we usually call second nature. Right. And typically we might think of that being achieved through repetitive, extensive repetition, which in some sense is true, but repetition is maybe not the best word because I think professionals in any area, or even just even if people are not competing, people get really good at what they do. Yeah, there's some repetition there, but it's actually kind of changing what you do every time, at least by a little bit, and then again getting adaptive about it. Right. So you're changing it, changing it, changing it, and you kind of fill that gap. But this tennis player who is just getting second nature at all, these things that were once quite deliberate and maybe mechanical, that's a good example of exceptional performance. Again, they wouldn't be aware of all those pieces as they're refining their technique. The thing they're refining is becoming more and more high level, more automatic. And so the kind of intricate coordination of body movements is not really something you're aware of other than the fact that they're going well, right, the precise timing of the toss. I highly doubt professional tennis players are counting the seconds that go by before they hit the ball. I don't know, but I doubt it because it just becomes more of a muscle memory, probably more of an emotional state. It's about trusting that the mind can do what we cannot. Right, what we cannot do deliberately. And I think with tennis or anything, that once a skill becomes formidable, as I'm talking about in this episode, you're getting good at knowing what to focus on. And what to focus on is kind of, again, less and less. It's more sparse, right? You're focusing on less things. One, because the things you're focusing on are kind of higher level anchors. And more things subsume under those higher level anchors. I've talked about this idea, right, of focusing on the abstract as opposed to the details as you get better. So they're more high level. There's always less high level things than there are detailed things, right. Just by the nature of how abstraction works. So they're higher level, there's less of them. And again, you're trusting the mind to take over in that automatic fashion. So you start to get good in the medicines you get good at just knowing that I'm only going to focus on these few things. And then you trust the mind to do the other things. And you can imagine a professional tennis player or someone who's trying to become a professional tennis player maybe not doing that well, especially initially. They're trying to do too many things deliberately. And of course, I'm using tennis as the example, but this could be anything in your life, right? You try to do too many things deliberately, you don't want to let go. Maybe the deliberate attention worked initially, but it was kind of hunky. It was kind of, what's the word? Or clunky, rather, and just too mechanical, right? And you have to let go. It's like that piano playing, right, example I used before, where it's very mechanical and choppy at first, and to get to the point where it just moves, you have to kind of stop thinking about it. And whatever it is you're focusing on is no longer the details. It's just a few high level things that will kind of anchor kind of the way a heuristic does anchor your mind on just a few important things to allow the rest to flow automatically. And you can think of that tennis player to get better. It becomes less about what specific technical things can I improve? Although there might still be some of that, and more about just almost envisioning that tennis player, envisioning what they want to look like, so they could imagine what their performance would look like if it was, say, 10% better. And then to just start moving in that fashion. And then via adaptation, the body starts to fill that gap. Because again, the way the mind's working now is in this automatic way. It will make the connections it needs to make. It will understand what it needs to understand, not in a way that we're going to be able to describe, but we know that the mind will fill the gap automatically. So where does that kind of automation come from? Right. The mind is figuring out ways to do things in ways that we will never understand. Right? There's the notion of kind of procedural memory, right? You can kind of put some labels on this where maybe you keep repeating something or doing something, and the mind kind of picks up on some of that muscle memory. It's able to understand the procedure as a memory, but not necessarily something that we call upon like other memories, we're not necessarily seeing the details, but the mind is figuring something out, more to do with the neural pathways that are getting developed. Right. We know, as with any neural network, the human mind is basically making connections between the neurons. And the more presumably, the connections between neurons establish some type of configuration in the mind which allows the processing we need to take place. In other words, as you start to take on a certain behavior, and you allow the mind to fill the gap between where you're at and where you want to be, those are neural pathways that are being established so that the next time you come to do the same task, you're a little bit better, and those pathways get stronger and stronger and stronger and maybe more pathways. And however the mind needs to, or the brain in this case needs to work specifically, right. Humans start to do chunking, and this is where, this is related to abstraction, right? Where as opposed to just looking at individual details or pieces, you start to see how those pieces are related to each other and you kind of chunk them into higher level categories. And that becomes the more sparse but more important kinds of anchors that you're focusing on. Those chunks, you see things as chunks. So maybe the tennis player is. It's not just like, okay, the wrist has to move and there's timing when you throw the ball and there's a force that you hit. Maybe the wrist movement and the timing and the force kind of get chunked into one movement, if that makes sense. And the way that humans kind of are able, at least in this example, let's say, for the athletic sense of things, that would chunk almost under, again, an emotion, right? There'd be a certain feeling, or maybe a certain. It could still be a muscle feeling, maybe in the shoulder or something. And if you just focus on that, then the supinating wrists and the timing and the force kind of flow into that. In other words, if I just focus on that one thing, the rest kind of gets coordinated automatically. And I'm using tennis as an example. But again, this is any skill, and it's not just physical, it's mental skills, it's anything, right? And it's not just muscle memory and remembered routines. It's something higher order. There's a synthesis. It's something that is emergent, right? It doesn't condescend to tell us how it works in a detailed fashion. You're not going to have access to that kind of information. So that automation is coming from those new neural pathways that your mind is figuring out. That's what exceptional performance really is. It's your mind rising to the task in ways that we ourselves do not. Again, it's kind of a funny way to say it, because our minds are obviously still us, but our minds are, more specifically, our brains are kind of figuring things out in ways that we don't know. And that's where exceptional performance lies. You should expect not to be fully aware of how things are working. I tweeted a few months back that our work should surprise us, right? Our work should surprise us. And that means that if you're really getting better at things, it shouldn't be just in some totally predictable deliberate fashion. In fact, it should become more and more surprising. You should almost get to the point where, yes, you have a technique and you approach it, and then when it's done, you kind of step back and say, what the h*** just happened? Because you're kind of surprised that, wow, in some sense, I know what I'm doing, but in another sense, I kind of got surprised, hopefully in a good way, about how that all came together and how that all synthesized, and I can't even almost explain how I'm doing it anymore. For the things that you want to be really, really good at, I think you should expect that. You should expect surprise, right? The mind is able to do what we cannot do deliberately. It's about trusting the mind. And again, because of the way the brain is forming those neural networks or those neural connections, rather, and doing what it needs to do so that the next time you come face to face with the same situation, you're a little bit better. It's important that you trust that when it comes to exceptional skills, if you don't learn to trust that you're not going to be focusing on the right thing, you're probably going to be focusing on too many details. You're going to be getting hung up on things that you think you need to control but actually don't. And you don't need to know anything about neural networks or axons or neurons or anything like that. Neurotransmitters, all this stuff. You just need to know that the mind is an adaptive machine, and it is able to take on things in ways that we don't understand. But you have to be very cognizant of that so that you know that in order to get better, there's more. Of a letting go. There's more of a letting go. And I think that's maybe surprising to a lot of people who might assume that if you're getting better and better at something, you're learning more powerful techniques and all this. And so you must be taking in more, taking in more. But I think it's actually less. You're stripping a lot away because more of what matters is getting offloaded to the mind. It's getting offloaded to the brain's ability to do what it does so that it emerges within the mind as a formidable skill. Okay, again, the gap between where you're at and where you want to be in order to fill that requires trust. It requires trust in your mind's ability to do what it needs to do. Your mind and your body. Obviously, depending on the skill that we're talking about. And so the big argument that I'm making in this episode is that so much of honing a formidable skill is learning which parts are automatically handled by the mind and which parts require your deliberate attention. I think that's really what you're learning, and that's more of a meta thing to learn. In other words, if you want to be that great tennis player, if you want to be a really good reader, if you want to have great memory, if you want to run long distances or public speaking or something to do with art or obviously any skill you can think of, and whether you're competing or it's just for yourself, if you want to really excel at it, if you want to hone that as a formidable skill, something that's well above your own average and maybe above the average of a class or a group or a small community or the world, depending how big your dreams are. It's not just learning the thing itself. It's stepping back, observing it holistically, and learning which parts are automatically handled by the mind and which parts require your deliberate attention. And the parts that require your deliberate attention are going to get less and less over time. But you have to know that, and you have to be willing to give that to the mind. And I think that's where a lot of people stumble in trying to develop formidable skills. It is surprising, because if you want to get really good at piano, it doesn't seem like I should let go. It seems like I should focus more on the chords I'm playing or whatever. If I want to do a really cool riff, one on an electric guitar, some lead from a song, I'm assuming. Yes, you got to learn the notes or the tab, as they call it, or whatever it is you're doing on the guitar. But at some point, if you really want to flow through it, if you want to achieve that flow state, you got to let go. You really have to feel your way through it. Think about getting good at what's automatic and what's not. If you use that tennis example, what's automatic? Well, a lot of the strokes that you do, the footwork, the way your body moves during a serve, the way you're going to return someone else's serve. I mean, don't ask me, ask someone who plays tennis professionally. But this might be an example of maybe those things are not thought of deliberately when you get really, really good, because those become automatic, which would make sense. Imagine returning someone's rapid serve. You don't even have time to think of that. It's kind of like somebody in the major league baseball pitching a ball to you. There's not a whole lot of analysis that can take place when the ball is coming at you 100 miles an hour or whatever it is. Right. It's very reactionary, but those reactions get better. Your mind is building the neural pathways to figure that out. And I think if you're going to hit that ball well or return that serve well, it's not just hoping it will happen. It's being cognizant of the fact that the mind is taking over and letting it do so. Okay. And what might be more deliberate attention? Because it's not like deliberate tension all goes out the window, even though it gets less and less well, I can imagine in the case of the tennis, there'd still be strategy and tactics, right? Kind of longer term, if the game goes this way, if the game goes that way, how might I switch things up? What new anchors might I deliberately focus on? Kind of emotional anchors, presumably types of decision making under pressure, adapting to an opponent's style. Right. Different opponents play differently. So there could be some deliberate cognitive effort there where you're kind of figuring things out depending on who you're facing and on and on. And that's really, I think what exceptional performance is about is getting that different between what's automatic and what's deliberate. Take any skill or set of skills. You want to be really good at most things you probably don't want to be really good at. Why would you can only be good at so many things. Really good at so many things. And to be clear, you don't have to be really good at many things, but you should probably be really good at at least something, right? Whatever it is, it doesn't matter if it's useful, useless, doesn't matter if it makes money. It doesn't matter if anyone else cares. It's very soulful. Soulful, filling to do something that you really enjoy and that you believe. Who's to say how true it is? But if you believe you're really, really good at it, that's fun. And I think that's really important. So choose that one or two things that you think are something you're really, really good at. And maybe you were kind of born that way, but it's probably more to do with your environment and differentiate between what's automatic and what's deliberate. And how has that changed as you've gotten better at it? And if you want to get even better at it, maybe some of those things that have your deliberate attention should actually be offloaded to the automatic way that your mind works. Offloaded to the mind. What might those be? And just try them. Right. Because you have to try them. I think that's really the exceptional performance in our lives. You should expect not to be fully aware of how things work when you go to take the next step in whatever it is you want to get good at. It's not because you figured it out in kind of an analytical sense. It's because you decided to let it go and you said, okay, I'm going to trust this to my mind to take the next step, and you got to do that incrementally. It can't be too big of a step, but I'm going to take the next step and then I'm going to see what my mind can do. And I'm not going to keep trying to figure out exactly what it's doing because I know I'm not going to know, but I am going to pay attention to kind of the emotional cues that seem to anchor me effectively. Be mindful of the fact that the mind is doing things that we can't do and that we can't do deliberately, even though it's still us. Right. Get good at knowing what to focus on. Right. Basic strokes, footwork, serve techniques, returning serves. That's probably not worth focusing on super deliberately if you expect those things to be automatic. Even some of that decision making under pressure or adapting to opponent's style, maybe that needs to be deliberate now. But if you take the next step, is that still a deliberate thing or does some of that need to get offloaded? We have to envision what the next step looks like and then trust that the mind is going to adapt to fill that gap. And I don't think that's obvious to a lot of people. I think when you think of exceptional skills, you think we tend to think that everything is deliberate. Like, I need to really be deliberate about the next step. In some sense, there is some truth to that, but a lot of it is trust and is letting go and doing less. Right. And it's probably one of the reasons why people who are really effective at what they do make it look so easy because in a way it does kind of get easy because we're not really doing it right. It's still us. But our mind has automated so much that it's kind of like we're not doing it anymore. If you learn that piano song super well and you sit down and your fingers are just flying across the keyboard and you make it look so easy. Right. The person who doesn't play piano or maybe who isn't as good as you, is thinking, oh, your mind must be going a mile a minute. You must be like thinking about where your fingers go, and there must be so much thinking involved. But that's because they're framing it the way that they currently learn piano or tennis or reading or memorizing or whenever it is they take where they are, assuming it's not as high as you are, and they're thinking of that skill in that deliberate fashion. Right? Not realizing that. Well, no, the reason it looks so easy is because it got easy. The reason it's got easy because I actually don't think a lot much about it anymore. I don't actually have a lot of deliberate thinking going on. I just have a few things that I anchor on to. I think that's good news for developing skills effectively, because if it was this constant increase in deliberate thinking that had to occur to get really good at something, then the cognitive load would be just so high that none of us would be able to become particularly exceptional at it. So exceptional performance. Let me use that example of reading. For example, think about what effective reading is. I'm kind of passionate about this. I enjoy reading, not because I think I'm necessarily getting anything out of the book, which of course, sometimes I do. I mean, I'm not going to read for no reason. It's interesting, but I think your philosophy in life and what you really learn comes from doing and taking actions and more specifically, building things. I talk about that all the time. But I like to read. It's an interesting thing to do. And I think reading should be pretty fast, smooth, and obviously remembered with good comprehension. I think that makes sense, right? I know some people say, well, I'm going to read slow because I want to be contemplative. Well, I think there's a time and place to read slow, but I don't think everything you should pick up should be super slow because, one, there's no reason to believe what you're picking up is going to be super exceptional, even if it was recommend it by someone else. I think you have to make that judgment call. Also, a lot of books have filler in them, and so I think you should be judicious about when you slow down and when you don't. But anyways, let's just assume that good reading is fairly fast because if it's natural and you're getting good at it, like I said, brevity is a good signal, right? So it should move pretty fast. It should be pretty smooth. Your eye movement should be nice and smooth. It shouldn't be super choppy and kind of stressful and straining. And when you put that book or the article down, you should have a pretty good comprehension of what you just read, right. And to achieve that, you need to go beyond kind of the literal attempt to read, which is, I guess, imagine when you were first reading, right? You look at every individual word and you need to kind of translate or transform that into reading the way that we live. What do I mean by that? Well, when we live and we walk through life, we got all the sensory input, right? That's kind of analogous to reading. It's information coming into our eyes and our ears and all our other senses. But we're not examining it in detail, are we? It flows and we see things in higher level categories. It's smooth. I don't walk through a brand new room all choppy because so many things are going on. I just decide what to pay attention to, decide what not to. My mind is in some sense, paying attention to more than I am. In other words, I'm not necessarily fully aware, and yet my mind is still kind of consuming the information and deciding what to do with it. That's what I think good reading is. I think if reading goes well, I'm just using reading as an example. If that was a skill you wanted to excel at, it wouldn't be taking the way that you read now and then just somehow speeding it up. That wouldn't make sense. You would actually have to take on techniques that rise above that. That kind of do things like chunking, increase your peripheral vision, learn to move smoothly through a lot of words, and grabbing onto the most essential aspects. I'm not talking about skimming. I'm talking about allowing the mind to automatically see large chunks of text and to use kind of these mental anchors to comprehend what those large chunks mean. And this might not make any sense to you. Doesn't matter. Maybe reading is not the skill you're particularly interested in, or you're just happy with the way you read now. But this is true for anything. Any exceptional performance is going to have the mind do things that are better than what we can do deliberately, and you're not going to be fully aware of how they work. It's the mind doing what we cannot do. And I think if you take the reading as an example and you wanted your reading performance to go up ten or 20% in terms of let's say speed and comprehension, then it wouldn't be supercharging what you do now. It would actually be letting go. It would be like, you know what? Maybe my mind can see these words without me focusing on every individual word. You're probably not focusing on every individual word right now. You might be chunking, like, three words at a time or something, right? But maybe you could chunk seven words at a time. Could you chunk two sentences at a time? That sounds like a lot. Is that true? But if that was a thing you wanted to excel at, you'd have to try it. You'd have to trust your mind. Like, maybe my mind, in almost a subconscious way, is able to do a lot more than I am deliberately. And again, it's supposed to surprise you. If reading was the thing where you wanted to go 1020, 30% better in speed and comprehension. And I'm not talking about skimming and even the label speed reading, maybe there's some good techniques in there. Forget about the label. I'm just talking about, can you consume information more effectively if that's what you wanted to be better at, that would involve you not being fully aware of how the mind works. That would involve you, require you to rather trust that the mind is going to adapt. Okay. And you would need to kind of distinguish between what's automatic and what's not. Right. And so what can we do about that? If it's true that so much of honing a formidable skill is learning which parts are automatic and which parts require more deliberate attention, what's kind of the thing we can anchor on here as a technique? Well, I would say envision what the behavior of better performance looks like and. Just start doing it. So if it's that tennis player, you might notice a tennis player move a certain way. Maybe they're faster, they're quicker, their service harder. And so you just start doing those things now, you're not going to be good at them, but you're forcing the body and the mind to adapt. Right. You can take on the behavior. There's kind of two things. There's the behavior or the movement of the skill you want to get good at, and then there's the actual performance itself, whether or not you're good at, like, the output you produce. Right. If you wanted to read a little bit better, you might start moving the eyes across the words a little bit faster, knowing that you're going to miss more at first, but you're going to take on the behavior initially and then see and trust. If the mind is eventually going to start to adapt. And of course, it's easy to test. You put down the paragraph, you put down the book and say, okay, what was on that page? Right? And then you can go double check and like, did you actually comprehend that? And see if you're getting a little bit surprised, right? That tennis player can take on the movements. Go memorize a list of 50 things even if you don't think you can right now, right? Go do the thing without being able to do it. If that makes sense, like, take on the motion and then let the mind start to fill the gap. Don't reach too much, but reach a little bit beyond where you're at. That's what exceptional performance is about. Don't expect to be fully aware of how it works. Know that the mind can do what we cannot do deliberately. Get good at focusing on what you should focus on deliberately and letting go of more and more to the mind and its automatic ability. Move first, naively take on the behavior of the skill you want, and then trust that the adaptation of the mind, more specifically the brain, is going to fill that gap. Okay, so our brains know more than we do. I think we have to trust our mind's ability to learn automatically if we really want to get good and develop an exceptional performance for a particular skill that we want to take on. Okay, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, take care. You it sa.