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Pushing Against Plateaus

aerial view photography of green leaf trees near mountain

Continuing the theme from The Okay Plateau, how do we avoid the leveling out of skills and development? Well, all learning and honing of abilities begins in the brain. Whether it’s a musician, a painter, a soccer player or an orator, or even a father trying to listen better to his teenage daughter, it all starts with the neurological pathways in the brain. Think of impulses and signals being sent down neurons from the brain to other parts of the body like a mail truck traveling a freeway to deliver messages. The body begins to enhance the efficiency of those pathways most often used, just like a city might widen a popular highway and keep the pavement clean and smooth.  

There are two triggers that cause this enhancement to continue, that create a continual improvement of signal transmission and thus learning: feedback and failure. In order to continue to progress and continue to improve, we have to push ourselves to face the two things almost no one wants to deal with.

As humans, we like feedback, but only as long as it’s positive. As soon as we find out we are doing things incorrectly, it’s a different story. We don’t like to be wrong, we don’t like to be corrected and we don’t like to be told to do it differently. But this is exactly what learning and improvement require. And the more immediate the feedback, the better. A wrong note on a piano is immediate. A missed jump shot in on the court is as well. Your wife reminding you a month after an argument how your tone of voice made her feel … not so much (totally hypothetical example). But this is why you aren’t better at shaving than you were 10 years ago. Trying to improve – and risking the immediate feedback of slicing your face open – probably isn’t worth “shaving off” (see what I did there) seven seconds from your pre-work routine.

And we certainly don’t like failure, but again, it’s one of the pre-requisites of progress. We must push ourselves to our limits and even beyond to continue to improve. The piano player may get immediate feedback from a mistake, but unless he pushes himself to play increasingly difficult pieces or steps up the tempo to a point at which he periodically induces that mistake, little skill development will take place. He must flirt with failure. And once more, this is why you are a no better driver than the decade-younger version of you: pushing yourself to failure while driving could mean a potentially life-threatening accident. It’s not worth the risk.

But there are many important areas of our lives where failure and feedback are more than worth the risk. They are necessary. And while they may be uncomfortable, the paths of feedback and failure may be the best roadways towards improvement.

In what areas of life is it essential that you continue to improve? How will you face feedback and flirt with failure to ensure progress is made? 

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