Getting your reps in

Not long ago the economist Tyler Cowan posed a cheeky question on his blog.

“What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?” 

Most of us probably don’t have a good answer. In our jobs, we don’t practice skills the way musicians or athletes do. We don’t “train.” But we could. If we thought about it hard enough, we could probably come up with drills – small tasks masterable by repetition – that would make us better at what we do for a living.

When I was younger I made a habit of reading an exquisite paragraph by a great writer and then trying to reproduce it from memory. I invite you to have a go at this: the results are bracing. When you compare your version to the original, you notice all the small (and not so small) differences — their superior choices in rhythm or diction. I’m sure doing this on the regular would make everyone a better writer, though it takes dedication. (I eventually stopped.) My friend Lynda has lately been memorizing poems, which is a kind of training – memory is pretty central to thinking, and thinking is pretty central to writing.

James Altucher seems to be sticking with his commitment to “come up with ten ideas” every morning. He’s been doing this for decades. That’s hardcore. And it’s no doubt paying dividends: at age 57, he remains a consistently interesting, gadfly-ish thinker.

“I see going to conferences as a mechanism for forcing continued learning,” said one of Cowan’s readers. I kind of think of OBD the same way. You pledge to tiptoe out of your comfort zone once a month. It amounts to a kind of “learning plan.” Reflection/review is a big part of skill-building of any kind. The structure of OBD covers this off neatly: the actual writing of the posts, after the Big Day is done, serves as a granular postmortem of how it all went down.

The question, of course, is: What are we actually getting better at, here?

Maybe doing life.