“Willpower Hacks” That Get Us To Practice
Gary Marcus is an NYU psychologist who set out to learn guitar at the age of 40 and wrote a book about it, Guitar Zero. He had some interesting things to say about adult learning at a recent conference:
“Marcus says the research doesn’t support the notion that children simply learn things easier than adults. ‘There’s a classic idea that to learn things easily you have to start as a child that isn’t supported in the literature,’ he said. ‘Kids are practicing so much more because they don’t have day jobs, they don’t have children to raise, they don’t have parents to care for.’
Author Malcolm Gladwell reported that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to learn something, an idea that has limited resonance with Marcus. ‘The problem is that the 10,000 hours theory ignores the talent and ignores the kind of practice,’ Marcus said. ‘Practice is an absolute prerequisite and it can get you somewhere, but you have to focus on your weaknesses.’
For Marcus, the weakness was rhythm and timing. “The easiest way to better that is practicing with a metronome, which is unbelievably tedious,” he said. ‘I started practicing with a drum machine.’ The drum machine gave him variety and the learning brain likes variety.
That led Marcus to the idea of ‘willpower hacks,’ ways of tricking yourself into getting around obstacles or things that inspire resistance to doing unpleasant work, like facing and challenging your weaknesses. ‘A lot of adults are easily discouraged,’ he said.” Read more here.
I like Marcus’s notion that children learn so rapidly in part because they have more time to devote to single-minded practice. And I like his idea of “willpower hacks.” Do you have any that work for you? I find that I have much more willpower in the morning, so I do unpleasant tasks then—knowing that by the end of the day I’m frazzled and will do only the tasks that I damn well want to do.
Annie,
Once again, I think you’ve inspired me to write a blog! I think that the idea of willpower hacks is indeed compelling. I’ll capture more on my blog, but here a few for your consideration:
1. I find it helpful to lie to myself as a hack for the toughest part of an unpleasant task: getting started. When I don’t want to go to the gym, I’ll always say, “Well, I’ll go to the gym, but I’ll just go through the motions for 30 minutes.” That helps me get there. Once I’m there and dressed and on a machine, I almost always say, “Well, I’m HERE, I might as well have a serious workout.
2. I put “sacred time” on my calendar for arduous tasks–once it’s on there, it literally would take a death, hospitalization, or similar major emergency to not honor that commitment. This is the only way I’ve managed to write so many books. Writing is hard work, and you have to be ruthless about not falling into the trap of needing to be “in the mood to write.” Having the sacred time makes me focus, shrugging off fatigue, minor colds, and other easy excuses. And almost inevitably, I end up forgetting about how I felt when I sat down because I finally get caught up in the task.
3. A big breakthrough was to stop “deciding” what to do each morning. It’s too easy to lie in a warm bed and think about whether or not to get up. It helps to decide in advance: Packing my gym bag the night before and having everything I need ready to go so I can get out the door without even thinking about what I’m doing and whether I want to do it.
This is a great post. Thank you!
I also think that the fact that children are less self conscious about trying new things makes a big difference. They play and pretend. And if they fall over, they get up and try again. If I fall over, on the other hand, I stay away or it takes much more out of me to try again. When babies learn to speak they get the words wrong a thousand times before they correctly pronounce it. Adults learning a language are so afraid of coming across as silly or incapable that they aren’t willing to make the same number of mistakes.
Children have license to be silly and playful which adults- maybe self-inflicted- don’t.
Maybe we would learn more, as adults, if we were more playful, silly and pretended our way to success?
It’s an interesting concept, but I honestly scoured his page looking for a “page 2″ link. It seems like a good start to a longer and more informative article