Anne Truitt Zelenka

Is there something you wish you were expert at? Tennis or golf? Web design? Coding with Ruby or Ajax, perhaps Java? Writing, fiction or non? Parenting, maybe? The most exciting news I’ve read recently says that if you want to be an expert and you put in the time and effort, you can do it. Practice is more important than talent. But the kind of practice you do matters. You need to practice mindfully. In The New Brain (recommended by Kathy Sierra), Richard Restak highlights the research of psychologist Anders Ericsson who has found that paying attention while developing skills is critical: “In order to achieve superior performance in a chosen field, the expert must counteract the natural impulse to gain an automated performance as soon as possible.” Don’t prematurely automate your skills, at least the ones in which you want to become expert.

Premature automation occurs when we rush to learn a task then do it mindlessly thereafter. It’s what I’m trying to avoid since making the switch from PC to Mac. Instead of doing everything with the mouse, I’m learning keyboard shortcuts for the things I can’t do with the Unix shell. When I want to upload a file using my GUI FTP program, it would be faster (right now at least, while I still have to search my mind for the keyboard shortcuts to use) to grab the mouse and click through the Finder window instead of using cmd-tab to get from whatever app I’m in to the Finder, then cmd-n for a new window, and cmd-shift-g to bring up a “Go to folder” text entry box, finally typing in the directory I want using tab completion. Soon, I hope, my finger muscles will know how to do it without any conscious thought on my part. Now that I’m analyzing it, I’m wondering if it might just be faster to use the command line ftp. That’s something to consider as I find the expert way through.

Mindful practice matters to programmers. Consider the Python-inspired changes to JavaScript that are being planned. While the changes–the addition of iterators, generators, and list comprehensions–are so advanced that many programmers won’t use them, they will make a difference to experts, those who always search for better, more efficient, and cleaner ways to write code. I wonder: how could you sort out the programmers committed to endless improvement from the ones who are content with their current level of knowledge?

The key to developing expertise is noting whether what you’re doing makes you any better at it and then modifying what you’re doing to get closer to the desired results. One reason Darren Rowse is so successful at blogging about professional blogging is that he’s constantly searching for ways to be better. Check out his 10 Habits of Highly Effective ProBloggers. Not only does he reflect on how to be effective, he invites other bloggers to participate with him, generating interest and links in a layered display of blogging virtuosity. This reminds me of cookbook author Lisa Yockelson’s approach in Baking by Flavor, where she achieves unusually delicious results by combining multiple compatible ingredients. For example, not content with standard chocolate brownie flavor, Yockelson’s recipe for Bittersweet Chocolate Brownies includes cocoa powder, melted unsweetened and bittersweet chocolate, and chunks of bittersweet chocolate that form “pools of goodness.” You can just imagine her in her kitchen thinking, “these brownies are good but they could be better.”

The search for constant improvement and mindful practice are not exactly the same thing, but they are not unrelated. You can’t mindlessly improve yourself. Mindfulness allows us to take even the most mundane tasks seriously, to be intensely in the moment as we do them. The expert musician or programmer or baker meets each practice or coding or recipe testing session as though it were the most important one ever. And they each are. We have only moments; sum them together and you get a life. This is Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence, a sort of German translation of Buddhism:

This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you-all in the same succession and sequence-even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a grain of dust.

Yes, there are times that good enough is good enough, when you don’t need to be fully focused on improving what you’re doing, when you just need to sit back and relax. However, to become really and truly good at something, no matter what it is, you must attend mindfully with full focus to what you do, again and again, over and over through time.