USE THE FORCE: be deliberate in order to grow

WHAT

You need something.
Something to drive you into growing.
Something to force you out of your way.
Something to pull you forward out of the swamp of randomness.

Deliberate practice, is another term used for this idea.
This concept of having a driving function to MAKE you develop in the direction you want.

WHY

Because random things take too long to make progress.
Yep.
They do make progress, but very slow compared to even slightly not random stuff.

Evolution?
That’s random (some say).
And it took 3.77 (I counted) billion years to get to this point of a slightly hairy monkey typing his night thoughts on a tiny blog on a remote part of the information network that other monkeys built a few decades ago.

DNA…

You see, just repeating the same old thing, over and over (like taking a step in a random direction) will not get you very far very quickly.

For example:

1. The average UK driver spends almost 4 year of their lives driving.
   But it usually doesn’t turn them into race drivers.

2. At 7,500 step/day, assuming 80 years of age, a person will take 219,000,000 steps in their life.
   But that probably won’t turn them into Triathlon champions.

Let’s look at some visuals!
If you take 100 random steps, each one in any direction, you’ll cover some area eventually:

Illustration of 100 random walk steps. You do cover some area eventually, but it’s not very efficient…

But if you add even a very small bias, that is, a sense of direction that slightly pulls your random steps towards it, you suddenly cover way more ground towards the desired direction. In the next image we can the previous image (purely random walk) overlayed on a slightly biased random walk:

Adding a small “bias”, to point your steps in the right direction, creates a big improvement in your progress in that direction

See how the added bias dramatically increased the progress in that direction?

Another way to see this, is to plot the “final distances” you cover after 100 “random” steps, for different strengths of bias. “Final distance” being the distance between your starting point and your position in the very last step:

Final distance for different strengths of bias. We see that as the bias increases, we cover more distance…

Ok I hope you got it - pure randomness is slower than slightly biased randomness

HOW

Fine fine, but in what ways can we sprinkle our lives with this positive bias?

Ingredient #1: Feedback

Feedback can bet internal (meaning, you are formulating it on yourself) or external (meaning someone else is evaluating you and giving you feedback).
Both feedbacks are useful and important.

External feedback can be collected from mentors, coaches, peers, leaders, friends,…
Internal feedback is generated by us, but we can still use external tool, like:

1. a mirror

2. a metronome (keeps track of rythm)

3. a video (for analyzing motion)

Ingredient #2: Plan

Social creatures that we are, getting feedback without follow up can be stressful.
So feedback is just the first step.
After you get feedback, you should set up a plan to tackle it.
Otherwise, your monkey brain will keep grinding at the sense of getting feedback.

One great way to apply feedback, in small and managable doses is “Atomic Habits”

Once you combine feedback and a plan to act on it, you are one step closer to growing and developing.

TAKEAWAYS

1. It helps to have some (good) “bias” to make decent progress

2. Feedback is a great “bias” to use for growth

3. Feedback without a plan (Atomic Habits) to implement it, becomes stress

You don’t have to randomly walk through life