The Process of Improving Performance
The research of Anders Ericsson makes it clear that the process of improving performance requires an absurd amount of time. Pop culture likes to call this the 10,000 hours rule of thumb. This rule of thumb is an oversimplification of Ericsson’s research, but it’s still a nice little reminder of what it takes to keep improving.
Moreover, to be sure you’re improving, you must not spend this extreme amount of time haphazardly on mindless hard work. Instead, it must be spent on what Ericsson calls deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is a specialized form of practice to improve a very particular aspect of performance.
Correspondingly, that aspect of performance must be a key ingredient to the process of improving. This requires a tremendous amount of patience doing what looks like boring, repetitive drilling by an outside observer. However, this boring, repetitive drilling is not boring to someone who is on a quest to improve.
Indeed, this is the essence of the process of improving. A deep fascination with the process so strong that you don’t get bored when it requires repetitive drilling tasks that bore others. This is a mental skill I call mastering mental monotony.
Master the Process of Improving by Overcoming Boredom
Mastering mental monotony is the ability to stimulate and maintain intense focus while toiling through tedious work. To put it another way, this is the mental skill that deals with overcoming boredom. As Geoff Colvin writes in his book Talent Is Overrated which confirms the research of Anders Ericsson:
It seems a bit depressing that the most important thing you can do to improve performance is no fun.
If you have ever played a sport, you know how monotonous it can be to do repetitive drills at a consistently high level of correctness. This monotony increases when you must do these repetitive drills alone.
What’s more, if you allow the boredom to cause a decrease in the quality of your repetitive drilling, instead of getting better you may actually get worse. This is because you will create bad habits by doing the right thing the wrong way over and over.
The only way for practice to be deliberate practice is to do the right thing the right way, over and over regardless of how boring it becomes. Correspondingly, as the research suggests, there is no way to consistently improve your performance without overcoming boredom.
How to Overcome Boredom as You Work on Improving Performance
It takes an extreme amount of repetitive solo practice to continually improve your performance. Subsequently, if you can’t maintain focus when practice gets boring, then you won’t continually improve. Therefore, mastering mental monotony is a basic pre-requisite for the process of improving performance.
This leads to the obvious next step of figuring out how do you learn to master mental monotony. To figure this out, you must take a page out of the same process one follows to master training pain. Training pain is a type of pain that is not injury related. It’s the pain that is most often the result of fatigue and one generally feels this pain in the muscles and lungs.
So, to improve your ability to handle training pain, you must follow a process to gradually push yourself further and further beyond the stage of fatigue. This requires a progression to increase one’s pain tolerance over time. So, this ultimately means the only way to increase your pain tolerance is to gradually experience more pain.
Correspondingly, mastering mental monotony requires this same thought process. This means more boredom is the secret for overcoming boredom. But not just boredom for the sake of it, boredom with a purpose and a progression. Ideally, this would flow from doing the repetitive drills that lead to real improvements in whatever skill you are building.
Use a Progression to Improve Performance While Overcoming Boredom
For example, if now you can only do the drills you need to facilitate the process of improving your performance for 15 minutes without getting bored, then the next step is to work towards 16 minutes. From there the progression may just be to add 1 minute each time you do the drills. The key is to continually increase your tolerance without decreasing the quality of each repetition. If the quality decreases, then decrease the time and don’t increase the time unless the quality remains high.
Over time, if you stick with the progression, your ability to focus through boring and repetitive activities will increase to expert levels. Then you will be a master of mental monotony for that particular activity. While it’s possible that your mastery of boredom could transfer to other related activities, it’s more likely that each additional activity will require a new progression for mastery.
It’s repeating this process over and over again for each activity that encompasses the process of improving performance.