Excuse me, but why am I ignoring Google Docs?

Skill issue x3

I have a confession: Writing is the single biggest activity that makes me self-conscious and uncertain. Whenever I face a blank Google Docs, doubts start to creep in.

“How do I open my sentence?” “Do my sentences flow?” “Are my metaphors colorful enough?” “Did I let that sentence breathe?” On and on I go, ad infinitum…

This experience is especially stressful because I consider myself fairly confident and secure in other areas of my life. That's why, for the longest time, I’ve been trying to understand why writing elicits this sort of response from me. Why do I go through this fight-flight pattern no matter how many times I write? What—specifically—is the challenge?

In my search for answers, I stumbled upon a series of resources that put things into perspective. And the very first thing I realized is that:

I’m operating with the wrong mental framework

According to the tweet, knowledge of how to perform a physical skill [cartwheels, for example] is no substitute for practicing that skill — this is super obvious.

However, with knowledge work, the distinction that knowledge of how to perform a mental skill is no substitute for practicing that mental skill is less obvious. This difference is less noticeable with complex mental skills because we tend to mistake reading, talking, or thinking about the skill for practicing it when, in reality, it isn't.¹

Because we assume we’re practicing these mental skills, we give ourselves little wiggle room to fail and even fewer chances to practice—all of which we’d never do with a physical skill. 

But the gag remains that it’s only through toiling, constant practice, failing, and giving yourself grace that any breakthrough can happen with any [mental or physical] skill. Sadly, all of this nuance gets lost with knowledge work. 

Knowledge work can sometimes have ambiguous feedback loops

With physical skills, the feedback loop is clear—every time you don’t do a cartwheel or a handstand, you understand that you can’t [yet] do one. However, if you’re lucky, you can get a coach or a trainer to provide granular feedback or drills that help you improve your technique.

Here’s an example of clear feedback I like from someone trying to [re-]learn Judo:

There are times in a Judo match when you realise that you cannot throw your opponent, and your advantage might lie with attacking them on the ground. In order to do this, you need to:

• Bring them, legally, to the ground

• Be fast enough to get to a dominant attacking position on the ground

• If necessary, to keep them on the ground (which means to keep them on all fours)

• Execute the newaza technique (be it pin, choke, or armlock).

Naturally, there are drills designed to train each of these four aspects of the skill. But doing well in the drills and being able to execute the technique during free sparring are two very different things. 

I like this point because it’s evident that knowledge of a physical technique differs from its real-world application. After all, the feedback loop is clear [you either execute or can't execute in a match].

The author continues:

What might not be so obvious, however, is that the existence of the drills makes it easier to diagnose failure in a live setting, since each drill represents and trains for a specific sub-skill. I discovered that it was rather easy for me (or my coach) to review game tape and go “ok, so my problem is ... X”, where X is some sub-skill that is broken down by some existing drill.

This point is also crucial because constantly practicing a drill can help you identify why you're failing to perform it in live scenarios, and reviewing it can help you improve your chances of execution. 

Here’s some more context:

Many of the scenario drills isolate what is tricky or rare in normal competition scenarios so that you get in an adequate amount of practice for those scenarios. This is, of course, common sense: advanced driving courses focus on rare and tricky driving scenarios, so that trainees know what to do when they find themselves in such scenarios in the real world. Similarly, advanced Judo training isolates relatively rare scenarios — on top of strong base foundations — so that you know what to do when you encounter them in an actual match.

In summary, learning a physical skill provides precise feedback and a path to improvement that is rare in other domains. 

Contrast this information with knowledge work where getting this type of finetuned staging area, granular paths to improvement, or even clear feedback from practice is tricky. Suddenly, you understand that you sometimes go in circles with knowledge work because you can’t accurately diagnose what’s wrong with your [current] approach. 

Learning a mental skill requires more mental toughness than we realize

When learning a physical skill, you quickly realize how painful it is to execute. And if you’re practicing a [physical] sport like Judo, your pain is compounded. 

As our narrator explains:

Judo is both painful in a physical sense — Judo is a fighting sport, after all — but more deeply in a psychological sense. The flip side of [deliberate practice] having clear, unambiguous feedback is that failure is also clear and unambiguous. And since I had so much to learn, and so little time to do it, I experienced tremendous pressure and continuous, crushing failure from day one.

This was a lot harder on me than I expected.

Here’s a journal entry from our narrator to put his difficulty into perspective:

His experience mirrors my experience playing football every week—which is that visceral, physical failure while practicing a physical skill teaches you so much about yourself. Chief among them is realizing how much mental fortitude you have when you’re consistently grasping at straws. 

The good news, however, is that recognizing the amount of mental fortitude you have or don’t have is the first step toward fixing up. 

Case in point:

My coach came to realise that he had neglected mental training with me, mostly because he never needed it as a player (I expressed wonder at this when he told me; he really is made of some stronger stuff). “The good thing about this is that we are humans, and we can change.” he said, “You now know that you are mentally weak, and you can work on that.” He started work on mental strength with me shortly after.

I believe the training worked. I headed back to my hometown for a two-week break over the Chinese New Year in January, and resumed training on the 1st of February. As I write this, I am two weeks in on my final month. The training, so far, has been good. The physical work is just as tough, but failure no longer feels as bad. I’ve increased my training volume. And most importantly, I no longer feel sorry for myself.

From this angle, it’s easy to see why we overlook the [mental] resilience required to practice a mental skill. This is because, unlike with a physical skill, there is no clear feedback to reveal all the ways we're lacking when practicing a mental skill. If there were, we'd quickly realize that half of our problems are psychological, and thankfully, we can solve them by toiling a bit more and being more mentally resilient. 

Lastly, a note from our sponsor — the fourth wall

A note of caution if you’ve read this far. At the end of the day, it’s easy to think that reading this article about the difficulty of practicing a mental skill means you’ll magically overcome any friction you encounter the next time you have to perform knowledge work. Sorry for the laugh.²

To borrow inspiration from Steve Ballmer’s famous “developers, developers, developers” riff: practice, practice, practice.

May the force be with us.

Glossary

Unfinished thoughts while writing this article:

1. Being able to differentiate between people who read, talk, and think about mental skills and people who actually practice mental skills is a valuable skill. It helps with identifying whose feedback you should take to heart or just politely acknowledge.
   

2. Epistemic humility: Knowledge work having ambiguous feedback loops means that there are probably parts of your current process where you’re stuck/going in circles. One solution might be getting “mental” trainers or coaches who can help us unfuck our current processes, and the only way to get that is to remain teachable/always be learning.
   

3. Friction. As long as people think that knowledge of a mental skill passes for practice of the skill, there will always be conflict. The reason is simple: people with skin in the game [that is, mental skill practitioners] will have context/nuance that people who haven’t practiced don’t have, and every side will argue from their POV. Most of the conversations on Twitter point to this, I think.

1. In my case, I was steadily confusing my taste in essays and my ability to spot what the writer was doing with my ability to replicate similar work. Put differently, I mistook reading and discussing essays for my ability to write them. 

2. “However, with knowledge work, the distinction that knowledge of how to perform a mental skill is no substitute for practicing that mental skill is less obvious. This difference is less noticeable with complex mental skills because we tend to mistake reading, talking, or thinking about the skill for practicing it when, in reality, it isn't.”