No better place to practice laser-like focus than the cockpit.
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
There are loads of self-help books. Boat loads, as they say. Some are good. Most are not. This new book—part self-help, part popular science—won’t help you lose weight or find inner peace; but if you want to learn to fly, or get better at piloting, or be the best pilot in the world in some airplane or mission—this is the best book you will read this year.
It’s written by Anders Ericsson, the lead psychology researcher who’s spent his career studying how humans acquire expertise, and Robert Pool, a science writer. How the good become great. It was his research that Malcolm Gladwell used in his popular (and not quite right) “10,000 hour rule” in the book Outliers. Now, Anders Ericsson is not as good a writer as Gladwell, but he paired up with an experienced science author to produce something much better than Gladwell: The distillation of a lifetime of fascinating research. It’s first person, first rate. Smooth clear English. Logically arranged, a complete whole with no odd dangling bits, and an effortless glide of a read. I’ve studied his tome The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, which for psychology students is awesome, but it’s hard to get the big picture and real perspective that Anders and Pool now give us in this book.
The overriding theme is great performance is not talent. It’s work. Anybody can be great.
“No one has ever managed to figure out how to identify people with ‘innate talent.’ No one has ever found a gene variant that predicts superior performance in one area of another, and no one has ever come up with a way to, say, test young children and identify which among them will become the best athletes or the best mathematicians or the best doctors or the best musicians.”
He goes on to explain exactly how they do get great. It’s ‘deliberate practice’, and he carefully explains what that entails. Along the way we explore chess, tone deaf bad singers, memorizing long strings of numbers, Top Gun fighter weapons school, scrabble, ballet, Olympic swimmers, surgical procedures, savants, child prodigies, the Beatles, the Dan Plan, high jumper Donald Thomas, and Dogbert. It’s very cool. And it’s all fully referenced to academic research papers.
“Doing the same thing over and over again in exactly the same way is not a recipe for improvement; it is a recipe for stagnation and gradual decline.”
“I can report with confidence that I have never found a convincing case for anyone developing extraordinary abilities without intense, extended practice.”
Now, the ‘all deliberative practice no talent’ idea has received some blow back. Including serious papers in leading psychology journals. This book is better for the academic push back, this is a great time for Anders to write this guide, as it has helped clearly define what deliberative practice is, and isn’t. It’s all in the book. With no filler about his personal life, or ego trips, or strange side avenues. The book is tight. Clear. Smooth.
“The most important lesson they gleaned from their teachers is the ability to improve on their own. As part of their training, their teachers helped them develop mental representations that they could use to monitor their own performances, figure out what needs improving, and come up with ways to realize that improvement.”
“One of the hallmarks of expert performers is that even once they become one of the best at what they do, they still constantly strive to improve their practice techniques and to get better.”
The conclusions are powerful. We really can do (most) anything. If we know how to practice. But it requires disciplined practice. Lots of disciplined practice. And it might not be enjoyable.
“At it’s core, deliberate practice is a lonely pursuit.”
Still. If you want to be really good at something you can. And being really good at something can be very rewarding. I just need to browse books on motivation now!
“Doing the same thing over and over again in exactly the same way is not a recipe for improvement; it is a recipe for stagnation and gradual decline.”
“To date, we have found no limitations to the improvements that can be made with particular types of practice. As training techniques are improved and new heights of achievement are discovered, people in every area of human endeavor are constantly finding ways to get better, the raise the bar on what was thought to be possible, and there is no sign that this will stop. The horizons of human potential are expanding with each new generation.”
I heartily recommend this book for anyone serious about becoming a great pilot.
(All quotes from Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool . To be published by Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on 5 April, 2016)
The Secrets of the Wave Pilots
There is a wonderful long-read article in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine titled The Secrets of the Wave Pilots. It never mentions flying or airmanship, but it’s thought-provoking contemplative stuff for any aviator concerned about visual flying skills. And it’s an in-depth romp through animal navigation, GPS, modern brain science and almost lost ancient knowledge.
The glue of the story is Alson Kelen, “potentially the world’s last-ever apprentice in the ancient art of wave-piloting”. That’s the science and art of navigating among the Marshall Islands with no modern tools. Once thought impossible, we know now that somehow it is possible, but we really don’t know how. The last re-meto, a proven Marshallese navigator, is studied by science.
“They wondered if watching him sail, in the context of growing concerns about the neurological effects of navigation-by-smartphone, would yield hints about how our orienteering skills influence our sense of place, our sense of home, even our sense of self.”
I’m not going to spoil the story. But once you’ve read it, you will think differently about pilotage and hand-flying a visual approach. To non-pilots it looks like magic, but it is a skill we all learn. The sense of the wind drift. The smoke blowing on downwind. The ripples on the lake on final. We are re-meto’s of the sky. Or we used to be. GPS, iPad, FMS, SOP, RNP, all are slowly robbing us of the ‘ancient art’ of airmanship.
“Detecting the minute differences in what, to an untutored eye, looks no more meaningful than a washing-machine cycle allows a ri-meto, a person of the sea in Marshallese, to determine where the nearest solid ground is — and how far off it lies — long before it is visible.”
I’ve long thought that all pilots need time flying kites to genuinely feel the changing wind; and all pilots need to start flying in sailplanes to really know the wind. This article also convinced me we need to allow students—and ourselves—to get a little off course so we can cement the airborne ri-moto skills.
“Recent studies have shown that people who use GPS, when given a pen and paper, draw less-precise maps of the areas they travel through and remember fewer details about the landmarks they pass; paradoxically, this seems to be because they make fewer mistakes getting to where they’re going. Being lost — assuming, of course, that you are eventually found — has one obvious benefit: the chance to learn about the wider world and reframe your perspective. From that standpoint, the greatest threat posed by GPS might be that we never do not know exactly where we are.”
What do you think? What ‘ancient art’ signals you have learnt? What do you trust when the voltage drops to zero?
(All quotes from: The Secrets of the Wave Pilots, by Kim Tingley, New York Times Magazine, 17 March, 2016.)
Michael Goulian on flying
Michael Goulian is an airshow pilot and Red Bull racer. This quote is from a great little video by Bose about ‘why I fly’ (and Bose headsets).
Patty Wagstaff on the perpetual pursuit
