David Brooks on Different Learning Curves

“Most of us are trying to get better at something,” says David Brooks in this New York Times column, and we tend to believe that progress will be linear, that we’ll steadily get better and better. But most of the time that’s not true. Here are several possible ways people improve:

• Logarithmic – Learning a new language, taking up running, and playing soccer follow this pattern: you make rapid progress at first, then it tails off and improvement becomes more challenging. “During the early high-growth phase, when everything is coming easily, you have to make sure you maintain your disciplined habits… fight the urge to self-celebrate and relax… or else you will fall backward,” says Brooks (drawing on the work of Scott Young). “Then later, during the slow-growth phase, you have to break some of your habits. To move from good to great, you have to break out of certain routines that have become calcified and are now holding you back.” 

• Exponential – Ice hockey, baseball, and mastering a craft or an academic discipline follow this pattern: people have to work for a long time (sometimes 10,000 hours) to master the fundamentals, seeing little progress, but then there’s rapid growth. “Many people quit exponential activities in the early phases,” says Brooks. “You’ve got to be bullheaded to work hard while getting no glory. But then when you are in the later fast-progress stage… when everyone is singing your praises, you have to fight self-satisfaction… you’ve got to be open-minded to turn your hard-earned skill into poetry.” 

• Stairway – You make some progress, then there’s a plateau with little growth, then there’s another step, and so on.

• Waves – “You go over some material and the wave leaves a residue of knowledge,” says Brooks, “then you go over the same material again and the next wave leaves a bit more residue.” 

• Valley – Your skill level goes down at first, then you improve. “The experience of immigrating to a new country can be like this,” says Brooks. “You have to start at the bottom as you learn a new society before you can make your way upward.” Moral progress can also follow this pattern: “You have to go down and explore your own failures before you can conquer them. You have to taste humiliation before you can aspire toward excellence.” 

Being aware of these different growth patterns is helpful in three ways, says Brooks. First, it might steer some young people away from flocking to logarithmic activities that give instant gratification and toward exponential activities with a longer-term payoff. Second, being aware of the structures develops restraint: “You don’t only need knowledge about what to do,” he says; “you have to train yourself to defeat your natural desires.”

And third, says Brooks, “this focus on growth structures takes your eyes off yourself. 

The crucial thing is not what traits you intrinsically possess. The crucial questions are: What is 

the structure of your domain? Where are you now on the progress curve? How are you interacting with the structures of the field? The crucial answers to those questions are not found in the mirror. They are found by seeing yourself from a distance as part of a landscape.”

“The Structures of Growth” by David Brooks in The New York Times, June 17, 2014, 

http://nyti.ms/1qEnqdd 

From the Marshall Memo #542