OK Plateau

A universe emerging in the surface of a pan: Still in search of mastery

Once we have acquired a certain level of expertise at a task, it is easy to just go into autopilot. Some call that place the “OK Plateau”—where good enough is good enough, and there really isn’t much intrinsic motivation to improve our skills. I am in OK Plateau when I drive, clean my house or do my taxes. There’s just no reason to try to get better at any of those tasks.

But what about those areas of expertise where getting better does matter, those skills where becoming exceptional is important to us? Certain tasks in the making of art are so familiar to me after all these years, and it is easy to slide into a “good enough” place with those skills if I’m not careful. Autopilot is a state of being unconscious, and opportunities to push at and explore new territories can go unnoticed.

When you are operating in that autonomous space you don’t have conscious control of what you are doing, and most of the time that’s a good thing, says science writer Joshua Foer. Your conscious mind has one less thing to worry about. But the downside is that the OK Plateau puts a barrier between you and your desire to develop a skill that is exceptional.

From Foer:

What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which [Anders] Ericsson has labeled “deliberate practice.” Having studied the best of the best in many different fields, he has found that top achievers tend to follow the same general pattern of development. They develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they practice by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant immediate feedback on their performance. In other words, they force themselves to stay in the “cognitive stage.”

In exploring Foer’s ideas, Maria Popova has pointed out that the mere amount of practice has little to do with improvement. It is a deliberateness that drives progress, not the actual time spent developing a skill set. The best way to transcend the OK Plauteau says Popova is to “cultivate conscious control over the thing we’re practicing and, above all, to actually practice failing. Deliberate practice, by its nature, must be hard.” To get really good at something, regular practice simply isn’t enough. To improve, you have to see where you fail, and learn from the mistakes.

The bottom line: How you conduct your “practice” is much more important than the amount of time you put in. The oft-quoted Malcolm Gladwell claim that mastery requires 10,000 hours just isn’t the full story. Deliberate practice means staying conscious and tracking down the weaknesses. Tenaciously.