The hidden logic of success - Part 2
THE HIDDEN LOGIC OF SUCCESS – PART 2
MARIO D’COUTO
Another
aspect to the hidden logic of success is what psychologists call ‘chunking’.
This is a word that has also been used by Roger Dawson, author of the book,
“MAKE THE RIGHT DECISION EVERY TIME”. According to Dawson, chunking is
connected with rapid reasoning. But what is rapid reasoning? To understand
this, let us first understand what Alexander Hamilton has to say, who was one
of the founding fathers of the United States of America. Whenever he faced a
problem, this was how he would handle a problem as he says, “Men
give me some credit of genius. All the genius I have lies in this: when I have
a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night, it is before me. I
explore it in all its bearings. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the
efforts that I made are what people are pleased to call the fruits of genius.
It is the fruit of labour and thought.”
Rapid
reasoning is your ability to pull together unrelated facts from your pool of
knowledge and focus them on the decision. The reason experts like Sir Isaac
Newton have rapid reasoning powers is that they chunk information. Chunking
describes what the mind does when it stores information in parcels rather than
individual pieces. Remember when you first tied your shoelaces? You learned to
pull both ends tight, cross them over into a simple bow, fold one loose end in
half and wrap the other around it. Now, how many times do you think through all
these steps when you put on a pair of sneakers? We no longer know what it takes
to tie a shoe (because we know it in an instant) because we have chunked all
those individual pieces of knowledge together.
People
who have great intuition really become very adept at chunking information. It
enables them to access huge amounts of information in seconds. The key to
intuition, then, is saturating yourself with information about the decision and
chunking that information to make rapid reasoning possible.
Consider
another example. If I gave you a set of alphabets to remember by just looking
at it for not more than 5 seconds and recall it without looking at the page,
you probably would not be able to do that. For instance,
X A W M Q
B F Z
Y N E
O G
Did
you try recalling it without looking at it? Be honest and ask yourself. On the
other hand, if I gave you another set of alphabets,
A B N O
R M A
L I T
I E S
I
am sure this would not have taken you a second to remember. Why? Because you
knew it all along. In 1973, William Chase and Herbert Simon, two American
psychologists conducted an experiment. They had two groups of people, one who
were actual chess masters and the other, a bunch of newbies in the game. The
experiment consisted of remembering the different positions of the chess coins.
So, the first time, all the chess coins were kept in the regular position after
which both groups were asked to recall the positions of the coins after viewing
for a few seconds. It was found that the chess masters were able to remember
with ease while the amateurs struggled. Later, the position of the chess coins
was shuffled and were kept in random positions. This time, both the groups,
were once again asked to recall the positions of the chess coins. The amateurs,
as expected, were not able to recall. But what was surprising was that the
so-called chess masters experienced the same difficulty. This goes to show that
talent is not something someone is born with. It is a process of repetitive
action where the action becomes second nature.
When
chess masters look at the positions of the pieces on a board, they see the
equivalent of a word. Their long experience of playing chess enables them to ‘chunk’
the pattern with a limited number of visual fixations in the same way that our
familiarity with language enables us to chunk the letters constituting a
familiar word. It is a skill derived from years of familiarity with the
relevant ‘language’, not talent. As soon as the language of chess is disrupted
by the random positioning of pieces, chess masters find themselves looking at a
jumble of letters, just like the rest of us.
The
same principle can be applied to other sports or even other aspects of life.
For instance, when Roger Federer returns a service, he is not demonstrating sharper
reactions than you and I. Rather what he is showing is that he can extract more
information from the service action of his opponent and other visual clues,
enabling him to move into position earlier and more efficiently than the rest
of us, which, in turn, allows him to make the return – in his case, a forehand
cross – court winner.
The
key point is that this is not something top sportsmen are born with. If you
were to go back to the time when Roger Federer was learning technique, you
would find that he was ponderous and sluggish. His movement would have been
characterized by conscious control of the skill, lacking smoothness or unity.
Only later, after countless hours of practice, were his skills integrated into
an intricate set of procedures capable of flexible execution.
Today,
Federer’s motor programme are so deeply ingrained that if you were to ask him
how he is able to play an immaculately timed forehand, he wouldn’t be able to
tell you. He might be able to talk about what he was thinking at the time or
the strategic importance of the shot but he wouldn’t be able to provide any
insight into the mechanics of the movements that made the stoke possible. Why?
Because Federer has practiced for so long that the movement has been encoded in
implicit rather than explicit memory. Psychologists call this the expert –
induced amnesia.
The
ascendancy of the mental and the acquired over the physical and the innate has
been confirmed again and again, as Anders Ericsson puts it, “The
most important differences are not at the lowest level of cells or muscle
groups but at the athletes’ superior control over the integrated and
co-ordinated actions of their bodies. Expert performance is mediated by
acquired mental representations that allow the experts to anticipate, plan and
reason alternative courses of action. These mental representations provide
experts with increased control of the aspects that are relevant to generating
their superior performance.” In other words, it is practice, not
talent, that holds the key to success. Top performers are not born with sharper
instincts, they possess enhanced awareness and anticipation.
Good
decision-making is about compressing the informational load by decoding the meaning
of patters derived from experience. This cannot be taught in a classroom; it is
not something you are born with; it must be lived and learned. In other words,
it emerges through practice.
Garry
Kasparov, the famous chess player, was embedded in the living, breathing
reality of playing chess. When he sees a chessboard, he does not chunk the
pattern by relating it to an altogether different experience but by perceiving
it immediately as the Sicilian Défense or the Latvian Gambit. His retrieval
structure is rooted within the fabric of the game. This is the most powerful
type of knowledge and is precisely the kind possessed by firefighters, top
sportsmen and other experts. Kasparov himself said after winning game two of
the 6 game match, “Had I been playing the same game against a very strong human, I would
have had to settle for a draw. But I simply understood the essence of the end
game in a way the computer did not. It’s computational power was not enough to
overcome my experience and intuitive appreciation of where the pieces should
go.”
Let
us now look at some other examples,
a)
Art Fry thought of post – it – notes while
singing in Church. His initial idea was for a bookmark that wouldn’t fall out,
rather than a note on which to write. It was fortunate he worked for a company
like 3M, which encourages its employees to follow up on their hunches. Lewis
Lehr, the chairman of the company, says its corporate structure is ‘designed specifically to encourage young
entrepreneurs to take an idea and run with it’. He calls it the heart of their design of
growth.
b)
Louis Pasteur, the French chemist and
microbiologist, was examining some fermented grapes when he realized that the
grapes ferment only when the skin is broken. He then knew that bacterial
infection was caused by germs in the air, not by the spontaneous internal
generation he previously thought responsible. His discovery saved the French
beer, wine and silk industries and led to the process we now know as
pasteurization.
c)
When Ray Kroc tried to buy the McDonald,
brothers’ share of his company, they stunned him by asking for $2.7 million –
an amount that would leave them a million dollars each after taxes. Kroc
recalled, “I’m not a gambler and I did
not have that kind of money but my funny bone instinct kept urging me on. So, I
closed my office door, cussed up and down and threw things out of the window.
Then I called my lawyer back and said, ‘Take it!’” It was a smart move,
however much it hurt. Their share was soon worth $15 million a year to Kroc.
d)
In 1928, Alexander Fleming was about to
throw away some bacteria he had been cultivating. A meld growth was
contaminating the culture. But before disposing of the culture, he noticed a
bacterium – free circle around the meld growth. A hunch led him to investigate
further. He found a substance in the meld that prevented the growth of bacteria
even when he diluted it 800 times. He called it penicillin.
e)
King Gillette was a salesman who sold cork
that went inside bottle caps. It fascinated him. He would say, “Isn’t that something? I make my living
selling something people throw away and keep on rebuying. I wonder what else
would people buy, throw away and buy again?” That’s where he hit upon the
idea of the disposable razor blade.
All of these appear to be examples of a magical intuition
when really, they are examples of rapid reasoning. Each of the people discussed
above was an expert in his field. Their expertise had caused them to chunk
their knowledge so they could access it easily. Ray Kroc had visited so many
restaurants as a malted-machine-salesman that he could quickly analyse what the
McDonald brothers had going for them. Louis Pasteur had spent 11 years studying fermentation
before he tried it together in his mind with exposure to air. And King Gillette
had spent his entire business life working with people who sold disposable
items to the public.
So how does one achieve this? There are 3 things,
a)
Accurately categorize the situation so you
can start looking for the solution in the right direction.
b)
Blueprint the problem accurately, so your
mind totally focuses on the problem it has to solve.
c)
Saturate your mind with facts about the
problem. Remember, it is all about chunking information which is nothing but
rapid reasoning.
How long can it take? According to research, it could
take a minimum of 10 years. In chess, for example, Herbert Simon and William
Chase, two American psychologists, found that nobody had attained the level of
an international grandmaster with less than a decade’s intense preparation with
the game. In music composition, John Hayes, author of the book, “THE COMPLETE
PROBLEM SOLVER”, states that it takes a good 10 years to achieve excellence.
An analysis of the top 9 golfers of the 20th
century shared that they won their first international competition at around 25
years of age, which was, an average, more than 10 years after they started
golfing. The same finding has been discovered in fields as diverse as
mathematics, tennis, swimming, long-distance running and other fields.
Even among scholars, in a study of the 120 most important
scientists and 123 most famous poets and authors of the 19th
century, it was found that 10 years elapsed between their first work and their
best work. Ten years, then, is the magic number for the attainment of
excellence.
At the beginning, the task of remembering thousands of
words and fitting them together using abstract rules of grammar seems
impossible. But after many years of experience, we can look at a random
sentence and instantly comprehend its meaning. It is estimated that most
English language users have a vocabulary 20,000 words. American psychologist
Herbert Simon has estimated that chess masters command a comparable vocabulary
pattern or chunks. This principle can of course be extended to other aspects of
life. That’s when the knowledge becomes instinctual.
