Why how-NOT-to is a faster way of acquiring a skill.
Most of us buy courses or books that seem to insist on HOW-to. It seems logical that if we learn how to do something, we'll get more talented. Are we the problem? Or is the HOW-to method the villain?
My niece, Keira, loves my camera.
It’s not a point and shoot camera, but rather a mirrorless Sony A7R III. And Keira operates the camera on manual, even though she knows absolutely nothing about the much-touted “exposure triangle”. How then does Keira nail the right picture every time?
Well, she doesn’t
Yesterday, for instance, all her pictures were blurry. She has no idea why, but I knew they were blurry without looking at the pictures closely. I just read the information and knew there’s no way for her (or anyone else) to shoot at that speed without “camera shake”. If you were me, what would you do next, especially if you wanted Keira to improve? You’d tell her what she needs to do, right?
You’d be likely to resort to how-to.
Instead, what I encourage her to do is take more blurry pictures. Which, at first, makes no sense at all. And excuse the photo jargon, but bear with me, because this is not as technical as it seems. Keira shot the pictures in a poorly lit room at 1/20 of a second. And it’s a mistake. The first task would be not to correct that mistake. Instead, I’d encourage her to take many more pictures at 1/20 of a second. Once she’s got a stack of useless images, she’s learned that 1/20 is something to be avoided.
We then move her to 1/30, and another dozen pictures later, we still have an enormous amount of fuzziness. And so we keep going up until, at some point, she realises that the photos are focused. (Note: any photographers reading this will be shaking their heads in a “no, no, no fashion, but ignore that head shaking or now). The key to learning something is that instead of a how-to, you have a how-NOT-to.
Which at first doesn’t make any sense until you realise how your brain works
The brain—whether human or animal—is focused on problems, danger, and trouble. You know this to be true because you could be walking down the street on a beautiful day, and you’re still looking to avoid that dog poo that’s in your path. Or maybe you’ve got young kids who not just love to play with Lego but also love to leave the Lego scattered randomly through the house. Step on a few Legos with your bare feet, and your scanner is almost permanently on. Yet look at people who don’t have Lego-kids, and they walk about without a care in the world. Whether it’s plotting a trip to the supermarket or writing your next e-mail, the brain is almost always trying to hunt down the problems that may potentially pop out of the woodwork.
How-to sounds like the easy way out, but the brain tends to miss steps when dealing with a how-to.
If it’s a single step, like going from 1/20th of a second to 1/30th, the brain catches on quickly. But it’s easy to forget if you randomly move from 1/20 to 1/100. However, the moment you keep making mistake after mistake, your brain rules out the errors and forges a deep hatred for 1/20 in low light conditions.
Yet mistake-making needs a two-fold approach
1- You need to speed up your mistake-making
2- Mistake making needs to be in draft format
First, let’s deal with speeding up your mistake making.
If you say to someone, “you get better at a skill by making lots of mistakes”, they usually come back with a boring retort. “I must be a genius because I make a lot of mistakes,” they say to you. Yet, what that person is usually referring to, is that they make many mistakes overall. What I needed Keira to do was make the same mistake repeatedly. When you make mistakes, you might think you’re making enough of them, and you need to move on. “Don’t make the same mistake twice”, you’re told. That kind of puts the upper limit on mistake-making in a very narrow spectrum, doesn’t it?
Instead, it’s better to make a mistake twenty or thirty times.
Don’t let me get in your way. If you were to make the same isolated mistake a hundred times in a row, we know one thing for sure. You’re not going to make that mistake again. Hence, when people say, “Ha ha, I’m the expert at mistakes.”—no, they’re not. They’re just making one or two mistakes. Maybe three, if they’re in a really generous mood. It’s way better to tens or even hundreds of errors and do so deliberately.
The second part of mistake making is that it needs to be in draft mode.
When Keira took those photos, they were of a family member cutting a birthday cake. That moment was almost too vital to miss. Mistake making is not a good idea when you’re in a crucial situation. All of the mistake-making has to be done in draft mode so that at the point when you need the ability, you’re not even thinking. The moment she picked up the camera, she should have known it was going to be blurry.
If all of this mistake-making sounds a bit over the top, here’s some fancy data
You and I think nothing about getting in a car, yet in 2008, an average of 102 people died each day in motor vehicle crashes 2008 — one every 14 minutes. The total number of people in car crashes that year was an astounding 5,811,000 police-reported traffic crashes, in which 37,261 people were killed, and 2,346,000 people were injured. Airlines, in the same year, reported 20 accidents for U.S. air carriers operating scheduled service. This works out to nearly zero accidents per million flying miles. No one died, and only five people were seriously injured.
Did you think this data is being cherry-picked because of the year 2008?
Well, try 2016, or 2000, or 1986 or almost any year at all. And what you find repeatedly is those car accidents are in the hundreds of thousands vs a smattering in aircraft. And there’s a reason why. Pilots learn how NOT to. They do a ton of how-to in the simulator. But a big chunk of training is how-NOT-to. They’re put into stressful situations where they’re lost all hydraulics, for example. Or an engine has shut down. They learn how NOT to crash the plane and keep it going. And they don’t do this while dinner is being served as they fly over some mountainous terrain. Instead, they learn it while in the simulator—or draft mode.
Learning how-to might sound like a perfectly logical approach.
However, people will go down their path even in very structured situations, like a writing course or a drawing course. In a watercolour class we once conducted, some would pick what was handy despite telling the clients what brushes and paper to pick. They’d use the wrong brush or in the wrong manner. They’d wrongly use photocopy paper instead of heading to the nearest art store. The results were horrific, and it’s easy to believe that these students are the exception rather than the rule. It’s easy to believe they’re acting silly and that the vast majority of clients would follow precise instructions.
The reality is that people interpret things in their way.
Hence, instead of just teaching them how-to, you need to have several sessions where things go completely wrong, and they have to find a way to fix it. Or not even fix it, but simply experience it. Hence, once they used the wrong sized brush on the watercolour course, they’d realise that you have to keep changing brushes while painting and can’t hang onto the one. By forcing them to use a thick brush for fine details and a thin one for broad sweeps, they learn to constantly pick the right tool when painting. Clients are taught how to write great headlines in the headlines course, and then they have to remove elements to make the headlines less attractive. All of this activity plays nicely into how the brain operates.
You don’t know how fire is until you experience it.
Most children reach towards a flame with a significant amount of glee. It’s bright, and it’s certainly interesting. However, they first learn to avoid the slightest of burns, but later, how to manage a fire. You could show a child a hundred pictures of fire and say it’s not so good to go near a fire. Or one isolated incident could instantly alert their brain to the danger. This isn’t to say you let kids fall downstairs or put their hands in sockets. This is not an article on how to blow up your kids—or clients.
Instead, it’s an understanding of how you can accelerate learning by bringing in small amounts of how-not-to to the table. We are all obsessed with how-to because it feels like the right way to go. It’s systematic and progressive, unlike the chaos that how-not-to seems to bring. Yet, even how-not-to is a system. It’s a system that pilots, firefighters, astronauts and other such professions have no choice but to go through. It’s a robust way of learning, and mostly it tends to be permanent.
This is why Keira’s next assignment is not to shoot great pictures.
But to shoot them all blurry. Once she has about 20-50 terrible photos, she’ll learn how-no-to, and in doing so, she’ll have removed that error once and for all. If the mistake resurfaces for some reason, as it will, she’ll know how to fix it. And that’s how she’ll become talented at photography and just about anything else she puts her mind to.
Try the how-not-to as well or find a teacher who understands this concept and watch how quickly you can become talented as well.
If you're wondering if there’s more to talent than what you’ve been told, maybe pressing that big blue button is a good idea. It won’t hurtle you onto Mars. It’s more likely to let you know when a new article shows up. It may even give you the nudge you need to write, draw, or make a great curry. Hence, go ahead click away. :)
Oh, and if you want to know about me, me, me. I’m Sean D'Souza. Just another Kiwi who lives in middle Earth and enjoys the sweeping views of New Zealand. Oh, I’m a cartoonist too. And a writer. And um, I’d better stop. If you want to see some stuff, you can amble across to Psychotactics.com as well.