LoneStarRuby Conf 2013 - Hacking Passion by Katrina Owens

I wanted to be extraordinary.

If I could have chosen at 15 what to be extraordinary at,

I probably would have picked science.

I like science. I was pretty good at it too but not extraordinary.

I come to believe that talent was some sort of genetic boolean.

You either have it or you don't. You're born with it or you're not

and I apparently was not.

At 15, I had not shown a single glimmer of extraordinary talent in anything.

and because scientist do their best work when they're young and I was already 15, I figured it was too late.

so I pivoted it.

For years, I tried to ferreted out my innate talent.

I was going to be a potter. I was an apprentice potter for about a week.

and then I was an apprentice artisan woodwork that was maybe for 6 months and I was like "screw this thing. I'm going to high high school

of performing art".

After 3 years on a tenor saxophone, it was obvious that I was not cut out to be a jazz musician.

I was pretty good at composing things like baroque coral music.

So I put together an application for a college of musical composition for film

and before I even sent off the application, I tried out for a theater school.

After a week of audition, I was inexplicably accepted as a student.

After a year, I could tell you with certainty that theater was not my talent.

neither was ballet

or fencing

or contemporary French circus.

I tried a lot of things and not halfheartedly either.

I worked really hard.

But whenever there's something that's really
difficult, there is this voice that reason.

It must not be my talent because had it
been my gift, it would have come naturally.

(inaudible)

I believed in the genetic explanation of greatness.

I thought you just have to stumble across that accidental match.

To find the lock for which you are the key

and inevitably by aiming in every possible direction at once, hoping to hit a target.

I wander blindly into a low paying job where
the only requirement was that you can type 80 words per minute.

I woke up on my 25th birthday thinking a quarter century?

I'm a washed up evolutionary dead end in a back water dead end life.

I performed a reality check and came to the
conclusion that even if I couldn't be an extraordinary scientist,

I can still probably become a top tier mediocre scientist.

All I needed was a university degree in something scientific.

Having majored in saxophone in high school,
there were remedial credits involved.

I began to teach myself math and physic and chemistry

and because I knew I wasn't talented, I didn't expect it to be easy.

I expected it to suck.

I just started at the beginning. Did one thing at
a time, by the book, until I learn it and then I moved on.

Whenever I panicked,I remind myself that this
is not rocket science. This is basic math.

If I don't understand it, I must have skipped a step

and so I slowed down and do some research
and sure enough, within hours or sometimes
days I be right back on track.

cheerfully slogging

I found that I was balancing on a continuum
and that there was a sweet spot and that
sweet spot has nothing to do with math or physics

and it works like this:

You're asked to perform a particular
saxophone tune at 88 beats per minute.

This fall squarely within your capability so you
can perform this task effortlessly, confidently.

While you're doing so, you can think about
other things. for example, how to adjust your
(tac?) based on what the drummer is doing.

You can react to something that happen in the
audience without fumbling or losing your place.

When you're asked to perform that same tune
at 105 beats per minute,

you can do this but it requires every bit of concentration that you can muster.

Your skill level is perfectly balanced against the challenge.

The difficulty of the exercise is barely met by your ability.

You're being stretched and being stretched is painful.

Remaining in that place, that painful place
that stretches you, requires a monumental effort.

It's exhausting. It's hard. It's not fun. It's also
satisfying. Empowering. Deeply rewarding.

When you're asked to play that tune at 120 beats per minute, you panic. You simply can't do it.

The challenge has no counterpart whatsoever in your skill.

You flail. Your executive function shuts down.
Your output becomes erratic. It's terrifying.

This continuum is a measure of effortlessly
you can perform a given task.

At one end of the continuum, you have your comfort zone where you can perform effortlessly.

You don't level up in your comfort zone
because you're doing stuff you already know how to do.

At the other end of the continuum, you have
your panic zone where you cone level up
because you're busy freaking out.

Between the two, there's a space where your
ability and the challenge barely overlap.

And this is where you level up. I'm not saying
you should never be in your comfort zone or
your panic zone,

not at all. Your comfort zone is where complex
skills become reflexive.

You have access to higher level of thinking.
You should absolutely spend time there,
especially when you need to be productive.

Your panic zone is an excellent place to
experiment. To play. To find your boundaries.

Because as long as you don't need to be
delivering values, your fear can be transform
into thrill and discovery.

you should absolutely spend time there,
but not when people are paying you money.

In other words, you should spend time in your
comfort zone and your panic zone.

You just shouldn't try to learn stuff there.

I spent months working through math and
physic problems and during that time, I
learned as much about practice as I did about
calculus and mechanic.

Practice is a strange beast. It's not play.
It's not intended to be fun

It's also not work. It's not intended to produce
anything. Practice is thing entirely unto itself.

What a lot of people commonly think as
practice is futzing around, kinda doing stuff
but seem relevant to what you think you might
want to kind of get better at.

This sometimes kinda works.For practice to
be truly effective, it need to be focus and deliberate.

The most basic form of practice is the drill.

Now, a good drill boils down to three
elements: focus, repetitions and continuous feedback.

A drill work in activities until you're focusing
on a narrow slice of that skill in
a way that's repeatable and which provide
immediate and continuous feedback.

How narrow a slice depends on your capabilities

If you're in your comfort zone, you need to ratchet up drilling a notch.

If you're in your panic zone, your adaptation
will be random and accidental and
you'll find yourself practicing doing it wrong
more than you're practicing doing it right.

Practice doesn't make perfect. It makes permanent.

If you're practicing in your panic zone, you'll wind up being permanently wrong.

You want to find that sweet spot. That space
where ability and challenge barely overlap.

So, find something that you can kind of almost do.

Warp it until you're focusing on a particular
aspect of that skill.

Make it repeatable so you can do it over and over and over

And it make the feedback loop as short as possible

And then go do it.
And then take a nap.

Not all focus (inaudible) practice activities are drilled

Take simulations, for example.

Athletes have scrimmages. In therapy it's call role play.

In programming, we do weekend projects,
hack fest, and code retreats.

In a simulation, you improvise as though it were the real thing

When you make a mistake, nobody dies.

You don't lose. You don't fail.
you also don't stop, go back and immediately
do it over again correctly because that's what
thrills are for.

In a simulation, you keep going.

A simulation doesn't warp activities. it
intensify them. You provide a more
concentrated learning experience.

by putting together implausible combinations
of unlikely occurrences.

Another interesting type of practices is the case study.

Athletes watch videos of practice sessions and performances.

Chess players study games played by grand masters and try to determine what the
next move would be

and then when they're wrong, they analyze why.

In programming, reading code is a case
study. What were they thinking?

What pressure cause them to choose this
approach? What are the trade offs?

Case studies are about observations and
analysis and critical thinking

and then you have direct practice.

Those precise notes and perfect pauses of a
violinist playing a concert piece while nobody's listening

Direct practice when done deliberately and
with focus hones clockwork precisions,
making it reflexive.

You can shift your attention away from the
mechanics of your performance.

You can focus all of your creativity on the
subtle details that lift your performance from
the subtle and mundane to the exquisite.

And typically, we associate direct practice with musicians

but it's just as much the domain of stand up
comedians and trial lawyers and
complementary French circus acrobats.

And then there's intimations. Overlooked and undervalued.

When you're a beginner, you don't know what you don't know.

Intimating masters will teach you things that you don't know you need to know

and often things that the master themselves are unable to articulate.

In our culture, we tend to hide individuality
and creative self expressions and it's really
hard to be creative.

Without having internalized a vast store of techniques and _____.

Don't be a snowflake. Go copy someone who
know that they're doing.

No matter what type of practice activity
you're doing, no matter how good you are,
practice is grueling.

Drills, simulations, case studies, direct
practice, imitations. These are all ways of
stretching you to the edge of your ability.

That's equally as difficult for expert as it is beginners.

That said, practice is particularly challenging
when grossly incompetent.

Not so much because you suck, per se. But
because feeling stupid is so powerfully unpleasant.

It's one of the important driver behind procrastinations.

When you're feeling overwhelm by your own
ineptitude, it's easy to become fatalistic.

Another disadvantage of being a beginner is
that so many practice activity lack inherent
feedback.

When you're vastly unskilled, your judgement
is completely unreliable.

Everything, including the right thing, feels wrong.

It's easy to consistently make the wrong
adjustment, leaving you with deeply ingrain
bad habit.

It took me 18 months to pass all the
prerequisite exams and I was ready to apply
to universities.

I was accepted to two study programs. One in
aerospace engineering and one in molecular
biology.

When people around me realize I was serious
about this university thing, I got a bit of a push
back.

They were like "holy crap, you're gonna be
like thirty two by the time you finish".

If we were gonna be realistic about it though, I
was going to be thirty two anyway.

I picked molecular biology.

University was completely uneventful. I wrote
papers. I did lab work. I read books. I took exams.

It changed my life. Not so much because of
the papers and the exams, but because I was
learning.

I was practicing and I was introduce to the (--------)

Now before university, I occasionally
experienced (flow?). Mostly when solving
truss problems and mechanics.

Telling the computer what to do was like truss
problems except better.

I kept coming back to and exploring
programming. Exploring. Not learning.

Learning is what I did with math and physics.
That was a study, tedious, rewarding, diet,
deliberate, focus practice.

It took a really long time before I
transition from exploring to learning programing.

Even when I did make the transition, it was
hit or miss.

A lot of the research I found were confusing,
outdated or just hopelessly advanced.

After three years, I had a bachelor degree in
molecular biology,

some basic ability to write control structures

and far more importantly, I've come to accept that talent is not ebullient*

It's not some innate genetic trait that you have
to go and look for and may or may not find

The truth is, talent is bullshit.

Skill can be develop systematically and
the system is awesome.

A system you can understand.
A system you can hack.

The technical term for skill development is
leveling up.

Now, a pair of researchers, a couple of
brothers by the name of Dreyfus

created a model of how leveling up works and
their scale goes like this

Novice, where you know nothing.

Advanced beginner, where you still suck but
you kind of see what this is about.

Competent, where you can start getting shit done.

Proficient, where you get shit done really well.

And expert, where the shit you get done
seems like magic to pretty much everyone else.

When we're novices, we can be in one of two
state: mindless obedience or overwhelm

As novices, we're in the (inaudible) position of
being only millimeters away from our panic
zone at all times.

If a rule was clear, we're stuck.

If we accidentally skip a step, we're stuck.

If we...I get a result that deviate even slightly
from what we expected, we're stuck.

We have no frame of reference.

When we're advanced beginner, we see
1,000 disconnected details and we give every
single one of those details equal consideration.

There's no cohesion where I'm able to
distinguish between relevant and irrelevant
and incidental.

We can look things up, but we can't troubleshoot.

When we're competent, we gain the ability
to evaluate relevance within a context.

We also gain the ability to perform routine
procedures and do basic troubleshooting.

Here, we can be productive without
something stepping outside of our comfort zone.

Which may be why so many people stagnated
this skill level indefinitely.

When we're proficient, we can make much
finer discrimination.

We can evaluate the significance of subtle indicators.

We look further ahead. We make predictions.
We prognosticate.

We recognize underline patterns.
We apply overarching principles.

All of the intricacies of the subject matter
come together in a vast and fascinating web.

When we're expert, you see 1,000 details and
immediately disregard 999 of them.

We focus in on the one that matters. How do we do it? No idea.

We don't know how we know, what we know.

A lot of people talk about instinct or intuition
as though it's some sort of super power.

But it's not magic.

It's powerful processing that happens very
very quickly and it's based on a gargantuan
store of knowledge and experience.

Described in this way, skill development
sounds so sequential and regular and inevitable

leveling up in a series of climaxes win after
win after win as though life was a television commercial.

This is a scientific model. A scientific model is
like a uml diagram but for science.

It's a simplification about the world. It's useful
lie that you tell yourself in order to navigate a
messy reality.

So maybe sequential, but regular? hardly.
Inevitable. We should be so lucky. Life is messy.

Leveling happens in spurts and sudden
surges and there are plateaus.

A lot of people seem to dread the plateaus.

Hurrying past them as best as they can and
always with their eye on the goal.

Am I there yet? Am I done yet? Am I good yet?

Plateaus are neurologically important.
The way sleep is neurologically important.

It injects time into your practice. It allows
complex skills to become deeply embedded.

Plateaus are where your skills being
refactored so that you can scale.

If you're in a rush, you're going to end up with
brittle and fragile skills.

Focus on what you're doing.
Not how you're doing.

There's a saying "immature practice until they
get it right.

Professional practice until they can't get it wrong."

That's what plateaus are about.
They put the level in level up.

I used my university degree exactly once. For the first programming job that I got.

The CTO of a start up looked at my resume and said

"huh, a degree in molecular biology in biological chemistry. You must be pretty smart."

And she gave me the job.

It was the combination of a lot of hard work,
practice and it was a start of a lot more
hard work and practice.

I thought I wanted to be extraordinary,

but what I really craved was passion and that
deep sense of satisfaction that comes with
focus and accomplishment.

Mastery isn't about perfection. Skills grows by
focusing intently on the things that stretch you

and passion grows by giving your attention to
something long enough to gain depth and
understand nuances.

Talent is bullshit. Skill is cultivated. Passion is
curated ad hacking skills is hacking passion.

Don't do what you love. Do
something well enough to love what you do.

Thank You.