"A god was once a person too. He simply did what other people couldn't, and so he became a god."
Title text D – Ah Mook
To borrow a line of dialogue from Initial D: if today you set up shop selling the secret of turning a person into a god, how much would you charge? I've done the maths — it's actually not that pricey. You could afford it; you could afford it even if you were dead broke, and all the more so in this 21st century of ours. It all comes down to whether you're willing.
The story of pushing an ordinary person onto the altar of the gods
Anders Ericsson, author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, believed the brain is in fact much like a muscle: as long as you hit on the right training method, the brain can be brought to do many remarkable things.
At the start of the book, Ericsson records a two-year experiment in which, every week, subjects came into the lab for several memory-training sessions each lasting up to an hour. The aim of the experiment was very simple: to find out how many digits a subject could remember in a short span of time, and then, through sustained practice, to see whether an ordinary person could break through the bottleneck and do something beyond the ordinary.
The experiment worked like this: a digit would be read out every second, and the subject had to try to remember the string of digits as it formed. For a Hong Konger, remembering eight digits shouldn't count as difficult, and at first Ericsson's subjects too could only hover around the 10-digit mark. But after four months of practice, the score climbed to recalling 15 digits at a time. Finally, on the day the two-year experiment was completed, the subject could remember 82 digits. The story behind it isn't mysterious — it was just very, very hard, yet entirely within the realm of the imaginable.
Practice has three essentials: Focus, Feedback, Rectification
Focus
Having clear and purposeful training goals. Practising aimlessly only wears you down, body and mind, slogging away with nothing to show for it until you give up and quit altogether.
Feedback
That is, when you make a mistake, an instructor points out the error and offers the correct method. Feedback doesn't have to come from an instructor or coach; you can also give feedback to yourself. For an esports player, for instance, getting feedback is very simple — simply replaying the match and watching, over and over, the moments where you made mistakes counts as a form of feedback.
Rectification
Once you've grasped your own mistakes, you start devising and working out new methods to solve the problem.
You may wonder: by this kind of reasoning, repeating it endlessly, can you really train yourself into a god?
The subject was also just an ordinary psychology student, but the results showed that even the very same training method, applied to different test subjects, really does produce different outcomes. One subject, on reaching 30 digits, hit a bottleneck and for a long time couldn't find a way through, and then chose to give up. The author points out that the subject who set the record of remembering 82 digits also often ran into bottlenecks he couldn't break through, but his choice was to lean towards trying out different methods, searching for a new way forward.
Ericsson states plainly in the book that achieving that record had a great deal to do with the subject's background, and he also acknowledges that his experiment's success owed something to luck — because the subject was in fact a long-distance running enthusiast, so when facing a bottleneck he had a certain grit and a reserve of patience to draw on, which is why the experiment ultimately stretched from the few weeks anticipated to two years, and achieved an unprecedented record for its time.
The Comfort Zone
Ericsson's experimental design is very interesting: if a particular round of practice failed, the target would be wound back by two digits, letting the subject try again. A setup like this is in fact a great help to the subject's psychology, and it's something we can all try when drawing up a training plan.
Because when it comes to something the brain has never done before, it feels deeply uncomfortable and puts up a lot of resistance — the brain starts sending out signals like:
"I don't think I can do it."
"I've never tried running this far."
"This is too hard, I can't manage it."
So the training target is wound back by two digits, the aim being to let the subject retreat into their comfort zone — and once confidence has been built up, to push forward again, expanding the comfort zone with a training setup that keeps taking on new targets without letting too much of a sense of failure build up.
Beyond that, the line from Master Wu — "Take it easy, dial it back a bit" — really does have its subtle wisdom, because if you take on too much, the brain only feels acute pain, and the result it trades back is nothing but active avoidance. Take a friend just starting out at the gym, for instance: lacking an instructor's guidance, they charge in over-eager from day one, jumping from one exercise to the next, aiming to build a magazine-cover physique within a month. For one thing, the body is easily injured; for another, leaping too far across the brain's comfort zone makes the whole process acutely painful. "Progressing step by step in order" and "dialling it back a bit" let the body adapt gradually, accept the present state, and build up a comfort zone of greater area.
Held up by a daydream into a writing delusion, procrastinating ever since — a special side feature: 【Self-Taught, with No Master: Franklin's God-Tier English Writing Practice】
When Benjamin Franklin was young, he greatly envied other people's ability to write excellent essays, while he himself lacked an instructor to guide his writing. So he boldly took the magazine of the day, The Spectator, as his teaching material and set out on a journey of "writing his own essays and teaching himself."
At the start he first "observed": he picked out a few essays he liked and added simple annotations, so that he could recall their gist. If he then forgot the wording of certain sentences in an essay, he would try, using his own pen, to rewrite the sentences in the way closest to the original. Then came feedback and rectification: he would take the sentences he had rewritten and compare them against the original text of The Spectator, reflecting on his own and the other writers' choice of words, expression and description when conveying the same thing. This process of continually finding mistakes and then correcting them advanced Franklin's writing ability at god-like speed.
Ericsson notes that Franklin later created a training variation to help himself practise more efficiently, but I won't go into it here; you're welcome to refer to Chapter Six of Peak: "What to do when there's no teacher."
Side feature, part two – 【A small experiment by the author】
The whole book lays out the concept of deliberate practice very clearly, so naturally I had to try applying it to life. I was lucky enough to do an exchange at university, so I tried drawing up a running plan, the entire model designed around the goal of running for two days, resting for one, and pushing forward by one minute or thirty seconds with each run. If I was too tired or not in the right state, I'd go for a slow run that day and lean towards keeping the record unchanged. From being able to run only 9 minutes at the start, the score eventually held steady at 40 minutes. (And then there was no "and then," because once I got back to Hong Kong it was another story altogether, ha ha.)
Side feature, part three – 【The possibility of a turnaround】
This is why I said at the outset that anyone can afford it: because the price really is easy to pay — it can be ten years, twenty years, even thirty years, and time is something everyone has. What it comes down to is whether you're willing to keep doing "that one thing," practising, making mistakes, and then rectifying, over and over. Many middle-aged people, my own parents included, often use a decaying brain and a memory that isn't what it used to be as an excuse to refuse to learn anything new.
But the truth isn't like that. Even when a person reaches middle age, Ericsson describes the brain as still possessing a degree of "plasticity"; things not sticking in your head are simply the result of not having used the brain's memory function for a long time. So by taking a little time to "Reboot" and keeping up the practice, you can recover what you once had — which is why, even in middle age, a person still has the capacity to keep learning.
References
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise — a comprehensive analysis from the original pioneer, a way of learning that matters more than innate talent. Authors: Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool
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