Three Questions Newsletter #2: Learning & Empowering Beliefs

“The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead.”

- William Zinser, from On Writing Well.

Read on for why I started here.

I’ve used my recent free time as an opportunity to hone in on a skill that I haven’t worked on since college: learning. I picked up Peak by Anders Ericsson trying to find tips and tricks on “learning how to learn.” The one line summary of the book: in order to get better, focus on deliberate practice. Here’s an article on deliberate practice from HBR, but a brief description: practice should be slightly uncomfortable and highly focused on one specific aspect of the desired skill you’re trying to improve.

I personally want to get better at writing newsletters. Traditional practice would say the best way to do that is “write more newsletters.” Deliberate practice, though, would entail:

1. Breaking down the fundamentals of the best newsletters

2. Identifying all the different characteristics that make them great: sentence structure, tone, prose, length etc.

3. Practicing each individual subcomponent. Rinse and repeat.

This final step, in my opinion, is the most important. As an example, I could read the sentence structure of the best introductions of my ten favorite newsletters and try to implement them. So —how did I do this week?

The good news is there’s a clear scientific process for learning. The bad news is there’s a big inhibitor to deliberate practice for me—distraction. If you’re like me, the endless dopamine hits your smartphone gives you tend to take up a lot of time. Before you know it, “five more minutes” on social media turns into an hour. One of my favorite thinkers on social psychology, Eric Barker, recently wrote a blog on how addicted we actually are to our smartphones (definitely subscribe to his newsletter, I highly recommended);

“...there’s a study that was done asking people, mainly young adults, to make a decision: If you had to break a bone or break your phone, what would you prefer? Forty-six percent of people would prefer to have a broken bone than a broken phone. But even for the fifty-four percent of people who say they’d prefer to have a broken phone, it wasn’t a snap decision. They agonized over it.”

Broken bone?! I’d like to think that most of you reading wouldn't succumb to that. It is obvious, though, that even in a time where we’re not as busy, we are increasingly distracted. As I dug deeper in Peak, Ericsson highlights a key mental shift you need to make in order to successfully stay focused and perform deliberate practice. What is it? “Belief that you can succeed.” He highlights numerous examples, from Olympic runners to musicians, that a core tenet of their success was greatly tied to personal belief.

It turns out identity defines not just who you are, but what you do as well. This reminds me of a line from one of my favorite books, Atomic Habits, by James Clear. “To change your behavior for good, you need to start believing new things about yourself.” In other words, tell yourself that certain things are true. Action (or a lack thereof) will follow.

Related to my goal of learning how to write better newsletters, I must tell myself, “You’re a writer.” I can attest to the fact that this tip does in fact work. I am embarrassed to admit that I used to be a terrible nail-biter. The day I read Atomic Habits, I told myself “You’re not someone that bites nails,” and it made a major difference. I do tend to relapse from time to time, but this single piece of advice completely changed a terrible habit I once had. Such a simple, yet powerful mental shift.

Ultimately, it is your belief that drives your behaviors, and your behaviors drive the outcome. Here’s another study Eric Barker cited which illustrates this via 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior: ‘Ed Diener and Martin Seligman screened over 200 undergraduates for levels of happiness and compared the upper 10% (the “extremely happy”) with the middle and bottom 10%. Extremely happy students experienced no greater number of objectively positive life events, like doing well on exams or hot dates, than did the other two groups (Diener & Seligman, 2002).’”

It is deceivingly obvious—your beliefs impact everything that happens in your life. The study above illustrates that mindset is a determining factor as to whether or not you’re happy. There are many other applications for this: relationships, finances, professional development, skills. If that’s the case, why wouldn’t you have an empowering belief about nearly everything you do?

Another one of my favorite thinkers, Brian Johnson, recently reminded me of something Socrates once said. I thought it was a good way to wrap up: “I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can…And, to the utmost of my power, I exhort all other men to do the same…”

Wrapping up:

• What is an area of your personal or professional life where you can implement deliberate practice?

• What is an area in your life where you could benefit from an empowering belief?

• What’s stopping you from doing it?

/ae