Jonah Lehrer follows up on his recent Wall Street Journal article with some helpful information about how to not screw-up when the quality of your performance is important. For many people, this would be in a competitive sports-type situation. For me, it’s in the area of cutting teeth for a grade. Here’s an excerpt from Lehrer’s article Don’t Choke : The Frontal Cortex:
The second interesting result was that there was a way to
ward off choking. When the expert golfers contemplated a
holistic cue word, their performance was no longer
affected by anxiety. Because the positive adjectives were
vague and generic, they didn’t cause the athletes to lose
the flow of expert performance or overrule their
automatic brain.
So, you can think “smooth” or “precise” or “accurate” — and your body will act in a way that mimics the word being contemplated. It seems like a great strategy for trying to produce your best performance on cue… but of course it only works if you have many practice hours invested, allowing you to call on that “automatic brain”.
… if something is ugly, it can’t be the best solution.
There must be a better one, and eventually someone will
discover it.
The good writing just doesn’t stop:
To have a sense of humor is to be strong: to keep one’s
sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes, and to lose
one’s sense of humor is to be wounded by them. And so the
mark— or at least the prerogative— of strength is not to
take oneself too seriously. The confident will often, like
swallows, seem to be making fun of the whole process
slightly, as Hitchcock does in his films or Bruegel in his
paintings— or Shakespeare, for that matter.
Annnd:
In most fields the appearance of ease seems to come with
practice. Perhaps what practice does is train your
unconscious mind to handle tasks that used to require
conscious thought. In some cases you literally train your
body. An expert pianist can play notes faster than the
brain can send signals to his hand. Likewise an artist,
after a while, can make visual perception flow in through
his eye and out through his hand as automatically as
someone tapping his foot to a beat.
Professors at the dental school are telling me I should get jaw surgery now, because it’s cheaper while I’m in school (anything less than $25,000 is… cheaper). They’re telling me I could lose my teeth. School says I can’t remember enough, that I’m not coordinated enough, not disciplined enough. This is the first time they’ve said I’m not put together correctly.
When the other men reach their top speed, their limit,
Usain Bolt continues to accelerate. By the fifty-meter
mark, he has caught up to the leader. By the sixty-meter
mark, a noticeable gap has emerged between him and the
rest of the pack. By the seventy-meter mark, he is
covering more than twelve meters of ground — about forty
feet — every second, a pace faster than the speed limit
for automobiles in most neighborhoods. Nobody has ever
moved this fast before under his own power. Usain Bolt’s
top speed is simply significantly higher than anyone
else’s, ever.
A quote from poet Jane Hirshfield in David Grubin’s film “The Buddha”, on PBS:
No matter what your circumstances, you will end up losing
everything you love, you will end up aging, you will end
up ill. And the problem is that we need to figure out a
way how to make that all be all right.
Every time I think I’ve got the dental school thing down, I just get crushed flat by something going wrong. Lately, it’s been these practicals. We’re trained to cut teeth to very stringent guidelines — previously, we were simply graded on the degree to which we met these guidelines. NOW, we only pass if every single aspect of our tooth cutting meets a clinically acceptable standard. Otherwise, we fail: one failure requires a make-up… two failures and, well, I’m not sure.
I sit there during the practical… and everything I practiced, all the skills I developed, fly right out the window. Somewhere on SE Washington Avenue, my tooth cutting skills are getting run over by a Metro Transit bus. Meanwhile, I’m flailing away like some moron with a glorified Dremel tool. It’s outrageously frustrating, not being able to show what I’m capable of during these practicals. I know I can do it; it’s just that I’m not proving it when it counts.
It doesn’t matter how many hours you spent on an empty court shooting free-throws, they only count if you make them during the game.
When FBR Capital Markets, an investment bank based in
Virginia that lost $200 million in 2008, pulled out of
its sponsorship of this year’s PGA Tour event in
Scottsdale, Ariz., Finchem signed up Waste Management to
take its place. The tournament is now called the Waste
Management Phoenix Open, a name that can’t help but
telegraph that a new kind of partner is being welcomed to
the tour.
The Phoenix event is not your average golf
tournament. It’s basically a sprawling frat party,
complete with beer gardens and busty women in tank tops
handing out discount drink coupons. On the tournament’s
16th hole, a par 3 surrounded by a grandstand that seats
15,000, golfers who fail to clear the desert shrubbery
fronting the green are lustily booed. Woods has played
the tournament only a handful of times, but he is
nevertheless responsible for one of its more memorable
moments: in 1997, his first full year as a pro, he aced
the 16th hole and was approvingly showered with beer
cans.
The Waste Management Phoenix Open. Phoenix Trash Open. Trashy Open.
We are coming up on my favorite season in the whole-wide world: street sweeping season. After getting gravel, rocks, and sand kicked into my face for a season, I finally get relief: a chance to ride the good bike without worrying about destruction of myself or the bike from street debris.
That’s what’s so great about Minnesota: everyone here knows what spring means: the awesomeness of room-temperature air. We really should have some sort of celebration or parade.