This Fall, I'll spend a few weekly evenings collecting kids from soccer practices and most Saturdays watching a youth soccer games. It's interesting to see how kids learn soccer. It's certainly not how adults would learn it. Adults might start running in mid-summer to get in shape and watch soccer on TV and tutorials on YouTube. Kids play soccer in the street. One of them has decided that, new for this year, when he plays goalie, he'll use his hands. The other let us know that he's observed his coach sometimes telling the boys, at the end of practice, that they didn't really pay attention and probably need to get clued in more to make practice useful, but other times the coach doesn't say that. The kid found this curious, because he thinks all practices are about the same.This—driving to and from practice fields—got me thinking about practice. Where do we get practice outside of sports? Somehow sports are the thing that we find it easiest to break down into smaller bits and devote attention to getting good at those bits with the expectation we'll then perform the overall thing better. For the last two years, when I ski, I am working on doing a thing with my knees to get more power in the turn. I can still remember the feeling, in March after intently focusing on this knee-power thing for two years, of just doing it and feeling the power throughout the turn. Wow! What made that ski run memorable? Well, it was two years of practice.
I think this is probably why we analogize to sports so often in the business world: they give us a context for competitiveness and for practice and performance. While we like the "wins" and "teams" and "points" analogies from sports, I don't think we do enough, in knowledge work, to get the practice analogy right. It's hard because practice, for a knowledge worker, is more nuanced. There's not a set of body movements you can learn nor drills you can do on a field two nights a week to get better at being a solutions architect (my job, for those keeping track). I tend to get so focused on what I need to solve, that I forget about the routines and patterns I adopt when I attempt to solve it. From Google searches to document creation to AI prompts the tactics all just the way I work and I assume they're fine. Where I assume the real value comes is in the question (the knowledge) itself, not in how I attempt to work at the answer. Imagine the soccer player who treated every attempt to field and pass the ball as unique. He'd measure the angles and plot the other players on a graph and calculate the time and openness of each one and he (and the ball) would be lost! It's a silly analogy, but I think this is what we tend to do with knowledge work: we assume the details of the question and its answer matters exclusively, not how we structure our efforts, approaches, and tactics.
Think about it this way: if you remove the domain-specific information (in my case, the software, HubSpot), what are the tactics and approaches of the knowledge worker (in my case, solutions architect)?
- Engagement management
- Synchronous and asynchronous discovery
- Research and concept-proving
- Diagramming & design
- Recommendation presentations
- Implementation and execution consulting
I'd wager my performance and value in the role have far more to do with my ability to perform along these core skills than any particular feature or ingenuity coming from the software itself. And, it's clear looking at the list that these tactics can be practiced in relative isolation, both from each other and from the software, allowing my knowledge work to get stronger without "just doing it."
What does it look like to practice a skill such that you can deploy it, purposefully, to perform at the highest level? Normally, a sports analogized bit like this would show you a Tom Brady play. Instead, take a listen to the opening three minutes or so of comedian Pete Holmes's 2019 appearance at Google. He asks, "how's this going?", repeatedly, at the beginning, as he opens with silly jokes to establish rapport. Eventually, and no one expects you to watch it to the end, he calls back to the "how's this going?" bit! This stuck with me because I heard him talk about, in a podcast I can't quite find, what he's up to here. His theory is that while an audience arrives at a comedy club ready to have a laugh and an in-the-room experience, it takes a lot of work to get to the same level of joy and expectancy in a corporate room, so he amps up the "we are here" and "we are doing a thing" and the silliness to try to break through the audience's normal mode. He knows exactly what he's doing because he's practiced it. He knows what builds towards an ideal comedy set and aims to adapt his approach to get that same energy in a room of seated corporate types there for his book tour event. What Holmes does in that moment is really interesting and has little to do with the purpose of his talk (promoting a book, answering the interviewer's questions, etc.). I couldn't find the precise link, but he talks about it elsewhere: when appearing in front of a group of people, in a comedian/court jester role, he feels like part of the job is to remind them that they are all actually there, experiencing a thing together, and to wake up to the actual moment. To me, this work is no different than a quarterback walking up to the line, reading the defense, and calling an new play to adjust to what he's seen—it's performance based on deep practice.
We can't all be sportspeople and we can't all be comedians (although, we'd be better off if we tried for a little more good humor). But we are all able to practice. For the reading this week, there are two pieces on practice for the "rest" of us. David Perell takes the example of athletic training plans to suggest we knowledge workers should deploy "learning plans." Which as I read it, are short-cycle (quarterly, according to Perell), objective-based (learn X) ways of focusing our attention. Intellectual omnivore Tyler Cowen has a typically concise list of what he does to practice at his flavor of knowledge work. His question, "what is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?" makes for worthy consideration. My current answer is that I make visual diagrams for almost everything that crosses my desk. What's your equivalent to the pianist practice scales?
Reading
Learn Like an Athlete
You'll improve your process every time you complete a learning challenge. By pushing through the cycle of start to finish, you'll discover quirks about yourself, accelerate your learning process, and ultimately, learn like an athlete.
How I practice at what I do
Following up on my post a few days ago, about the value of deliberate practice for knowledge workers, a number of you asked me what form my practice takes. Here is a partial list of some of my intellectual practice strategies: