Do enough to change your brain
After years of searching, I have discovered that the best breakfast burritos in my city are to be found at a counter inside a suburban gas station.
And just as with many such establishments around the world, business there is conducted entirely in Spanish.
I don’t speak Spanish, really. I know a few words. But the other day, I was delighted to find that I understood the woman’s simple greeting and all of her questions without mentally translating them into English. It was as though a little window opened up in my brain — an unexpected pop-up shop, not unlike the taco counter itself. Something had changed.
On the other hand, driving the next day through a heavily Korean business district, I couldn’t make meaning from any of the signs. But of course, anyone who reads Korean could easily do so.
What would it take for me to be able to begin to read and speak Korean? An intense amount of effort over a short period of time. My brain would begin to change, and I would be able to understand the signs and a spoken conversation the same way I can now grasp a bit of Spanish.
Because the system of traditional education is set up to give us small increments of information and experience over a long period of time, we rarely see the payoff that comes from putting in a lot of effort over a shorter period of time. We don’t see that we are gaining, because the gains are so slow. This hampers our motivation and leads to even slower gains — and that’s if we even get anywhere. How many people have taken four years of high school French and couldn’t even use it to buy a baguette?
On the other hand, what if we put more intense effort in? What if we do enough that we can actually change our brains, seeing clearly the impact of our hard work?
Recently, one of my students, Amelia, decided that she wanted to be ready for Algebra I by ninth grade. To do this, she was going to have to deal with an aversion to math that goes back five years. She committed to doing an astounding twenty hours of math per week in order to master the material.
At first, Amelia’s math time was painful. Here she was, doing her least favorite activity for hours every day. But midway through the second full week, lo and behold, her brain started to change. Things started to become easy. She could glance at a challenging problem and understand instinctively how to solve it. Naturally, her motivation grew — she was excited to see what the next breakthrough would be. Not bad for someone who started out shaky on times tables and fractions.
I’ve been seeing the same phenomenon in my tennis practice. I started playing only about six weeks ago, but I’ve been practicing almost every day. At this point, I can reliably get the ball over the net and onto the court. I can spot (and feel) the difference between good technique and bad. I can’t yet make the ball go where I want it to go, but I can begin to see how that would be possible. I can’t yet read the other person’s shots, but again, I’m starting to see how I will eventually do that. More of the game is becoming known to me, giving me a map of what’s next and how I can continue to grow. When the ball is coming at me, I react in a completely different way than I did three or four weeks ago. Again, it feels like there’s a new area in my brain opening up.
Maybe what I’m saying here is obvious to you. I mean, it makes sense: Stepping up your effort until you see “realtime” results will have a powerful impact. It will change the way you see things. It will change your brain. But judging from the many people I have taught in math, music, and other subjects, it doesn’t seem to be obvious to most people that stepping up the effort will make any difference. It does.
If you want to discover hidden talents, start deliberately developing them. Push aside the voice in your brain that suggests you’re doing too much or you don’t have what it takes. Do the work and reap the reward.