Find the gap

You grow them, you dry them, you grind them…but I’m not sure exactly how. (Image by Steve Buissinne)

A student and I were working through some challenging problems involving ratios. 

But not the most challenging problems. There were a few that she was really stuck on, but we ignored those. We went backward in her book, section by section, until we found problems that she knew how to do but didn’t really know how to explain, even though she was able to get the right answer.

This student has a lot going for her already: She has the self-awareness to know what she has a handle on and what she doesn’t. She knows that having the right answer isn’t enough. She gets that, in order to improve, she has to focus not just on the outcome, but on the process. 

What she’s still learning is that she needs to embrace not just the developing skills and knowledge, but the space where the skills and knowledge does not yet exist. She needs to lean into the gap in her understanding and get excited about being wrong instead of consoling herself with the parts that are right. Within that gap is an opportunity.

I’ve written before about the importance of building on strengths instead of compensating for weaknesses, and that still applies even when we’re looking for the weak points in a given performance. To harness the power of building on our strengths, we ought to choose growth opportunities that allow us to engage with something we have already mastered to a degree of about 60 percent to 80 percent. From there, our additional effort and attention will make a noticeable difference with minimal negative effects. Chances are, we’ll be able to identify the gap or at least have more clarity about what and where it might be. 

By contrast, when we’re working on something that we are struggling with—perhaps at a 20 percent to 40 percent level of mastery—we might get too frustrated and overwhelmed to stick with the necessary work of mastery. Even if we remain patient and determined, it might simply take too long to see results for it to be worth it. The gap has to be small enough that you can see it. If it’s too big or too close, you can’t find your way out of it. Views of Manhattan are breathtaking from Hoboken or Weehawken, but you can’t see the skyline when you’re standing in the middle of Midtown. You need some perspective and distance.

Many amateur musicians know parts of songs. They’ve got the intro to “Stairway to Heaven,” the guitar solo from “Sweet Child O’Mine,” or the bass line from “Billie Jean.” As admirable and fun as it may be to learn a cool lick, the hard part is having the attention to detail and stamina to learn a song all the way through. If you just hand-wave the in-between parts where it’s sort of repetitive, you are missing out on the exact puzzle pieces that will make you better. Those songs—and parts of songs—that are too difficult to be quickly rewarding certainly offer the promise of new skills, but the songs that you might feel are “too easy” to be worth learning is where you will experience the greatest payoff. When they’re supposedly “too easy,” but you can’t actually play them well, these are the very songs that will yield noticeable improvement in your musicianship.

When you can get most of the song on the first try, you can make it sound better on the second without too much trouble because you can hear what is missing and fix it. It’s straightforward to perfect a recipe that uses mostly familiar techniques and ingredients. You’ll be able to self-correct a woodworking project when you know what it’s supposed to look like when it’s done. And when you’re trying to understand a math concept, it’s helpful to do a bunch of them in a similar vein so that you can begin to see patterns. Pushing to the limits of your ability, on the other hand, does not necessarily yield heroic, impressive results; it might just leave you with confusion and uncertainty.

Instead of avoiding or shortchanging the easy stuff, we can polish it until it shines. To do this, we have to dig into the mistakes and the parts we got wrong, exploring the mysteries and investigating the twists and turns. “Yeah, I know this,” we might say, but our knowledge isn’t as deep or rich as it could be. Fixing that is where our effort will pay off the most. Knowing about something isn’t the same as knowing something; knowing something isn’t the same as knowing how to do something. And knowing how to do something isn’t the same as being able to do it well, with ease, reliably. That’s what we’re going for.

It sounds counterintuitive, but spending time on the stuff that’s adjacent to what we think we know strengthens our skills faster than working on the really hard stuff. We have to find the gap between what we know and what we don’t. We might have to let go of a little ego and gain a little humility to do it, but we’ll appreciate the results on the other side.