You want to make a healthful lifestyle change,
but question whether you can invest the time and effort necessary to make it
happen.
In his book Outliers (2008), Malcom Gladwell—a journalist—glibly advised that
masterful performance in certain fields of endeavor, such as chess playing, requires
about 10,000 hours of practice. Many professional
and lay people readily accepted his suggestion as gospel until a research review
by Princeton psychologist Brooke N. Mac Namara and her colleagues (2014)
debunked it. They showed, for instance,
that even 10,000 hours did not guarantee mastery in such diverse areas as game performance,
musical instrument expertise, educational achievement, and professional
success. They asserted instead that
intra-individual factors were critical, such as when you begin to work on your
skill, how well you employ your cognitive capabilities, and how your
personality aligns with your goal and goal implementation efforts.
However, the Mac Namara review group did not
in any way deny the importance of time on task, only that ten thousand hours, equivalent
to three and one-half years of 8 hours days, is not determinative. Rather, their advice implied that calculating
time cannot be divorced from a person’s idiosyncratic characteristics and
from the amount of effort that he/she devotes to planning and implementing their
change program.
I too firmly believe that your idiosyncratic characteristics
and the amount of effort that you devote to planning and implementation are
central. If you choose your goals wisely
and increase them at a reasonable rate, you can achieve incremental mastery that
aggregates toward your best possible outcome.
This approach is predicated on an activity orientation. Recall that an activity is rational,
organized, comprehensive, and long-lived.
Suppose you want to get stronger. A rational plan presumes that you have
gathered the necessary information to determine how strength is acquired. You then study the process and make an
informed decision about where you need greater strength and what you need to do
to attain it. Next, you organize your
plan, deciding particulars such as the location(s) where you will perform the strengthening. Third, you ensure that your plan includes all
the most critical features of strengthening.
And finally, you establish a schedule to execute your plan.
Once you have accounted for all components of
your healthful activity, you will be able to accurately determine the amount of
time and the amount of effort required to reach your goal. It will not be 10,000 hours, that’s for
sure. If you structure your activity properly,
you gradually will master your healthful lifestyle change week by week by week—not
10,000 hours at a time. You will have
apportioned your goal so that it is manageable.
You will have proven to yourself that health is not mastered in the same
way that bread-making is. You will
accept that health always is a work in progress and find solace in the fact that
you continually are putting forth sufficient personal time and effort for you to
achieve and maintain as much health as is reasonably possible.
By the way, although there is no substitute
for a personalized plan in order accurately to estimate the time and effort
needed to develop a salutary exercise habit, you may be comforted to know that
faithfully adhering to a five week program has been shown to work very well for
most people (Iso-Ahola, 2013).
Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The
story of success. New York: Little,
Brown.
Mac Namara, B., Hambrick, D., & Oswald, F. (2014). Deliberate
practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: A
meta-analysis. Psychological Science, 25,
8, 1608-1618.
Iso-Ahola, S. (2013). Exercise:
Why it is a challenge for both the nonconscious and conscious mind. Review of General Psychology, 17, 1, 93-110.
No comments:
Post a Comment