The Basics of Skill Development (A Practical Story)

Because a MS/PhD does not follow a clearly defined syllabus, you have to make your own decisions about what to do and about the standards you set for yourself in your work.

It’s a bit like doing a high jump in the dark; you know the bar is there somewhere, but you don’t know how high you have to jump in order to clear it. Combine this with the high expectations most Post Graduate (MS/PhD) students have of themselves and the natural temptation is to try to jump as high as possible.

But what if you set your immediate expectations far in excess of your current ability? I made this mistake very early in my MS when my supervisor asked me to write a literature review. Determined to make a good first impression and confident in my writing ability, I decided that I would write the best literature review the world had ever seen. I even formatted my document in double-column format like a journal article, imagining that the end result would be good enough for publication.

I started reading and writing, but very quickly felt overwhelmed by the scale of the task. There were so many sources, so many areas to cover, so many things I didn't understand… Although I wrote several thousand words, I never actually finished that first literature review.

With hindsight, failure was inevitable. I was trying to write a broad review, comprehensively covering every aspect of IFM’s and IBI’s, but without first developing a broad range of expertise on which to base it. By imagining I could write a publishable literature review right at the start, I was setting a goal far in excess of my ability and expertise. I put myself under far too much pressure to be brilliant from day one, and all I did was damage my own confidence.

Ambition gives you direction and purpose, but any ambition worth pursuing will not be immediately achievable. It takes time, persistence and patience to develop the required skills.

To become better at anything, you have to set the difficulty of your practice at an appropriate level relative to your existing skill.

If you are trying something for the first time, then it’s quite likely that you won’t be very good on your first attempt. It makes sense then to start with the simplest and easiest version of a task, and then increase the difficulty or complexity only once you have succeeded.

When you apply this in practice, there are two possible outcomes; either you succeed quickly because the task is too easy, or you find that even at a simple level there are difficulties you did not anticipate. In the former case, you haven’t lost much time and can raise the bar with confidence. In the latter case, it is easier to address the difficulties at a small scale than if you had started with the most ambitious possible aim.

So rather than just “stepping out of your comfort zone”, the task needs to be just beyond your current level—enough to stretch your ability, but achievable with conscious effort. After you have succeeded once, you need less effort to repeat the same task, and you can then increase the difficulty of the challenge.

These small intermediate steps allow you, in time, to reach a high level of skill, but if you attempt to bypass the process by setting a task far in excess of your current ability (as I did with that first attempt at a lit review), you will be overwhelmed. Your improvement will be minimal – no matter how intelligent you are and no matter how hard you work – because it’s much harder to identify and rectify individual problems when you start with a very complex task than it is with a simple one.

The amount of attention a task requires is determined by your level of skill relative to the difficulty of the task; the more skilful you are, the less conscious attention required, and vice-versa.

When you are a novice, every single action takes a high level of mental concentration. You will be slow, because you have to think about every single movement, every single component part.

This conscious effort is essential, but with practice, some of those actions start to become automatic. Your brain starts to form new processing short-cuts so that the same actions that were once alien, slow and difficult start to become so familiar, fast and easy they require barely any conscious thought at all.

Every time you add new layers of difficulty, you increase the amount of conscious attention you have to give to the practice. You have to think about the new component parts, but with more conscious, deliberate practice, again it becomes easy. Your brain continues to adapt, and the new, more-difficult components become automatic. This frees up some of your conscious attention to take on the next challenge.

There is a limit to how many things you can consciously process at any one time, so whenever you are attempting something new, or beyond the level you have done before, you may need to slow down and concentrate on just one element at a time.