{"id":1232,"date":"2013-10-30T06:24:55","date_gmt":"2013-10-30T14:24:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/?p=1232"},"modified":"2013-10-30T06:31:14","modified_gmt":"2013-10-30T14:31:14","slug":"consistency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/30\/consistency\/","title":{"rendered":"Consistency"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I mentioned in my previous post<\/a>, I’ve gotten back into playing volleyball this summer at Google, and have been really enjoying it. The sand court on Google’s main campus is in regular use, and I’ll occasionally stop by and watch to pick up some pointers. One Wednesday at lunch, I was watching the really good game with players that are probably AA-rated (one notch below the top beach players). One of my coworkers sat down next to me and asked me what was the difference between me and them. <\/p>\n

He asked “Can you hit it like that?” and I said “Sometimes” and he asked “Can you make a defensive play like that?” and I said “Sometimes”, and so he didn’t understand why I said those guys were at a whole different level than I was.<\/p>\n

Of course, the difference is that I said “Sometimes”. When I go up for a hit, I can hit it down hard 10-20% of the time – these guys were doing it 90% of the time. When my opponent spikes the ball down, I can dive for it and return a playable ball maybe 5-10% of the time – these guys were doing it 30% of the time. So watching them is amazing because one of them will go up and pound the ball past the blocker, and the defender will have read the hit and pop it up, and it’ll go back and forth a few times. Whereas when I play, half the time I screw up the initial pass and get a weak hit at best. <\/p>\n

A similar situation arose when I was playing in a pickup ultimate frisbee game last week. I had the best game I’ve had all year – I was jumping over two defenders to catch the disc, I was throwing hucks for scores, etc. The frustrating thing is that I know I can play like that, but it is rare when I can put it all together – at the previous week’s game, I couldn’t get open and missed several throws. <\/p>\n

And that’s the difference between the intermediate player and the advanced player: consistency. Anybody athletic can have an occasional great play, but being a great player means being able to make that play every single time. I am stuck at a certain level in these sports where I have moments of greatness, but am mediocre most of the time, because I can’t consistently play at that higher level. <\/p>\n

To take the next step requires the patience of deliberate practice. It’s not just about doing the activity more – it’s about breaking the activity down to its component parts and practicing each of those parts so much that they become second nature. So rather than just playing volleyball, I need to do drills to practice passing over and over again, and then drills on setting, hitting and digging, to focus on each individual skill. But that requires effort and organization, so I just play instead and have to therefore be content with my current level of inconsistency.<\/p>\n

As usual, this doesn’t just apply to sports. Every activity requires practice to embed it deeply into our unconscious expertise<\/a>, whether it’s cooking or project managing or data analysis. If you have to use your limited conscious bandwidth to examine something, it will take too long<\/a>. So if you’re stuck at a level of inconsistency, are you willing to take a step back and practice individual skills assiduously? If not, you’re going to be inconsistent for a lot longer. <\/p>\n

P.S. I’ve written about this topic before, in posts on what it takes to achieve mastery<\/a> and the importance of coaching and feedback in improving<\/a> and getting results<\/a>, but I decided to write about it again, given my recent inconsistent play in sports. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve gotten back into playing volleyball this summer at Google, and have been really enjoying it. The sand court on Google’s main campus is in regular use, and I’ll occasionally stop by and watch to pick up some pointers. One Wednesday at lunch, I was watching the really […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1232"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1236,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1232\/revisions\/1236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}