I was reading an article on “mental athletes” by The New York Times. It was a fascinating subject, however, there was one section in particular that caught my attention and seemed worth passing along.

In the Secrets of a Mind-Gamer (an article with a very off-putting and tawdry introduction which only makes sense if you read the entire thing) Joshua Foer explores his journey from journalistic curiosity to competing for the United States Memory Championship. As he relates the steps he took, he tells of when he seemingly hit the plateau of his memorizing potential, and how he got past it:

Cooke kept me on a strict training regimen. Each morning, after drinking coffee but before reading the newspaper or showering or getting dressed, I sat at my desk for 10 to 15 minutes to work through a poem or memorize the names in an old yearbook. Rather than take a magazine or book along with me on the subway, I would whip out a page of random numbers or a deck of playing cards and try to commit it to memory. Strolls around the neighborhood became an excuse to memorize license plates. I began to pay a creepy amount of attention to name tags. I memorized my shopping lists. Whenever someone gave me a phone number, I installed it in a special memory palace.

Over the next several months, while I built a veritable metropolis of memory palaces and stocked them with strange and colorful images, Ericsson kept tabs on my development. When I got stuck, I would call him for advice, and he would inevitably send me scurrying for some journal article that he promised would help me understand my shortcomings. At one point, not long after I started training, my memory stopped improving. No matter how much I practiced, I couldn’t memorize playing cards any faster than 1 every 10 seconds. I was stuck in a rut, and I couldn’t figure out why. “My card times have hit a plateau,” I lamented.

“I would recommend you check out the literature on speed typing,” he replied.

When people first learn to use a keyboard, they improve very quickly from sloppy single-finger pecking to careful two-handed typing, until eventually the fingers move effortlessly and the whole process becomes unconscious. At this point, most people’s typing skills stop progressing. They reach a plateau. If you think about it, it’s strange. We’ve always been told that practice makes perfect, and yet many people sit behind a keyboard for hours a day. So why don’t they just keeping getting better and better?

In the 1960s, the psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner tried to answer this question by describing the three stages of acquiring a new skill. During the first phase, known as the cognitive phase, we intellectualize the task and discover new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. During the second, the associative phase, we concentrate less, making fewer major errors, and become more efficient. Finally we reach what Fitts and Posner called the autonomous phase, when we’re as good as we need to be at the task and we basically run on autopilot. Most of the time that’s a good thing. The less we have to focus on the repetitive tasks of everyday life, the more we can concentrate on the stuff that really matters. You can actually see this phase shift take place in f.M.R.I.’s of subjects as they learn new tasks: the parts of the brain involved in conscious reasoning become less active, and other parts of the brain take over. You could call it the O.K. plateau.

Psychologists used to think that O.K. plateaus marked the upper bounds of innate ability. In his 1869 book “Hereditary Genius,” Sir Francis Galton argued that a person could improve at mental and physical activities until he hit a wall, which “he cannot by any education or exertion overpass.” In other words, the best we can do is simply the best we can do. But Ericsson and his colleagues have found over and over again that with the right kind of effort, that’s rarely the case. They believe that Galton’s wall often has much less to do with our innate limits than with what we consider an acceptable level of performance. They’ve found that top achievers typically follow the same general pattern. They develop strategies for keeping out of the autonomous stage by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented and getting immediate feedback on their performance.

Amateur musicians, for example, tend to spend their practice time playing music, whereas pros tend to work through tedious exercises or focus on difficult parts of pieces. Similarly, the best ice skaters spend more of their practice time trying jumps that they land less often, while lesser skaters work more on jumps they’ve already mastered. In other words, regular practice simply isn’t enough. For all of our griping over our failing memories — the misplaced keys, the forgotten name, the factoid stuck on the tip of the tongue — our biggest failing may be that we forget how rarely we forget. To improve, we have to be constantly pushing ourselves beyond where we think our limits lie and then pay attention to how and why we fail. That’s what I needed to do if I was going to improve my memory.

With typing, it’s relatively easy to get past the O.K. plateau. Psychologists have discovered that the most efficient method is to force yourself to type 10 to 20 percent faster than your comfort pace and to allow yourself to make mistakes. Only by watching yourself mistype at that faster speed can you figure out the obstacles that are slowing you down and overcome them. Ericsson suggested that I try the same thing with cards. He told me to find a metronome and to try to memorize a card every time it clicked. Once I figured out my limits, he instructed me to set the metronome 10 to 20 percent faster and keep trying at the quicker pace until I stopped making mistakes. Whenever I came across a card that was particularly troublesome, I was supposed to make a note of it and see if I could figure out why it was giving me cognitive hiccups. The technique worked, and within a couple days I was off the O.K. plateau, and my card times began falling again at a steady clip. Before long, I was committing entire decks to memory in just a few minutes.

I think this is fascinating and challenging. To be honest, it is something I have wondered about in passing but never took the time to actually investigate.

In some ways, I have to confess I regret learning about it because I’ve lost an excuse I like to use. Sometimes when I do things and reach my plateau I simply stop, because I’m a perfectionist, and if I don’t compare with those who are really good then I don’t want to do it at all. There are other things I’m better at, I reason, and so I excuse myself by rationalizing that it’s a waste of time to dwell on something I can’t get any better at. Now I’ve lost my excuse.

But on the other hand, this thought thrills me. The best you think you can do, is not the best you can do. With the correct approach, with feedback, and diligence in repeatedly practicing the hard parts and the areas in which we are the most likely to fail, we can go far beyond what initially appears the limits of our potential.

Join in by answering any or all of the following questions:

• Have you experienced the “O.K. Plateau” in your own life?
• If so, did you respond by coasting or by pushing through?
• What are some areas in your life where you could apply these principles?

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Several people had recommended this sermon to us, but we never got around to listening to it until it was assigned as part of Investigative Journalism class at Patrick Henry College. We were discussing the role of Christian journalists, but the message is for all Christians — and seems especially relevant to rebelutionaries.

Pastor Tim Keller unpacks Jeremiah 29:4-7 to argue for a uniquely Christian approach to citizenship, one that avoids assimilation and tribalism in favor of selfless service. Keller defines “assimilation” as using the city for your personal benefit and “tribalism” as using the city for the benefit of your group. Both approaches fall short of God’s command in Jeremiah, where the Israelites are instructed to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”

LISTEN TO KELLER’S MESSAGE - 38 MIN. LONG

Keller argues that Christians should be the very best citizens because we enter society with an intact identity in God. We can approach the earthly city with hearts ready to serve because we already have a secure inheritance in the heavenly one. We need very little, but we have much to give. And God’s kingdom comes when believers demonstrate their love for God by the way they love other people.

If this is true, then many Christians (and rebelutionaries) are taking the wrong approach to leading the nation and shaping the culture. The Church’s rise to prominence in the Roman Empire resulted not from the pursuit of power, but from an unexplainable, self-sacrificing love for others (listen to the sermon to hear this story). Their influence arose from the quality and consistency of their service, not the extent of their ambition or the strength of their network.

SERIOUSLY, YOU NEED TO LISTEN TO THE MESSAGE

This concepts are vital for rebelutionaries because they touch at the heart of why we do hard things, why we rebel against low expectations, and why we pursue character, competence, and collaboration. Is it for personal gain or glory? No. Is it to ensure “our team” wins the culture war? No. We do it so others might see our love and come to know the Source of that love. We do it so others might see our good works and give glory to our Father in Heaven (Matt. 5:16)

That’s it for our thoughts. Listen to the message (it’s well-worth 40 minutes of your time). Then, join the conversation by answering the following questions:

• What has most characterized your approach to “changing the world” — assimilation (serving yourself), tribalism (serving your group), or selfless love (serving the city)?
• How do you think assimilation and tribalism influence the Church’s effectiveness? Have these approaches ever worked in the past?
• How should a renewed emphasis on service change your tactics (or the tactics of Christianity as a whole)?

+ Join the Conversation +

Throughout history more lives have been changed through books than by any other means. Books are important. Reading is important. Charles Spurgeon, the prince of preachers, wrote: “The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men’s brains, proves that he has no brains of his own.”

If that’s true then our generation is largely brainless. We don’t read — and that’s especially true of boys. The following article, published in The Wall Street Journal, charts a forward course that could save our generation, or at least help us raise the next generation of leaders/readers. Take a look, and then get off the computer.

When I was a young boy, America’s elite schools and universities were almost entirely reserved for males. That seems incredible now, in an era when headlines suggest that boys are largely unfit for the classroom. In particular, they can’t read.

According to a recent report from the Center on Education Policy, for example, substantially more boys than girls score below the proficiency level on the annual National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test. This disparity goes back to 1992, and in some states the percentage of boys proficient in reading is now more than ten points below that of girls. The male-female reading gap is found in every socio-economic and ethnic category, including the children of white, college-educated parents.

The good news is that influential people have noticed this problem. The bad news is that many of them have perfectly awful ideas for solving it.

Everyone agrees that if boys don’t read well, it’s because they don’t read enough. But why don’t they read? A considerable number of teachers and librarians believe that boys are simply bored by the “stuffy” literature they encounter in school. According to a revealing Associated Press story in July these experts insist that we must “meet them where they are”—that is, pander to boys’ untutored tastes.

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