Learning is optimized when we fail 15% of the time -- ScienceDaily

Learning is optimized when we fail 15% of the time -- ScienceDaily

As a junior varsity high school tennis coach I tell the players that they should look at losing matches as an opportunity to learn what they can do to improve their game. (I tell myself that too when I play tennis matches.) If the players can learn from losses they still win in the long run even though they lost the latest match. (I’d also say they can also learn from wins by looking at what they can improve. I do this by keeping a journal in which I rate whether I improved in technique, tactics and mental parts of my game and rate what needs to be improved.)

The Science Daily article links to a paper titled The Eight Five Percent Rule for optimal learning that is fairly technical. The Science Daily article summarizes:

Educators and educational scholars have long recognized that there is something of a "sweet spot" when it comes to learning. That is, we learn best when we are challenged to grasp something just outside the bounds of our existing knowledge. When a challenge is too simple, we don't learn anything new; likewise, we don't enhance our knowledge when a challenge is so difficult that we fail entirely or give up.

So where does the sweet spot lie? According to the new study, to be published in the journal Nature Communications, it's when failure occurs 15% of the time. Put another way, it's when the right answer is given 85% of the time.

So we optimize our learning if we fail about one out of six times. Good to know!

I believe these results parallel what it takes to achieve a state of mind that is called Flow, a concept identified by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian-American psychologist. The Wikipedia entry describes flow as “the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by the complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting loss in one's sense of space and time.”

I say that there is a connection between optimal learning and flow because achieving a flow state requires facing a task that challenges you without being daunting. The Positive Psychology website explains: “an optimal Flow state was created when people tackled challenges that they perceived to be at just the right level of ‘stretch’ for their skill sets. In other words, neither too tough nor too easy as to be boring.”

Putting together the findings on optimal learning and flow it appears that both need a “Goldilocks” challenge: one that stretches you to achieve flow and reveals what you need to improve for the next time.

Lessons from the NFL AFC Championship

I know many people outside of New England are tired of seeing the New England Patriots playing in the Super Bowl. There are a lot of reasons why the Pats dominate so much but I believe we can apply a couple things Tom Brady said in the post-game interview of the 2019 NFL’s AFC Championship (in which the New England Patriots beat the Kansas City Chiefs 37-31). We can apply these ideas not just to sports but how we live. I’ve provided his response to a reporter’s question with key words in bold.

Q: How do you stay so calm in the biggest moments, especially when your team is down and you have to drive the team right back?

BRADY: “Part of playing sports is just staying in the moment. We always say one play at a time and you can’t make up for things that happen in the past. You just have to think about what you are going to do moving forward. Start of the fourth quarter, they scored. We are up three to start the fourth quarter. What a great opportunity to be against this team and to be ahead three in the fourth quarter with a chance to win is pretty sweet. They blew so many teams out this year. It is just a great opportunity for us, and we took advantage of it.”

His first point, staying in the moment, is key. I’ve seen players and teams get desperate or angry when losing or when calls go against them then try for plays or shots that aren’t part of their normal repertoire. They’re upset about what just happened then try to make up for it by hitting the ball harder or going for shots they don’t “own.” For instance, in tennis (the sport with which I’m most familiar because I play it almost daily) I’ve seen players go for a shot or an angle that they normally wouldn’t try if they were ahead. Instead, they often end up making an unforced error, which only makes things worse. (I know because I’ve done it!) 

As Brady says it’s better to forget about past mistakes or calls that go against you and focus on two things: stay in the moment while thinking of what you’re going to do next. One tip I use in tennis after making a mistake is to tell myself, “Next time” while making a couple shadow swings on how I wanted to hit the shot that I just missed. “Next time” means I’m telling myself I’ll do it better the next time I have the chance. This attitude implicitly represents a focus on the process rather than the results. It also reflects their confidence in themselves. And, it also means that their self-esteem isn’t tied to the outcome. Sure, it doesn’t feel good to lose but someone like Brady or Federer just use the loss as motivation to learn from what happened and try to improve. (This also reflects something I’ve written about in a previous post: the difference between having a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset.)

Later Brady said that the Pats had a “great opportunity” when starting the fourth quarter with a three point lead over a team that was seeded #1 and had beaten other teams by large margins. I find it interesting that he didn’t say it was a challenge or that they were nervous. This is one of the qualities I’ve noticed with champions like the Brady, the Patriots or, switching to tennis again, Roger Federer. They are unflappable.  They see facing a tough opponent as an opportunity to excel rather than a challenge for which they might not be good enough.

So what accounts for this calmness? I’d say these factors: focus on the present, confidence in yourself without tying the outcome to your self-esteem and a process-oriented mentality. 

Tennis Reminders

I originally posted this in January 2018 in my blog on Talking Sports and updated it today. It occurred to me that some of the ideas could also apply to flourishing and self-development so I've pasted the post below.

Tennis Reminders

In an earlier post, Can I? versus I Can!, I shared results of research on how people performed when they asked themselves the question “Can I do this?” versus coaxing themselves with “I can do this!” I mentioned that I apply this by asking myself “Can I play well today?” then answering “Yes!”

At the end of that post I also mentioned that I also use the acronym LIFE3 as part of my pre-match routine to remind why I’m playing: to Learn, Improve, have Fun and to Express myself, to Explore my capabilities and to Exercise.

The final pre-match self-talk covers key reminders on the techniques I want to use. I use two phrases, one for groundstrokes and one for serving. For groundstrokes I say, “Watch me Catch Butt.” This actually contains three reminders in one. Watch: reminds me to watch the shadow of the ball. Why the shadow? To narrow my focus to something specific on the ball, not the ball itself. (I actually don’t watch the ball over its entire flight. More on that in a later post. Hint: has to do with something called saccadic eye movements.) Catch: reminds me that on my forehand I’m holding my left arm across my body and basically parallel to the baseline as if I’m going to catch the ball. This forces me to turn my upper body, which sets up the coil needed to generate power. On the backhand I pretend I’m going to catch the ball with the butt of my racket. On volleys Catch reminds me to set up my racket as if I’m catching the ball with it. Butt: reminds me to pull the racket through contact to help generate racket speed.

Finally, when serving, I use the word UP to remind myself that I’m hitting Up on the ball and to Pronate.

By the way, in case you were wondering, here is a little background on my tennis playing ability and experience. When I’ve taken tennis lessons in the past couple years I’ve asked the four different instructors how they’d rate me on the NTRP (National Tennis Rating Program) scale. All of them say I’m at least a 4.0, maybe a little higher. Of course, all of them say this is based on what they see during lessons and that the rating could change depending on how I play in actual matches.

I constantly study the game by watching YouTube videos, reading many books and subscribing to a bunch of email newsletters of pros and instructors such as Wil Hamilton, Clay Ballard, Brent Abel, Peter Freeman, Ramon Osa, Jorge Capestany, and Ian Westermann. For the last three years I also have kept a tennis journal in which I rate myself whether I made incremental improvement in technique, tactics and my mental/emotional state. The journal also records observations on areas that need to be worked on for the next match.

I also use the Babolat POP wrist sensor to track my strokes. The POP collects average and maximum speeds of groundstrokes and serves, the kinds of groundstrokes (top spin, slice or flat) and gives an overall rating based on spin, speed and style. (I record this information in a spreadsheet to look for trends.)

All of this information aims to show that even though I might not be a 4.5 or higher rated player my constant study has resulted in my game continuing to advance. I believe I’m playing better now at the age of 67 than I have ever played before in the 50+ years that I’ve played this sport. And I’m not done!

UPDATE 1/2/2019

Since writing this a year ago I've tweaked and added to my pre-match routine. The UP reminder for serving now is PUPSS which stands for Point at the toss, hit Up, Pronate, start the serve take back Slowly and try to keep my body Sideways longer. I added these to my pre-serve reminder because I was finding myself starting the take back too fast then stopping or slowing down and my body was opening to the court too early which I think caused my first serve to go into the net too often.

The following might sound hokey but I also ask why am I playing. The answer is LIFES. This stands for to Learn more about the game and myself, to Improve, to have Fun, to Explore, get Exercise, have Excitement and Express myself with Style. The Style reminder is to get me to focus on playing smoothly and on the process of hitting the ball rather than the results. I got this idea after reading Gabriele Wulf’s Attention and Motor Skill Learning in which she describes the results of her research on the difference between having an external focus rather than an internal focus in performing athletic skills.

Here is how Amazon summarizes her book. “Attention and Motor Skill Learning challenges traditional views that the method of learning a motor skill involves focusing attention on each part of the skill and internalizing proper execution. Instead, author Gabriele Wulf argues that the learning of new motor skills suffers when attentional focus is on the coordination of movements. When attention is directed to the desired movement effect, however, performance levels rise. Not only is a higher level of performance often achieved faster with an external rather than an internal attention focus, but the skill is retained better.”

Her book discusses experiments she conducted with people doing a variety of skills such as standing on a balance bar and trying to keep it steady. The internal group was told to try to keep their feet as steady as possible while the external group was told to try to keep two lights that were on the balance beam as steady as possible. The external group consistently did better than the internal group and maintained this advantage when tested days or weeks later.

You could argue that my emphasis on making my shots with style actually is an internal focus but I would say it’s more of an external focus. By thinking about making my strokes with smooth style I’m thinking about the result, not on the mechanics of how to play with style. And I’m thinking mostly about how the forehand, backhand or serve look when they’re completed rather than the whole stroke. Bottom line: I think it works, at least for me!