The Plateau Effect

Of course, that’s not at all what’s happened. Your nose has simply gotten tired of the garlic scent and stopped telling your brain that it’s there. You might say you’ve grown numb to the garlic, but the word numb hardly does justice to the amazing evolutionary trait we’ve just described.

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The Plateau Effect will show how athletes, scientists, relationship therapists, companies, and musicians around the world are learning to do just that—to turn off the forces that cause people to “peak out” or “get used to” things—and turn on human potential and happiness in ways you

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The Plateau Effect will show you why the world is full of one-hit wonders, why all good things come to an end, why all trends eventually fall, why most people get less for more, and how you can break through again and again. Plateaus are like governors that cap your U-Haul van speed at fifty miles per hour. We will show you how to disable this secret governor and turn on your inner Maserati.

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“Just try harder. Just work harder. Just do more.”

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That’s the advice you’ve heard again and again, from teachers, coaches, bosses, and parents. But what if you’re already trying as hard as you can? In fact, “try harder” is often the worst advice you could possibly give.

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Trying harder is a failed, frustrating strategy.

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Dieters and bodybuilders know this well. They begin a new regimen of starvation or weightlifting. For ten days or so, the results are fantastic, even inspiring. Down four pounds, or up another ten on the military press. But somewhere near that two-week mark, they hit a wall. The scale seems frozen in place. The strength gains top out. They have, cruelly, plateaued.

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To escape the plateau, they developed extreme methods to reset and restart their faith, like the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, created by the founder of the Jesuit order in the 1500s, which must be practiced in silence for a month.

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malady. Doing more work doesn’t work. You can put the BlackBerry down now and relax a little. You already look more graceful.

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exercises on a universal gym don’t do nearly as much for you as lifting free weights.

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And that stomach-crunch rolly thing isn’t worth the $9.95 shipping and handling you paid for it. Why? Because all these gadgets work to isolate individual muscle groups. That’s fine if you want one very strong muscle in your life. But if you want to be healthy, you have to play outside. You have to let your body struggle with all the variety,

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surprise, and diversity that nature affords.

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You don’t have to live in a cave to see his point. Isolationism, driven by gadgetry, treadmills, and other modern “conveniences,” hastens the Plateau Effect dramatically. Now more than ever, it’s essential to understand why.

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This is why so many things you do seem exciting at first, but within a few weeks, the thrill is gone. It’s also why most exercise and diet plans fail at around the two-week mark.

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The time it takes to “get used to” things can vary, but it always follows the same familiar pattern—a response curve that accelerates quickly at the beginning and slowly begins to level off. If you plotted this curve, it would look a lot like a graph you saw about a thousand times in high school math. No one ever mentioned that this simple curve is actually the key to growth in just about

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We don’t want to spoil the surprise, but for now we’ll just say the mere possibility that you’ll receive a phone call while reading this passage means you will probably understand about 20 percent less of this chapter.

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Many of us are elephants. We’ve defined our lives by the circles we move in, using years-old experiences as absolute parameters for what we can and can’t do. To outsiders, we might look as foolish as a huge elephant restricted by a tiny chain. This is the cause of most plateaus. This book will help you pull in a new direction, and whatever place you are in, we hope to make your world bigger.

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The concept of tolerance spreads far across the drug world.

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People in pain often receive morphine in the hospital—and after time, they need more and more of it to have the same pain-killing effect.

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A patient who requires blood thinners might need to take what would be a fatal dose to achieve the required benefit. Take too much of a blood thinner, and your brain will bleed. So instead of overdosing the patient, doctors slowly ramp up the dosage over a month or two. The same dose that could kill a patient with a side effect on October 1 could be tolerated by a patient on December 1, now in an amount that provides the necessary medicinal benefit.

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They often attack the problem with diversity.

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The next time—hopefully far in the future—you check in for surgery, the hospital won’t simply give you morphine. You’ll get a complex cocktail of seven or eight different drugs, all with slightly different benefits and side effects. It’s called “multimodal therapy.”

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any drug, even a multimodal cocktail of cancer-fighting chemotherapy drugs, loses its effectiveness over time. That’s one reason why doctors tell patients to take what’s called a “drug holiday,” to give the patient’s body a chance to reset, to give receptors a chance to desaturate, and hopefully to kick-start a drug’s positive effects.

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Things work, until they don’t. Just because you do something that works doesn’t mean doing more of it will work even better. Now, we want to prove that to you mathematically.

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By the time he was finished, the second list of scholars had also been shown five times—but at intervals which were precisely spaced: at twenty-five seconds, then two minutes, then ten minutes, then an hour. It’s a formula that has been understood for decades—derived based on meticulous experimentation—but locked away in the annals of science.

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Every problem has its kryptonite, and for memory, that kryptonite is bad timing. With memorization, as with many things in life, doing the same thing over and over only takes you so far.

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His discovery that we reach a memory plateau, and his research into how to avoid it, led to a method of learning that has helped accelerate retention and is the basis of the world’s most effective learning techniques.

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five seconds, the next after twenty-five seconds, the third after two minutes, the next at ten minutes, then one hour, five hours, one day, five days, twenty-five days, four months, two years, and that’s it, the information is locked in permanently. Don’t believe it? We’ll sneak in a drill shortly that will convince you.

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But Randolph didn’t wait. Instead, he took one step backward in order to make a giant leap forward.

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How did he do it? By quite literally learning to take his first step all over again.

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“We were re-coaching his first step, over and over,” Riley told Ian O’Connor, author of a book about Jeter. “I think he hated doing these drills at first, because it’s almost like reeducating a little kid. An accomplished athlete is like, ‘I don’t want to do this because it makes me look stupid.’ And then suddenly, Derek was killing those drills.”

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unconscious incompetence; conscious incompetence; conscious competence; and finally, the victory, unconscious competence.

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To explain: Jeter was taking his first step incorrectly but didn’t know it (Step 1: unconscious incompetence). When Riley pointed it out, Jeter knew the technique was wrong but had big trouble breaking his bad habit (Step 2: conscious incompetence). With great practice and much conscious focus, he rewired his neuromuscular communication to the point that he started to make the correct movements—but only as long as he concentrated very hard (Step 3: conscious competence). And finally, the new movements were burned into memory

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and could be done automatically (Step 4: unconscious competence).

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“This is the goal of all movements,” Riley told us. “To perform the movements effectively, efficiently, allowing for better recruitment, better synchronization, and less energy expenditure.”

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Dancers who count one … two … three, one … two … three look silly. So do shortstops who think about their steps while chasing hard grounders up the middle.

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But with enough practice, the right way becomes the automatic way, and real change occurs.

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And another: “If your lifeguard duties were as good as your singing, a lot of people would be drowning.”

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To put it another way, systems becomes

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You need to be able to ignore shiny new objects and focus on a task to ever complete anything of substance.

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University of Pennsylvania, and an expert on the quality of stick-to-itiveness,

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By expanding your gratification horizon, you can push through times where the incremental benefit is small.

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you’re able to think about things in much bigger chunks, you can make good long-term choices and investments of your effort and time.”

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Looking at a monumental task in its entirety can be daunting. Duckworth believes that gritty people naturally break down a large task into a series of milestones and that allows them to push through.

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“My research team breaks down a task into little steps so that we can get that little dopamine hit of checking off a box. ‘Write the first section of the methodology section.’ Check. ‘Organize files.’ Check,” Duckworth told us. Perhaps it is the ability to graft incremental progress onto a task where incremental progress is difficult to measure that is the

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true skill of gritty people. If you see yourself as taking little steps forward, the perceived benefit stays high, even though the end goal may still be far off in the future. “It’s really a strategy to keep the perceived benefits high without saying, ‘Well, the only box to check off here is to complete the entire manuscript.’ There probably is a little bit of gamesmanship that goes on within yourself.”

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Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson calls this “deliberate practice.” Ericsson believes that in any area of human endeavor we need ten years of focused attention to achieve true proficiency, after which we plateau.

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The idea of deliberate practice is that you problematize whatever you’re doing.

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The only thing that is going to get someone who is proficient off their plateau is to isolate some small component that needs improvement and concentrate there.

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“Our current thinking is actually quite mathematical,” Eichstaedt said. He believes that human achievement is the function of a set of variables that psychologists can then get their heads around. Such a model might help explain the results of researchers like Mischel, Ericsson, and Duckworth on how we reach accomplishments.

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a heavy dependence on “time on task”—meaning that if a person is able to marshal all their skills of concentration and focus, they can control the most dominant factor in their own success: time spent working on a task.

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Most people are happy to be a mediocre-plus keyboard player or typist. According to Eichstaedt, at some point many people prefer to focus on turning the skill that they’ve acquired into accomplishment instead of focusing on turning their talent into additional skill.

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In the beginning, when you pick something new up, it’s actually quite rewarding because you can see your talent potential being actualized into skill. You pick up the elementary aspects pretty quickly and fluently. Then the rate of skill acquisition diminishes.

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book. To get past that plateau you need to problematize your practice, focusing on the difficult to attain skills, like stretching your pinky finger over to hit the plus sign on a keyboard instead of typing the letters A S D F over and over again.

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Psychologists call this positive future-mindedness. Others might call it faith. It’s the belief that you can attain some future outcome without direct evidence.

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think the biggest barriers to doing great things are not cataclysmic events that require heroic action. It’s more important to focus on incremental effort and results than the heroic acts that typically get the lion’s share of the attention,” Duckworth told us.

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Spaced repetition is the antidote to learning plateaus.

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You must repeat the fact to yourself at that very moment when it is about to be forgotten, right as the librarian in your head is about to hop on the elevator to the basement of your brain and deposit the knowledge there.

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salt. Adults who suffer from cold hands and cold feet often suffer from poor circulation; slower breathing can improve this condition by improving the blood’s ability to carry oxygen. Other research shows dramatic improvement among asthma sufferers from slower breathing.

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We call those stumbling blocks, the things that go wrong when you increase capacity, flow issues.

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because airlines, government agencies, and even consumers often measure and count the wrong things.

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We’re going to call this malady “bad metrics,” the first distortion technique you’ll find in the circus of bad data that most of us live in every day.

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Most of us do something exactly that silly every day. What’s worse than having no data at all? Having bad data.

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sets out the ways that our perceptive abilities let us down.

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What follows are the most pernicious causes for these false truths—counting the wrong things, risk miscalculation, opportunity cost, magical thinking, measurables and unmeasurables, data idolatry, overweighing Grandma, bad norms,

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Often, the way you measure improvement is too narrow.

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Maybe you’re building muscle. Maybe you’re starting to chip away at your cholesterol. Maybe you’re a little stronger than you used to be. But if all you care about is the bathroom scale, you are bound to fail, even if you are succeeding.

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How do you effectively measure progress toward those goals?

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The “splits” we use to mark progress at the quarter pole, halfway point, and so on might be even more important than the goals themselves. Why? Goals are lofty and esoteric. We live with splits—how many calories did I consume today?—every day.

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By measuring things and listening to what the measurements tell you. You’ve got to move the decision out of the part of your brain that made you decide whether you should or shouldn’t jump off that high wall outside your elementary school when you were eight years

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Simple idea, hard concept to internalize. No

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one really picks one mate as compared to hundreds of millions of others. Humans are incapable of contemplating a gazillion potential future outcomes—too many options and the regret that might follow could create a condition called “cognitive dissonance,” an unnerving feeling that we avoid at

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So we tend to burrow ourselves into a mental tunnel and self-limit our choices. But even then, we struggle mightily.

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Only the most optimistic among us can leave a job, a school, or a friendship feeling confident that the loss means the future holds far better things.

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Yet that is indeed nearly always true.

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You can measure that simply by counting the number of times someone around you says something like “Thank goodness she broke up with me” or “What a blessing in disguise that I was laid off.”

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“I’ve been in this job for twenty years—that has to count for something!” Unless it helps grow your pension, it counts for nothing.

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“It is identifying those who want to be fooled,” he says.

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Everyone wants to believe in magic. Magic tricks got us through those first few traumatic years—first trip to the dentist, first airline flight, first sore throat. Magic made presents appear under the Christmas tree. So, yes, we want to believe. We want to believe that when we give $5,000 to a Man in a White Shirt, he can turn it into $20,000, tax-free. We want to believe that drinking this tea will cure us of cancer, or filling out that spreadsheet will get us noticed and win us a promotion.

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The problem with magical thinking is that—lo and behold—it’s sometimes right. Once in a while, a $5,000 investment really does pan out. For magical thinkers, that’s enough to send them into years of futility. You’ve heard them. “But John

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A classic magical thinker is always late for meetings, movies, and dates—not because he is disrespectful but because he’s overly optimistic.

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Magical thinking is big trouble. It leads people to sign bad mortgages or marry the wrong person, and it tricks companies into spending years headed in the wrong direction.

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Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and a host of other best sellers, has made an entire career out of telling general managers and American CEOs precisely what data matters … and perhaps, more to the point, how to find hidden value by using unusual data to outsmart competitors.

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The human body will go to great lengths to remain stable and resist change; the medical community calls that phenomenon homeostasis.

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For example, if you’re overweight, the path to a better life is exercise, but the body tries to resist—you are moving in opposition to homeostasis.

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It also prevents us from achieving our best. Conformity has a big impact on our lives—personally and professionally.

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Groupthink limits the exploration of ideas. The group becomes insular, closed, and resistant to viable new ideas.

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What happens next? The rat jealously scoops up the crumb, devours it with satisfaction, and then starts banging his head into the wall, expecting more food. You try explaining, cajoling, begging, even picking the rat up and putting him at the end of the maze, where more food awaits. No matter. He learned quickly that banging walls equals food, and he’s

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going to keep on trying that, again and again. This is the torture called accidental reinforcement.

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Unlearning something is a heck of a lot harder than learning something. That’s why accidental reinforcement is learning’s dark side.

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Gambling pit bosses have known this trick for years. Let the novice win a hand of blackjack early on, and he will lose another ten hands before giving up, doubling or tripling his losses in the meantime.

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Countless thousands had to die before we unlearned that strategy.

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Sometimes, getting an early taste of success can be your worst enemy.

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Plenty of studies make this technology-addiction connection, but here’s a disturbing one: The Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London published a study on infomania that found checking your e-mail while performing another creative task decreases your IQ in the moment ten

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points. That’s the equivalent of not sleeping for thirty-six hours—or double the impact of smoking marijuana.

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Technology is making us dumb and reckless.

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Instead, he calls it “rapid toggling” between tasks.

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Rapid toggling is very expensive.

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showed today’s office worker gets only eleven continuous minutes on a project before interruption.

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But much worse than that, it takes twenty-five minutes for them to return to the original project after interruption!

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Distraction and interruption are the enemy of focus and concentration, and they attack with the force of addictive drugs, billions of dollars in new technology, biological rewiring of your brain, and seemingly inexhaustible resources—your cell phone can always be recharged,

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even when you can’t. It’s no secret that distraction is the enemy of every successful venture.

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When people do two or three things at once, all but one task must involve a level of proficiency so advanced that it can be done

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thoughtlessly, as if on autopilot. As all parents (and teachers) know, this is a life-or-death skill.

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Because in truth, you can really only focus on one thing at a time, despite the false god of “efficiency” that is promised by gadget marketers.

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The truth is, the older people get, the more their listening comprehension sinks.

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Making matters worse, studies show that people wildly overestimate how good they are at listening. Now, do I have your attention?

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By now, we hope you see the problem. Your brain is hungry for information, like a golden retriever puppy is hungry to chase a tennis ball.

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Important information, however, rarely comes as fast as your

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Just try being the one person in your office who stands up and says, “Let’s think about this for a day.” In fact, at most companies, try being the one person who walks into the boss’s office and says, “We need to talk. I think we are really

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riding off the rails on this one.” Odds are high that you’ll have trouble getting to the word riding before your boss looks down to check his e-mail.

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To borrow a phrase, when you’re going in the wrong direction, you should at least take your foot off the gas pedal. Listening is one way to do that.

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What do most firms, and families, do in this situation? They hire an outside expert. Now, if you get a consultant drunk and

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ask him for the truth, he’ll tell you this: Most of the time, consultants are merely tiebreakers. One part of the company isn’t listening to the other, so a third party is brought in to confirm one side’s point of view. For some strange reason, people are often far more willing to listen to random strangers than close friends.

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If you try to improve your listening skills, you’ll notice a lot of discussion about “listening with intent.”

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That’s right: Before you offer an explanation or defense, just imagine that whatever the other person is saying must be true. That’s radical. But it sure is the fastest way to get new

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“Attention is the most valuable commodity on Earth,” said Weiser,

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“You don’t want personal technology; you want personal relationships,” Weiser said.

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Failing slowly is natural because it’s difficult to tell

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that a situation is incrementally getting worse. If you toss a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately jump out. But if you put it in the pot a few minutes earlier, while the water is still cool, it’ll ride it out as the temperature climbs. As things get just a little warmer with each passing moment, it never notices when it crosses a dangerous threshold—and neither do we.

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type of incremental failure and why we have such a hard time noticing it.

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The answer sits at the intersection of psychology and physics in a concept known as the just-noticeable difference, or the JND.

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Agility, it turns out, was the key to avoiding monumental, slow, and expensive failures.

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Projects could be recalibrated and refocused before they went too far down the wrong path.

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The process results in a large set of fast, small failures instead of one giant, monumental, and slow failure.

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Instead of investing big in a few slow but promising projects, he stress-tests ideas, and if they fail, the cost is minimal.

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This ability to fail quickly is key, especially when the problems are changing quickly.

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“If You Don’t Like the Game, Hack the Playbook,” where he outlined his radical approach to

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“The key to a good strategy is to have multiple options.”

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study failure. In fact, among his accomplishments there was the creation of a “Law of Failure,” which simply says: “Most new ideas fail even if they are well executed.”

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Statistics back him up. On average four out of five start-ups fail.

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Most new restaurants fail in their first few years of operation.

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they plateau. Some of it can be chalked up to bad execution: Even a great idea can’t survive poor implementation. But precise execution can’t protect against a fatal flaw: A good idea might not be a good business. Savoia puts it a slightly different way: “Make sure you are building the right ‘it’ before you build ‘it’ right.”

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The real disasters are slow failures—where you continue to put more time, more money, and more energy into something that just won’t work.

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The quickest way to the top, to the peak, is often to reach the bottom first. The faster you fail, the faster you can move on to something that will work. Savoia might have a way to make this happen.

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While a test website might take weeks to build, a pretotype can be drawn in Photoshop within a few minutes. With pretotyping, you never have to say, “Sorry, it’s not worth experimenting with that idea,” because there are hardly any barriers to entry.

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The discipline of innovation demands failure. It’s as fundamental to innovation as spreadsheets are to accounting. Failure is inevitable. The question isn’t “How do I turn this idea into reality?”; it’s “How can I find out if my idea is a bad one without committing too much time, money, and resources to

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it? How can I avoid working my way up to an expensive plateau?”

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Hawkins had learned a huge lesson from the Zoomer—adapt, and don’t fail slowly.

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“My mission is to help people find the right ‘it.’

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I’m also going to expand ‘it’ in the future to personal lives: finding the right job, making sure you get the right major, and all of those things because the lessons are all very similar.”

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The willingness to try when failure is likely is a distinct character trait.

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People with a growth mind-set see success as an outcome of their efforts, not an inherent quality of who they are.

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When they study, they have yardsticks of comprehension; they validate their learning against other sources.”

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“Daily. It means you promise this paper will be there every morning at six A.M. when people wake up. Daily. That’s the biggest and first promise you make to readers. That’s the one thing you can’t compromise. And if any of these other things get in the way of that,”

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“And, yes, that means some nights—in fact, many nights—you will knowingly send the paper out the door with mistakes. You want to minimize them. You want them to be small mistakes. But there will come a time—many times—when you will have to pick between ‘daily’ and ‘perfect,’ and every time, you must pick ‘daily.’”

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Then, he made his final point. “And so your job as a journalist is this: You are not supposed to put out the best paper you can put out. You are supposed to put out the best paper you can in the time you have. There’s a big difference.”

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To put a positive spin on it, some therapists talk about finding your “growth edge” and constantly pushing your boundaries.

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Fitts and Posner call “augmented feedback.”

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They are blind to their blind spots. They refuse focused practice.

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Perfectionists focus on one point in time: the end. Graduation. Wedding Day.

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Well-timed practices that are consciously spaced out bring much better results.

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Sprinkling a bit of diversity into practice accelerates success even more.

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The best way to finally conquer that complicated section of music is to learn some new pieces, and learn some new skills, which in turn can be transferred to the troublesome piece.

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Today, there is no such balancing force. For most of us, there is no direct relationship between being hungry and going to work. In fact, there isn’t even a direct relationship

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rest tend to stay at rest. Getting up always involves at least a small kick in the butt.

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This same effect occurs in both our bodies and our minds, new brain studies show. In fact, intense mathematical computations can actually be more exhausting for the body than physical labor, and require more recovery time.

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Stanford philosophy professor John Perry is a confessed procrastinator. In fact, he might be considered world-class. His website even contains a picture of him exercising at the beach, with the caption: “Author practices jumping rope

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It’s essential for anyone who plans to take on the battle of distraction to know this: The temptations never go away. Not after the six books and thousands of articles both of us have written. Not after your twenty-sixth piano concerto. Not after the first billion.

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Understanding the powerful inescapable forces arrayed against you—together with good habits, a good approach, and loving support—can make paying attention, remaining agile, and applying yourself easier.

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The final, most direct cause of a plateau is failing to decide to do anything at all.

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Elastic band decisions are the antidote to plateaus.

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You make one move until it no longer seems effective, then you take the opposite move.

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Elastic band decisions recognize that life is a series of plateaus, and that one technique might work for a while, but then stop working.

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People are reluctant to “sleep on it,” even though studies show sleeping on choices is remarkably effective.

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