Talent Tip #13: Find the Sweet Spot

Talent tip number 13. Find the sweet spot. There is a place right on the edge of your ability where you learn best and fastest. It's called the sweet spot. Here's how to find it. The comfort zone feels like ease, effortlessness, you're working, but you're not reaching or struggling, and your percentage of successful attempts is 80 percent and above.

So that might be an easy math worksheet, or A drill and practice that at least four, four times out of five, you get right. That's called the comfort zone. Here's the sweet spot. It feels like frustration, difficulty, alertness to errors. You are fully engaged in an intense struggle as if you're stretching with all your might for a nearly unreachable goal, brushing it with your fingertips and then reaching again.

Your percentage of successful attempts in the sweet spot. is 50 to 80 percent, but there's a place beyond the sweet spot and beyond the sweet, uh, the comfort zone. It's called the survival zone. Sensations in the survival zone are confusion, desperation. You are overmatched, scrambling, thrashing, and guessing.

That's a math test you didn't study for and skipped class all week. You guess right sometimes, but it's mostly luck. And your percentage of successful attempts is below 50%. That's the survival zone. So think of it like a gauge. Comfort zone. Easy. Sweet spot. Frustrating. 50 to 80 percent correct. Challenging.

But past that's like the red zone. I'm just trying to survive. To understand the importance of the sweet spot, consider Clarissa, a freckle faced 13 year old clarinet player, who was part of a study by two Australian music psychologists. Yes. There's an interesting job for you. Music psychologist. You study how people learn music.

Clarissa was an average musician in every sense of the word. She had average ability, average practice habits, average motivation. But one morning, a remarkable thing happened. Clarissa accomplished a month's worth of practice in five minutes. Your brain has to be going, how is it possible to get a month's worth of practice done in five minutes?

Here's what it looked like. Clarissa played a few notes. Then she made a mistake and immediately froze, as if the clarinet became electrified. She peered closely at the sheet music, reading the notes. She hummed the notes to herself. She fingered the keys in a fast, silent rehearsal. Then she started again, got a bit further, made another mistake, stopped, went back to the start.

In this fashion, working instinctively, she learned the song. The music psychologist calculated that Clarissa learned more in a span of five minutes than she would have learned in an entire month practicing her normal way, in which she played songs straight through, ignoring any mistakes. Why? Picture the wires of Clarissa's brain during those five minutes.

Each time she made a mistake, she was, one, sensing it. She knew she messed up. Two, she was fixing it right away, welding the right connections in her brain. Each time she repeated the passage, she was strengthening those connections and linking them together. She was not just practicing, she was building her brain.

She was in the sweet spot. Locating your sweet spot requires some creativity. For instance, some golfers work on their swings like this. This slows them down so they can sense and fix the mistakes in their swing. Some musicians play songs backwards, which helps them better sense the relationship between notes.

If you think you know the alphabet, try saying it backwards. You only know it one way. These are different methods, but the underlying pattern is the same. Seek out ways to stretch yourself. Play on the edges of your competence. As Albert Einstein said, One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one's greatest efforts.

The word that's important there is barely. Ask yourself, if you tried your absolute hardest, what could you almost do? Mark the boundary of your current ability and aim a little bit beyond that. That is your sweet spot. Talent tip number 13, find the sweet spot. Now, how does this apply to you as a student?

I want you to think of how much time you've spent in school from kindergarten until wherever you are right now. You've done a lot of math worksheets, written a lot of essays, listened to teachers talk. What percent of your time in school have you spent in the sweet spot? 50 to 80 percent of the time you got the problem right, you were frustrated, you were challenged, you were keenly attuned to errors.

If you are like most students, you have spent very little time in the sweet spot. You are mostly in one of the other two zones, and a lot of you, it's the comfort zone. This is easy. Here's a worksheet. First one done. Boom. Are you actually learning? No. You're just filling time. You could do 2 plus 2 all day.

You didn't get better at math. But look at all the math worksheets that I did. That's not your sweet spot. If you get every question right, that was a waste of your time. You shouldn't get more than 4 out of 5 right. Or, it's too easy, you're in the comfort zone. The other side of that is I skip math class all week, I show up and have a test.

You're in the danger zone. You have no idea what you're doing. You don't even know how to start to solve the problem. That is just system overload and I shut down. So, try to spend more time in the sweet spot and less time in the comfort zone and the danger zone and you'll get more out of school.

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