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Boundless game mastery7/22/2023 ![]() When I started realizing I was making the mistakes, it was easy to fix them in the flow of deeper work because no one had labeled it as bad in the first place. They get figured out through iteration and self-awareness. It turns out that if you are aiming high, you really don’t have time for small mistakes like spelling errors and formatting. But here I was at McKinsey, where the expectations were much, much higher than any place I had been before. Up to that point in my life every authority figure and institution was organized around the idea that the goal of life is to do perfect work and to avoid mistakes. The path to real improvement is only through trusting our self 2, the doer, and allowing ourselves to become more aware.Īt McKinsey I remember being surprised when a manager ignored several minor mistakes I made on a document in my first year. We are convinced that better knowledge will fix our challenges but by searching for fixes we imply problems and Gallwey suggests that we simply discard the idea that there are problems to be fixed at all. And as a pretty shitty bowler, I can’t say I had any sort of knowledge of how it was happening. I was “in the zone” as they say in sports. When I bowled those six strikes in a row, I remember feeling absolutely locked in. We then tighten, make changes, and never give ourselves the opportunity to be present enough to notice that our natural instincts and intuition (self 2) might provide a better way forward. When we label a stroke as “bad” we are stuck in that frame of mind. The first step is simply to “see your strokes as they are.” In Gallwey’s telling there are no good or bad strokes. From this pattern, one basic message came across loud, clear, and often: you are a good person and worthy of respect only if you do things successfully.Īt least in tennis, he offers a way out. Even before we received praise or blamed for our first report card, we were loved or ignored for how well we performed out very first actions. …we live in an achievement-oriented society where people tend to be measured by their competence in various endeavors. Which is really hard because most of us are brought up in cultures that tell us that life is pretty much all about avoiding bad outcomes, aiming at “good” goals, and trying harder when we fail. We have to find ways to loosen the grip that self 1 has over our actions. The problem is that you can’t just “do” doing. Throughout the book the message is quite clear: we spend far too much time in self 1 mode and struggle to let go enough to shift into self 2 mode. It is the relationship between these two selves that determines how well people are able to translate “knowledge into effective action.” This is what he calls the “inner game.” He argues that everyone has two selves: self 1, the “teller,” and self 2 the “doer. Timothy Gallwey shares his approach for thinking about improvement through the lens of tennis. I haven’t bowled much at all since then and have not pursued professional bowling but was reminded of it while reading the Inner Game of Tennis this week. I ended up with a 200, the best score of my life. I deployed this trick at the bowling alley and asked myself “can you bowl a strike?” It worked six straight times and then failed the seventh. All you had to do is ask yourself an open-ended question like “can you do X?” before you did X. It was from the Dan Pink book “To Sell Is Human” and somewhere in the book it had this positive psychology hack that would help you improve how you performed on a specific task. I once bowled six strikes in a row and it’s probably the coolest thing I’ve ever “implemented” from a book.
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