This section reveals the third element of the dark horse mentality-knowing your own action strategy.
In the dark horse mentality, action strategy is the way to improve things. Whether you want to learn how to play curve ball, increase sales, or become a more influential leader, you need to formulate some kind of action strategy. Finding the right action strategy is a key step towards Excellence.
"Know your own action strategy" is to let you find the correct learning method, training system or education system under the guidance of your own advantages, rather than passively following the formal methods of authoritative departments. "Knowing your own action strategy" doesn't require you to come up with some unique behaviors that even subvert the whole rules of the game. The creativity of the dark horse character is actually similar to that of others. You don't need a magical instinct to focus on the action strategy that suits you best. Dark horse characters are not more intuitive than others in choosing action strategies, but there are obvious differences between people with dark horse mentality and those with standardized mentality in how to look at action strategies. "Know your own action strategy" requires you to interpret the essence of advantages from a new perspective.
Ppk: What angle? overlook
Advantage and motivation are two completely different things.
A standardized contract doesn't care about your personal motives, but it does want to know your personal advantages. Organizations are constantly using a series of standardized tests, scores and face-to-face competition to evaluate your so-called advantages. The school claims that you are better at analysis and reasoning than the average person, or your viola playing level is below average, or your vocabulary ranks high in your age group. This kind of evaluation seems wise and scientific, but it all represents some mathematically invalid evaluations made by standardized practices for your own benefit, and usually has nothing to do with your current ability and future potential.
Micro-motivation is part of your core identity, so it is not only powerful, but also difficult to change. Our brains can naturally perceive and experience our motives directly. In fact, various desires often unconsciously sneak into our consciousness. Even if we can't accurately describe a specific desire, expectation or desire in our hearts, we can always perceive the subtle differences of our own micro-motives through introspection. Because when we are careful about our desire, we can feel the existence of this idea. However, unlike the motivation of lighthouse stability, the advantages are subtle and dynamic, and vary from place to place.
In other words, the so-called advantage is actually a vague concept. It is no mystery that the human brain cannot directly feel the advantages it has. What we call personal advantage is almost an artificial concept imposed on you by the outside world, rather than a natural flow from the heart. Writing doggerel, writing online applications and performing ballet are all cultural performances, but these abilities do not exist in your heart, but are gradually formed through your continuous efforts. On the contrary, micro-motivation manifests itself as some persistent psychological entities directly connected with your brain, which can always play a role in any environment. Unlike micro-motivation, we can't observe our own advantages through introspection, because all your advantages don't actually exist in you.
Did you know that you are naturally good at finding truffles in the forest? Can you sing with your mouth closed? Are you good at classifying thimbles of different sizes? Can you handle a poisonous snake? Can you eat all the fruit candy quickly? Can you keep grasshoppers? Can you blow the bubbles out of your eyes? Can you balance the paper clips on your nose? Can you know exactly the past minute? If you immerse your hand in two different liquids, can you accurately estimate the temperature difference between them? Unless you have tried these tasks or done something similar before, it is difficult to predict whether you have this talent. Practice is the only way to test ability. You know your strengths not through introspection, but through practice.
Advantages are also related to the environment. Any quality of everyone can be ability or obstacle, depending on the specific situation. Compassion is a positive advantage for nurses, but a disadvantage for pilots who operate military drones. For an NBA player, being tall is an advantage, but for a coal miner, it is a disadvantage.
Although a certain quality in you seems to be an advantage today, there is no guarantee that it will become a disadvantage tomorrow. This is because advantage is a dynamic concept, which has strong plasticity and conforms to the evolutionary law of use and abandonment. Although the micro-opportunities you have change with time, although the process is usually slow, they are rarely changed because they are used. Bold action may be due to people's new micro-motives, or they may realize their existing motives from different aspects, but it is unlikely to change the motives that once prompted you to make such a choice. On the contrary, the key to choosing an action strategy is to improve one's existing skills or knowledge, that is, to change one's advantages. Because advantages and motives are completely different things, you should take a completely different method from choosing opportunities when choosing action strategies.
Ppk: To sum up briefly, advantages are closely related to practice and environment.
If you are clear about your micro-motivation, you will be confident when choosing opportunities, because you are sure that your motivation will fit a particular opportunity. But because your advantages are vague, it is more difficult to determine your behavior strategy on this basis.
Standardization convention requires us to adhere to a "best way". If this doesn't work for you, then you just need to show more enterprising spirit, face difficulties and continue to work hard. If you have never mastered this "best way", it's time to face reality-you just don't have the ability and quality it needs. In standardized thinking, choosing an action strategy is actually a question of whether you can "stick to it"; However, under the dark horse mentality, choosing an action strategy is a "trial and error" process.
In fact, the process of "knowing your own action strategy" will be the first complete failure you may encounter with the dark horse mentality. Please keep a positive attitude towards this. Experiencing failure is an important part of forging the dark horse mentality, and it may still constitute a key milestone for us to achieve Excellence. Failure is the only way to help you find a fuzzy advantage. Every action strategy you choose is to experiment on yourself: is this method suitable for me? Can it help me make progress? If so, what are my advantages? If not, what lessons can I learn from this failure, which can be used as a reference for my next action? Ppk: This series of self-questions is very important! Think from multiple angles!
"Knowing your own action strategy" is a highly iterative dynamic process of self-discovery and self-improvement. Even if you find a suitable action strategy, it doesn't mean that your life is coming to an end. This action strategy will help you become better, and it will change your existing advantages; On the contrary, on this basis, you may adopt some new action strategies to try to make better use of your changed advantages, which can further make your advantage matrix change dynamically ... This process continues.
Ppk: The author spent a lot of time here to introduce the story of a hero Raman who grew up from a young blind child to a senior research scientist at Google. Let me briefly summarize:
Raman's own micro motivation is: solving difficult problems, exploring structure and enjoying competition.
At school, his interest in solving difficult problems and exploring structures attracted him to study mathematics and achieved good results.
When Raman 13 years old, the elevated intraocular pressure in the right eye led to retinal detachment and complete blindness.
The way for most blind people to graduate from blind schools is to become a telephone operator. Raman doesn't want this. Raman realized that it is best to come up with a set of learning strategies by himself, as Raman said, "find another way." He first heard about the Rubik's Cube in the 1980s, when he noticed that everyone around him was trying to solve an interesting new problem, but they all ended in failure. Most people can't recover the fact of the Rubik's Cube, which activated Raman's micro-motivation to like competition, and the Rubik's Cube also activated his micro-motivation to solve problems and explore structures, so he bought a Rubik's Cube. In the process of studying the Rubik's Cube, he realized that he needed to feel the squares of different colors on the Rubik's Cube in order to make greater progress. His brother put five different kinds of Braille on five colored squares, leaving only the white square smooth.
He began to study micro-algorithm, and solved the specific Rubik's cube pattern by processing the number string corresponding to the pattern he felt with his fingers in his mind. Although it is extremely difficult for most people to remember all these different patterns and their relationships without the help of visualization technology, Raman is good at dealing with complex structures. He can remember digital patterns and has a keen sense of touch, which are his unique advantages, and are very suitable for him to formulate a set of action strategies to restore the Rubik's cube by relying on touch.
After several weeks of trial and error, Raman invented a set of operation methods, which can solve all possible layout problems of the Rubik's Cube. It was an exciting moment, but Raman's sense of competition did not stop him. Raman said: "After that, I tried to speed up. I expanded a set of shortcuts so that I could move several squares into place at the same time. Now I can really use it. I can see all sides of the Rubik's cube at the same time. I think this is one of my great advantages. Finally, I was able to restore the Rubik's Cube in 24 seconds, which is faster than anyone I know who plays the Rubik's Cube. "
At school, most of the early challenges that Raman needs to deal with involve how to attend classes with children with normal vision without being left behind. For example, one of the first problems he needs to solve is how to take notes quickly in the lecture. Although Raman soon taught himself Braille, writing with raised dot symbols requires punching holes in the paper, which is a clumsy and time-consuming process. Raman couldn't keep up with the speed of taking notes in Braille, so he invented his own shorthand.
In math class, he faces another communication problem. He needs a mathematical symbol system, so that he can effectively express and read complex equations composed of subscripts, superscripts, mathematical symbols and Greek letters. He expanded the concept of Braille shorthand and designed a new mathematical symbol system for the blind. "
When he was admitted to university, Raman wanted to go to the best science and engineering school in China, namely Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), because in India, it was equivalent to Massachusetts Institute of Technology or California Institute of Technology in the United States. The entrance examination of Indian Institute of Technology consists of two parts: the first part is multiple-choice question, and Raman estimates that he can cope with the existing strategies; The second part is the real challenge for him-the written test that needs him to solve the problem comprehensively.
Raman said: "The written test requires me to learn a new spirit of self-discipline. I'm used to finding answers directly, so I can usually work out the final answer quickly, but I must ensure that every step is completed in an orderly way and write it down before I can move on to the next step. This is a different way to answer questions, but I am very motivated because I know that if I can pass the exam smoothly, I have a good chance to enter the Indian Institute of Technology. " He did successfully pass the entrance examination. Raman was admitted to the university and did well in all subjects, becoming the first blind person to graduate from Indian Institute of Technology. After graduation, he first worked in a digital company, and later went to Adobe and IBM. Today, Raman is a senior research scientist at Google.
Raman didn't succeed because of his extraordinary and outstanding mathematical talent. He succeeded because he chose the development opportunities suitable for his micro-motivation and the action strategies suitable for his own advantages.
In a standardized profession, you have no choice but to adopt systematic learning strategies. For example, if you want to be a doctor, you must go to medical school first and pass every required course. However, in occupations without standardized training paths, we rarely have the opportunity to examine how the action strategies chosen by individuals make people thrive in the wild, because professionals with ideals and ambitions can solve problems by themselves without institutional intervention. During the investigation, we made some unusual discoveries. When a profession no longer imposes a "best way" to surpass others, everyone will become a dark horse.
A sommelier (actually a sommelier) is a typical example. In the whole hotel industry, sommelier is the most difficult title to obtain. It is an honorary certificate issued by the world sommeliers association, and sommeliers with this title will have great glory. There are only 157 sommeliers in the whole western hemisphere, less than those who won the Nobel Prize in physics, less than those who graduated from neurosurgery in the United States in one year, and less than those who have been to outer space.
Although to become a sommelier, you must finally do a specific thing, that is, pass the sommelier's certification exam. Before that, it is entirely up to you to choose how to cultivate enough professional skills.
The master's examination for sommeliers is called "competency examination", which means to evaluate the specific skills that sommeliers must use in their work, and it is conducted under exactly the same real-life situation as sommeliers practice. The master sommelier exam is divided into three parts: first, service, including providing services to demanding customers under pressure in a high-end dining environment; Secondly, the theory includes a wide range of practical problems about the geography, science and history of wine and grape cultivation; The third and most famous part is wine tasting, which includes tasting six different wines on the spot, quickly identifying and accurately evaluating their content components. The three parts of the master sommelier exam are all oral, which reflects the actual situation of sommelier's work: when sommelier works, he needs to answer customers' questions at the dinner table, instead of writing the answers in a booklet or checking them on the computer screen.
As you may guess, for most people, the most difficult part of the exam is wine tasting, which is the core competence of wine tasters that distinguishes them from other professions. To become a master sommelier, you need to formulate an effective action strategy and cultivate highly esoteric wine tasting skills: identify fermented grape varieties according to taste and smell.
Ppk: Next, the author lists many methods that sommeliers try to pass the exam. Let me give you a brief list.
1. Bram Callahan (with natural advantages)
When he was a child, he felt that the smell had its own unique personality like the characters in the play. In addition to this powerful natural advantage, Bram lived in an agricultural area since childhood, where he could smell all kinds of smells similar to various wines. He can vividly recall the changes of pear aroma in different scenes: its fruity aroma on the tree, its moist aroma when it was cut on the kitchen chopping board, and its unpleasant smell when it rotted in compost. His coping strategy for preparing for the sommelier's exam is simple: he combines his instinctive sense of smell with the formal deductive tasting method required by the sommelier's exam, because the latter requires candidates to accurately identify many specific qualities of wine, such as dryness and acidity. He almost passed the first tasting, but Bram easily passed the wine tasting exam the next year. You may think that most sommeliers are as gifted as Bram in sense of smell and taste, but Bram is an exception and does not represent the common situation among sommeliers.
2. Emily Pickrel (simple repetition+overall perception)
By "brute force": Taste as much wine as possible until your brain learns to match the taste of wine with its characteristics through simple repetition. Unlike Bram, Emily is not concerned with the individual ingredients of wine, but with its overall recognition. "You are used to smelling something, you are so familiar with it, and you are used to treating it as a whole. You think,' Oh, that's right.' "Emily explained," I put my nose close to the glass and smelled Pinot Noir in California. "I don't think,' Oh, it smells like ripe red cherries, licorice and oak', I just think,' Wow, that's black Pi Nuo in California', or think,' Oh, yes, that's Shiraz from North Rhone, it can't be anything else'!" Emily used what she called "muscle memory" strategy when she took the master sommelier exam, and passed the wine tasting exam at one time.
3. Pascal Lin Le pelletier (combined with his own love)
She has always loved philosophy. While studying for a doctorate in France, she specialized in the metaphysics of Plato and henri bergson. Pascal Lin said: "wine satisfies my curiosity because I like to find out why." There is always a reason why wine has a certain taste. I use philosophical deduction to understand why. This requires knowledge of chemistry, biology, physics, sociology, geology and geography, even including linguistics and my major-metaphysics. Tasting wine is equivalent to the practical application of philosophy in life, so I feel natural in doing this job, which helps me to connect all the above knowledge points in series. " Relying on her "philosophical" strategy, Pascal Lin passed the wine tasting exam at one time.
4. Alice Lambert (adjusting mentality)
Alice looked for subtle signs such as color, taste and smell, which led her to discover the characteristics of wine, such as the taste of muddy chestnuts, peaches or wild blackberries. She pays special attention to the acidity of wine. Before tasting on the spot, she will sip some "calibration wine" to help her adjust her taste response to acidity. Although she worked hard, she failed to pass the master's examination of sommelier five times in a row. Alice found an unconventional action strategy, which made her stand out in the sixth exam. "I watched a video of Amy Cuddy, in which she talked about the importance of body posture and mental attitude. This made me realize that sommeliers can't just want to be sommeliers. On the contrary, in the test center, your mentality is to believe that you are already a master of wine tasting. Before the exam, I put my arms in a winning posture. Since then, I have tried to control my body posture, especially when dealing with demanding or skeptical customers on the spot. " Alice became the world's top sommelier and ranked fifth in the world's best sommelier competition, becoming the first woman to win the best sommelier competition in the United States.
5. Michael Marr (with physiological reaction)
At first, he also relied on "brute force" to prepare for the wine tasting exam, and he failed three times. Later, he added a "visual" action strategy to his training activities. This is another popular strategy of sommeliers. In this strategy, if you try to associate the characteristics of wine with the visual scene, you will instinctively associate a taste. For example, connect your reaction to malbec wine with the sky before the storm, and connect your reaction to Muscat wine with the desert of white sand dunes. After preparing according to this popular strategy, Michael took the wine tasting exam for the fourth time, but he failed again. Michael said, "I realized that using other people's methods didn't work for me." Adding up the training strategies of other sommeliers did not make my grades better, but only made me understand how others passed the exam. Michael said, "We have different tastes, and we have different ways of perceiving and remembering wine. The sommelier's description of wine is very objective, but we find that these descriptions vary from person to person. "Michael began to take his personality seriously for the first time. He began to give up many of the action strategies he used. He still failed in the fifth exam, but he felt that his idea was correct and he was more and more adapted to his true character. At this time, he finally came up with a very suitable action strategy-"physiological" strategy. Michael said: "I began to realize that I was very sensitive to the physiological feeling of wine tasting, so I decided to take advantage of this." "I am concerned about how wine affects my body's reaction. For example, after swallowing wine, the chest feels hot and spicy, or the whole chin feels sour, or the upper jaw can feel mineral particles, or sulfur dioxide makes the eyes feel uncomfortable. " Although he is learning a brand-new training strategy, he has greatly reduced the preparation time from 40 hours a week to 5~ 10 hours. He knows that as long as he finds this brand-new personalized training method, he will no longer need to keep memorizing as before. Michael Marr successfully passed the sixth wine tasting exam.
1. Bram Callahan
Although Bram has supernatural wine tasting ability, he failed in the theoretical part of the first exam and performed poorly. Bram is full of confidence in his academic ability, but this psychology has formed an obstacle for him to pass the exam, which is the opposite of what Michael experienced. Bram said: "I admit that I didn't pay enough attention to the theoretical part, which was attributed to my arrogance at that time." I didn't take the theory seriously at all. " Because I think I am smart, I have an absurd confidence in passing the theoretical exam. "He thought that his failure was due to his abnormal performance, so he didn't change his learning strategy carefully before learning the theory for the second time, and he failed the exam again." This failure made me very upset. "Bram said," it makes me feel ashamed. I have a good memory, even random things can not beat me. But I realized that memory only provides people with a bunch of raw data, and the raw data in a vacuum will not benefit anyone. "Therefore, Bram has a new understanding of himself, which is similar to the situation that prompted Michael to change his learning method. Bram said: "At that time, I studied in the same way as others, but I kept looking at cards, maps and the like. "But then I began to reflect, where is my advantage? My advantage is writing papers. So I decided to write a paper, including everything I need to know. " Bram's new "thesis" strategy includes writing an academic paper for every content that causes him trouble. He forced himself to find and cite three different sources for each paper and write everything into an academic document, just as he might submit it to a professor for examination. This method enables him to create the environment and find the meaning of what he has learned. "The next time I take the theoretical exam, I will pass it as easy as blowing off dust."
2. Each has its own method.
The action strategy of sommeliers learning theory is as different as their action strategy of learning wine tasting. Some sommeliers find it easier to study theory in a group and take turns asking each other, while others prefer to study alone. A sommelier makes a recording while talking about wine, and plays back the recording during the learning process. Ppk: This learning method recommended by Brother Yang is quite good. Another sommelier used the strategy of "visual navigation" and wrote down all the information he needed to learn on a piece of white paper, but instead of using these "quick look-up tables" as cheating cards, he remembered the location of the knowledge recorded on each piece of paper. For example, if he needs to remember the names of Argentine vineyards, he will imagine the paper that says "Argentina" in his mind, and then "see" the vineyards listed in the lower right corner of the paper in his mind.
Let's step back and think about what all this means. To master the art of wine tasting and serving, we must first control ourselves. To some extent, every aspiring sommelier must face his own shortcomings and a daunting reality: the standardized behavior strategy ("the best way") that brought sommeliers to the present height is not enough to make them reach the highest professional level.
Every prospective sommelier needs to accurately evaluate the fit between his micro-motivation and sommelier's career. Those who misjudge their own micro-motives, when they realize that they must enter the unknown world without company, will never generate enough motivation to push themselves forward. They must successfully design enough enthusiasm and goals to drive them through a terrible and intense process of personal trial and error when looking for the right action strategy for their unique and vague advantages.
There is no established road to becoming a master sommelier. In the process of pursuing success, you must always use and exert your personality.
After learning to understand your own micro-motivation, you can design your own enthusiasm, which can give you vitality and make you feel the authenticity of life. After learning to understand your choices, you can design your own goals in life, which provides you with the meaning of life and the direction of progress. After learning to understand your own action strategy, you can design your own goals. When you do this, you will experience a deep sense of pride and self-worth, because you will accomplish meaningful feats while maintaining your true self. However, if you want to achieve the highest level of personalized success, if you want to achieve the highest level of Excellence and life satisfaction, you must first forget a familiar lesson.
What class? To be continued. . .