5000, 4999, 4998, 4997…

I’ve been reading some kinesiology texts of late (yes, really), and stumbled across an interesting paper by Dr. Richard Schmidt [Motor Learning, 1988] about acquiring motor patterns through repetition.

Schmidt’s extensive research focused on the amount of practice necessary to learn a movement, to make it habit. A new pattern learned from scratch, he discovered, seemed to reliably take between 300 and 500 repetitions to become permanent. But new patterns learned to correct and replace an old, less efficient pattern instead consistently took between 3000 and 5000 repetitions – a literal order of magnitude difference.

I’ve thought about that recently as I’ve worked out, looking at the ways I move in basic exercises. But I’ve thought about it even more, looking at how I ‘move’ through the rest of my life.

Over the years of running companies, I’ve developed work habits, communications styles, and basic approaches to business. Most of those, on inspection, have served me very well. But a handful have not. And, indeed, I’ve increasingly noticed that I spend disproportionate amounts of time and energy undoing the problems cause by those handful of inefficient, bad patterns.

I’ve been focusing on correcting those patterns, replacing them with new, better, more efficient approaches. And, for the most part, I’ve been moving forward. But, of course, like with anything new, from time to time I misstep.

Before, I’d always believed the business self-help book saw that it takes 30 days to make a new behavior a habit. And, perhaps, in some cases, it does. But Schmidt’s research makes me think that time has nothing to do with it. Instead, it’s about volume of practice. And, in the case of re-learning something, it’s about a very, very large volume of practice.

Five thousand is an inordinate number of times to face a decision, and to make the right choice. In that context, those missteps seem inevitable. How can you do something new correctly five thousand times in a row?

And, just as important, in that context, it’s clearly only worth setting out for change when you’re ready to buckle down for a long-haul commitment, when you’re ready to start even knowing that you aren’t aren’t ‘done’, you aren’t finished thinking about your actions, until you’ve got things right again and again and again, three thousand to five thousand times.

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When in Rome

I grew up in Silicon Valley, at the very beginning of the personal computer revolution and its attendant startup boom. So perhaps it was inevitable that I’d start some tech companies, or spend my life in various entrepreneurial pursuits.

But I grew up in Silicon Valley also largely by chance. My parents, born and bred New Yorkers, headed out West only after my father matched post-med-school at Stanford’s residency program. Just as easily, he could have ended up at a hospital here in New York, or in Boston, or down in DC. And I always wonder, had I been born in any of those places, might I have been more likely to follow a different path?

Would a childhood in DC have pulled me into politics? Would Boston have kept me in the world of medicine? Here in New York, would I have leaned towards banking and the public markets?

My best guess: definitely.

As Malcom Gladwell points out in his (admittedly less than stellar) Outliers, it’s all too easy to overlook the power of place. Which is something I’ve been thinking about of late, as Jess and I still, slowly, mull over where we’d like to live, in both the short and long term.

In theory, with technology of all kinds flattening distances, physical location should matter less and less. But, in practice, that hardly seems to be the case. In just the past few days, I’ve met a dozen or so people at events around the city, all of whom intersect in some interesting way with my work at Cyan, or Jess’ work in the fashion world, or with CrossFit NYC, or with something else somehow relevant to our life. And, indeed, those serendipitous meetings, the building of new weak ties, is exactly what you lose in absenting yourself from a physical community.

The problem is, those communities are also quite specific. So far as I can see, the only place where substantial pockets of fashion, film, and finance people intersect is right here in New York City. So, toy as we might with fantasies of complete escape, Portland, Maine becomes practical only if I’m ready to switch careers to lobstering.

Still, there’s an upside to this line of thought. After a decade of life in Manhattan, and as a relative newlywed, it’s all too easy to lapse into eating lunch in the office, into spending the evening at home with Jess on the couch. So it’s good to be occasionally reminded that the only way we can justify the crazy rents, small footprints, and booming street noise of our New York offices and apartment is to get out of them, and to meet the slew of smart, interesting people all around this city.

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