I’m reading a book – for fun – called Moonwalking with Einstein. It’s about memory. The author, after watching a competitive memory event and writing a article about it, decided to try to train his own memory and eventually compete in memory events. The book is an account of his process and also an examination of the history and science of memory. I just got to a part in the book in which he reached a plateau in his memory speed and went looking for why and what to do about it. And came across an analysis that suggests that any time we learn a skill we pass through three stages. There’s the initial “cognitive” stage in which we’re learning how to even do it (I put the fingers of the left hand onto the guitar fretboard like this, and strum the strings of the guitar with the right hand . . .), and spend all our time focusing on that. Then there’s a second (“associative”) stage in which we spend less time concentrating and start to accomplish the basics of what we’re trying to do (my fingers get to the G chord more or less when I want them to, and when I concentrate I can do a nice fingerpicking pattern at the same time). And eventually we get to a third (“autonomous”) stage, in which we can do all of these things without having to think about them while we’re doing it (If I want to I can think about my shopping list (or the next three songs in the set) while playing a song, because all the parts work as I need them to). That third stage is where the plateau happens; you keep getting better until you get to that stage where you can do whatever the skill is without thinking about it. The author calls it the “okay plateau,” because it happens at the point at which you decide that you’re doing acceptably well at the skill, and the way you’re working on it shifts. Rather than thinking about it, when you’re practicing, you’re just doing it. His point – and the point of the research on this (and on people who become truly expert at something) – is that you don’t want to let yourself get to that plateau if you want to keep getting better. And that people who are truly expert find ways of keeping themselves perpetually at the cognitive and associative stages. That’s why someone like Pete Kennedy practices harder and harder guitar passages, and when those start to get easy he picks out something else that’s hard and requires concentration. Some of the examples the author (Joshua Foer) gives come from music; he points out that good musicians play music when they devote time to their skill, but great musicians don’t – they find difficult passages and go over them repeatedly, rather than playing through the piece or the song. Or they make them more difficult, or move on to some other thing that is still difficult. I need to remember those observations and approaches. On the one hand, sometimes I want to simply play music, because it’s fun and that’s why I do it. But I should also figure out the bits that never quite work the way I want them to, or could be better played or sung or arranged, and – keeping myself in the cognitive phase – genuinely practice.