The core ideas in this essay came together serendipitously from three related but different sources. This essay explores the indispensable role of effort, deliberate practice, and broad-based education in achieving mastery, drawing insights from Roger Federer, Charlie Munger, and flight schools. Let us start with Federer.
On June 9th, 2024, Roger Federer did something quite unlike anything he had done before in his life. He gave a commencement speech at Duke University to the outgoing class of 2024. We will get to the speech soon, but before that, a few words on Federer’s tennis. On the court, Federer was the Rolls Royce of tennis: smooth, magical, ruthless, clinical, and precise. He made the game look so effortless when he played it. Never before in the history of the sport had someone walked on the tennis court with so much talent, grace, and sportsmanship – eight Wimbledon titles, six Australian Open titles, five US Open titles, and one French Open title. After a career of two decades, when he took his last bow in September 2022 after partnering with his long-time rival Rafa Nadal in a double game, a curtain fell on one of the most surreal careers in any sport. During the commencement speech (which in its entirety was wonderfully crafted, in his trademark unassuming style), Federer mentioned that the thing that frustrated him the most was when people called his game “effortless.” In his own words:
“People would say my play was effortless. Most of the time, they meant it as a compliment… But it used to frustrate me when they would say, “He barely broke a sweat!”
Or “Is he even trying?”
The truth is, I had to work very hard… to make it look easy.”
The last sentence is important. Nothing is effortlessly achieved. Even those who inherit a legacy of any kind have to work hard to keep it safe and grow it. One of the greatest myths in life is this notion of effortlessness in achievement of any sort. It may be true that some people may show a propensity to excel in a particular skill, but nothing of significance is achieved unless those skills are honed, practiced, and made one’s own. In Geoffrey Colvin’s 2008 book “Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else,” he argues that 10,000 hrs of effort – deliberate practice is the term for this kind of effort – is required at the bare minimum for a skill to crystallize into talent worth speaking about. This is true not just of sports but any field of activity. While genetic factors sure do contribute to the budding of initial abilities, they are not sufficient for flowering and reaching the pinnacle of any field. In Federers’s commencement speech, apart from the imperativeness of practice to reach greater heights in one’s career, he also stressed the critical factor of the mental resilience required to renew and retain a skill at that high level constantly.
The second event happened roughly at the same time Federer delivered his commencement speech. I was at a conference in San Francisco, and I happened to hear the term “Flight school” mentioned during a happy-hour event. An instructor from the company which organized the conference told us about it. He said that an intensive training program modeled on the concept of a Flight school was mandatory for all employees. While training programs are not uncommon in the corporate world, to christen it as a “flight school” set me thinking. For context, a flight school is a place where Pilots are trained. Flying a plane is one of the most complex jobs. For one, you are up in the air with no support, and if something goes wrong, even by a tiny margin, the result is often disastrous and tragic for everyone on board. The scope for error when flying an airplane is very minimal, if not non-existent. Pilots train to know everything they need to know for the job, whether they like it or not. Not just at a conceptual level but at the level of what we call “practiced fluency.”. There are no “boring” subjects in their curriculum. Every aspect of flying, about the plane, about reading the flight path, and about the atmospheric conditions, is life-critical. Every switch, every button, every light panel, every instruction in the instruction manual, including and more critically, the exceptions that can occur, must become part of the Pilot’s DNA. Only then can pilots react with those educated instincts – note the word educated, not just gross instincts – to a sudden change in the flight path or any other contingencies. I will come back to the point later in the essay.
The third factor that contributed to this essay was a book of essays and talks by Charlie Munger called “Poor Charlie’s Almanack.” Around the time Federer delivered his commencement speech, I was reading ( studying may be a better word because the essay is so full of ideas) Munger’s 1998 speech on the occasion of the fiftieth reunion of his Harvard law class of 1948. The subject of the speech was the art of creating a deep and broad-based education in our colleges along the lines of a flight school curriculum. For those of you who may not know who Charlie Munger is, here is a brief profile. Munger was the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the famous Warren Buffet company. Warren Buffet often attributes the success of his firm mainly to the direction that Charlie gave it during his tenure at BH. Munger grew up during the Depression era of the 1930s and was a self-made man who keenly understood the value of broad-based education and its effects on society. While his financial wisdom and acumen were legendary and much sought after, his influence went beyond finance into the realms of psychology, economics, and multidisciplinary thinking. The last one was significant to him. His passionate advocacy for mental models, out-of-the-box thinking, and education that can draw wisdom from various disciplines made him a kind of prophet of modern-day education.
A brief introduction to the book is necessary. The title of the book “Poor Charlie’s Almanack” is homonymous and a tribute to Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” a collection of daily thoughts and aphorisms by Franklin that has attained cult status in the annals of American literature. Charlie Munger admired Benjamin Franklin for his diverse interests and his ability to cross-pollinate his learnings across fields. Franklin was a polymath: an inventor, scientist, diplomat, author, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He had an extraordinary range of interests. That kind of three sixty-degree vision, curiosity, and wisdom aligned with Munger’s own advocacy for broad-based learning and mental models from various disciplines. During his lifetime, Munger relied on his broad learning to drive investments and business decisions without losing his soul in the process. Charlie Munger died on November 28th, 2023, at the age of ninety-nine, in his modest California home in which he lived, unostentatiously, for seventy years. Munger’s legacy is not in the billions he was worth at the time of his death. It was in the wisdom and practical insights he shared freely throughout his life and work. Munger fiercely advocated broad-based education, and not just mechanical specialization, as the key to effective thinking, as an antidote to superficial thinking and a less examined life. Every essay in “Poor Charlie’s Almanack” is a gem and a life-changing experience.
The common thread that runs through the above paragraphs is the art of learning. In Federer’s case, it is about the effort that went into playing his brand of effortless tennis; in the case of the Flight school, the focus is on the best way to train pilots in any field so they learn to adapt and meet different challenges on the fly, so to speak instead of being bogged down to a set of standard maneuvers as a result of narrow specialization. Munger’s life is about the benefits of exposing professionals to a broad-based, multidisciplinary education so they can learn to think multi-dimensional. The idea of a Flight school is interesting because it encompasses all these ideas. I began thinking about the principles on which a flight school is organized. How are they prepared to meet unexpected challenges, and how do they weigh their options? And how do they ensure ( most of the time) the pilots do not get to fly an airplane unless they have met all the requirements? I work in education, and it is our constant endeavor each day to create training programs and train people so they hit the ground running and respond to challenges in real time.
The question then boils down to what principles make a flight school so successful in preparing pilots for their jobs. If we can build training programs around those principles, perhaps we can create skilled professionals in many fields. Based on Federer’s thoughts, Charlie Munger’s Harvard reunion speech, and my thoughts on it, these are the basic tenets.
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- Formal education in any skill should be broad enough to cover practically everything useful in the field. This seems self-evident but rarely emphasized in formal education. Imagine what would happen if Pilots were selective about what they learn about airplanes or flying. Pilots are given no choice in their training; they have to know the fundamentals in all the subjects well enough: everything about and in the cockpit, every dial, every indicator, switch, and lever, there is, along with the general science and engineering behind the airplane. No subject is or can be “optional.” or taken less seriously than others. This rigor in insisting that the fundamentals have to be strong and well-established before anything else is the key to training and learning. You may be a prodigy and have begun to play the violin or write software code at a young age, but that mercurial phase will not last long unless that innate skill is set on firmer ground – in other words, with the fundamentals in place. Talk to anyone from a musical family, and they will tell you that they spend more time practicing than folks who don’t have the musical DNA in them. No long-lasting achievement in any skill is possible if we don’t make the effort to know the nuts and bolts of the skills we wish to master.
- This second tenet is critical. Our learning should be directed to achieve what Charlie Munger and Federer call “Practice-based” fluency. The only difference between people who have a natural ability for a skill and those who do not is the effort they put in to become good at it. Preternatural skill can only give you a jump-start, but for the long haul, practice, grit, and directed effort are imperative. The Olympics is on now – a spectacle of human excellence. For all the athletes gathered there, how many years of training and learning must have preceded this moment in Paris? How many days would they have had to wake up in the morning and do the same routine day after day, despite the boredom, the lethargy, the uncertainty of success, and the sense of futility that can come over time? Yet, the intensity of effort cannot diminish. Persistence is important. Only then can their skill shine through in those moments when the spotlight is on them during the next two weeks. Learning is all practice, and there is no shortcut to it. When I started writing fifteen years ago, it wasn’t easy. I had to learn how to write from scratch. I bought books on writing, educated myself on grammar, voraciously read whatever I could lay my hands on, and, most importantly, I was determined to write each day, no matter what, even if it was just a paragraph. When I look back at many of my pieces written a decade ago, I cringe, but I also realize that without those building blocks and those clumsy attempts, I wouldn’t have gotten better.
- At NIIT, we follow the paradigm of “critical mistakes” analysis in designing our learning solutions, which is closely aligned with this point. The principle is that training should focus on imparting the most important skills in performing a given role, that it gets the most training coverage, and is raised to the highest fluency levels. Every job has its critical components, without which mastery is incomplete. A tennis player, for instance, should have a clean backhand, forehand, serve, and volley. These are essential skills for the game, and if a player is not at “professional-level” good at any one of these, it will soon become a weakness that an opponent can leverage. While learning any skill, we should focus on what we are not doing right more often than on things that we do right. If the player’s backhand is weak, they should practice more backhand strokes. If a software programmer is struggling to write modular code, then they should be made to think more about modularity. A few months ago, I started resistance or muscle training at my gym. After the first month, my adviser told me: “Hey, bala, your left arm looks weaker than your right; let us, for the next two weeks, work on that.”. I hadn’t realized this until it was explicitly pointed out to me. That is the value of a good coach. For a few weeks, I was put on a painful regimen of working with weights on my left side until the expected level of muscle strength was achieved on both sides. That is the essence of training – working on weaknesses. We often misconstrue deliberate practice as doing the same thing over and over again. It doesn’t take long to realize that such mechanical effort doesn’t get us anywhere. The purpose of focused training is to invest time and effort wisely across all aspects of a task, strengthening each component of the skills and focusing more on areas that need additional effort.
- The fourth tenet is something imperative for Pilots to learn. In fact, it is this skill that differentiates good pilots from the excellent ones. It is called “inverse thinking”. This idea is derived from Algebra. Anyone who remembers their algebraic exercises from school days will recall that we were made to work on two kinds of algebraic equations. In some cases, we had to work with the left side of the equation to arrive at a solution. In others, the solution was given to us, and we were expected to work backward to solve the equation. Of course, very few teachers took the trouble to teach us why learning both these approaches was indispensable not only for algebra but for life. If they had, I guess, we would have far more skilled professionals in the world than we do. Anyway, how does this principle apply to pilots and training in general? When there is a challenge in the air, a pilot has two options depending on the challenge: if it is a known and documented challenge, he should follow the steps to achieve a desirable ( in this case, safe) outcome, and if the challenge is unexpected and there is no playbook for dealing with it, he should know how to work backward and land the airplane with minimum damage. The quality of thinking in both cases is radically different. In the first case, there is a playbook to follow, and in the other, the pilot has to make decisions on the fly based on his educated and fine-tuned flying instincts gathered over hours of flying time during the learning phase in simulated environments.
- At the beginning of my career at NIIT, my mentor advised me to maintain a checklist, an idea that was anathema to me at the time. I had supreme confidence in my ability to “know” what I should do. Nevertheless, I began maintaining one. It didn’t take me long to realize the tremendous value of a checklist in executing a job well. For a pilot, a checklist is indispensable. Without checking off the thousand little things that make an airplane fly, the pilot will not even taxi. Even a single glitch, however inconsequential it may seem before the flight takes off, has to be corrected. The margin for exceptions is non-existent. Similarly, an athlete, an artist, or any professional has to have checklists for everything they do. While a pilot, for compliance reasons, has to maintain a physical checklist, we can do without it, as long we don’t miss steps. The biggest challenge in training and learning is the tendency to look for shortcuts. How to get to the goal without doing what it takes to get there. We like to achieve our goals with the least effort and resistance. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. A cheetah may be the finest killing machine nature has designed so far. Every bone, each muscle, is perfectly and ergonomically suited to the purpose of catching its prey in flight. But watch a documentary on how a cheetah hunts, and you will witness a mental checklist in play: the waiting, the stalking, the identifying, the run, and then the leap for the jugular vein. If any of this is ignored, the effort is wasted, and the cheetah and its clan will have to go hungry until the next opportunity shows up. Learning, therefore, must include checklists. If not for anything else, checklists help us reflect on the course of our actions instead of mechanically executing them and, more importantly, keep us disciplined. Whether I write software, train for athletics, or play the piano, each skill has its micro steps and discipline that demand adherence.
- The worst enemy of learning is the sense of adequacy and complacency it begets soon after. We feel we have learned enough and don’t feel compelled to continue learning unless there is a crisis. Unfortunately, many training programs are designed to perpetuate this illusion. What about Pilots and flight schools? Pilots have to renew their skills at periodic intervals, whether they like it or want it. They are expected to return to flight school and work on polishing their skills, learning new skills, relearning critical routines, or practicing routines that haven’t been used in a while – and get recertified. This recertification process is not optional; it is mandatory. It is a known fact that if a skill is not used often, it atrophies; in other words, we lose the skill. And that is the worst that can happen to the pilot if, in mid-air, with the lives of hundreds of passengers at stake, they fumble. The secret of learning is, therefore, to keep the core skills in working order, and to do that, we have to take time off and retreat into a learning mode periodically. Charlie Munger called it the maintenance routine. Just as a car requires maintenance, upgrades, or replacements, our skills need them, too. To rely on what we were trained on years ago to solve a current problem may be the surest way to failure. My outlook signature has this quote: “A teacher should prepare the student for the student’s future, and not the teacher’s past.” This applies to designing training programs as well. It is uncommon in the corporate world these days for professionals to go on a learning sabbatical. It is a great idea. In fact, such sabbaticals should happen by design and not be left to the individual. Without such a renewal of what we know, the skills we bring to our jobs will diminish over time, and consequently, the quality of work will suffer. Flight schools are designed to address both these issues – ensuring pilots are on top of their skills, and they can deliver when it matters.
- The last tenet of a flight school design is to teach pilots how to balance a thirty-thousand-foot view of their flight path with the details revealed in the cockpit. In other words, how do we keep the big picture in mind and focus on the details with equal felicity? Pilots do not have to stare at the dials in front of them every second of the flight, but they need to know when to pay attention. This is critical. Sometimes, the path outside may look clear, but the cockpit could show a different picture. Pilots have to make a quick judgment call based on the data they see to either continue with same flight path, or make the necessary adjustments to reach the destination. This judicious evaluation of both these metrics is critical for a pilot and any professional, for that matter. The problem with many training programs is that they are designed for specialization without exposing the student to the bigger picture. There is danger in this approach. One of the reasons I firmly believe that studying history is important is because history gives us a telescopic vision of how we arrived where we are today. That vision is essential to put the details in perspective. In fact, the details will make sense only when there is such a vision. I was speaking to a group of software developer the other day, and all of them, unanimously, were worried that generative AI is going to take away their jobs. Yes, that is true. However, I reminded them that this trend has been going on for years now, with IDEs prompting most of the coding options on behalf of the developer. Generative AI has only accelerated that trend. Indeed, developers today cannot rely on their coding skills alone; they cannot match the prowess of MS Copilot in generating quality code, but what will remain a human prerogative – at least for some time – is the broader vision of software architecture design and the purpose of the software itself. Software programmers have to elevate their thinking skills to the level of a solution designer and architects. And that means they have to relearn how to think differently.
None of the principles outlined above is new. They have been in circulation in teaching and learning circles since man began to organize his education in a formal manner. Before schools, young men and women apprenticed under their fathers and learned the trade using more or less similar principles. If you read Leonardo Da Vinci’s biographies, you will recognize all the above principles in action. The innate talent, the hard work, the long-term vision, the effort to correct imbalances in skill—all of them present in ample measure. The critical point I wish to make in this essay is that learning is not a pastime, at least not so if you are serious about it. The beauty of the human species is that we are not born with limitations on what we can learn and how deep we can learn. By design, our instincts are deliberately weak when compared to other species, but our capacity to expand through our effort – in breadth and depth – is unparalleled. Education is all about expansion. And training is the art and science of achieving such an expansion.
It took about three weeks to write this essay—a long time, by my standards. I took my time because this subject is close to my heart, and I wanted to make sure I conveyed its essence well. I am an autodidact by nature. Most of my learning happened without the scaffolding of formal training. Because of the effort I had to put in, I realize how important it is to design training well so that students are led in a structured manner to realize their potential. I hope the principles outlined here will resonate with some of my readers. It is important to bear in mind that the path to learning and mastery is paved with relentless effort, a commitment to continuous learning, and an openness to interdisciplinary insights. These are the three pillars of education.