43 · Watching Myself Think

I really don't want to believe that metacognitive ability is a gift or innate talent, but it is God's honest truth that not everybody can admit they are wrong without emotional damage — and also zoom out of the flesh and watch themselves think and act from a third-person perspective. It's such an outlying trait that feels normal to me but is genuinely hard to find. I have no problem admitting I'm wrong; going through painful moments where it stung, where my ego took hits, gave me this. I earned this skillset through conscious and unconscious training — but that doesn't mean everyone else can or will, and I just don't know. For a majority of people, asking "what is my problem right now, what is the bottleneck, what in my values, my self-talk and my actions needs to be fixed" — with nearly zero emotional pain — is alien. I welcome that question; the only opportunity I miss is failing to ask it more often. People can handle unfathomable amounts of things. The world is the canvas. They can fix everything.

Some of the most important things for greatness in skill development are tight feedback loops. The frequency of asking: what am I doing wrong? What is the problem? What must be fixed? What is my error? What could I have done better? Which is the right thing to optimise? How should I have reacted? How could I have reacted faster to that cue? How do I model this? How do I build the mnemonic?

You need to confront yourself with as much "I was wrong" as possible. If you can consistently say — I was wrong, this is what I did wrong, why am I wrong here, what conceptual gaps do I have, why did my day start wrong — growth accelerates.

There are two facades to any skill: skill training and skill performance. Knowing which one you are in, or working for, is so important. Oscillating between forcing yourself to perform and then being self-analytical, critical, stripping everything you did — that discrimination is vital for accelerating mastery.

My biggest realisation this morning: you can be optimising entirely for the wrong thing, and that is the primary bottleneck. When you're figuring out a system that is alien to you but obvious to someone else, a mistake in identifying the problem costs you time optimising something that shouldn't exist. I decided that "not writing the verbal expression" was why I failed — but that wasn't the right diagnosis. So what is the process I should be optimising, specifically, for Edexcel maths — and why isn't it the same for IAL physics, and how do I adapt?

Track your failures. Where are you failing? The biggest bottleneck right now is that I set daily ambitions too big — a manifestation of fear — and get nothing done because I'm overwhelmed. So: what is something you know you can do today for sure, plus a little more? What is the frog to eat today? One past paper analysis plus one unit's content mastery. We can do that, then a skim of the formula booklet. What is the hardest work? Do that first, then come back.

After every daily quarter, record an activity and decision log of all actions taken, and find everything done wrong — usually about 95% of the work is meaningless. When you become conscious of your decisions and activities, you find you've been doing almost everything wrong, and only a small proportion of the daily work was meaningful. That's not despair; that's the sharpening.