A Steep Learning Curve

[Colonel Sanders]

Everyone wants - nay, expects - to be a phenomenon.

For some bizarre reason, people feel entitled that they
should learn difficult material quickly and easily.

And if they don't master something difficult quickly
and easily, they immediately give up - they expect
instant gratification.

WTF?

But the fact is, how quickly you progress in your first
few hours of learning a new skill, is no predictor of
how good you eventually will be.

Let's look at this guy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabby_Gabreski

- top American fighter ace in Europe during World War II
- jet fighter ace in Korea
- commanded two fighter squadrons
- six command tours at group or wing level,

Incredible pilot and leader. You probably think he soloed in
3 hours or something. But look at how his civilian training
went:

He took lessons in a Taylor Cub and accumulated six hours of flight time. However, he struggled to fly smoothly and did not solo, having been advised by his instructor Homer Stockert that he did not "have the touch to be a pilot"

I am sure that after hearing that, 99.999% of today's
student pilots would give up. No instant gratification.
Not a phenomenon. Obviously no future.

He persisted, though, and joined the military, and almost
flunked out of military flight training:

Gabreski undertook primary flight training at Parks Air College, near East St. Louis, Illinois, flying the Stearman PT-17. Gabreski was a mediocre trainee, and was forced to pass an elimination check ride during primary to continue training

You'd be certain, after finding out that he was the
bottom of his class, that he would be certain roadkill
in WWII. No hope.

But that's the guy that went on to become a top fighter
pilot and legendary leader.

Lesson for you. A little persistence can pay off. Just
because your delicate feelings got hurt, doesn't mean
you should give up. Not everything worthwhile comes
easy (in fact, it rarely does) and for every professional,
there was once an amateur that just wouldn't give up.

I know that people are resentful when I jump into an
aircraft type that I've never flown before, and do surface
acro in it. And crosswind? Who gives a sh1t? Stick over.

But do you think it came easy? I've been at this for
40 years now, which is more than 1/3 of the history
of powered human flight. I have had to tackle and
overcome some incredible obstacles that were thrown
in my way over the decades. When was the last time
that you represented yourself in Federal Court of Appeals
to argue the applicability of Double Jeopardy to
Administrative Law?

But I never, ever gave up. And neither did Colonel
Gabreski.

[Rookie50]

Everyone wants - nay, expects - to be a phenomenon.

For some bizarre reason, people feel entitled that they
should learn difficult material quickly and easily.

And if they don't master something difficult quickly
and easily, they immediately give up - they expect
instant gratification.

WTF?

But the fact is, how quickly you progress in your first
few hours of learning a new skill, is no predictor of
how good you eventually will be.

Let's look at this guy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabby_Gabreski

- top American fighter ace in Europe during World War II
- jet fighter ace in Korea
- commanded two fighter squadrons
- six command tours at group or wing level,

Incredible pilot and leader. You probably think he soloed in
3 hours or something. But look at how his civilian training
went:

He took lessons in a Taylor Cub and accumulated six hours of flight time. However, he struggled to fly smoothly and did not solo, having been advised by his instructor Homer Stockert that he did not "have the touch to be a pilot"

I am sure that after hearing that, 99.999% of today's
student pilots would give up. No instant gratification.
Not a phenomenon. Obviously no future.

He persisted, though, and joined the military, and almost
flunked out of military flight training:

Gabreski undertook primary flight training at Parks Air College, near East St. Louis, Illinois, flying the Stearman PT-17. Gabreski was a mediocre trainee, and was forced to pass an elimination check ride during primary to continue training

You'd be certain, after finding out that he was the
bottom of his class, that he would be certain roadkill
in WWII. No hope.

But that's the guy that went on to become a top fighter
pilot and legendary leader.

Lesson for you. A little persistence can pay off. Just
because your delicate feelings got hurt, doesn't mean
you should give up. Not everything worthwhile comes
easy (in fact, it rarely does) and for every professional,
there was once an amateur that just wouldn't give up.

I know that people are resentful when I jump into an
aircraft type that I've never flown before, and do surface
acro in it. And crosswind? Who gives a sh1t? Stick over.

But do you think it came easy? I've been at this for
40 years now, which is more than 1/3 of the history
of powered human flight. I have had to tackle and
overcome some incredible obstacles that were thrown
in my way over the decades. When was the last time
that you represented yourself in Federal Court of Appeals
to argue the applicability of Double Jeopardy to
Administrative Law?

But I never, ever gave up. And neither did Colonel
Gabreski.

[SMELS]

Maybe students should read "Outliers"... From wikipedia " Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours."

I agree some people have entitlement and feel everything should be theirs for nothing!

[Colonel Sanders]

Not sure you need 10,000 hours. Skill is asymptotic
with respect to experience. If you plot a graph with
skill on the Y axis, and experience on the X axis, you
get this:



Many times here I have opined that anyone with less
than 1,000 hrs should fly twice every day. That's how
you get good at flying. Or playing golf, or a musical
instrument. Not a whole lot of magic there. Just a lot
of persistence and hard work.

Even such greats at . Yeager and Bob Hoover, in
their respective autobiographies, point out that they
flew more than the other guys.

IMHO by the time someone has 3,000 hrs, he's shown
you what he's got.

Note that recency is huge. First of all, someone with
3,000 hrs in 5 years is going to be a better pilot than
his identical twin with 3,000 hrs in 50 years. The skill
development you get with 600 hrs/yr (fly 10x a week)
is going to be so much more than 60 hrs/yr (fly once a
week).

Next, once your skill level flattens out on the curve
(certainly by 5,000 hrs) how good you are is a function
of how much you have flown in the last month. If
you flew 30 hrs in the last month, you're going to be
a lot sharper than if you didn't fly at all in the last month,
and it really doesn't matter what your total time is any
more.

While you could argue with a straight face that a 100
hr pilot might be twice as good as a 50 hour pilot (on
the steep slope of the curve) I don't think anyone can
argue that a 20,000TT pilot is always twice as good as
a 10,000TT pilot. In fact, I would suspect that the skills
of the 20k pilot are in decline because of his advancing
age. Let's face it, at age 60 you just aren't as sharp and
fast as when you were 30 years old.

What keeps the wiley 60 yr old pilot alive is his ability to
draw on a lifetime of flying experience, which allows him
to smell trouble coming miles away, and to carefully
avoid it, despite the insistent urgings of non-pilots on
the ground to tackle it head-on. Also with age comes
perspective and with it spine - to smile and pleasantly
refuse to fly into dangerous situations, no matter how
much pressure there is to do so.

Once you have survived several tests like that - non-pilots
pressuring you to do something really dangerous, and
you refusing - you will be astonished at how quickly
they forget what they tried to pressure you into doing.

But you should never, ever forget that lesson - how
unimportant that flight really was. I wish some medevac
guys would learn that lesson.

[Bede]

I encourage people not to read Malcolm Gladwell. While a very good writer, he is the type of guy who can advance an idea without providing any evidence and people treat it as gospel. For example, this 10000 hour rule. Do you flounder for 10000 hrs until on hour 10001 you "get it". The entirety of the book is reduced to practice something and you'll be better at it. Practice for 10000 hours and you'll probably be reasonably good. Simon Sinek is another example of the same type of writing.

I kind of disagree with Col on this one. While I disagree with instant gratification, and I wouldn't give up something if I didn't get it right away, but I see far more people blowing endless amounts of time/effort on something they have no aptitude for. Take me for example- basketball, music, making things look nice, computer engineering, finish carpentry, etc are all things I'm not great at. I may be able to get alright at them with enough practice, but I'd rather practice something I have some innate aptitude for and get really good at it.

I had a student one time who loved flying and had the money to learn but simply did not have the aptitude. He was inconsistent and was intellectually unable to pass any type of test (5 PSTAR attempts I think). It would have been best if we would have told him at 20 hours he was never going to get a license rather than waiting 40 hours just to have him nearly crash on his second solo.

[Colonel Sanders]

I see far more people blowing endless amounts of time/effort on something they have no aptitude for

People are certainly capable of wasting time and money,
but I wonder how much effort they are really putting into
it.

You are correct that as you move farther and farther
left on the bell curve of aptitude, the harder and harder
it's going to be for someone to get good at something.

However in my experience, people giving up too soon
(as soon as they encounter the first little obstacle) is
at least 100x as common as someone with no aptitude
whatsoever pounding their head against the wall endlessly.

I have spent a lot of time teaching people how to:

- land a nosewheel airplane
- land a slow, docile taildragger
- land a fast, blind taildragger
- fly IFR
- fly formation
- fly aerobatics
- fly formation aerobatics

And almost every time, when someone has a lesson that
isn't all sunshine and lollipops, they consider giving up.

And I tell them, hold on a second. Look around you. A
lot of people a lot stupider than you have mastered this.
You know why? They didn't give up when their ego didn't
get stroked. That's the difference between someone who
is successful, and someone who isn't - persistence. Not genius.

Something worthwhile is going to take some work. Probably
a lot of it. For example, it took me four pretty unpleasant years
to get an engineering degree, and I was a horrible slacker, and
did far less work than any of my classmates. I can only try to
imagine what Hell they endured.

[eaglepilot]

I encourage people not to read Malcolm Gladwell. While a very good writer, he is the type of guy who can advance an idea without providing any evidence and people treat it as gospel. For example, this 10000 hour rule. Do you flounder for 10000 hrs until on hour 10001 you "get it". The entirety of the book is reduced to practice something and you'll be better at it. Practice for 10000 hours and you'll probably be reasonably good. Simon Sinek is another example of the same type of writing.

I disagree that Malcolm Galdwell says that if you practice something for 10,000 hours, that you'll master it.

His point was that even if you have an exceptional talent, that you will not achieve mastery unless you practice, on average, 10,000 hours.

I could write more to defend the point, but, as usual, Malcolm doesn't need any help.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/s ... exity.html

(complete with references and evidence)

[Colonel Sanders]

you will not achieve mastery unless you practice, on average, 10,000 hours

I strongly agree that it will take around ten years
to master something challenging and worthwhile.

The exact number of hours? Who knows. But
someone with 10 years in, has skill and knowledge,
and still has youth on his side.

Roger Federer comes to mind.