One of the most difficult types of thing to learn is a new skill that requires the development of body and mind, for example, learning an instrument, learning to draw or paint, learning a ball game, learning to dance, learning to speak a new language, learning to sing and so on.

One of the principal difficulties is that these are analog activities. They require the development of subtle nuances in capability in order to achieve refined levels of performance. Very often, absolute and perfect results don’t exist. Results are generally judged relative to previous performance or relative to the performance of other people or things. When starting to learn a new skill a person’s initial abilities are often very low and very crude because they have developed no refinement and little ability to discern good and bad results. It is very hard for a beginner to quickly achieve a refined ability. When you start out you are like a child learning to write. You hold the pencil in your fist and you create crude and scratchy writing because you have no refinement. Over time you can hold the pencil more gently and you can write with increasing accuracy and consistency. You have to go through this process each time that you learn a new ‘motor’ skill.

A good way to get through this initial stage more easily is to exaggerate actions and results deliberately. Through exaggeration you can quickly build up experience of operating at the extremes of either your own personal capabilities or of the extreme physical limits possible for an activity. This sets up an endpoint marker and then crude distinctions between minimal effort, movement or result and the extremes can be more readily perceived, which helps to develop refinement of skills much quicker.

When we start off learning a new skill we often quickly come up against personal limits that lead to frustration because we can’t achieve what we desire. Development can become constrained by only working within existing low level abilities because we don’t want to feel bad by continuously running up against personal limits and hence feeling inadequate. This can make progress very slow because we don’t want to take risks, we don’t want to fail and we don’t want to end up humiliated. By accepting exaggeration as a way of quickly testing and experiencing limits we step outside of the comfort zone and experiment and discover what’s possible. Ludicrous imitation, exaggeration and mimicry can teach us a lot. It’s a form of play that reveals new things in a fun way. It allows us to break free of constraints by accepting that we’re just going to mess about and explore.

Here are some examples of how I have used exaggeration to develop enhanced abilities very quickly:

Playing guitar - When I practice I tend to play very loudly and very hard. This doesn’t always sound pretty but it demands the development of more power plucking and strumming as well as more accurate fingering in order to play loudly. This excess of capacity allows me to perform in public at a lower level, which now sounds pretty but which is much stronger than I would have played if I hadn’t exaggerated the piece previously.

I also exaggerate to very slow extremes sometimes when learning something new that is difficult to put together. This gives me the time to consciously think through the movements of the left and right hand just before doing them whilst ensuring that the rhythm is correct and consistent albeit slow. This allows me to build ‘finger memory’ (unconscious competence) much quicker because I program my abilities correctly from the start.

Drawing portraits - I used to do a lot of drawing and painting of portraits. It’s quite a tricky skill to create an accurate representation of a person’s face on paper. My abilities stepped up a gear when I learned how to draw caricatures. When you create caricatures you must search out the unusual features and the variations from the norm and exaggerate them for comic effect. This focus on extreme possibilities allowed me to refine my abilities with drawing normal portraits because it enhanced by ability to discern what specific things to look out for that define a person’s face and their relative positioning.

Hip-Hop Dancing - I was a bit uptight when I began to learn hip-hop dancing. I learned the moves but I had nothing like the panache of my teacher. I felt uncomfortable about ‘going for it’ and so in order to develop my style I decided to exaggerate my moves. I felt ludicrous and in the beginning I looked ludicrous (I practiced at home in front of a mirror) but I got a good idea of the possibilities and of the effect upon the outward appearance of my dancing. It then became easier to step things down a notch to a more comfortable level but which gave an overall enhancement.

Speaking Languages - I learned French at school and I didn’t put much effort into speaking it with a proper accent. Then one day many, many years ago, I saw a TV program where a French politician or diplomat was interviewed and he spoke English with an impeccable and posh English accent. It really took me aback because I had never experienced this before. I was deeply impressed with the man because he seemed so English. The lack of accent stripped away my normal judgement and (at that time) prejudices. I felt enormous empathy with the guy because he clearly had taken a lot of effort to speak so well and I developed the conception that he must love the English in order to make such an effort (I had no proof of that but that’s what I felt). Consequently, I wanted to speak French and sound like a Frenchman.

I don’t know how it is in the States but in England pretty much everyone can speak English with a ridiculous French accent if they’re in the mood. We therefore know how to pronounce vowel sounds and consonant sounds in the French way but we tend to speak according to the English interpretation of how the French words should sound when written and not in the French way. I guess that most nationalities do this, hence the dreadful accents that we hear. When I chose to improve my French accent I simply decided to speak French with a ridiculous French accent. It felt ludicrous and I felt like I was making fun but French people commented on how good my accent was! By throwing in a few appropriately timed gallic shrugs I could pass myself off as a native (only kidding)

Problem-Solving and Decision-Making - We can also use exaggeration to gain an understanding of difficult concepts or concepts where the difference between on condition and another seems to small to discern any effect. I learned this from my first job as a fifteen year old helping out at a auto restoration workshop. I used to ask my boss, Nick Topliss, about things that I observed on cars and he would explain the engineering principles behind them. One time I asked him why it was that racing cars of the nineteen twenties era had such enormous wheels and yet modern cars had much smaller wheels. He told me that bigger wheels give a smoother ride but it didn’t make any sense to me; “A wheel is a wheel,” I thought, “They are all smooth.” Nick explained that in order to understand engineering concepts that it is often beneficial to exaggerate things to extremes in order to see the relative difference more clearly.

In this case he told me to imagine a piece of very rough ground to travel across full of bumps and holes. Next he told me to imagine a very small wheel going across that terrain. It would go up and down affected by almost every undulation. It would give a very bumpy ride. He then told me to imagine a huge wheel as tall as a house, or even bigger. Next I had to imagine it passing over the same bumpy terrain. This time the huge size of the wheel would mean that it wouldn’t be affected by every bump and hole. It would ‘bridge over’ holes and consequently the overall undulations of the axle would be a lot less than for the small wheel. A smoother ride would be the result. By scaling back to more normal sizes the general principle that a large wheel gives an advantage over a small wheel for creating a smoother ride still holds true.

I still use this principle of exaggeration for making-decisions on courses of action where upfront the differences seem minor but, when exaggerated and perhaps projected into the future, the results and impact of those differences become much clearer.

In summary, the process of exaggeration forces you to build an ‘excess’ of capability or an enhanced understanding of a concept. Since you can only do what is possible for you to do then building an excess of capability makes you more resourceful and it makes you more competent. When you have a lot of competence you get the natural side-effect of confidence and when you perform well within your capabilities then you can have high-confidence in your abilities and in your ability to recover from minor problems.

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[Photo by levi_sz]