The Problem with Being Too Patient

Mastery is often associated with patience. After all, getting good at things takes a long time, and only those who are in it for the long haul can expect to reach the pinnacle of their craft.

Given that common association, I found it interesting to hear the opposite perspective from Butch Harmon, Tiger Wood’s coach during the best years of his golfing career:

Those golfers who insist on being patient and letting the game come to them rarely play up to their potential. They play well, maybe win a time or two, but they never reach the great heights their talents dictate. The players who want to learn, get better, and win right now—this second, no waiting—are the ones who exceed their natural abilities and become the game’s great overachievers.

Harmon later goes on to explain why Tiger was one of the least-patient people he had ever met:

When Tiger wants to do something with his golf swing, he wants it done now. No phasing it in and no long-term planning. Once he decides to make a change, he makes it fully and immediately. Then he works himself ragged until he perfects it, exhibiting little or no patience along the way.

In Harmon’s view, patience was often wishful thinking: the hope of future proficiency preventing you from really working today at what you want to improve.

The Five-Minutes-Per-Day Problem and Learning Hard Things

Harmon’s quote made me think about a phenomenon I’ve often seen in self-improvement circles. It is the idea that what matters most for learning is doing a tiny bit of something, every day, over a long period of time.

This approach is exemplified by the language learner who plans to become fluent in a language by playing on Duolingo for five minutes a day, the would-be novelist who commits to writing one page a week, or the aspiring photographer taking one picture a day.

It feels mean to be discouraging of this approach. After all, most people do nothing toward their aspirations, so doing something, even a little bit, is better than nothing. Isn’t it?

However, I can’t help but feel that this approach is akin to the wishful thinking exemplified by Harmon’s “patient” golfers—people who used the slowness of eventual mastery to dodge the demanding work of learning.

The Logic of Minimal Habits

At this point, it’s probably helpful to revisit why this approach is so popular in self-improvement circles. Atomic Habits, a fantastic best-seller written by my friend James Clear, is one of the most obvious proponents of the “start small” approach to self-improvement.

The logic of habit-building is compelling:

1. Starting is hard.
2. Small habits are easier to commit to.
3. Once you start, it’s easier to ramp up and do more.

Thus, the logic goes, the person who does ten minutes a day on Duolingo is building momentum for a larger habit of practicing speaking with people. By lowering the bar for entry, they begin the self-improvement process, while having high expectations may have made it too hard to get started.

Phrased this way, the logic of minimal habits is undeniable. I think it’s an important behavioral technique for getting started with anything, especially when the thing you’re trying to do feels unpleasant. I have used this approach to get back into exercising when I haven’t felt like doing so. I would never criticize someone for starting with smaller, enjoyable habits to break into something they find frustrating or unpleasant but want the outcomes of.

My concern is with #3. Theoretically, it’s easy to ramp up and do more once you’ve started. But in practice, the minimal habit often becomes the destination, not a warm-up for something bigger. And I’m skeptical that such “patient” approaches to practice will reliably result in substantial improvements.

How Effective is the “Patient” Approach to Mastery?

I’m not aware of any research that specifically pits “five-minutes-per-day” habits against more typical curricula for skills people want to master. The costs and difficulties of longitudinal studies mean that empirical research is generally somewhat scant over extended time frames.

The spacing effect in psychology would seem to support the slower, patient approach. Memories tend to be more durable when there are longer intervals between reviewing information than when the same review is massed together (as when cramming for a test). However, real-world studies of language learning tend to find the opposite, finding that more intensive curricula have the edge over more stretched-out approaches.

My guess is that which approach is more effective, whether five minutes daily or intensive bursts, depends on the exact nature of the skill being learned, the practice activities used, and the knowledge the learner begins with. I suspect that complex skills favor a more intensive approach, whereas broad, knowledge-based subjects tend to favor a more patient approach.¹

However this kind of analysis is probably beside the point because, in general, the sorts of things people do for learning when they opt for a five-minute daily habit are categorically different from those they would do in a typical classroom setting or as part of a focused learning project.

Here, “patient” approaches suffer from several serious drawbacks:

• Limited time constrains the types of practice you can do. In five minutes a day, you can complete an exercise on Duolingo, but meaningful conversation practice needs more time. Watching a video of someone painting can be done in five minutes, but replicating that painting yourself takes more time.
• A focus on “sustainability” avoids necessary effort. When you pick activities designed to be sustainable over months or years, there’s a bias against picking anything too effortful or time-consuming. This eliminates a lot of the intense, deliberate practice needed to achieve mastery.
• Long timeframes make it harder to tell if you’re making progress. Improvement is evident when you’re learning a lot over a few months. If you’re not making progress, you change your approach. When improvement is something expected to occur years in the future, how do you know if you’re actually getting better at the underlying skill?

For these reasons, I’m skeptical of many of the proposed plans I’ve heard from readers to achieve mastery via simple, long-term habits.

Mastery is Slow—and Impatient

In his research on deliberate practice, Anders Ericsson articulated the view of mastery that most closely corresponds with my own. He argued that mastery is a slow process, and also an impatient one:

• Mastery is slow because it takes a long time. No, my book is not an exception to this. I do think it’s possible to learn more efficiently, and that effectively-designed projects can help people accomplish more than they think possible. But genuine mastery (not just relatively quick intermediacy) requires a long time, and nothing I’ve worked on is an exception to that rule.
• Mastery is impatient because the work required is deliberate, effortful and striving. Deliberate practice was Ericsson’s term to describe the kind of learning efforts put in by elite performers in chess, music and athletics. It clearly describes Tiger Woods, Harmon’s most famous student.

I believe this is true even if you don’t aspire to world-class greatness. Even getting “good enough” requires a level of commitment that’s difficult to reach with minimal habits alone.

1. A full discussion of exactly what sorts of skills (or sub-skills) benefit from different learning schedules is outside the scope of this essay. Learning vocabulary via flashcards, for instance, seems well-suited to an extended schedule, but the procedural fluency needed for conversations probably benefits from a more intensive one. Similarly, learning about history by watching recorded lectures can probably be done leisurely, but developing the analytical skills of a historian will require a more focused approach. My point here is that my argument that certain categories of “long-term habits” are ineffective for their purpose shouldn’t be misconstrued as the opposite point that an intensive schedule is always better for acquiring all types of skills.