Automaticity

Learning something new and feeling like you suck at it?

Good. That’s normal.

It’s also temporary. Stick with it and one day it clicks. Not because you got cleverer. Because your brain stopped needing to think about it.

There’s a word for that, and I learned it the hard way, in a car.

I loved my first car more than most of my family (sorry, Mum). Freedom, independence, fun. Nobody asking where I was going.

But at the start, driving was a nightmare. Failed my test twice. Gears, mirrors, speed, the clutch, the bloke on the bike I hadn’t seen. Too many things, all at once, every one of them wanting my full attention.

Sound familiar?

Fast forward a year and I was driving without a second thought. Music on, chatting away, arriving places with no memory of the roundabouts in between.

Nothing about the car had changed. Nothing about the roads. I’d changed, and I hadn’t noticed it happening.

Stage one is the driving test. You’re working the pedals like a maths problem and there’s no room left for the road.

Stage two is the first few months after passing. Mostly fine, the odd stall, a lot of swearing.

Stage three is a year in. You’re somewhere else entirely while your hands and feet drive.

The effort didn’t disappear. It moved somewhere you can’t feel it.

When you practise, your brain physically rewires. The connections you use get stronger and quicker. The ones you don’t use fade. Walk the same route across a field every day and you get a path. That’s neural plasticity, and it isn’t a metaphor.

Bogdan Draganski and his colleagues at Regensburg put people in a scanner in 2004, taught them to juggle for three months, and scanned them again. The grey matter in the parts of the brain that track moving objects had grown. Then the jugglers stopped, got scanned three months later, and most of it had gone.

Three months of dropping balls changed the shape of their brains. Three months of not bothering changed it back.

That’s the deal. The brain pays for what you use and stops paying for what you don’t.

If you want the practice to stick faster, sleep on it, literally. I covered that in Learn faster.

Longer than you’d like. Shorter than it feels.

Phillippa Lally and her team at UCL followed 96 people in 2010 while each tried to make one new daily habit stick, and asked them every day how automatic it felt. The middle of the pack got there in 66 days. The quickest took 18. The slowest was on course for 254.

The bit that matters: missing a day didn’t wreck it. The curve carried on. What wrecked it was stopping.

Driving took me about a year, which puts me at the slow end. I’m fine with that. I still got there.

So what do you do

Keep going. That’s it.

Struggling at the start isn’t a sign you’re bad at it. It’s what the start looks like for everyone. The bloke who makes it look easy was at the top of the same curve once. You just weren’t there to see it.

So when you feel like you suck at the new thing, you’re probably right. You do, for now.

Do it again tomorrow.

One day you’ll catch yourself doing it without a second thought, and you won’t be able to remember when it got easy.