Check out this video of Tim Nolan, a world record holding professional juggler and basketball entertainer. He does insane tricks like chucking a basketball, letting it bounce a few times off the walls, then off the backboard, into a trampoline, off the backboard again, and then through the hoop.
He can do the juggling stuff on demand because he’s put a lot of years into it (and you can clearly see that some of what he does is at the limit of his ability). And he can do some of the basketball tricks on demand, like the over the head shot (he wouldn’t do it in front of an audience if he couldn’t get it within a few attempts).
But I think many of his basketball tricks depend a lot on luck. Just a guess, but I don’t think he’s that much better at some of these tricks than you or I would be. The difference is that he was willing to make jillions of attempts before it worked. Have you ever given up on something because it didn’t work the first time, or the tenth time, or the hundredth time, or the thousandth time?
This weekend I attended the 2008 Congress of Jugglers at the University of Maryland. It’s an annual convention where jugglers from all over the country meet to throw things at each other, and it was my first time attending, as well as my first time doing serious juggling in about two years.
Wikipedia happened to have a photo that appears to be from a prior year of this convention. I know the people and I think I recognize the room where they contained the bounce jugglers, to keep them from having to chase their dropped balls across the gym. This is a picture of world record holders Dave Critchfield and John Jones bouncing 18 balls.
Anyway, I was hoping to walk away with some lessons that would be applicable to my blog, and I came up with two of them.
1. At 32, I’m no longer young enough that I can get away with not exercising.
My arms are sore and I have a bruise on my forearm, but that’s typical because I always work on hard stuff. However, this was the first time my physical ability has ever hindered my juggling. There’s one particular trick I used to do that required a lot of accuracy, but it was not physically difficult. When I tried it this time, I wasn’t able to throw that many balls, that fast, that high, and it hurt my shoulder to try.
More surprising than that is how sore my legs and lower back were. It’s because of all that bending down to pick up dropped objects. It never bothered me before, but last night it hurt to move. Taking off my shoes has never been that hard. (But my 65 year old juggling friend said he had no sympathy for me.)
Will this inspire me to start exercising to delay or hopefully reverse the decline in physical ability I’m starting to get a taste of? That remains to be seen. But at least I’m starting to think about it.
2. Hard work is sometimes mistaken for extreme talent.
Among the very best jugglers there were three brothers, ages 14, 11, and 7. Even the 7 year old was far beyond most of the people there. I talked to the 11 year old for a while, and we only found one thing where my personal record was better than his (and just barely). I thought this kid must be some kind of superhuman wonder boy. I started juggling before he was born. How could he be that much better than me?
Of course, kids can learn much faster than adults. But they had only been juggling for two years. Is something in the water where they live? Actually, the answer is much simpler. They practice 5-6 hours a day, 7 days a week. Wow, that’s a lot! It’s a full time job, in fact. It’s certainly more than the 0-2 hours a week I’ve been practicing for the last few years.
I wonder how often we assume that top performers must have tremendous natural talent, instead of giving credit to how hard they work. If there’s something you do in your spare time that you’d like to be better at, where would you be if you spent 40 hours a week on it?
There’s a scene in The Matrix where Morpheus is explaining to Neo how they’ve been hiding from the invincible agents who rule the Matrix. He says that a prophecy has foretold of someone known as “the One,” who Morpheus believes to be Neo, and who has the power to destroy the agents and save the human race (no pressure). Morpheus says:
“I won’t lie to you, Neo. Every single man or woman who has stood their ground, everyone who has fought an agent has died…I’ve seen an agent punch through a concrete wall. Men have emptied entire clips at them and hit nothing but air. Yet their strength and their speed are still based in a world that is built on rules. Because of that, they will never be as strong or as fast as you can be.”
“What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets?”
“No, Neo. I’m trying to tell you that when you’re ready, you won’t have to.”
It isn’t exactly clear what Morpheus means until the end. Neo is shot by Agent Smith and confirmed dead. But then Trinity tells him that the Oracle told her that the man she loved was the One, so he can’t be dead. When Neo realizes that he’s the One and the rules of the Matrix don’t apply to him, he gets up, uses his mind to stop the bullets fired by the three agents, sees through the illusion of the Matrix to the streaming green code behind it, effortlessly blocks Agent Smith’s punches with one hand, then jumps inside Agent Smith’s body and explodes him from the inside. Woah.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what we refer to as a quantum leap, a sudden and profound jump from one state to another. Neo started out not believing that he could ever be able to dodge bullets, then at some point his powers suddenly expanded so much that dodging bullets was beneath him. There were many steps in between that led up to this, but it culminated in a quantum leap—that one instant when Neo accepted that he was the One. Now he’s forever changed and can’t go back.
OK, this makes for a good example, but it’s just a movie. Let’s look at a real world example.
One of my hobbies is juggling. In college, my roommate and I had learned how to juggle three clubs individually, but we wanted to learn how to pass. This means that instead of juggling by yourself, every right hand throw or every other right hand throw passes a club to the other person. We saw in a video that it looked pretty cool, and we decided to give it a try.
It was very unnatural at first and it took us a while to get started, especially since we were both left-handed (we had to do it right-handed or we’d never be able to pass with anyone else). It took some time before we were able to pass even once. With some more practice we were able to pass a few times before dropping, and eventually we could consistently keep it going for a while before it fell apart.
Although we were getting better, my roommate said that we’d never be able to pass like the people in the video. He said that maybe if we practiced really hard and had a lucky run, we might be able to pull off 20 passes, but that was about it. And I agreed with him. We had made a lot of progress, but it was still very hard. We could continue to get better with practice, but realistically we weren’t going to get a hundred times better. Other people told us this as well.
What I hadn’t counted on was a quantum leap.
We stopped practicing at some point, never having been able to pass very well. But a few years later I met some people who had been passing for years, and I practiced with them. I don’t remember how long it took, but at some point it just clicked. It no longer seemed that every pass was a desperate Hail Mary, but time slowed down and it just came naturally. Today I can pass as long as I want to, and it gets boring unless I throw in some under-the-leg passes, left hand passes, and double spins. Aspiring to make 20 regular passes now seems like a joke.
Quantum leaps are much more likely to happen with mental abilities than with physical ones. You’re not likely to instantly lose 100 pounds, double your bench press weight, or cut two minutes off your mile. Why is that? Because your body is based in a world that is built on rules. Because of that, it will never be as strong or as fast as your mind can be.
Juggling may seem like a physical activity, but it’s predominantly mental. The reason I’m able to pass clubs is not because I increased my strength or my endurance. It’s not even really because I improved my accuracy, although that’s part of it. The main thing that happened is that I just learned how to pass! It was like flipping a switch on in my brain. Suddenly I just got it, and now it’s hard to understand why I couldn’t do it before.
You’ve surely made some quantum leaps in your life. Some common ones are learning how to walk, read, or ride a bike. Maybe you’ve made the quantum leap of going away to college, getting married, or having a baby. A lot of quantum leaps happen naturally, without a lot of forethought. Toddlers learn to walk because trying to is instinctive, they don’t have much else to do, and they don’t remember that it hurts when they fall. People get married because one day after spending years together, it just seems like the right thing to do.
But many quantum leaps aren’t inevitable. While nature and society deserve most of the credit for you learning how to walk and going off to college, it’s up to you to decide if you want to become super confident, develop a positive attitude, become self-employed, or establish healthy eating habits. How do you consciously initiate a quantum leap?
The main thing is to be aware that personal development often occurs in quantum leaps, as opposed to continuous growth. You can put in a lot of effort without seeing any results, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not making progress. Something’s happening inside your brain; it just hasn’t manifested in the physical world yet. At some point something clicks and you’re able to make the quantum leap. It won’t necessarily be an instantaneous shift, but once you see how it’s going to happen, the shift will happen relatively quickly compared to all the effort that led up to that moment.
Consider this:
At 211 degrees, water is hot.
At 212 degrees, it boils.
And with boiling water, comes steam.
And with steam, you can power a train.
One extra degree makes all the difference.
So don’t give up because your efforts don’t seem to be producing results. Just keep going. The bullets may seem impossibly fast, but if you keep trying to dodge them, maybe one day you’ll find that you don’t have to.
