I once bowled six strikes in a row and it’s probably the coolest thing I’ve ever “implemented” from a book. It was from the Dan Pink book To Sell Is Human and somewhere in the book it had this positive psychology hack that would help you improve how you performed on a specific task. All you had to do is ask yourself an open-ended question like “can you do X?” before you did X.
I deployed this trick at the bowling alley and asked myself “can you bowl a strike?” It worked six straight times and then failed the seventh. I ended up with a 200, the best score of my life.
I haven’t bowled much at all since then and have not pursued professional bowling but was reminded of it while reading The Inner Game of Tennis.
In the book, the author, W. Timothy Gallwey, shares his approach for thinking about improvement through the lens of tennis.
He argues that everyone has two selves: Self 1, the “teller,” and Self 2, the “doer.” It is the relationship between these two selves that determines how well people are able to translate “knowledge into effective action.” This is what he calls the “inner game.”
Throughout the book the message is quite clear: we spend far too much time in Self 1 mode and struggle to let go enough to shift into Self 2 mode.
The problem is that you can’t just “do” doing. We have to find ways to loosen the grip that Self 1 has over our actions. Which is really hard because most of us are brought up in cultures that tell us that life is pretty much all about avoiding bad outcomes, aiming at “good” goals, and trying harder when we fail.
As he writes:
…we live in an achievement-oriented society where people tend to be measured by their competence in various endeavors. Even before we received praise or blame for our first report card, we were loved or ignored for how well we performed our very first actions. From this pattern, one basic message came across loud, clear, and often: you are a good person and worthy of respect only if you do things successfully.
At least in tennis, he offers a way out. The first step is simply to “see your strokes as they are.” In Gallwey’s telling there are no good or bad strokes.
When we label a stroke as “bad” we are stuck in that frame of mind. We then tighten, make changes, and never give ourselves the opportunity to be present enough to notice that our natural instincts and intuition (Self 2) might provide a better way forward.
When I bowled those six strikes in a row, I remember feeling absolutely locked in. I was “in the zone” as they say in sports. And as a pretty shitty bowler, I can’t say I had any sort of knowledge of how it was happening.
We are convinced that better knowledge will fix our challenges but by searching for fixes we imply problems and Gallwey suggests that we simply discard the idea that there are problems to be fixed at all. The path to real improvement is only through trusting our Self 2, the doer, and allowing ourselves to become more aware.
At McKinsey I remember being surprised when a manager ignored several minor mistakes I made on a document in my first year. Up to that point in my life every authority figure and institution was organized around the idea that the goal of life is to do perfect work and to avoid mistakes. But here I was at McKinsey, where the expectations were much, much higher than any place I had been before. It turns out that if you are aiming high, you really don’t have time for small mistakes like spelling errors and formatting. They get figured out through iteration and self-awareness. When I started realizing I was making the mistakes, it was easy to fix them in the flow of deeper work because no one had labeled it as bad in the first place. I was learning to take ownership over my work, something that has served me well working on my own.
This is really hard for people to do. Many of us search for approval or permission and have never been left alone enough in our lives to really connect with our own Self 2’s.
I also don’t think I would have believed that this way of approaching things was possible if not for the two years I spent at McKinsey.
Gallwey argues this is a secret, hidden in plain sight:
What I have tried to illustrate is that there is a natural learning process which operates within everyone - if it is allowed to. This process is waiting to be discovered by all those who do not know of its existence…To discover this natural learning process, it is necessary to let go of the old process of correcting faults, that is, it is necessary to let go of judgements and see what happens.
This goes against all our natural instincts, and I sense that our desire to control the world and other people might actually be driven by our own lack of inner game.
That is, when we fail to connect with our own natural doer, we become a bit frustrated with ourselves and end up trying to overcompensate by overplanning and overengineering our lives.
This is what Gallwey calls the “outer game.”
Most of the adult world is oriented around succeeding at the outer game. If someone has a good job, high salary, and a nice house, everyone happily ignores that person’s lack of an inner game.
When I reflected back on that bowling memory it stands out as a really great moment during a two year stretch in which I didn’t feel awesome about my life. It was an inner game moment in a time when I was living in an outer game reality.
Luckily, the indie world forces you to grapple with your inner game and this has made all the difference as I’ve found a path I enjoy being on and one where I have enough awareness to see what is happening.
Just see your strokes as they are.
Just see your days as they are.
In paycheck world, I was incentivized to succeed at the outer game, no matter the cost to my inner game. Making six figures while feeling like my soul was dying was high-status and praised. I told myself for far too long “you should appreciate what you have,” a voice that it seems many other people in good-paying jobs have these days. But I was making the same mistake Gallwey’s students did. I was telling myself how I should feel rather than noticing what I was experiencing.
The paycheck world doesn’t give a damn if you have an inner game and this is a key thing to realize. Some people can go within and find it in that world. I couldn’t.
All I know is that learning to trust myself and releasing my grip on the world is what has led to almost every interesting thing that has happened to me in the last six years.
Experiencing this in my day-to-day feels like the magic of bowling several strikes in a row and I hope you get to experience it one day too.
I want to close with this quote from Gallwey which I think is fitting:
In most lectures that I have given recently, I remind myself and the audience that even though I come from California I don’t believe in self-improvement, and I certainly don’t want to improve them…I don’t think anyone’s self 2 needs improvement from birth to death. It had always been fine. I, more than anyone, need to remember that. Yes, our backhands can improve, and I’m sure my writing can get better, and certainly our skills in relating to each other on the planet can improve.
But the cornerstone of stability is to know that there is nothing wrong with the essential human being.
+ The book is a short read, about 125 pages. Check it out if this sounds interesting.