I’ve been thinking about a quote making the rounds in podcasts and Navy SEAL memoirs, something I first heard from Jocko Willink, I think:
“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations; we fall to the level of our training.”
Back in fifth grade when we were introduced to band, I learned the clarinet because that’s what my older sister played, and my parents were not about to buy a trumpet just because I wanted to play The Waltons theme song. I ended up liking the clarinet, practiced diligently, and by the end of high school was good enough to go on to become a professional musician, but that’s not something people where I was from went on to do in life. We followed more traditional, reliable routes, or maybe, better stated, chose careers where you didn’t need to be in the top 1% of 1% to make a living. At least this is how I think about my decisions back then and long into my adulthood, perhaps even sensibly so.
Playing clarinet is the last instance I can think of in my life, of all the endeavors I’ve tried, where I experienced that direct correlation between training and performance. I didn't pick up the clarinet and pump out Mozart like a musical genius. I had to work at reaching excellence. So many other things in my life have been murkier, subjective efforts, more like aiming for mediocre, or not about training at all but rather about someone else being irrational because they didn't get their morning coffee or being insecure and petty. And I’ve had lots of training in lots of different areas; it’s just that none of it has been aimed at excellence or becoming exceptional or demanding excellence because life or death was on the line. Mostly, I’ve been about the business of checking boxes or compliance or competence, unfortunately.
Until now, that is: for the past few months I've been in training for something I’ll talk about more in future posts (after/IF I successfully pass the training) that has me thinking with intention about that quote, “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations; we fall to the level of our training.”
Take what happened this past weekend during training. The drill was straightforward: at a speed of one mph, navigate a course of small orange flags in an arroyo while simultaneously counting strides and scanning in what’s known as the “searcher’s cube” (six directions) for any objects that shouldn’t be in the arroyo, and then report both number of strides and number plus kind of objects detected to the instructor waiting at the end of the course.
I thought I’d be pretty good at this since I’ve been practicing attention every day all year. Boy, was I wrong.
The course turned out to be just a hundred meters long with eleven objects, none of them particularly hidden or camouflaged. I lost count of my strides (79-92, somewhere in there?) and spotted only three objects. I somehow missed the obvious skull and crossbones, and one brightly colored object I identified as a teddy bear in a sweater turned out to be a painted pot.
A dismal performance.
The next exercise leveled up the attention demand: count strides, navigate on a bearing, maintain equal distance from the person to my left and right, scan in the searcher’s cube, find the objects that don’t belong, and cover the assigned area within the time limit. Oh, and make sure not to ram a foot into a cactus or step on a rattlesnake or do a faceplant stumbling over roots and rocks, all while carrying a backpack filled with 35 pounds of required gear.
I felt flustered and frustrated. So. Very. Difficult. I managed to find one object—a slipper—and simultaneously lost my radio, ripped out of my chest pack as I bushwhacked through a scrub oak thicket but something I didn't notice when it happened. [Side trip: thankfully, someone else found it—and now I can laugh about it because a) I’m not paying to replace a $300 radio, and b) I lost it while searching for something else which is absurd and stupid).
Sure, I’m new at all this and I’ll surely get better with practice (or so I tell myself), but to be self-evaluative for a minute, I expected to do much better at these skills, specifically the attention-related skills. What happened?
I fell to the level of my training. Here are my takeaways:
1. I’ve known for a long time that I’m no good at multitasking, that I’m a slow thinker, and that I’m easily distracted. My attention walks are singular-focus activities. I’m not dealing with any additional inputs—no toddler asking questions, no conversation with a friend, no podcast, no counting of strides, no bearing to follow. So, while I can perhaps claim that my ability to pay attention has grown over the past year in some ways, I am not able to transfer that skill into a situation where I need to do more than one thing simultaneously, with all those things demanding attention of different kinds. Counting strides doesn’t require the kind of attention applied to noticing a smell or a footprint but I still need to be able to do both somehow and this isn’t something I thought about with practicing attention.
2. So, I need to change my practice, up my training, and train a more expansive version of attention. A meditator mentioned taking their practice into a busy place so they could learn how to summon a meditative state under more typical, chaotic, distracting conditions. Clearly, I need to train in these ways as well, if I want to perform in situations where conditions aren’t optimal, where I need to manage a lot of inputs and overcome obstacles of all sorts and somehow still pay attention.
I haven’t pushed myself in my adult life like this and on the one hand, I feel disappointed in myself about this. Why didn’t I? What happened to that kid who was showing such promise back in the day? How did I get so mediocre and lazy, a mid-pack performer with nothing much at stake? Questions not unknown to the 3am musings of the typical 50-year-old, I suppose. It wasn’t that I didn’t expect exceptional things of myself but rather that I just never trained to be exceptional, where that’s what I would “fall to” when performing.
So, for maybe the first time in my adult life, I’m training for excellence in something again. The stakes are the life and death kind, where I won’t be able to fake anything. I will fall to the level of my training. That’s pretty motivating for training, both for getting me through this stage where I am floundering and frustrated by my incompetence and for that time to come when I might not feel like training (do it anyway).
During the pandemic I bought a clarinet. I hadn’t played since I left high school. My expectations were low. Would I even remember the fingerings? The Yamaha arrived and perhaps the whiff of cork grease was enough to set everything in motion, but out from memory came Camille Saint-Saëns’ Sonate, the piece I’d played for my senior music competition. Thirty years later, unbelievable, but actually, when I think about the hundreds of hours I put into learning, memorizing, performing that piece, all that training, putting in the work, not so unbelievable.
We do not rise to the level of our expectations; we fall to level of our training.
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