Today’s piece goes a level deeper, and is a gift to my substack members. Thanks for your support!
I introduce today a key new distinction in my work: the difference between acquisitional learning and reorganizational learning, and how consequential understanding this is for any ambitious person.
If you’re not already a member, I think this one is surely worth 5 bucks.
Also, my fiber internet is down and I’m still on satellite backup and rationing data, so The Human Maturity Podcast is on hold until that’s fixed. I did, however, watch my first DVD in years and it was a novel and nostalgic experience.
When I was a springboard diver, one of the stranger things I had to learn was how to surrender control of my body while flying through the air.
This is not generally considered a good time to surrender control.
When you’re learning a new dive with multiple somersaults, however, you have a problem. You “know where” the dives you’ve already learned are. If you can do a double somersault, your body knows what a double feels like. You know when to come out of the tuck, straighten your body, and prepare to enter the water.
But suppose you’re learning a two-and-a-half.
Where is two-and-a-half? You don’t know. You cannot know.
That’s what you’re trying to learn.
So your coach stands on the pool deck watching your rotation and “calls you out.” You take off, initiate the somersault, and then wait.
“HUP!” That’s your cue.
When you hear it, you kick out.
Imagine driving blindfolded at 35 mph (and pulling 6-7g) toward a brick wall and having to make a hard right when your coach yells “HUP!” from outside the car. That’s what it’s like. and it’s never not scary.
This call is not advice. It’s not something you take under consideration. There’s no time to think. You act instantly or you crash.
You come out when you’re called, and there are very good reasons for this.
Your coach can see something you cannot. They can see your body rotating from outside. They know what a two-and-a-half looks like. You don’t yet know what it somatically feels like.
The entire learning structure exists to bridge that gap, and usually it’s terrifying. But if you want to get better, then you must be terrified and do it anyway. There’s no way around it. The fear tapers slowly after that, but it doesn’t disappear until you’ve done the dive dozens of times.
Where I Know What to Do
I remember learning a front two-and-a-half from the three-meter board. I did ten or so doubles from one meter. That’s what they call the “lead up.” Unfortunately, they do very little for the fear.
The idea is that you find a rhythm and are imagining another half rotation, then take it upstairs with whatever terror remains. I knew well how to do a double, but that became a problem.
On my first attempt, I took off, chased my feet into a tuck, and collapsed under the fear. Instead of waiting for the call, I kicked out where I knew the double was. It wasn’t even a thought; it was a vain hope that somehow I could bail out.
It was familiar.
I knew what to do there. Thank you very much, I’ll just do two somersaults for now. Something in me really thought I could get away with that.
Unfortunately, I had plenty of room and angular momentum left. After kicking out at the double perfectly (I was later told), arms at my sides and totally committed to a feet-first entry, I rotated another ninety degrees, flat as a board, smacking so parallel to the water that I didn’t go deeper than a foot.
It was one of the most painful experiences of my life, like being stung by 1,000 wasps. My entire front seared with red-hot pain from head to toe and I cried into the edge of the pool for a while. I couldn’t see right for twenty minutes.
There is something wonderfully clarifying about hitting water face-first at high speed.
I had tried to make myself safer by returning to what I knew, and that’s what hurt me. This is one of the most important things I’ve learned about learning.
Sometimes the thing that feels safer is only safer within the range of competence you already possess.
Once you are attempting to move beyond that range, returning to the familiar can become the dangerous move.
Follow the Fucking Instructions
I recently wrote about something I call FTFI: Follow the Fucking Instructions.
When I work with people I’m often surprised by how difficult this is for them.
I’ll give an assignment with very specific instructions designed to make them practice a particular thing. Then they’ll change the assignment to something more comfortable.
From their perspective, some of these modifications probably seem completely reasonable.
But the instruction isn’t arbitrary: It’s the apparatus creating the learning condition.
This is something that springboard diving makes extremely obvious because the consequences arrive quickly and often painfully.
If I tell you to wait until you’re called out and you decide, while rotating, that you’d rather come out where you’re comfortable, reality will provide unusually prompt feedback.
Most adult learning doesn’t work that way.
You can modify the assignment, preserve your existing way of thinking, produce something plausible, and walk away believing you learned something.
Nobody lands on their face.
You just remain organized exactly as you were before, with a manufactured narrative and self-image that you learned something.
The Information You Don’t Have Yet
This points to a basic problem with learning that I don’t think we talk about enough.
Sometimes the capacity you’re trying to develop is the very capacity you would need in order to know what to do. If I already knew where two-and-a-half was, I wouldn’t need someone to call me out. The information I need is unavailable from inside my existing competence.
That’s why the coach is there.
This occurs in many physical disciplines. Gymnastics, trampoline, aerial arts, trapeze, martial arts, freestyle skiing, and countless other activities eventually put you in situations where an experienced person can perceive something you cannot yet perceive.
But the same problem occurs in less dramatic forms of learning. If you don’t yet think structurally, you cannot reliably use your existing structural thinking to determine how to learn structural thinking.
And by the way, there are many highly intelligent people who cannot think structurally, and have no idea what they’re missing, often precisely because they’re so intelligent that they cannot imagine an entirely different domain of mental perception that they suck at.
If you don’t recognize the way you organize information, you cannot necessarily identify when you’re reverting to it. If you don’t know what you don’t know, you cannot independently generate all of the conditions required to discover it.
Research gives us little reason to trust learners’ intuitions about how they learn best. People can readily tell researchers how they prefer to learn, but those preferences do not reliably identify the methods through which they actually learn most effectively. This is critical.
A major review by cognitive psychologists Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork found virtually no credible evidence that matching instruction to a learner’s supposed “learning style” improves learning.
In another study of 426 college students, students’ assessed learning styles neither predicted their study behavior particularly well nor predicted their performance. What “feels like” the best way to learn and what actually produces learning are not necessarily the same thing.
I’d argue that anyone who’s learned something of serious significance already knows this. You learn best by doing what experienced people tell you is the way to learn. You accept the method with their expertise, because because they have information about the learning process that you do not yet possess; that is, they know what it takes.
In other words:
At some point, someone will have to tell you when to come out.
This Is Not Blind Trust
There’s an obvious problem here. Coaches can be wrong. I’ve received bad calls as a diver, and made bad calls as a diving coach, too. Calling is a skill in and of itself and it’s not easy.
A coach can call you early. A coach can call you late. You can react too slowly. You might kick in the wrong direction because you’re so disoriented. Things can go wrong and sometimes will.
That’s tough: following the instruction does not guarantee safety. This is important because otherwise the lesson becomes something stupid like:
Trust authority.
No, that’s not the lesson.
The alternative to following the call isn’t perfect safety. The alternative is relying upon an internal reference that you do not have. That’s a completely different calculation.
I’m not surrendering because the coach is infallible. I’m surrendering because I have voluntarily entered a learning situation in which there is an information asymmetry.
They can see something I can’t. They know something I don’t. And for a very specific period of time, I have agreed to let their perception govern my action.
That’s not obedience. It’s developmentally necessary surrender.
Self-Authority Includes Surrender
This can sound paradoxical if we have a simplistic understanding of self-authority.
Shouldn’t mature people think for themselves? Of course. But self-authority doesn’t mean maintaining conscious control over everything at every moment.
I chose the coach. I chose to get on the board. I chose to learn the dive. I understand why the call is necessary. If I conclude that my coach is incompetent, I can stop training with them. All of that belongs to me.
But once I’ve made those decisions and I’m rotating through the air, I come out when they say so. The surrender occurs inside self-authority.
I haven’t surrendered authority over my development. I’ve used that authority to enter a situation in which I temporarily surrender control because doing so is necessary to develop a capacity I don’t yet possess.
That’s a very different thing from submission.
Submission says:
Your judgment supersedes mine because you are the authority.
Developmental surrender says:
For this specific purpose, in this specific domain, I am temporarily allowing your perception to guide me because you possess information or capacity that I do not yet.
And here’s the crucial part: The goal is to eventually stop needing the call.
In most sports with somersaults and twists, you’re supposed to learn how to “spot,” which means not relying on somatic feeling after some time. You keep your eyes open: water/sky/water/sky/water/kick. That’s a two-and-one-half.
If you learn that, you become more independent of calls, more quickly. That increases self-authority and transfers to future dives, but you never escape needing occasional calls. Greatness requires learning to spot and it isn’t easy. I never did.
How Authority Should Make Itself Obsolete
After enough repetitions, something changes.
You begin to feel where two-and-a-half is, and ideally you learn to spot it, too.
The external information becomes internal capacity. You take off, rotate, kick out, and enter the water without anyone yelling at you. This is what good developmental authority should do.
It should progressively make itself unnecessary.
The coach’s perception temporarily supplements yours so that yours can develop. The teacher’s structure temporarily constrains your thinking so that you can develop greater structural capacity. The instruction creates a condition you cannot yet reliably create for yourself.
Eventually, if the learning works, you don’t need it.
This is also how we can distinguish developmental surrender from dependency. If the relationship continually requires me to surrender my judgment because the authority figure must remain the person who knows, something isn’t right.
If the relationship progressively increases my capacity to see, decide, and act for myself, the temporary asymmetry has served its purpose.
The Problem With Staying in Control
There is a deeper paradox here.
If I insist on retaining control throughout the entire learning process, I can only exercise the capacities I already possess.
Read that again.
If I will only act according to what already makes sense to me, then my present organization has become the final authority over the process intended to reorganize it.
That’s a nearly perfect recipe for what most education and training is: acquisitional learning.
I can accumulate more information. I can learn terminology. I can add techniques. I can become more sophisticated. But I remain fundamentally organized in the same way.
Reorganizational learning is different.
At some point, it has to interfere with the organization doing the learning.
And that means there will be moments when what you’re being asked to do does not yet make complete sense from inside your existing organization.
Of course it doesn’t.
If it already made complete sense, you wouldn’t be reorganizing.
Why We Modify the Assignment
This also explains something I watch repeatedly as a teacher.
When people encounter uncertainty, they often modify the learning condition until it becomes compatible with capacities they already possess.
The structural assignment becomes a personality analysis. The experiment becomes a discussion. The completed attempt becomes a request for preliminary feedback. The unfamiliar syntax gets translated back into familiar language.
The student experiences this as personalized adaptation.
From the teacher’s perspective, it can look like someone kicking out at the double.
There. I know where I am again.
The problem is that sometimes the entire point of the exercise is to take you somewhere you don’t know where you are. The instruction is specifically designed to prevent you from solving the problem in the way you already know how to solve it.
That’s why following instructions can sometimes be developmentally necessary rather than merely administratively convenient.
You don’t follow them because compliance is virtuous. You follow them because the instruction carries information your current organization cannot yet generate.
The Risk Cannot Be Removed
This is where I think a lot of contemporary developmental thinking becomes unrealistic.
We want learning to be “safe.” We want people to retain agency. We want teachers not to abuse authority. We want students to question assumptions.
Good.
All of those concerns are legitimate.
But they can accumulate into an impossible requirement:
Develop without ever surrendering control to anything you don’t already understand.
You certainly can do that, and you will get nowhere beyond what your self-image and narrative manufacture.
Real learning contains epistemic risk. You might trust the wrong teacher. You might follow a bad instruction. You might fail. You might look stupid. You might temporarily become less competent rather than more competent. You might discover that something you were certain about was wrong. Sometimes you might even land flat on your face. But if any of that happens, you will learn important lessons from it.
The objective cannot be to eliminate those possibilities.
The objective is to develop enough self-authority to decide which risks are worth taking, which teachers are worth trusting, and which developmental containers deserve temporary surrender.
And then, having decided, actually surrender.
Come Out When I Call You
Looking back, the lesson from diving seems almost embarrassingly obvious. I wanted to learn something my body didn’t yet know. Someone standing outside me could see what I couldn’t. I agreed to let him guide me through the part I didn’t know.
Then fear arrived. And at exactly the moment when I most needed the learning structure, I abandoned it and returned to what was familiar.
I kicked out at the double and got the shit slapped out of me by a swimming pool. Of course, I was furious at my coach because the alternative would be to look at my total responsibility.
The psychological versions are usually less dramatic and more difficult to notice for most students. Reality often lets us get away with them for years. We hire teachers and then reinterpret their instructions. We enter developmental relationships and then negotiate away the developmental demand. We ask to be shown something we cannot see and then reject the perspective because it doesn’t match what we already see. “This feels harsh” which is a judgment, not a feeling. “This doesn’t resonate with me,” when it hasn’t been actually tried and you’re not a guitar string.
These are symbolic and deflective forms of resistance that you have the right to invoke, possibly in a way that’s perpendicular to what you say you want.
We say we want to change while reserving the right to remain in control of exactly how change occurs. That’s a cake-and-eat-it-too problem, and because nobody hits the water face-first, we may never realize what happened.
Sometimes learning requires something more difficult than effort. It requires voluntarily entering a situation in which someone else can see further than you can, while knowing perfectly well that they may sometimes be wrong. That’s difficult.
It requires enough self-authority to surrender without submitting, enough discernment to choose where to surrender, and enough courage, once you’ve made that choice, not to retreat to the familiar merely because the unfamiliar has become frightening.
Sometimes the only way to discover where two-and-a-half is…
…is to wait for the call.
And when you’ve only ever done a double, it seems like you’ve been in that tuck forever while you hang on for your life.