The Myth of ‘Just Do It’

Yogi Berra, the former Major League baseball catcher and coach, once remarked that you can’t hit and think at the same time.

Of course, since he also reportedly said, “I really didn’t say everything I said,” it is not clear we should take his statements at face value. Nonetheless, a widespread view — in both academic journals and the popular press — is that thinking about what you are doing, as you are doing it, interferes with performance. The idea is that once you have developed the ability to play an arpeggio on the piano, putt a golf ball or parallel park, attention to what you are doing leads to inaccuracies, blunders and sometimes even utter paralysis. As the great choreographer George Balanchine would say to his dancers, “Don’t think, dear; just do.”

We should conclude that poor choices come not from thinking but from not being trained how to think.

Perhaps you have experienced this destructive force yourself. Start thinking about just how to carry a full glass of water without spilling, and you’ll end up drenched. How, exactly, do you initiate a telephone conversation? Begin wondering, and before long, the recipient of your call will notice the heavy breathing and hang up. Our actions, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty tells us, exhibit a “magical” efficacy; yet when we focus on them, they degenerate into the absurd. A 13-time winner on the Professional Golfers Association Tour, Dave Hill, put it like this: “Golf is like sex. You can’t be thinking about the mechanics of the act while you are performing.”

But why not?

A classic study by Timothy Wilson and Jonathan Schooler is frequently cited in support of the notion that experts, when performing at their best, act intuitively and automatically and don’t think about what they are doing as they are doing it, but just do it. The study divided subjects, who were college students, into two groups. In both groups, participants were asked to rank five brands of jam from best to worst. In one group they were asked to also explain their reasons for their rankings. The group whose sole task was to rank the jams ended up with fairly consistent judgments both among themselves and in comparison with the judgments of expert food tasters, as recorded in Consumer Reports. The rankings of the other group, however, went haywire, with subjects’ preferences neither in line with one another’s nor in line with the preferences of the experts. Why should this be? The researchers posit that when subjects explained their choices, they thought more about them.

Tucker Nichols

The expert food tasters were able to both provide reasons for their choices and, arguably, make the best choices.  Thus, we should conclude that poor choices come not from thinking but from not being trained how to think.

Although novice athletes need to think about what they are doing, experts in normal situations, we are told by the University of Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock in her recent book “Choke,” ought not to since, as she puts it, “careful consideration can get them in trouble.” Based on experiments she and her colleagues have performed, she concludes that high-pressure situations lead experts to think in action and that such thinking tends to cause choking, or “paralysis by analysis.” To prevent this, she advises, you need to “play outside your head.”

Yet contrary to Beilock’s findings, rather than keeping their minds out of the picture, experts at least sometimes seem to avoid the type of performance detriments associated with high-pressure situations precisely by concentrating intensely and focusing on the details of their movements.  When one’s mind is consumed by the angular momentum of one’s golf swing, there is no room for the type of nerves that lead to a choke.

That experts increase their focus on the task at hand in order to cope with pressure is suggested by studies, like those carried out by the University of Hull sports and exercise psychologist Adam Nicholls, which ask professional or elite athletes to keep a diary of stressors that occur and coping strategies that they employ during games. Though small scale, these studies do indicate that a common method of dealing with stress involves redoubling both effort and attention. As Nicholls told me, when I asked him about it, “increasing effort was an effective strategy and really helped the players.”

Of course, one may wonder whether athletes, or anyone for that matter, have accurate insight into what goes on in their minds.  Beilock’s work, for the most part, avoids this worry since her methods are comparatively objective. For example, in one study she and her research team measured the accuracy of golf putts when players were distracted from what they are doing compared with when they were asked to focus on what they are doing.  Such a procedure does not rely on subjective reports.

Yet there is a trade-off between greater objectivity and what researchers call “ecological validity.” Nicholls’s work, while perhaps less objective, is more ecologically valid because it looks at experts in real-life settings, asking them to do nothing other than what they would normally do. In contrast, Beilock — in a study suggesting that “well-learned performance may actually be compromised by attending to skill execution” — asks subjects who are putting golf balls to say “stop,” out loud at the exact moment they finish the follow-through of their swing. True enough, this interfered with performance. Yet expert golfers do not normally focus on the exact moment they complete their follow-through; expert golfers, when thinking about their actions, focus on something that matters. In fact, such a task would seem to be more distracting than any of the study’s explicit distractions.

Moreover, in contrast to Beilock’s studies, which typically use college students as subjects, Nicholls works with professional-level experts. This is relevant since, as with Wilson and Schooler’s experiment, it is the expert and not necessarily the college student with a couple of years, or sometimes a couple of hours, of experience who has the ability to hit and think at the same time.

Though the University of California at Berkeley philosopher Hubert Dreyfus takes his inspiration more from Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger than from empirical studies, the conclusions he arrives at resonate with Beilock’s. Dreyfus has long argued that “the enemy of expertise is thought” and that the apogee of human performance is exemplified in seamless, unreflective actions in which the self disappears.  In a debate with the University of Pittsburgh philosopher John McDowell, published in the journal Inquiry, Dreyfus tells us that whenever Homer describes his heroes at a feast, instead of having them deliberately reach for bread in baskets or bowls brimful to drink, “their arms shot out to the food lying ready before them.” Similarly, says Dreyfus, the grandmaster chess player might find “his arm going out and making a move before he can take in the board position.” As with the master archer in Eugen Herrigel’s perennially popular “Zen in the Art of Archery,” neither Odysseus feasting at a banquet nor the grandmaster playing chess moves his arm; rather “it shoots.”

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It may very well be that our ordinary actions, like eating — especially when famished after a battle — do in some sense just happen to us. Yet what are we to say about the grandmaster as he closes the mating net? According to Dreyfus, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger teach us that “what we are directly open to is not rational or even conceptual … [rather,] it is the affordance’s solicitation — such as the attraction of an apple when I’m hungry.” The problem with this picture for chess, however, is that the attractive apple is often poisoned. In such cases, leaving reason behind leads you right into your opponent’s trap.

In “All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age,” which can be seen as a paean to the idea that exemplary performance happens to, rather than is done by, an individual, Dreyfus and his co-author, the Harvard philosopher Sean Kelly, argue that letting the self get washed away in action is the key to living a meaningful life: it is when we are “taken over by the situation” that life “really shines and matters most.”  But is this right? The question “what is the meaning of life?” is, of course, a big one; however, if it includes developing one’s potential, what Immanuel Kant spoke of in the “Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals” as our duty to cultivate our “predispositions to greater perfection,” a duty he saw as often involving a struggle, then the idea that the expert should stand back and effortlessly let it happen just isn’t going to do it.

I remember how difficult philosophy seemed when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley. I was taking epistemology with Barry Stroud at the time and, feeling a bit disheartened, went to his office and asked, “Does it ever get easier?”  No, it doesn’t, he told me, since as you grow as a philosopher you work on increasingly more difficult problems. Although this was not the response I was hoping for, it made sense immediately, for I was entering college directly from a career as a professional ballet dancer.  Ballet, I knew, never gets easier; if anything, it gets harder, because as you develop as a dancer you develop both stricter standards for what counts as good dancing and your ability to evaluate your dancing, finding flaws that previously went unnoticed. Just as in Plato’s dialogue, the Apology, Socrates is wise because he knows that he is ignorant, it is, among other things, the ability to recognize where there is room for improvement that allows expert dancers to reach great heights.

The ability to see room for improvement, however, is not of much use unless one also has a strong and continuing desire to improve. And it may be that, more so than talent, it is this desire to improve, an attitude the Japanese call “kaizen,” that turns a novice into an expert.  I certainly had kaizen in abundance, as did most every professional dancer I knew.  It was ingrained in my body and mind to the extent that every class, rehearsal and performance was in part aimed at self-improvement.  And improving, especially after you have acquired a high level of skill, typically requires an enormous amount of effort.  Sometimes this effort is physical — and it certainly involves more physical effort than philosophy — yet it also involves concentration, thought, deliberation and will power.

The philosophers and psychologists who advocate a just-do-it mentality all admit that during those rare occasions when something goes wrong, performers or athletes need to direct their attention to their actions. Yet although from an audience’s point of view, things rarely go wrong, from the expert’s point of view, things are going wrong all the time. Lynn Seymour, who was a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet, commented that when she danced with Rudolph Nureyev in the film “I Am a Dancer,” she was too cowardly to ever watch it: “whenever I see myself dancing I practically die.”

When we make the morning coffee, tie our shoes or drive to work, we are satisfied with performance that is good enough. And it is easy to see how an evolutionary advantage could accrue to those who could think about more important things during routine activities like grooming. Yet there are significant differences between everyday actions and the actions of experts, since for a golfer at the U.S. Open or a dancer on stage at the Royal Opera House, there is nothing more important than the task at hand.

Perhaps golf is like sex, not because, as Dave Hill claimed, attention to performance interferes with expert action, but rather because both the sex drive and the expert’s drive to excel can be all-encompassing. And excelling in such highly competitive arenas as professional-level golf requires not just doing what has normally worked but doing better than ever. Yet doing better than ever cannot be automatic.

In its “just-do-it” advertising campaign, Nike presumably used the phrase to mean something like, “stop procrastinating, get off your posterior and get the job done.” Interpreted as such, I’m in favor of “just-do-it.” However, when interpreted as “experts perform best when not thinking about what they are doing,” the idea of just-do-it is a myth.

If so, the enormous popularity of books that tell us how to achieve mastery in chess, cinch a business deal or become a better parent with neither effort nor thought nor attention may turn on our preference for “magical” efficiency over honest toil. They reach the status of best sellers for the same reason as do diet books that advocate eating as much as you want as long as you abstain from some arbitrary category of food: not because they work, but because they are easy to follow.

As for Balanchine’s claim that his dancers shouldn’t think, I asked Violette Verdy about this. Verdy was a principal dancer with New York City Ballet for 18 years under Balanchine’s direction. But she brushed off the question. “Oh, that,” she replied. “He only said that when a dancer was stuck; like an elevator between floors.”

By BARBARA GAIL MONTERO