There is a general bias in academic culture to focus on the fact that one of the things we learn through research is to be skeptical, at least in our fields of expertise. Andrew Pettegrew, a noted Reformation scholar set me straight though. We were at dinner and I started out a story by saying "You’ll never believe this." He interrupted me and said "I’m a scholar. I’m trained to believe the unbelievable." I don’t even remember what story I told, whether it dealt with my research or with something that had happened to me that afternoon, but his comment taught me what was hands down the single most important thing I learned in graduate school.

When I thought about it, I realized that is the more powerful and important skill that we learn through research. It’s not to have our bullshit detectors out constantly. Rather, it’s that we do research and testing and when the testing shows us something unbelievable, we don’t reject it because common sense tells us it isn’t so. We might need a second round of research and testing, more data, better controls. But in the end, it’s not our common sense and skepticism that allows us to think new things in new ways. Those are merely the obstacles that keep us from think foolish things in foolish ways, but nothing interesting, great or innovative ever comes from them.

Uncommon sense, backed with data, lies behind every idea worth propagating.

Telecommuting from my mountain hideaway, I’m blessed to be insulated from most biz-speak. I depend on my visits with my brother to tell me about the latest trends in useless business mumbo jumbo. As a former engineer and business strategist for HP and current executive leadership coach for HP, IDX and GE (he only works for companies that go by acronyms apparently) and now on his own, he hears a lot of it. Also, his in-laws are mostly real-estate agents, a profession that generally has a gluttonous appetite for devouring motivational speakers and such. So he’s virtually a certified expert on biz-speak mumbo jumbo.

Anyway, I was telling him something and he made some sarcastic response along the lines of "Yeah, 212!" I had no idea what this was until he explained to me the mathematically and scientifically challenged metaphor behind 212: The Extra Degree.

Motivational speakers tend to be mathematically challenged. The proper sports lingo requires that one give 110% or even 200% (100% psychological and 100% physical). Of course, anyone who tells you to give 110% is, ipso facto, full of crap or a very poor mathematician. Anyway, these people, who espouse the so-called 212 principle preach instead of the gospel of giving just a little bit more. They love to say things like you’ll see in the YouTube video such as:

• From 2000 to 2006, the average difference in PGA victories was 1.71 strokes.
• In the 2004 Olympics, the 200m freestyle swim had margin of victory of .43 seconds (hey, in 2008, some swim events had a margin of victory of .01 seconds).

The unreasoning goes like this. If you have some water on the stove and you start adding heat, you take it from room cold water right out of the tap to 211 degrees and pretty much nothing happens. But if you go just a little farther, to 212 degrees, there is a state change, the water boils, real action takes place, nothing is the same. That little change makes all the difference. So in your sport/life/business/blog you have to keep pushing because sometimes you’re at 211 degrees without really knowing it and if you can go just a bit farther, success, riches, sex and unlimited ice cream await you.

There is the minor problem that when you take water from 211 degrees to 212 degrees, in fact nothing changes under standard, idealized conditions (i.e. the thermodynamic equivalent of the frictionless surface used in mechanics). This then leads us into the major problem of taking water from 212 degrees in liquid form, to 212 degrees in vapor form. Since the latent heat of vaporization is roughly 540 calories per gram, depending on conditions, it turns out that the state change effect, which is "just a little farther", is in fact a hell of a lot of work. So to keep it all in metric, if the water out of your tap is 20 degrees, it takes 80 calories per gram to heat it to the boiling point. But, to actually get it to boil takes almost seven times the energy that it took to get it there. So you think you’re almost there, you’ve almost reached that pinnacle of unlimited ice cream, but whatever it took you to get where you are, you now have to be prepared to plow 6.75 times as much energy into it to achieve the state change.

In my experience as a historian, this pretty much correlates with what it really takes to push through to boiling and become one of the best at what you do. I read old manuscripts which can be very difficult to decipher. To get to the point where you can read 90% of the words and get the vague sense takes a couple of months. To be able to read 99% takes perhaps a year or two and you get the meaning right in 99.9% of the cases. To get to the point where you can decipher 99.9% of the words and are considered a leading expert and people come to you for help and advice seems to take some natural apptitude, dogged determination and over a decade of focussed effort. For most people it simply isn’t worth it to push form 211 to 212 degrees because of the massive amount of energy it takes to achieve state change.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article on Asymptotes

Put another way, excellence is asymptotic in my experience. An asymptote is a curve that approaches a line, but will never touch it. In other words, the trip from beginner to not bad goes pretty fast, the trip from not bad to damn good takes quite a while and the trip from damn good to perfect can’t be attained. Now, you might at this point say that I’m missing the point, that the metaphor works in that there’s a point where you break through and stand out from the crowd and magic happens. I understand that, but when you take into account the actual physics of boiling water, the metaphor makes a lot more sense.

I remember a great magician I used to like to watch on the streets. Someone came up to him and said "You’re really good." He said, "No, I’m great. Do you know the difference?" The difference is that it only took him 80 calories to be good. But long years of trial and practice, the investment of another 540 calories made him great. From incompetence to competence takes 80 calories. From competence to excellence takes 540 calories.

Marshall Goldsmith sees it altogether differently. He argues that it’s not that the amount of effort required for the state change is massively different, but that more of the same will typically not get you there at all. He’s the author of the top-selling success guide What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful. To stay with the 212 metaphor, Goldsmith thinks that it actually takes different skills to make a huge leap like the one from liquid to gas than the skills it took to get you from cold to hot.

Reason has failed the 212ers not because of flawed logic but because of bad information with the consequence that they don’t know when to give up. They don’t know that they’ve become competent but have neither the drive nor the aptitude to become excellent. I’m not, by the way, saying I do. I sing the praise of mediocrity in most endeavours (alas, that’s another topic, but I am not being facetious). I only strive for excellence in a couple of areas and, through long practice and much suffering, I have perhaps arrived in one or two areas. Mostly, though, I accept mediocrity for the simple reason that I understand how many calories are required for a state change and I know that I can only pour those calories into a few things and I had better be damn sure they really matter. 540 calories hurts! And if Marshall Goldsmith is right, more won’t help anyway. What is required is different.

Is it worth it to try to make the water boil?