The Nap Had Nothing To Do With It
"I think it was the nap that did it. I'm going to start napping between classes from now on." Let me stop you right there...
"I think it was the nap that did it. I'm going to start napping between classes from now on."
Let me stop you right there as I douse your excitement with some good news and bad news. The good news is you were finally able to memorize some difficult material for one of your hardest classes. The bad news, backed by anyone who has ever tried and failed to implement a magic-bullet strategy, is the nap had nothing to do with it.
Yes, you took an hour-long nap (hey, that's too long) between your morning and afternoon classes. Yes, you don't normally do this. Yes, your memory seemingly sprang into life after the nap, allowing you to recall some of the toughest subject matter you've faced this semester. But no...
The nap had nothing to do with it.
"So what was it, then?"
How long did you say you've been working on memorizing this material?
"At least thirty minutes a day for three weeks."
And do you think out of those 630 minutes of intense memorization the 60 minutes of napping you crushed this morning was the skeleton key to unlock that treasure chest of knowledge?
"...maybe?"
Maybe you need another nap.
This exchange with my oldest son a few weeks ago highlights how unnatural it can be for our brains to isolate the correlation of our actions to an outcome. There are thousands of variables from which to choose and many more thousands we don't even know about going on behind the scenes. It's akin to the actions of a post-war cargo cult, building planes and Jeeps out of straw in hopes that the real planes containing supplies and advanced technology that arrived during World War II would return again. Luckily for humankind, however, we devised empirical methods of gathering knowledge that focus on open-eyed scrutiny and testing of our assumptions. Unfortunately, that shit takes time and most humans are impatient.
When something finally clicked for our napping student, why did he immediately skip over all the hard work as the probable cause? Well, which would I rather do? Spend ten hours doing rote memorization or take one long ass nap? But when it comes to determining the correlation between action and progress, I'd be hard-pressed to find a metric better than Time Spent Doing. And I don't mean talking about doing or thinking about doing, I mean actually doing. If I run a software company and my engineers spend more time in meetings than in the code, our progress will tank. Trying to zero in on the minutiae of correlation is missing the point if I'm not dedicating enough time to the subject in the first place.
When I started this Substack, I set aside the same time every day to write so I could always ship a new essay at the end of the week. I was terrified at first because I was only making an educated guess about what a successful routine looked like. In the beginning, I was over-indexing on the subject matter of the essays, thinking the topic had to be perfect for me to be motivated to write. After a few, I got a feel for what milestones I needed to hit along the way to avoid last-minute panic on shipping day and eventually, I felt confident enough in the process that the subject matter didn't matter. I know if I pick a topic on Monday and start an outline, the rest will fall into place as the days tick away. It reminds me of asking a filmmaker to tell a compelling visual story about something as mundane as getting the mail. The mileage they put in allowed them to sculpt a routine that will provide a successful outcome, regardless of the subject matter.
So the next time he comes to me with tall tales of a magic bullet, I'll waft out this simple reminder: "The nap had nothing to do with it."