Use-It-or-Lose-It Tendency
Skills and mental abilities weaken when not regularly practiced. To retain rarely used skills, one must engage in continuous practice, akin to a pilot using a flight simulator.
THE IDEA
Tell your readers to use it or lose it. If you don’t use your muscles, they get weak. If you don’t use your mind it begins to fail.
—John Templeton
All skills attenuate with disuse. I was a whiz at calculus until age twenty, after which the skill was soon obliterated by total nonuse. The right antidote to such a loss is to make use of the functional equivalent of the aircraft simulator employed in pilot training. This allows a pilot to continuously practice all of the rarely used skills that he can’t afford to lose.
Throughout his life, a wise man engages in practice of all his useful, rarely used skills, many of them outside his discipline, as a sort of duty to his better self. If he reduces the number of skills he practices and, therefore, the number of skills he retains, he will naturally drift into error from man with a hammer tendency. His learning capacity will also shrink as he creates gaps in the lattice-work of theory he needs as a framework for understanding new experience. It is also essential for a thinking man to assemble his skills into a checklist that he routinely uses. Any other mode of operation will cause him to miss much that is important.
Skills of a very high order can be maintained only with daily practice. The pianist Paderewski once said that if he failed to practice for a single day, he could notice his performance deterioration and that, after a week’s gap in practice, the audience could notice it as well.
The hard rule of Use-It-or-Lose-It Tendency tempers its harshness for the diligent. If a skill is raised to fluency, instead of merely being crammed in briefly to enable one to pass some test, then the skill (1) will be lost more slowly and (2) will come back faster when refreshed with new learning. These are not minor advantages, and a wise man engaged in learning some important skill will not stop until he is really fluent in it.
When to use it
A surgeon uses a surgical simulator to maintain proficiency in rare, complex procedures.
A software engineer keeps a checklist for deployment steps to avoid missing critical but infrequent tasks.
A multilingual person practices each language regularly, even if not needed in daily life, to retain fluency.
A student reviews past course material periodically to prevent forgetting and to strengthen their mental latticework.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
Calculus skill loss
A person who was proficient in calculus in college but never uses it after graduation will find the skill severely diminished years later.
Pilot skill maintenance
Pilots use flight simulators to practice emergency procedures that are rarely needed in real flights, ensuring they don't lose those skills.
Musician's daily practice
The source reports that Paderewski noticed a decline after missing a day of practice and believed an audience could notice after a longer gap. The anecdote illustrates how highly developed performance can depend on regular practice.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
Identify a skill you have not used recently. How has its absence affected you, and what could you do to practice it regularly?
Consider your profession. What rarely used but critical skills might you be losing? How can you simulate practice for them?
How can you apply the concept of fluency to ensure your most important skills are deeply ingrained and resistant to decay?
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- Wisdom Theory 100 Mental Models (2020) (Wisdom Theory)