Ever worn prismatic glasses? Often found at science fairs, these  creations appear to turn the world upside down. What they’re actually doing is putting it the right way up, since the lenses in our eyes invert everything and we have learned to correct automatically somewhere in our brains. Put on a pair and for a while, everything is difficult to do, your hands miss whatever you reach for and it’s impossible to walk. However,the brain very quickly learns the corrective states and you are able to get on as normal. Take them off, and the whole sequence has to be unlearned, which interestingly seems to take far longer.

This little trick confused natural philosophers, even Isaac Newton, for centuries as they knew from camera obscuras that lenses can invert images. So, as well demonstrating a number of fascinating facts about the brain,  it can be used as a metaphor for learning and achievement.

Some things we instinctively do. The basics of humanity are simply picked up as we go along. Walking, eating, sleeping and talking come pretty much built into the hardware. Other skills are taught in a more formal setting, such as reading, writing and mathematics. These require a structured approach but can be applied as a base layer of education to everything else we need to do. Beyond that are the skills that require time, effort and talent to achieve a high level of competence. None of us will be Usain Bolt, Chris Hadfield or Caitlin Moran. These people not only have brilliant born talents but have worked very hard to get to where they are.

The common ties between these layers of skill, innate, basic taught and advanced, other than practice are:

Story

Focus

Drive

A child wants to walk to explore its surroundings. Reading, writing and mathematics allow us to gain some traction in understanding the world better. Usain Bolt wanted to be the fastest runner, Chris Hadfield wanted to be an astronaut, Caitlin Moran a writer. From those basic goals, everything else flowed.

Refine, polish and adapt your story. Use that to generate the focus and drive that will get you many steps closer to where you need to be than just wishful thinking. If you don’t seem to be getting progress, review the story. Sometimes side branches can become the main path, occasionally they’re dead ends.

And looking at the prismatic glasses? Put on a pair and the brain suddenly has to get back to a state of normality, so will figure out the way to go about that, even without your slow conscious input. Your story can be the prismatic glasses. Why not give them a polish?