Insider Rowing

The subtitle is “The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,” and Gladwell’s book is analysis and stories about making snap decisions. I picked this one up at the airport on the way to D.C. and devoured it on the plane. The writing is very clear, easily digestible, and filled with interesting and fun anecdotes.

Basically, Gladwell attempts to explain the process and significance of the snap decision, or any decision you have to make in two seconds or less. He calls the part of the brain that makes these intuitive leaps the adaptive unconscious, and the actual instant of decision is a “thin-slice,” as in making a decision based on a very thin slice of information.

Blink is filled with great examples of these quick decisions and their significance. One example is how a tennis coach, Vic Braden, can tell if a player is about to double fault during the instant that the ball is lofted into the air with uncanny accuracy. Another is how certain art experts can tell if a statue is a forgery or authentic based on their gut feeling after a second or two of looking at it. Basketball players with this type of intuition are said to have court sense, and generals have comp d’oiel, or the power of the glance.

A great example in every day life of how we thin-slice is when we meet someone new and form a first impression; this impression can be based on nothing more than a bit of body language and the word “hello.” At the instant of the first impression, we might come away knowing if we like or dislike the person we just met. He points out that the whole industry of speed dating is based on these types of quick decisions.

I found this work to be incredibly insightful in the context of rowing. I’ve always felt that coaching is as much an art form as it is a science, and a big part of that art is making decisions based on your intuition and not necessarily on numbers. One coach, Bill Jurgens, described coaching on the water as being similar to playing a musical instrument. I thought this was very accurate. Being able to adjust your personnel in certain ways that you might not be able to immediately articulate, and then being able to make little technical tweaks and changes on a minute by minute basis, all contribute to the artfulness of the practice, which in turn (hopefully) translates to boat speed.