I was watching a Youtube video this week that had a great quote. The creator was talking about sanding a woodworking project and said something about how much it needed to be sanded.

Whenever you think you’re done, that’s when you’ve just started.

That statement really resonated with me. I’ve found that it’s far too easy to think you’re finished with something right about the time you really need to hunker down and put in extra effort. In running they call it “hitting the wall” and it usually marks the point when your body is out of energy. There’s often another wall you hit mentally before you get there, though, and that’s the one that needs to be overcome with some tenacity.

The Looming Rise

If your brain is like mine you don’t like belaboring something. The mind craves completion and resolution. Once you’ve solved a problem it’s done and finished. No need to continue on with it once you’ve reached a point where it’s good enough. Time to move on to something else that’s new and exciting and a source of dopamine.

However, that feeling of being done with something early on is often a false sense of completion. I learned that the hard way when I was studying for my CCIE. Every question has an answer. Some questions have a couple of different answers. However, knowing the correct answer isn’t the same as knowing all the incorrect answers. Why would I want to take the time to learn all the wrong things instead of just learning what’s right and moving on to the next topic?

The reason to keep going even after you know what’s right is to recognize what the wrong thing looks like. When studying you’re often confronted with suboptimal situations or, especially with the CCIE, put into positions where you can make mistakes that will lead to disaster if you don’t recognize the pitfalls early. Maybe it’s creating a routing loop. It could be a choice between two methods of configuration that really only has one correct answer if you know why the other one will cause problems.

Persevering through that mental wall that says “you’ve done enough” is important because the extra value you gain when you do is critical to understand the myriad ways that something can be broken. It’s not enough to know it’s not right. You have to recognize what isn’t right about it. That kind of understanding can come from practice experience, like making the mistake, or through careful study in controlled situations like learning all the wrong ways to work the problem.

The Challenging Ascent

Getting over that wall isn’t easy. Your brain doesn’t want to struggle past the right way to do things. It craves challenge and novelty. You’re going to have to work against your better nature to get to a point where you’re past the wall. Don’t be afraid to lie to yourself to get where you need to be.

When running I will trick myself when I hit my mental wall by saying “one more song” or “one more block” when I’m ready to give up. The idea that I can make it a short distance or short amount of time is comforting to my brain when it wants to stop. And by tricking it I can often push a little harder to another song or two more blocks before I get completely over the wall and have the mental toughness to continue.

Likewise, when you’re studying and you’ve found the correct answer you need to push yourself to find one incorrect way at first. Maybe a second. If it’s something that has configurable settings you should investigate a few wrong values to figure out what happens when things are outside of bounds or when they’re just a little bit off. Maybe convince yourself to figure out two or three and write down the results. If one of them ends up being really interesting it could spark you to do more investigation to find out what caused that particular outcome.

You’ll find that you can get past your mental blocks much easier with tricks like that. More importantly, you’ll also find that you can get them to pop up faster and be overcome with less effort as you understand when they happen. If you’ve ever sat down to study something and your brain immediately wants to give up you know that the wall is right in front of you. How you overcome it can mean the difference between truly understanding a topic and just knowing enough about the answer to regurgitate it later.

Tom’s Take

As always, your mileage may vary with skills like these. I’d wager that most people do hit a wall whether it’s running or doing math or studying the intricacies of how OSPF works over non-broadcast networks. Don’t settle for your brain telling you that you’re done. Seek to really put in the work and understand what’s going on. Write everything down so you know what you’ve discovered. And when that wall seems like it’s too high to climb just whisper to yourself you’re going to climb another foot. And then another. And pretty soon you’ll be over and in the clear.