I’ve learnt more this year than I have in a very long time. Why?

Because I’ve unexpectedly gone back to school. I have become a student of artificial intelligence in order to marry it with my lifelong discipline of leadership science. One year ago, I would’ve never imagined that I’d be sitting in Silicon Valley attending one of the top tech conferences and learning about algorithms — but that’s exactly where I’ve been.

While the learning has been intense, I’m loving every second of it and, in the process, I’m remaking my CEO coaching business into an exciting new project called the Leadership Ai Lab. This year can definitely be defined as a ‘stage one’ year.

Performance psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner, whom I’ve written about before, tell us that we pass through three distinct stages when learning and growing. During the first stage, we intellectualise a task in order to discover new ways to accomplish it more proficiently. In stage one, we’re very aware of what we’re doing and are concentrating on improving.

For example, I’m aware that I’m learning to code in python. Not for one moment do you think you’re good enough when in stage one. In effect, it’s the “practice” stage.

But practice doesn’t make perfect. My dad used to always correct the phrase by saying, “Perfect practice makes perfect”. Practising something only makes you better in the way you’re doing it.

If you’re making a mistake while practising, you will become great at making the same mistake.

When you improve, you move into Fitts and Posner’s second stage: learning by simply doing, not thinking. During this stage, you concentrate less, as you’re actually getting better at carrying out a task. As a consequence, you make fewer errors and generally become more efficient.

That may sound like the ideal situation — you believe you’ve mastered what you’re doing. Only, you then realise progress isn’t being made. Instead, you’ve fallen into autonomous autopilot.

In order to break that automatic action and kick-start progress, you’ve got to go back now and then to the first stage of learning.

Running on autopilot

Then comes the third stage, where you feel that you’ve gotten as good as you need to get at a specific task, skill, or behaviour. Thereafter, you basically run on autopilot once more. You stagnate, and without realising it, you’ve stopped trying to be as good as you can be.

This holds true for the way you lead. You do it every day and, most likely, you lead as you have done for years. Instead of getting better, inertia takes hold; you settled for good enough long ago, and as far as you’re concerned, you’re still good enough. Have you settled into stage three?

The older you get, the harder it is to get better. This is because you’ve been doing it “your way” for most of your life. Over time, learning slows down and progress gets harder to achieve.

This explains why most people never progress beyond “good enough”. They get stuck doing something the way they learnt how, way back.

Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, practises the concept behind Fitts and Posner’s stage one, only Bezos calls it Day 1. No matter what it’s labelled, the meaning is the same: it’s important to keep the early stage vitality going.

For Bezos the idea came about in the very early days of Amazon. He occupied a building called Day 1, named as a reminder that the company should always be in ‘Day 1’ mode. He sees ‘Day 2’″ as a stasis, or worse, the reversal of the ‘Day 1’ concept, which leads to irrelevance.

To Bezos, irrelevance is followed by excruciating, painful decline, and ultimately, death.

Effectively, what I’ve been reminded of this year is that good enough simply isn’t good enough. Yet, that is what most people settle for. Are you one of them?

Tommy Weir is CEO of the EMLC Leadership Ai Lab and author of ‘Leadership Dubai Style’. Contact him at tsw@tommyweir.com.