Everyone wants to grow into their ideal future state. Regardless of whether you want to be an athlete, a musician, or a family man, you want to get the best outcome out of as little effort as possible. (Unfortunately, outcomes are often correlated with effort)
But how do you actually do that? How do you optimize your growth and development to get to the best outcome for your life? Psychologists have been studying this for years and have come up with a few models to understand how to optimize your performance. You probably know the famous one for its use in any discussions of high-performing individuals: Flow. Flow, made famous by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is the idea that your optimal state of performance is when your ability perfectly matches the difficulty of the task. If the task is too difficult, you become frustrated; if it is too easy, you become bored. The goal is to balance them to hit that “Flow” state for optimal performance. I have spoken about this at length in other blog posts, so feel free to reference those for more on that.
The one that I want to talk about today is the Zone of Proximal Development by Leo Vygotsky. Why? Because Flow primarily focuses on an individual performing a task on his or her own, and you can maximize your growth with the help of others. What Vygotsky hypothesized was that there were three categories of capabilities and skills: ones that you could already do on your own, ones that you could never do, and then things that you could do if you had help. For example, it is unlikely that anyone will run a 2-minute mile anytime soon, and just about any young person of average capability with a healthy weight could run a 12-minute mile if they had to. But someone who could run an 8-minute mile today but could run a 7-minute mile with the right coaching around technique, routine, and nutrition would have that skill development opportunity lie within that Zone of Proximal Development.
We see the Zone of Proximal Development at work in day-to-day life. Children go to first grade, second grade, and then third grade. Video games have tutorials for new players to get comfortable with the controls faster than if you just threw them into the game to sink or swim. Baseball has a farm system where players go from A to AAA minor league systems to give them time to adjust to the level of competition at the higher levels. Professionals have apprenticeship and internship programs to give people months to learn the trade before they have to actually step into a full-time role expected to deliver at full capacity. Even children playing games with adults will experience this without even knowing it when the adults will reduce their performance to match the child’s ability and make the game (feel) more fair. The Zone of Proximal Development is in effect all around us.
As I always say, the best way to understand something is through contrast—to understand the opposite/lack of it. I experienced this firsthand with an old game called Tropico. This game came out decades ago, and so when I loaded it up on a modern operating system, there was a surprise in store for me: the scenarios for the game were listed in alphabetical order. I was shocked, as most video games intuitively understand the Zone of Proximal Development and build it into their gameplay. Nintendo and Valve are famous for this, as if you’ve ever watched making-of stories about Super Mario Bros. or Half-Life, the developers go into great detail as to how each level is designed to introduce the player to new concepts and give them a safe or simple opportunity to learn the game mechanic before they then make it increasingly more difficult and complex. So when introduced to this alphabetical-order list of scenarios in Tropico, I found one or two that were obviously tutorials but then was left guessing at which one would be right for my skill level at the game. Well, I ended up guessing wrong around the fifth or sixth scenario I played, and I played over and over again but couldn’t beat it. It was just too far away from my knowledge of the game to that point. What did I do? I felt extremely discouraged, had a perception that I wasted my time, and didn’t want to play anymore (vs. just moving on to the next scenario and coming back later, which would’ve been a logical alternative). That’s what happens when you don’t get this right.
So, how can you use this concept in your life? All you need to do is realize two things:
Because the Zone of Proximal Development is a combination of what you are capable of doing with help, the two factors are that it’s a. something that’s possible for you to do and b. something that would help you grow faster or more effectively with help. As a results, those are the two criteria you need to consider when using this concept to improve your growth.
Let’s take two examples. The first is sports. If you are a rising star athlete, for example, you might be the best in your neighborhood at throwing a football, but there are other prodigies out there who are continuing to improve as well. As such, you need help to make it to the next level. So, you join a peewee league, develop your throwing motion, speed and agility, and knowledge of football terms and concepts, and then you play middle school and high school football. Then, you apply for colleges and get a scholarship, learning from some of the best coaches in the nation and competing against collegiate-level athletes. Then, you enter the draft and join a professional team and spend years learning from the best coaches and players in the world until you reach the peak of your ability.
The second is career. You might as a child be interested in science. So, you study from your grade-school teachers and ace your exams. You go to college and learn from your professors. Then, you get an internship and learn from some of the best engineers in the world. You get extended an offer, and then you end up working on the latest technology that will reduce vehicle deaths by 20%. You end up inventing a new technology that gets adopted within ten years by every major vehicle manufacturer in the world.
In both cases, you cannot get hired from grade school as a professional and meet the performance expectations of the typical professional in that field. It’s just out of your capability at that time. But you could learn the fundamentals quickly with the right education and support, and you can grow much more quickly than figuring stuff out on your own (most of the time). So the Zone of Proximal Development is helping you see the next level of development at each level of your ability and giving you the next step to progress.
Hopefully, you can use this concept to optimize your growth and development. I will give you a final word of caution, however: people are so used to how the world has optimized for this that they assume that this is how it always was or how it has to be. I assure you, it was and is not. Life thousands of years ago was brutal, with people left to their own devices for the most part to figure things out with maybe some family, friends, or tribal leaders to help them out. In fact, most traditions evolved from the idea that people engaged in repeated, ritualistic behaviors to pass on knowledge and ability to the next generation. It was only after years of development that schools and other developmental programs evolved where you could get the kind of scale we have today. But it works both ways: you might be more capable in an area compared to your peers and, therefore, might develop more quickly. As a result, you might get bored following the normal path. If you are in a state of assuming, take time to appreciate the elegance of development programs; if you are in a state of boredom with how slow the average progress is, find new or additional development opportunities that are more suitable for your skill level.
The Zone of Proximal Development is a simple reminder that the best, fastest way to develop is to try something that requires you to get just a little bit better than you are today and that you can maximize the speed of development with a little help. If you keep those things in mind, you can optimize your rate of growth for your ability and potential.