Peter Attia· MD
so that framework is we start out as unconsciously incompetent so you take a person like me at thirty-one who doesn't know how to swim you put them in the water there's no ambiguity about how bad I am but I don't know why all I can tell you is I can't swim I can't actually tell you why I can't swim so the first step of learning how to swim is becoming consciously incompetent you actually have to understand why you are really bad at this Oh once you start to understand our committees principle that's like a very important part of understanding how to swim the more of you that's underwater the more buoyancy there is to hold you up once you start to understand how Bernoulli works oh all of a sudden there's this difference about the velocity of a fluid over a body etc and then by the way you're no better as a swimmer in those two boxes right the difference I just want to know the percentage of people who are learning swimming whose site I just love that that's the earth I don't know if I still have them but I would love it if I did I used to journal so relentlessly about swimming I had reams of journals that I would write in every single day of my free body diagrams of my body in different swimming positions and trying to figure out ways to make this less bad when I got into this I became so obsessed that I swam twice a day every day this model makes so much sense to me well you don't actually start swimming until you reach the third box which is now you are consciously competent now the problem is you can't do that for long so you tend to vacillate a lot between the second and third box which is consciously competent and then you go back to being consciously incompetent but as long as you can maintain focus you will vacillate between those and usually it's your physical fatigue that will push you from the third box back to the second box now when you become a really good swimmer like Michael Phelps you transcend to this fourth box you are now unconsciously competent everything becomes sort of autonomic at that level