GTD
Tacit knowledge is what you gain when you’ve spent your ten thousand hours on a thing. It’s muscle memory, subconscious thoughts, effortless. It’s the things you know that you know while you’re doing them, but can’t exactly explain why.
That makes me think of Amsterdam’s biggest philosopher, okay, second biggest maybe after Spinoza: Johan Cruijff. When he tried to explain how soccer worked, most of us were left in the dark, because his understanding of that game was at such a different level than mere mortals.
That was really funny. One time the presenter of Studio Sport, Mart Smeets, asked him: “Johan, do you actually understand yourself what you’re explaining?” And Johan said: “I haven’t the faintest clue.”
Don’t we all sometimes not have the faintest clue? But we know we’re on our way to getting things better.
For example, I like to make myself a good cup of coffee. I tweak it all the time, just by doing it again and again. The same goes for baking, cooking, playing guitar, anything. A recipe or script is something you follow tightly as a beginner, but over time you learn to understand the hows and whys intrinsically.
Something I also learned when I was shooting, developing and printing black-and-white photographs back in the day. All steps are very simple by themselves. The effects of shooting close up or from a distance. Choosing a wide angle, regular or telelens. If you open the aperture, your depth of field narrows. And if you double the exposure time, you get twice as much light on your film. High key or Low key? Grainy or Smooth? Pushing the film when developing it, picking the paper with the correct grayscale. All simple steps on their own, but making intuitively the right choices to express exactly what your were after is something else. And nothing has changed on that front, if you ask me.
I might be a romantic, but even today we humans are still our own judge of what we choose to do or don’t. If you want to make something, use whatever you think suits your purpose best. Or just what’s available to you. But whatever you pick, it will take time and practice to get your own ideas, personality or feelings to really shine through. You can’t just delegate that to whatever. Close readers know which technology I’m currently not mentioning. :-)
It also has to do with mindfulness. Stop and think, act, reflect. That’s also the key thing regarding the technology-I-don’t-want-to-mention here: make sure you own the core ideas. Because those are the seeds, determine the direction of any further steps. But then you have to go the full learning cycle. Own the plan, direction and all intermediate decisions that follow. You need to notice things, then reflect, stop and think, then revise your plan and actions. We’re still dealing with the experiential learning cycle of Kolb here, right? That one will always be here, for us now and in the future.
Anyway, tacit knowledge. When I make a cup of coffee, even while grinding and pouring the water, when pressing the coffee, you already feel if you’re on the right track. And it’s such a pleasure when you’ve made exactly a double espresso of 40 grams. Okay, it might not lead you to (almost) win the world championships, but it will make your day.
“Muscle Memory” by Justice, an instrumental from their 2024 album Hyperdrama. No words needed — the track itself embodies the idea: dense, instinctive, and built from sounds layered across Justice’s entire catalog, as if their own craft history bleeds in without announcement.
Listen on: Apple Music | Spotify | Youtube
Some things you only understand by doing them. Again, and again, and again.