What Is the OK Plateau? Joshua Foer on Why Skills Stop Improving

Joshua Foer trained for months to memorize a shuffled deck of playing cards faster, and then his speed stopped improving even though he kept practicing the same way. In his account, the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson recognized what had happened: Foer had hit what he calls the OK plateau.

The OK plateau is the point where you stop getting better at something because you have become good enough that you no longer have to think about it. It appears in Foer’s 2011 book Moonwalking with Einstein, and it is one of the better answers to a question many people type into Google late at night: why did I stop improving?

What does Foer mean by the OK plateau?

Foer builds the idea on a three-stage model of skill learning from the psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner, published in 1967. In the cognitive stage you think hard about the task and try strategies. In the associative stage you concentrate less, make fewer big errors and get more efficient. In the autonomous stage you are good enough, and the skill runs on autopilot.

Foer’s examples are ordinary ones. People learn to type quickly for a while and then level off, even though they type for hours every day. Drivers get competent in their first years and then stay about as skilled as they were, however many miles they log. Practice, in the usual sense of repetition, stops paying out, because repetition at the autonomous stage rehearses what you already do.

The word “OK” matters. The plateau is not a wall. It is the moment when the brain judges that the result is acceptable and hands the job to the part of you that does not pay attention.

How do the best performers get off it?

Ericsson spent his career on this question and gave the answer a name, deliberate practice. As Foer summarizes it, people who keep improving stay out of the autonomous stage. They focus on technique, work toward specific goals and get immediate feedback. Ericsson’s advice, in Foer’s telling, was to practice failing.

One typing experiment that Foer describes shows how. Typists were flashed words 10 to 15 percent faster than their fingers could manage. They made mistakes, worked out what was slowing them down, fixed it over several days, and ended up typing faster than their old ceiling. Nobody told them to try harder. They were put where autopilot could not cope.

Foer’s own version was stranger. For his training sessions he bought industrial earmuffs and lab goggles, spray-painted the lenses black and drilled a tiny hole in each, to help himself focus. The point was to make a familiar task unfamiliar again.

If you want the broader debate about how much practice matters, the post on the 10,000-hour claim and the paper it came from covers where Ericsson’s work gets overstated.

Why is the OK plateau a problem for Atomic Habits?

James Clear’s Atomic Habits (2018) is the most popular book on this subject, and its machinery points in the opposite direction. Clear wants a behavior to become so easy and cued that you do it without deciding to. His chapter on the Goldilocks rule asks you to work at the edge of your ability so that you stay motivated, and his image of the ice cube warming from 25 to 32 degrees explains why results show up late. (We have a full post on the plateau of latent potential if that image is new to you.)

Put Clear next to Foer and a tension appears. The plateau of latent potential says progress is hidden and you should keep going. The OK plateau says that if you keep going on autopilot, there may be no progress being stored up at all. A habit is the cognitive stage’s work moved into the autonomous stage on purpose. That is useful for brushing your teeth. For a skill you want to improve, it is exactly the setting where Foer says improvement ends.

Clear is not blind to this. His closing material on the downside of good habits says that automaticity makes you stop noticing small errors, and he recommends reflection and review. That is the right instinct. But it is a late chapter, and the book’s main structure is about getting behaviors to run themselves. A reader who follows the first three-quarters faithfully can build a 600-day streak of a habit that stopped teaching them anything around day 40. Our earlier piece on what Atomic Habits is missing argues the social side is the gap; the skill side is the other one.

So the claim here is narrow. Habits are how you get consistency. Consistency is how you reach the autonomous stage. And the autonomous stage is where improvement stalls unless you do something on purpose to leave it. A habit needs a scheduled step that un-automates it.

What are four ways to break the plateau?

These are drawn from Ericsson’s findings as Foer reports them, plus ordinary coaching sense.

1. Record yourself and watch it back. Feedback is the thing autopilot removes. Film your presentation, your serve, your pace, your first ten minutes at the desk. You will see errors your attention had stopped registering. Memory of a performance is flattering; video is not.

2. Make errors on purpose. Go slower than the habit, or faster than it, or change the grip, the order or the hand. The typists who were flashed words too quickly are the model. Breaking the pattern forces the associative stage back into the room. A rotation of small changes is the idea behind the Kierkegaard rotation method, which applies it to boredom in general.

3. Raise the difficulty by about 10 percent. The typing study used 10 to 15 percent. Clear’s Goldilocks rule points the same way, and the 85 percent rule for goal difficulty gives a research-backed target. If the rep feels comfortable, it has stopped working. Add a minute, a pound, a harder text, a tighter deadline.

4. Get a witness. Someone else watching changes what you attend to. A coach, a friend who reviews your video, or a small personal board of people you trust can say what you cannot see from inside. A witness also stops you from quietly deciding the result is OK.

What does this look like with an alarm and a morning?

Waking up is a good test case, because it is a habit people try to automate. Setting a time and fighting through is the autonomous version. Over months the alarm becomes background noise and the snooze press becomes a reflex that happens before you are awake enough to object.

The same four steps apply. Watching a recording of how you actually get out of bed is humbling. Changing the order of the first five minutes breaks the reflex. The psychologist Ellen Langer’s work on mindful attention, covered in our post on her counterclockwise study, is a useful companion here. And an outside observer helps: DontSnooze asks you to record a short video to prove you’re up, and if you miss, a random photo from your camera roll goes to friends you chose.

Foer’s lesson is not that practice is useless. It is that comfort is a signal. When a skill starts to feel easy, that is when to check whether you are still learning it or just performing it. Taste and ambition tend to outrun skill early on, as Ira Glass observed about the gap, and the OK plateau is what that gap turns into once you stop looking at it. If you have kept the same routine for a year and nothing is changing, that is usually the explanation.