Yesterday Apple announced a new iPhone, and with it an advanced software to add voice control to that phone. (“Siri”? Who names these things?)

Almost immediately the blogs and tech sites were abuzz with inevitable comparisons to the competition, complete with tables breaking down the products feature by feature.

I found it amusing that they all had one line that said ‘voice control’, with a simple “YES” or checkmark on each product. Some of the more adventurous would take pains to point out that the competition had ‘voice control’ for some time, and Apple was just catching up. What they failed to take into account was the relative sophistication and integration of the feature on all the products; love ’em or hate ’em, Apple’s new voice assistant goes well beyond the simple “call Bill at work” kinds of control that phones have had for years. The software anticipates and evaluates natural language requests in a way that hasn’t yet been done on a consumer device, and interacts with the phone’s functions in a wider way than we’re accustomed to.

(My best friend was the founder of a software company which did pioneering work in the field of computer control via voice recognition. Even he’s impressed with how far Apple was able to push this technology, and he’s about as jaded an expert in that field as you could ever find. He’s also one of the best shooting instructors I know, which gives me the perfect segue into this article’s actual topic!)

My point is not to sell phones – personally, I don’t derive my self-worth from what I buy or what you don’t buy – but rather to point out the folly of making bullet point comparisons. If you just looked at the bullet point of voice control and saw the checkmark, you wouldn’t come away understanding the vastly different ways in which that feature has been implemented.

This goes well beyond phones, as lots of people do the same thing when they take defensive shooting classes. I call them “checklist students” – people who make decisions as to what school or class they’ll attend by looking over a list of topics being covered. I’ve actually talked to people who have chosen one class over another because of the number of topics covered, without understanding the depth of the instruction or the unique approach of the instructor.

I’ve also seen students request refunds from instructors when the simple number of things they learned wasn’t the same as in other classes they’ve attended, even though the student made no effort to understand or become competent in those things that were taught. The checklist is in control, not their desire to learn nor their appreciation of their own skill development.

There are instructors out there who will throw a million different topics into a class and give the students perhaps a couple of minutes with each, then dash on to the next item on the agenda. There are other instructors who cover a fraction of those topics but cover them thoroughly, giving students time and opportunity to really start to develop some proficiency. Unfortunately, the former tend to be the more successful – checklists, it would seem, sell classes as well as phones, cameras, cars, and just about everything else.

If you buy a phone via a checklist, the worst that happens is that you don’t have the functionality of another phone. You can always get another. When it comes to your skill development, particularly the ability to successfully defend your own life, the stakes are a little higher. Make your training decisions based not on an ambitious list of topics, but on an understanding of what, how and why your instructor does what he/she does.

Leave the checklists to those who would rather brag than learn.

-=[ Grant ]=-