Avoiding The Path to Six Sigma Certification Studying Frustration

Last time we talked about how trying to study everything on the exam all at once leads to the path of frustration.

I showed an analogy of how that is essentially the same problem I have when I work on too many things on the SixSigmaStudyGuide.com website at the same time.

What I didn’t do was show what this looks like in practice. And I got emails about that. Several.

So let’s go with an example.

Meet John

Meet John.

John is a fictional case based off thousands and thousands of six sigma exam candidates that come to my site every day.

John’s bright, motivated, and ready to take his exam! He already passed all of his training and he’s working through his materials.

He knows that the best way to prepare for a certification exam is to do a lot of practice questions. Hundreds, if possible. And he’s already bought a book (or maybe an awesome on-line study system) to help him prepare.

But things aren’t going well for John.

John is on The Path to Six Sigma Certification Studying Frustration

John is putting in the hours to study. And it shows.

Anytime someone comes to his desk they can see that:

• There are dozens of tabs open on his browser – each to a different Six Sigma topic.
• His collection of dozens of notebooks, textbooks, and course guides are littered with hundreds of sticky notes.
• John’s whiteboard has a To-Do list a mile long! (His to-do lists have to-do lists).

John is certainly very busy. He’s spending every spare minute he can get (and stealing several other minutes besides) trying to prepare for his Six Sigma exam.

But he’s not getting anywhere.

Why John Isn’t Getting Anywhere

And each day he comes to his desk and sees his huge list of to-dos and all the sticky notes, and all of the browser tabs open and he… feels… frustrated and overwhelmed.

But John’s a professional. Just because the path is difficult doesn’t mean he’s going to let it get him down! So he perseveres!

He buckles down, gets right back in to it and does more work! He resolves to work harder, harder, and harder.

And what results does he have at the end of that work?

• His to-do list is now twice as a long listed with even more things to study!
• He’s run out of memory on his browser and his computer crashed because he had a hundred tabs open at once!
• There are so many sticky notes everywhere it looks like an office supply store exploded.

But worse, John is feeling so exhausted and frustrated and overwhelmed that he’s in danger of just giving up and abandoning his goal of getting a Six Sigma certification.

The Sad Parts

There are a few things that are really sad about this situation. What John is experiencing has a name: cognitive overload, trying to hold too many open loops in working memory at once, which is exactly what happens with a hundred browser tabs and a mile-long to-do list.

Why More Effort Made It Worse

The counterintuitive part of John’s story is that working harder made his actual progress worse, not better. That’s a predictable result of cognitive overload, not a personal failing: when working memory is already saturated with a hundred open topics, adding more hours of unfocused effort just means more topics get started and fewer get finished. The brain doesn’t get more capacity because you’re more determined; it needs fewer open loops, not more willpower thrown at the same number of them.

A Kitchen Analogy

A line cook who starts six dishes at once, stirring one pot while something else boils over, produces worse food slower than one who finishes each dish’s critical steps before starting the next. The kitchen isn’t rewarding the cook who “worked hardest” across the most dishes simultaneously, it’s rewarding the one who finished dishes. John’s browser tabs are the exam-prep version of six pots boiling over at once.

The Honest Part

What makes John’s situation sad isn’t that he’s lazy or unmotivated, it’s the opposite: his work ethic is real, and he’s applying it to the wrong lever. “Work harder” is the default response most people reach for when something isn’t working, because it feels proactive and it’s worked for them before in other contexts. But cognitive overload doesn’t respond to more hours the way, say, physical fitness does. More hours spent switching between a hundred open topics just produces more half-finished topics, not more mastered ones.

If any part of John’s story sounds familiar, the fix isn’t more discipline, it’s fewer open loops at once. Close most of the tabs. Pick one topic. Finish it before opening the next one.

The next article covers exactly how to do that, step by step.

Hang in there, the fix is simpler than it probably feels right now.

Best, Ted.

• Thousands of people fall into this trap every day.
• Passing a Six Sigma certification doesn’t have to be this hard.
• John’ doing this to himself. Hard work has always gotten him through before. Why not now?

Up Next

Next time we’ll cover the solution to John’s (and yours?) problem.

In the meantime if this sounds familiar, leave a comment here and let me know how it felt. If you were able to escape the cycle, let me know!