WEBVTT 00:00:20.927 --> 00:00:23.665 I wanted to be extraordinary. 00:00:23.665 --> 00:00:28.571 If I could have chosen at 15 what to be extraordinary at, 00:00:28.571 --> 00:00:31.967 I probably would have picked science. 00:00:31.967 --> 00:00:38.384 I like science. I was pretty good at it too but not extraordinary. 00:00:38.384 --> 00:00:45.519 I come to believe that talent was some sort of genetic boolean. 00:00:45.519 --> 00:00:49.716 You either have it or you don't. You're born with it or you're not 00:00:49.716 --> 00:00:52.954 and I apparently was not. 00:00:52.954 --> 00:01:00.911 At 15, I had not shown a single glimmer of extraordinary talent in anything. 00:01:00.911 --> 00:01:09.407 and because scientist do their best work when they're young and I was already 15, I figured it was too late. 00:01:09.407 --> 00:01:12.263 so I pivoted it. 00:01:12.263 --> 00:01:17.978 For years, I tried to ferreted out my innate talent. 00:01:17.978 --> 00:01:24.788 I was going to be a potter. I was an apprentice potter for about a week. 00:01:24.788 --> 00:01:32.097 and then I was an apprentice artisan woodwork that was maybe for 6 months and I was like "screw this thing. I'm going to high high school 00:01:32.097 --> 00:01:36.165 of performing art". 00:01:36.165 --> 00:01:41.892 After 3 years on a tenor saxophone, it was obvious that I was not cut out to be a jazz musician. 00:01:41.892 --> 00:01:46.243 I was pretty good at composing things like baroque coral music. 00:01:46.243 --> 00:01:50.874 So I put together an application for a college of musical composition for film 00:01:50.874 --> 00:01:54.748 and before I even sent off the application, I tried out for a theater school. 00:01:54.748 --> 00:02:01.051 After a week of audition, I was inexplicably accepted as a student. 00:02:01.051 --> 00:02:07.252 After a year, I could tell you with certainty that theater was not my talent. 00:02:07.252 --> 00:02:09.475 neither was ballet 00:02:09.475 --> 00:02:11.564 or fencing 00:02:11.564 --> 00:02:15.436 or contemporary French circus. 00:02:15.436 --> 00:02:18.939 I tried a lot of things and not halfheartedly either. 00:02:18.939 --> 00:02:21.035 I worked really hard. 00:02:21.035 --> 00:02:24.377 But whenever there's something that's really difficult, there is this voice that reason. 00:02:24.377 --> 00:02:32.486 It must not be my talent because had it been my gift, it would have come naturally. 00:02:32.486 --> 00:02:35.515 (inaudible) 00:02:35.515 --> 00:02:39.223 I believed in the genetic explanation of greatness. 00:02:39.223 --> 00:02:42.563 I thought you just have to stumble across that accidental match. 00:02:42.563 --> 00:02:46.759 To find the lock for which you are the key 00:02:46.759 --> 00:02:52.195 and inevitably by aiming in every possible direction at once, hoping to hit a target. 00:02:52.195 --> 00:03:01.591 I wander blindly into a low paying job where the only requirement was that you can type 80 words per minute. 00:03:01.591 --> 00:03:07.032 I woke up on my 25th birthday thinking a quarter century? 00:03:07.032 --> 00:03:14.707 I'm a washed up evolutionary dead end in a back water dead end life. 00:03:14.707 --> 00:03:21.966 I performed a reality check and came to the conclusion that even if I couldn't be an extraordinary scientist, 00:03:21.966 --> 00:03:26.897 I can still probably become a top tier mediocre scientist. 00:03:26.897 --> 00:03:32.980 All I needed was a university degree in something scientific. 00:03:32.980 --> 00:03:37.731 Having majored in saxophone in high school, there were remedial credits involved. 00:03:37.731 --> 00:03:41.299 I began to teach myself math and physic and chemistry 00:03:41.299 --> 00:03:45.459 and because I knew I wasn't talented, I didn't expect it to be easy. 00:03:45.459 --> 00:03:48.508 I expected it to suck. 00:03:48.508 --> 00:03:56.330 I just started at the beginning. Did one thing at a time, by the book, until I learn it and then I moved on. 00:03:56.330 --> 00:04:01.207 Whenever I panicked,I remind myself that this is not rocket science. This is basic math. 00:04:01.207 --> 00:04:05.079 If I don't understand it, I must have skipped a step 00:04:05.079 --> 00:04:11.525 and so I slowed down and do some research and sure enough, within hours or sometimes days I be right back on track. 00:04:11.525 --> 00:04:15.022 cheerfully slogging 00:04:15.022 --> 00:04:26.925 I found that I was balancing on a continuum and that there was a sweet spot and that sweet spot has nothing to do with math or physics 00:04:27.010 --> 00:04:29.887 and it works like this: 00:04:29.889 --> 00:04:34.953 You're asked to perform a particular saxophone tune at 88 beats per minute. 00:04:34.953 --> 00:04:42.038 This fall squarely within your capability so you can perform this task effortlessly, confidently. 00:04:42.047 --> 00:04:51.859 While you're doing so, you can think about other things. for example, how to adjust your (tac?) based on what the drummer is doing. 00:04:51.859 --> 00:04:59.757 You can react to something that happen in the audience without fumbling or losing your place. 00:04:59.757 --> 00:05:05.020 When you're asked to perform that same tune at 105 beats per minute, 00:05:05.020 --> 00:05:12.633 you can do this but it requires every bit of concentration that you can muster. 00:05:12.633 --> 00:05:17.558 Your skill level is perfectly balanced against the challenge. 00:05:17.558 --> 00:05:24.391 The difficulty of the exercise is barely met by your ability. 00:05:24.391 --> 00:05:28.743 You're being stretched and being stretched is painful. 00:05:28.743 --> 00:05:35.920 Remaining in that place, that painful place that stretches you, requires a monumental effort. 00:05:35.920 --> 00:05:48.289 It's exhausting. It's hard. It's not fun. It's also satisfying. Empowering. Deeply rewarding. 00:05:48.289 --> 00:05:54.750 When you're asked to play that tune at 120 beats per minute, you panic. You simply can't do it. 00:05:54.750 --> 00:06:00.228 The challenge has no counterpart whatsoever in your skill. 00:06:00.228 --> 00:06:11.202 You flail. Your executive function shuts down. Your output becomes erratic. It's terrifying. 00:06:11.202 --> 00:06:17.210 This continuum is a measure of effortlessly you can perform a given task. 00:06:17.210 --> 00:06:23.916 At one end of the continuum, you have your comfort zone where you can perform effortlessly. 00:06:23.916 --> 00:06:30.287 You don't level up in your comfort zone because you're doing stuff you already know how to do. 00:06:30.287 --> 00:06:36.640 At the other end of the continuum, you have your panic zone where you cone level up because you're busy freaking out. 00:06:36.640 --> 00:06:43.268 Between the two, there's a space where your ability and the challenge barely overlap. 00:06:43.268 --> 00:06:50.815 And this is where you level up. I'm not saying you should never be in your comfort zone or your panic zone, 00:06:50.815 --> 00:06:57.848 not at all. Your comfort zone is where complex skills become reflexive. 00:06:57.848 --> 00:07:06.939 You have access to higher level of thinking. You should absolutely spend time there, especially when you need to be productive. 00:07:06.939 --> 00:07:15.964 Your panic zone is an excellent place to experiment. To play. To find your boundaries. 00:07:15.964 --> 00:07:24.235 Because as long as you don't need to be delivering values, your fear can be transform into thrill and discovery. 00:07:24.312 --> 00:07:32.848 you should absolutely spend time there, but not when people are paying you money. 00:07:35.188 --> 00:07:41.273 In other words, you should spend time in your comfort zone and your panic zone. 00:07:41.273 --> 00:07:48.618 You just shouldn't try to learn stuff there. 00:07:48.618 --> 00:08:00.416 I spent months working through math and physic problems and during that time, I learned as much about practice as I did about calculus and mechanic. 00:08:00.416 --> 00:08:07.450 Practice is a strange beast. It's not play. It's not intended to be fun 00:08:07.450 --> 00:08:16.912 It's also not work. It's not intended to produce anything. Practice is thing entirely unto itself. 00:08:16.912 --> 00:08:26.883 What a lot of people commonly think as practice is futzing around, kinda doing stuff but seem relevant to what you think you might want to kind of get better at. 00:08:26.883 --> 00:08:36.540 This sometimes kinda works.For practice to be truly effective, it need to be focus and deliberate. 00:08:36.540 --> 00:08:39.898 The most basic form of practice is the drill. 00:08:39.898 --> 00:08:47.389 Now, a good drill boils down to three elements: focus, repetitions and continuous feedback. 00:08:47.389 --> 00:09:00.508 A drill work in activities until you're focusing on a narrow slice of that skill in a way that's repeatable and which provide immediate and continuous feedback. 00:09:00.508 --> 00:09:04.424 How narrow a slice depends on your capabilities 00:09:04.424 --> 00:09:08.939 If you're in your comfort zone, you need to ratchet up drilling a notch. 00:09:08.939 --> 00:09:21.731 If you're in your panic zone, your adaptation will be random and accidental and you'll find yourself practicing doing it wrong more than you're practicing doing it right. 00:09:21.731 --> 00:09:28.576 Practice doesn't make perfect. It makes permanent. 00:09:28.576 --> 00:09:34.500 If you're practicing in your panic zone, you'll wind up being permanently wrong. 00:09:34.500 --> 00:09:41.387 You want to find that sweet spot. That space where ability and challenge barely overlap. 00:09:41.387 --> 00:09:47.019 So, find something that you can kind of almost do. 00:09:47.019 --> 00:09:52.161 Warp it until you're focusing on a particular aspect of that skill. 00:09:52.161 --> 00:09:56.435 Make it repeatable so you can do it over and over and over 00:09:56.435 --> 00:09:59.913 And it make the feedback loop as short as possible 00:09:59.913 --> 00:10:07.943 And then go do it. And then take a nap. 00:10:07.943 --> 00:10:12.092 Not all focus (inaudible) practice activities are drilled 00:10:12.092 --> 00:10:16.190 Take simulations, for example. 00:10:16.190 --> 00:10:21.218 Athletes have scrimmages. In therapy it's call role play. 00:10:21.218 --> 00:10:27.579 In programming, we do weekend projects, hack fest, and code retreats. 00:10:27.579 --> 00:10:33.907 In a simulation, you improvise as though it were the real thing 00:10:33.907 --> 00:10:39.899 When you make a mistake, nobody dies. 00:10:39.899 --> 00:10:48.682 You don't lose. You don't fail. you also don't stop, go back and immediately do it over again correctly because that's what thrills are for. 00:10:48.682 --> 00:10:52.726 In a simulation, you keep going. 00:10:52.726 --> 00:11:00.529 A simulation doesn't warp activities. it intensify them. You provide a more concentrated learning experience. 00:11:00.529 --> 00:11:07.474 by putting together implausible combinations of unlikely occurrences. 00:11:07.474 --> 00:11:13.239 Another interesting type of practices is the case study. 00:11:13.239 --> 00:11:17.006 Athletes watch videos of practice sessions and performances. 00:11:17.006 --> 00:11:22.899 Chess players study games played by grand masters and try to determine what the next move would be 00:11:22.899 --> 00:11:27.971 and then when they're wrong, they analyze why. 00:11:27.971 --> 00:11:36.799 In programming, reading code is a case study. What were they thinking? 00:11:36.799 --> 00:11:44.551 What pressure cause them to choose this approach? What are the trade offs? 00:11:44.551 --> 00:11:49.897 Case studies are about observations and analysis and critical thinking 00:11:49.897 --> 00:11:51.950 and then you have direct practice. 00:11:51.950 --> 00:12:01.003 Those precise notes and perfect pauses of a violinist playing a concert piece while nobody's listening 00:12:01.013 --> 00:12:09.496 Direct practice when done deliberately and with focus hones clockwork precisions, making it reflexive. 00:12:09.496 --> 00:12:12.702 You can shift your attention away from the mechanics of your performance. 00:12:12.702 --> 00:12:23.521 You can focus all of your creativity on the subtle details that lift your performance from the subtle and mundane to the exquisite. 00:12:23.521 --> 00:12:26.488 And typically, we associate direct practice with musicians 00:12:26.488 --> 00:12:36.185 but it's just as much the domain of stand up comedians and trial lawyers and complementary French circus acrobats. 00:12:36.185 --> 00:12:44.997 And then there's intimations. Overlooked and undervalued. 00:12:44.997 --> 00:12:47.749 When you're a beginner, you don't know what you don't know. 00:12:47.749 --> 00:12:52.723 Intimating masters will teach you things that you don't know you need to know 00:12:52.723 --> 00:12:58.913 and often things that the master themselves are unable to articulate. 00:12:58.913 --> 00:13:07.268 In our culture, we tend to hide individuality and creative self expressions and it's really hard to be creative. 00:13:07.268 --> 00:13:13.496 Without having internalized a vast store of techniques and _____. 00:13:13.496 --> 00:13:21.072 Don't be a snowflake. Go copy someone who know that they're doing. 00:13:21.072 --> 00:13:26.772 No matter what type of practice activity you're doing, no matter how good you are, practice is grueling. 00:13:26.772 --> 00:13:38.138 Drills, simulations, case studies, direct practice, imitations. These are all ways of stretching you to the edge of your ability. 00:13:38.138 --> 00:13:44.457 That's equally as difficult for expert as it is beginners. 00:13:44.457 --> 00:13:49.735 That said, practice is particularly challenging when grossly incompetent. 00:13:49.735 --> 00:13:56.442 Not so much because you suck, per se. But because feeling stupid is so powerfully unpleasant. 00:13:56.442 --> 00:14:00.332 It's one of the important driver behind procrastinations. 00:14:00.332 --> 00:14:08.201 When you're feeling overwhelm by your own ineptitude, it's easy to become fatalistic. 00:14:08.201 --> 00:14:15.131 Another disadvantage of being a beginner is that so many practice activity lack inherent feedback. 00:14:15.131 --> 00:14:21.661 When you're vastly unskilled, your judgement is completely unreliable. 00:14:21.661 --> 00:14:27.737 Everything, including the right thing, feels wrong. 00:14:27.737 --> 00:14:36.384 It's easy to consistently make the wrong adjustment, leaving you with deeply ingrain bad habit. 00:14:39.784 --> 00:14:47.247 It took me 18 months to pass all the prerequisite exams and I was ready to apply to universities. 00:14:47.247 --> 00:14:55.492 I was accepted to two study programs. One in aerospace engineering and one in molecular biology. 00:14:55.492 --> 00:15:00.280 When people around me realize I was serious about this university thing, I got a bit of a push back. 00:15:00.280 --> 00:15:07.981 They were like "holy crap, you're gonna be like thirty two by the time you finish". 00:15:07.981 --> 00:15:16.065 If we were gonna be realistic about it though, I was going to be thirty two anyway. 00:15:16.065 --> 00:15:18.349 I picked molecular biology. 00:15:18.349 --> 00:15:25.840 University was completely uneventful. I wrote papers. I did lab work. I read books. I took exams. 00:15:25.840 --> 00:15:31.531 It changed my life. Not so much because of the papers and the exams, but because I was learning. 00:15:31.531 --> 00:15:37.200 I was practicing and I was introduce to the (--------) 00:15:37.200 --> 00:15:47.330 Now before university, I occasionally experienced (flow?). Mostly when solving truss problems and mechanics. 00:15:47.330 --> 00:15:55.203 Telling the computer what to do was like truss problems except better. 00:15:55.203 --> 00:16:00.455 I kept coming back to and exploring programming. Exploring. Not learning. 00:16:00.455 --> 00:16:09.020 Learning is what I did with math and physics. That was a study, tedious, rewarding, diet, deliberate, focus practice. 00:16:09.020 --> 00:16:14.464 It took a really long time before I transition from exploring to learning programing. 00:16:14.464 --> 00:16:18.339 Even when I did make the transition, it was hit or miss. 00:16:18.339 --> 00:16:28.257 A lot of the research I found were confusing, outdated or just hopelessly advanced. 00:16:28.257 --> 00:16:33.802 After three years, I had a bachelor degree in molecular biology, 00:16:33.802 --> 00:16:37.368 some basic ability to write control structures 00:16:37.368 --> 00:16:42.174 and far more importantly, I've come to accept that talent is not ebullient* 00:16:42.174 --> 00:16:49.842 It's not some innate genetic trait that you have to go and look for and may or may not find 00:16:49.842 --> 00:16:54.740 The truth is, talent is bullshit. 00:16:54.740 --> 00:16:58.506 Skill can be develop systematically and the system is awesome. 00:16:58.506 --> 00:17:05.434 A system you can understand. A system you can hack. 00:17:05.434 --> 00:17:11.152 The technical term for skill development is leveling up. 00:17:11.152 --> 00:17:15.169 Now, a pair of researchers, a couple of brothers by the name of Dreyfus 00:17:15.169 --> 00:17:23.542 created a model of how leveling up works and their scale goes like this 00:17:23.542 --> 00:17:25.713 Novice, where you know nothing. 00:17:25.713 --> 00:17:30.143 Advanced beginner, where you still suck but you kind of see what this is about. 00:17:30.143 --> 00:17:33.223 Competent, where you can start getting shit done. 00:17:33.223 --> 00:17:35.530 Proficient, where you get shit done really well. 00:17:35.530 --> 00:17:42.504 And expert, where the shit you get done seems like magic to pretty much everyone else. 00:17:45.204 --> 00:17:57.511 When we're novices, we can be in one of two state: mindless obedience or overwhelm 00:17:59.511 --> 00:18:08.843 As novices, we're in the (inaudible) position of being only millimeters away from our panic zone at all times. 00:18:08.843 --> 00:18:11.143 If a rule was clear, we're stuck. 00:18:11.143 --> 00:18:13.192 If we accidentally skip a step, we're stuck. 00:18:13.192 --> 00:18:20.837 If we...I get a result that deviate even slightly from what we expected, we're stuck. 00:18:20.837 --> 00:18:24.712 We have no frame of reference. 00:18:24.712 --> 00:18:36.449 When we're advanced beginner, we see 1,000 disconnected details and we give every single one of those details equal consideration. 00:18:36.449 --> 00:18:45.106 There's no cohesion where I'm able to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant and incidental. 00:18:45.106 --> 00:18:50.959 We can look things up, but we can't troubleshoot. 00:18:50.959 --> 00:18:58.135 When we're competent, we gain the ability to evaluate relevance within a context. 00:18:58.135 --> 00:19:02.389 We also gain the ability to perform routine procedures and do basic troubleshooting. 00:19:02.389 --> 00:19:06.945 Here, we can be productive without something stepping outside of our comfort zone. 00:19:06.945 --> 00:19:12.390 Which may be why so many people stagnated this skill level indefinitely. 00:19:12.390 --> 00:19:17.819 When we're proficient, we can make much finer discrimination. 00:19:17.819 --> 00:19:23.063 We can evaluate the significance of subtle indicators. 00:19:23.063 --> 00:19:28.137 We look further ahead. We make predictions. We prognosticate. 00:19:28.137 --> 00:19:31.869 We recognize underline patterns. We apply overarching principles. 00:19:31.869 --> 00:19:40.743 All of the intricacies of the subject matter come together in a vast and fascinating web. 00:19:40.743 --> 00:19:47.023 When we're expert, you see 1,000 details and immediately disregard 999 of them. 00:19:47.023 --> 00:19:51.753 We focus in on the one that matters. How do we do it? No idea. 00:19:51.753 --> 00:19:55.495 We don't know how we know, what we know. 00:19:55.495 --> 00:20:00.397 A lot of people talk about instinct or intuition as though it's some sort of super power. 00:20:00.397 --> 00:20:02.391 But it's not magic. 00:20:02.391 --> 00:20:13.495 It's powerful processing that happens very very quickly and it's based on a gargantuan store of knowledge and experience. 00:20:13.495 --> 00:20:23.059 Described in this way, skill development sounds so sequential and regular and inevitable 00:20:23.059 --> 00:20:31.476 leveling up in a series of climaxes win after win after win as though life was a television commercial. 00:20:31.476 --> 00:20:38.531 This is a scientific model. A scientific model is like a uml diagram but for science. 00:20:38.531 --> 00:20:48.134 It's a simplification about the world. It's useful lie that you tell yourself in order to navigate a messy reality. 00:20:50.344 --> 00:21:03.228 So maybe sequential, but regular? hardly. Inevitable. We should be so lucky. Life is messy. 00:21:03.228 --> 00:21:10.764 Leveling happens in spurts and sudden surges and there are plateaus. 00:21:10.764 --> 00:21:13.680 A lot of people seem to dread the plateaus. 00:21:13.680 --> 00:21:18.908 Hurrying past them as best as they can and always with their eye on the goal. 00:21:18.908 --> 00:21:26.261 Am I there yet? Am I done yet? Am I good yet? 00:21:26.261 --> 00:21:32.092 Plateaus are neurologically important. The way sleep is neurologically important. 00:21:32.092 --> 00:21:40.971 It injects time into your practice. It allows complex skills to become deeply embedded. 00:21:40.971 --> 00:21:44.904 Plateaus are where your skills being refactored so that you can scale. 00:21:44.904 --> 00:21:51.912 If you're in a rush, you're going to end up with brittle and fragile skills. 00:21:51.912 --> 00:21:59.136 Focus on what you're doing. Not how you're doing. 00:21:59.136 --> 00:22:04.031 There's a saying "immature practice until they get it right. 00:22:04.031 --> 00:22:07.946 Professional practice until they can't get it wrong." 00:22:07.946 --> 00:22:14.973 That's what plateaus are about. They put the level in level up. 00:22:16.273 --> 00:22:23.666 I used my university degree exactly once. For the first programming job that I got. 00:22:23.666 --> 00:22:26.631 The CTO of a start up looked at my resume and said 00:22:26.631 --> 00:22:34.346 "huh, a degree in molecular biology in biological chemistry. You must be pretty smart." 00:22:34.346 --> 00:22:37.436 And she gave me the job. 00:22:37.436 --> 00:22:48.186 It was the combination of a lot of hard work, practice and it was a start of a lot more hard work and practice. 00:22:48.186 --> 00:22:51.492 I thought I wanted to be extraordinary, 00:22:51.492 --> 00:22:59.978 but what I really craved was passion and that deep sense of satisfaction that comes with focus and accomplishment. 00:22:59.978 --> 00:23:09.355 Mastery isn't about perfection. Skills grows by focusing intently on the things that stretch you 00:23:09.355 --> 00:23:18.177 and passion grows by giving your attention to something long enough to gain depth and understand nuances. 00:23:18.177 --> 00:23:28.227 Talent is bullshit. Skill is cultivated. Passion is curated ad hacking skills is hacking passion. 00:23:28.227 --> 00:23:32.375 Don't do what you love. Do something well enough to love what you do. 00:23:32.375 --> 00:23:34.723 Thank You.