I wanted to be extraordinary.
If I could have chosen at 15 what to be extraordinary at,
I probably would have picked science.
I like science. I was pretty good at it too but not extraordinary.
I come to believe that talent was some sort of genetic boolean.
You either have it or you don't. You're born with it or you're not
and I apparently was not.
At 15, I had not shown a single glimmer of extraordinary talent in anything.
and because scientist do their best work when they're young and I was already 15, I figured it was too late.
so I pivoted it.
For years, I tried to ferreted out my innate talent.
I was going to be a potter. I was an apprentice potter for about a week.
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
of performing art".
After 3 years on a tenor saxophone, it was obvious that I was not cut out to be a jazz musician.
I was pretty good at composing things like baroque coral music.
So I put together an application for a college of musical composition for film
and before I even sent off the application, I tried out for a theater school.
After a week of audition, I was inexplicably accepted as a student.
After a year, I could tell you with certainty that theater was not my talent.
neither was ballet
or fencing
or contemporary French circus.
I tried a lot of things and not halfheartedly either.
I worked really hard.
But whenever there's something that's really difficult, there is this voice that reason.
It must not be my talent because had it been my gift, it would have come naturally.
(inaudible)
I believed in the genetic explanation of greatness.
I thought you just have to stumble across that accidental match.
To find the lock for which you are the key
and inevitably by aiming in every possible direction at once, hoping to hit a target.
I wander blindly into a low paying job where the only requirement was that you can type 80 words per minute.
I woke up on my 25th birthday thinking a quarter century?
I'm a washed up evolutionary dead end in a back water dead end life.
I performed a reality check and came to the conclusion that even if I couldn't be an extraordinary scientist,
I can still probably become a top tier mediocre scientist.
All I needed was a university degree in something scientific.
Having majored in saxophone in high school, there were remedial credits involved.
I began to teach myself math and physic and chemistry
and because I knew I wasn't talented, I didn't expect it to be easy.
I expected it to suck.
I just started at the beginning. Did one thing at a time, by the book, until I learn it and then I moved on.
Whenever I panicked,I remind myself that this is not rocket science. This is basic math.
If I don't understand it, I must have skipped a step
and so I slowed down and do some research and sure enough, within hours or sometimes days I be right back on track.
cheerfully slogging
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
and it works like this:
You're asked to perform a particular saxophone tune at 88 beats per minute.
This fall squarely within your capability so you can perform this task effortlessly, confidently.
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.
You can react to something that happen in the audience without fumbling or losing your place.
When you're asked to perform that same tune at 105 beats per minute,
you can do this but it requires every bit of concentration that you can muster.
Your skill level is perfectly balanced against the challenge.
The difficulty of the exercise is barely met by your ability.
You're being stretched and being stretched is painful.
Remaining in that place, that painful place that stretches you, requires a monumental effort.
It's exhausting. It's hard. It's not fun. It's also satisfying. Empowering. Deeply rewarding.
When you're asked to play that tune at 120 beats per minute, you panic. You simply can't do it.
The challenge has no counterpart whatsoever in your skill.
You flail. Your executive function shuts down. Your output becomes erratic. It's terrifying.
This continuum is a measure of effortlessly you can perform a given task.
At one end of the continuum, you have your comfort zone where you can perform effortlessly.
You don't level up in your comfort zone because you're doing stuff you already know how to do.
At the other end of the continuum, you have your panic zone where you cone level up because you're busy freaking out.
Between the two, there's a space where your ability and the challenge barely overlap.
And this is where you level up. I'm not saying you should never be in your comfort zone or your panic zone,
not at all. Your comfort zone is where complex skills become reflexive.
You have access to higher level of thinking. You should absolutely spend time there, especially when you need to be productive.
Your panic zone is an excellent place to experiment. To play. To find your boundaries.
Because as long as you don't need to be delivering values, your fear can be transform into thrill and discovery.
you should absolutely spend time there, but not when people are paying you money.
In other words, you should spend time in your comfort zone and your panic zone.
You just shouldn't try to learn stuff there.
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.
Practice is a strange beast. It's not play. It's not intended to be fun
It's also not work. It's not intended to produce anything. Practice is thing entirely unto itself.
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.
This sometimes kinda works.For practice to be truly effective, it need to be focus and deliberate.
The most basic form of practice is the drill.
Now, a good drill boils down to three elements: focus, repetitions and continuous feedback.
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.
How narrow a slice depends on your capabilities
If you're in your comfort zone, you need to ratchet up drilling a notch.
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.
Practice doesn't make perfect. It makes permanent.
If you're practicing in your panic zone, you'll wind up being permanently wrong.
You want to find that sweet spot. That space where ability and challenge barely overlap.
So, find something that you can kind of almost do.
Warp it until you're focusing on a particular aspect of that skill.
Make it repeatable so you can do it over and over and over
And it make the feedback loop as short as possible
And then go do it. And then take a nap.
Not all focus (inaudible) practice activities are drilled
Take simulations, for example.
Athletes have scrimmages. In therapy it's call role play.
In programming, we do weekend projects, hack fest, and code retreats.
In a simulation, you improvise as though it were the real thing
When you make a mistake, nobody dies.
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.
In a simulation, you keep going.
A simulation doesn't warp activities. it intensify them. You provide a more concentrated learning experience.
by putting together implausible combinations of unlikely occurrences.
Another interesting type of practices is the case study.
Athletes watch videos of practice sessions and performances.
Chess players study games played by grand masters and try to determine what the next move would be
and then when they're wrong, they analyze why.
In programming, reading code is a case study. What were they thinking?
What pressure cause them to choose this approach? What are the trade offs?
Case studies are about observations and analysis and critical thinking
and then you have direct practice.
Those precise notes and perfect pauses of a violinist playing a concert piece while nobody's listening
Direct practice when done deliberately and with focus hones clockwork precisions, making it reflexive.
You can shift your attention away from the mechanics of your performance.
You can focus all of your creativity on the subtle details that lift your performance from the subtle and mundane to the exquisite.
And typically, we associate direct practice with musicians
but it's just as much the domain of stand up comedians and trial lawyers and complementary French circus acrobats.
And then there's intimations. Overlooked and undervalued.
When you're a beginner, you don't know what you don't know.
Intimating masters will teach you things that you don't know you need to know
and often things that the master themselves are unable to articulate.
In our culture, we tend to hide individuality and creative self expressions and it's really hard to be creative.
Without having internalized a vast store of techniques and _____.
Don't be a snowflake. Go copy someone who know that they're doing.
No matter what type of practice activity you're doing, no matter how good you are, practice is grueling.
Drills, simulations, case studies, direct practice, imitations. These are all ways of stretching you to the edge of your ability.
That's equally as difficult for expert as it is beginners.
That said, practice is particularly challenging when grossly incompetent.
Not so much because you suck, per se. But because feeling stupid is so powerfully unpleasant.
It's one of the important driver behind procrastinations.
When you're feeling overwhelm by your own ineptitude, it's easy to become fatalistic.
Another disadvantage of being a beginner is that so many practice activity lack inherent feedback.
When you're vastly unskilled, your judgement is completely unreliable.
Everything, including the right thing, feels wrong.
It's easy to consistently make the wrong adjustment, leaving you with deeply ingrain bad habit.
It took me 18 months to pass all the prerequisite exams and I was ready to apply to universities.
I was accepted to two study programs. One in aerospace engineering and one in molecular biology.
When people around me realize I was serious about this university thing, I got a bit of a push back.
They were like "holy crap, you're gonna be like thirty two by the time you finish".
If we were gonna be realistic about it though, I was going to be thirty two anyway.
I picked molecular biology.
University was completely uneventful. I wrote papers. I did lab work. I read books. I took exams.
It changed my life. Not so much because of the papers and the exams, but because I was learning.
I was practicing and I was introduce to the (--------)
Now before university, I occasionally experienced (flow?). Mostly when solving truss problems and mechanics.
Telling the computer what to do was like truss problems except better.
I kept coming back to and exploring programming. Exploring. Not learning.
Learning is what I did with math and physics. That was a study, tedious, rewarding, diet, deliberate, focus practice.
It took a really long time before I transition from exploring to learning programing.
Even when I did make the transition, it was hit or miss.
A lot of the research I found were confusing, outdated or just hopelessly advanced.
After three years, I had a bachelor degree in molecular biology,
some basic ability to write control structures
and far more importantly, I've come to accept that talent is not ebullient*
It's not some innate genetic trait that you have to go and look for and may or may not find
The truth is, talent is bullshit.
Skill can be develop systematically and the system is awesome.
A system you can understand. A system you can hack.
The technical term for skill development is leveling up.
Now, a pair of researchers, a couple of brothers by the name of Dreyfus
created a model of how leveling up works and their scale goes like this
Novice, where you know nothing.
Advanced beginner, where you still suck but you kind of see what this is about.
Competent, where you can start getting shit done.
Proficient, where you get shit done really well.
And expert, where the shit you get done seems like magic to pretty much everyone else.
When we're novices, we can be in one of two state: mindless obedience or overwhelm
As novices, we're in the (inaudible) position of being only millimeters away from our panic zone at all times.
If a rule was clear, we're stuck.
If we accidentally skip a step, we're stuck.
If we...I get a result that deviate even slightly from what we expected, we're stuck.
We have no frame of reference.
When we're advanced beginner, we see 1,000 disconnected details and we give every single one of those details equal consideration.
There's no cohesion where I'm able to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant and incidental.
We can look things up, but we can't troubleshoot.
When we're competent, we gain the ability to evaluate relevance within a context.
We also gain the ability to perform routine procedures and do basic troubleshooting.
Here, we can be productive without something stepping outside of our comfort zone.
Which may be why so many people stagnated this skill level indefinitely.
When we're proficient, we can make much finer discrimination.
We can evaluate the significance of subtle indicators.
We look further ahead. We make predictions. We prognosticate.
We recognize underline patterns. We apply overarching principles.
All of the intricacies of the subject matter come together in a vast and fascinating web.
When we're expert, you see 1,000 details and immediately disregard 999 of them.
We focus in on the one that matters. How do we do it? No idea.
We don't know how we know, what we know.
A lot of people talk about instinct or intuition as though it's some sort of super power.
But it's not magic.
It's powerful processing that happens very very quickly and it's based on a gargantuan store of knowledge and experience.
Described in this way, skill development sounds so sequential and regular and inevitable
leveling up in a series of climaxes win after win after win as though life was a television commercial.
This is a scientific model. A scientific model is like a uml diagram but for science.
It's a simplification about the world. It's useful lie that you tell yourself in order to navigate a messy reality.
So maybe sequential, but regular? hardly. Inevitable. We should be so lucky. Life is messy.
Leveling happens in spurts and sudden surges and there are plateaus.
A lot of people seem to dread the plateaus.
Hurrying past them as best as they can and always with their eye on the goal.
Am I there yet? Am I done yet? Am I good yet?
Plateaus are neurologically important. The way sleep is neurologically important.
It injects time into your practice. It allows complex skills to become deeply embedded.
Plateaus are where your skills being refactored so that you can scale.
If you're in a rush, you're going to end up with brittle and fragile skills.
Focus on what you're doing. Not how you're doing.
There's a saying "immature practice until they get it right.
Professional practice until they can't get it wrong."
That's what plateaus are about. They put the level in level up.
I used my university degree exactly once. For the first programming job that I got.
The CTO of a start up looked at my resume and said
"huh, a degree in molecular biology in biological chemistry. You must be pretty smart."
And she gave me the job.
It was the combination of a lot of hard work, practice and it was a start of a lot more hard work and practice.
I thought I wanted to be extraordinary,
but what I really craved was passion and that deep sense of satisfaction that comes with focus and accomplishment.
Mastery isn't about perfection. Skills grows by focusing intently on the things that stretch you
and passion grows by giving your attention to something long enough to gain depth and understand nuances.
Talent is bullshit. Skill is cultivated. Passion is curated ad hacking skills is hacking passion.
Don't do what you love. Do something well enough to love what you do.
Thank You.