00:00:20.400
I wanted to be extraordinary. If I could have chosen at 15 what to be extraordinary at, I probably would have picked science. I liked science, and I was pretty good at it too, but not extraordinary.
00:00:28.320
I'd 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. Because scientists do their best work when they're young and I was already 15, I figured it was too late. So, I pivoted.
00:01:06.559
For years, I tried to ferret 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 woodworker for maybe six months. After that, I decided I was going to high school for the performing arts.
00:01:31.680
After three years on the 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 choral music, so I put together an application for a college of musical composition for film. Before I even sent off the application, I tried out for a theater school. After a week of auditions, 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, fencing, or contemporary French circus.
00:02:00.960
I tried a lot of things and not half-heartedly either; I worked really hard. But whenever something was really difficult, there was this voice that reasoned, 'It must not be my talent, because had it been my gift, it would have come naturally.' I believed in the genetic explanation of greatness. I thought you just had to stumble across that accidental match to find the lock for which you are the key.
00:02:37.120
I wandered blindly into low-paying jobs where the only requirement was that you could type 80 words per minute. I woke up on my 25th birthday thinking, 'A quarter of a century, I'm a washed-up evolutionary dead end in a backwater dead-end life.' I performed a reality check and concluded that even if I couldn't be an extraordinary scientist, I could still probably become a top-tier mediocre scientist. All I needed was a university degree in something scientific.
00:03:05.360
Having majored in saxophone in high school, there were remedial credits involved. I began to teach myself math, physics, and chemistry, and because I knew I wasn't talented, I didn't expect it to be easy. I expected to struggle. I just started at the beginning, did one thing at a time, bought the books, and learned it. Whenever I panicked, I'd remind myself that this is not rocket science; this is basic math. If I didn't understand it, I must have skipped a step. So I'd slow down, do some research, and within a few hours or sometimes days, I'd be right back on track.
00:03:41.520
I found that I was balancing on a continuum and that there was a sweet spot. That sweet spot had nothing to do with math or physics. It works like this: you're asked to perform a particular saxophone tune at 88 beats per minute. This falls squarely within your capabilities, so you can perform this task effortlessly and confidently. While you're doing so, you can think about other things, like how to adjust your attack based on what the drummer is doing.
00:04:02.800
You can react to something that happens 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 still 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 that stretching 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, yet it's also satisfying, empowering, and deeply rewarding.
00:04:42.560
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, and your output becomes erratic. It's terrifying. This continuum measures how effortlessly you can perform a given task. At one end of the continuum, you have your comfort zone, where you can perform effortlessly and don't level up because you're doing things you already know how to do.
00:05:29.440
At the other end of the continuum lies your panic zone, where you don't 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. Now, 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 thinking, and you should absolutely spend time there, especially when you need to be productive.
00:06:51.720
Your panic zone is an excellent place to experiment, to play, to find your boundaries because as long as you don't need to deliver value, your fear can be transformed 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.
00:07:36.080
I spent months working through math and physics problems. During that time, I learned as much about practice as I did about calculus and mechanics. Practice is a strange beast; it’s not play, it’s not intended to be fun, and it’s also not work. It’s not intended to produce anything; practice is a thing entirely unto itself.
00:08:07.199
What a lot of people commonly think of as practice is futzing around, kind of doing stuff that seems relevant to what you think you might want to get better at. This sometimes kinda works. For practice to be truly effective, it needs to be focused and deliberate. The most basic form of practice is the drill. Now, a good drill boils down to three elements: focus, repetition, and continuous feedback.
00:08:35.680
A drill warps an activity until you're focusing on a narrow slice of that skill in a way that's repeatable and which provides immediate and continuous feedback. How narrow a slice depends on your capability. If you're in your comfort zone, you need to ratchet up that drill a notch. If you're in your panic zone, your adaptations 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.
00:09:27.479
You want to find that sweet spot, that space where your ability and the challenge barely overlap. 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 then make the feedback loop as short as possible. And then go do it, and then take a nap.
00:09:43.200
Not all focused and deliberate practice activities are drills. Take simulations, for example. Athletes have scrimmages; in therapy, it's called role-play. In programming, we do weekend projects, hack fests, 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.
00:10:01.920
You also don't stop, go back, and immediately do it over again correctly, because that's what drills are for. In a simulation, you keep going. A simulation doesn't warp activities; it intensifies them. You provide a more concentrated learning experience by putting together implausible combinations of unlikely occurrences. Another interesting type of practice is the case study. Athletes watch videos of practice lessons and performances.
00:10:42.479
Chess players study games played by grandmasters 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. You ask yourself: what were they thinking? What pressures caused them to choose this approach? What are the trade-offs? Case studies are about observation, analysis, and critical thinking.
00:11:37.440
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 precision, 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.
00:12:11.760
Typically, we associate direct practice with musicians, but it's just as much the domain of stand-up comedians, trial lawyers, and contemporary French circus acrobats. Then there's imitation, which is often overlooked and undervalued. When you're a beginner, you don't know what you don't know. Imitating masters will teach you things that you don't know you need to know and often things that the masters themselves are unable to articulate.
00:12:57.040
In our culture, we tend to hype individuality and creative self-expression. It's really hard to be creative without having internalized a vast store of techniques and idioms. Don't be a snowflake; go copy someone who knows what 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, imitation—these are all ways of stretching you to the edge of your ability.
00:13:42.600
That's equally difficult for experts as it is for beginners. That said, practice is particularly challenging when you're grossly incompetent, not so much because you suck per se, but because feeling stupid is so powerfully unpleasant. It's one of the important drivers behind procrastination. When you're feeling overwhelmed by your own ineptitude, it's easy to become fatalistic.
00:14:08.960
Another disadvantage of being a beginner is that so many practice activities lack inherent feedback. When you're vastly unskilled, your judgment is completely unreliable. Everything, including the right thing, feels wrong. It's easy to consistently make the wrong adjustments, leaving you with deeply ingrained bad habits.
00:14:34.960
It took me 18 months to pass all of the prerequisite exams, and then I was ready to apply to university. I was accepted into two study programs—one in aerospace engineering and one in molecular biology. When people around me realized that I was serious about this university thing, I got a bit of pushback. They were like, 'Holy crap! You're going to be like 32 by the time you finish.' But if we're going to be realistic about it, though, I was going to be 32 anyway.
00:15:03.840
I picked molecular biology. University was completely uneventful. I wrote papers, I did lab work, I read books, and 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 introduced to the Bash prompt.
00:15:25.600
Now, before university, I had occasionally experienced flow, mostly when solving truss problems in mechanics. Telling the computer what to do was like trust 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 steady, tedious, rewarding diet of deliberate and focused practice.
00:16:25.680
It took a really long time before I transitioned from exploring to learning programming. Even when I did make the transition, it was hit or miss. A lot of the resources I found were confusing, outdated, or just hopelessly advanced. After three years, I had a bachelor's degree in molecular biology, some basic ability to write control structures, and, far more importantly, I'd come to accept that talent is not a boolean.
00:16:59.680
It's not some innate genetic trait that you have to go look for and may or may not find. The truth is, talent is skill that can be developed systematically, and a system is awesome—a system you can understand, a system you can hack. The technical term for skill development is leveling up. A pair of researchers, a couple of brothers by the name of Dreyfus, created a model for how leveling up works.
00:17:47.080
Their scale goes like this: novice, where you know nothing; advanced beginner, where you still suck but you kind of see what this might be about; competent, where you can start getting things done; proficient, where you get things done really well; and expert, where the you get things done seems like magic to pretty much everyone else.
00:18:29.600
When we're novices, we can be in one of two states: mindless obedience or overwhelmed. As novices, we're in the unenviable position of being only millimeters away from our panic zone at all times. If a rule is unclear, we're stuck. If we accidentally skip a step, we're stuck. If we get a result that deviates even slightly from what we expected, we're stuck. We have no frame of reference.
00:18:39.039
When we're advanced beginners, we see 1,000 disconnected details and give every single one of those details equal consideration. There's no cohesion; 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.
00:19:07.040
We also gain the ability to perform routine procedures and do basic troubleshooting. Here, we can be productive without stepping outside of our comfort zone, which may be why so many people stagnate at this skill level indefinitely. When we're proficient, we can make much finer discriminations. We can evaluate the significance of subtle indicators; we look further ahead, make predictions, prognosticate, and recognize underlying patterns.
00:19:47.680
We apply overarching principles. All of the intricacies of the subject matter come together in a vast and fascinating web. When we're experts, we see a thousand details and immediately disregard 999 of them. We focus 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 superpower, but it's not magic.
00:20:21.760
It's powerful processing that happens very quickly and is based on a gargantuan store of knowledge and experience. Described in this way, skill development sounds so sequential and regular and inevitable. Leveling up feels like a series of climaxes—win after win after win—as though life were a television commercial.
00:21:14.080
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 a useful lie that you tell yourself in order to navigate a messy reality. So it may be sequential, but regular? Hardly. Inevitable? We should be so lucky. Life is messy.
00:21:55.680
Leveling up happens in spurts and sudden surges, and there are plateaus. A lot of people seem to dread the plateaus, hurrying past them as best they can, 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. They inject time into your practice and allow complex skills to become deeply embedded.
00:23:07.760
Plateaus are where your skill is being refactored so that you can scale. If you're in a rush, you're going to end up with brittle and fragile skill. Focus on what you're doing, not how you're doing. There's this saying: amateurs practice until they get it right; professionals practice until they can't get it wrong. That's what plateaus are about—they put the level in level up.
00:23:51.560
I used my university degree exactly once—for the first real programming job that I got. The CTO of a startup looked at my resume and said, 'Huh, a degree in molecular biology and biological chemistry? You must be pretty smart.' And she gave me a job.
00:24:14.880
It was the culmination of a lot of hard work and practice, and it was the 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.
00:24:16.960
Mastery isn't about perfection. Skill 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.
00:24:55.780
Talent is skill that's cultivated; passion is curated, and hacking skill is hacking passion. Don't do what you love; do something well enough to love what you do. Thank you.
