Decoding Greatness by Dr. Ron Friedman 

Key Takeaways 

• Identify the models you can Deconstruct, Analyze, and Reproduce. 
• You can copy others’ work backwards to extract a wide range of lessons. 
• Don’t limit your focus to a particular domain or genre, sample a wide range of fields/people/industries. Studying a wide range and having a broad spectrum of influences will sensitize you to the subtle differences between genres, help develop and refine your “palate”/ intuition and expose you to more ideas to spark creativity. 
• Venture outside your field for influences. Read, watch, talk, connect from disparate genres to produce more original work. 
• Your unique style will not come overnight but will slowly emerge over years and is a by-product of incremental change. 
• Experiment with everything. Sample 
• Take chances. Don’t play it safe. These are necessary components of skill acquisition. 
• Practice relentlessly with a deliberate focus (have feedback loops) 
• Reflect/ Step back/ Zoom Out in order to contemplate your own progress 
• Teach yourself. Collect works you admire, identify crucial features that make them unique, work to recreate these from scratch. Then evolve, don’t just copy. Apply the formulas you uncover and tweak them by combining influences, experimenting with different tools, styles, techniques and taking lots of intelligent risks. Find your stretch points and always practice at the edge of your capabilities, find opportunities for growth, reflect deeply in ways that provide observation and actionable insights. 

10 Lessons of Decoding Greatness 

1. Become a collector. The first step to achieving greatness is recognizing it in others. When you come across examples that move you, capture them in a way that allows you to revisit, study, and compare them to other items in your collection. When we think of collections, we tend to think of physical objects, like artworks, wine, or stamps. That definition is too limited. Copywriters collect headlines, designers collect logos, consultants collect presentation decks. Tour your collection as you would a private museum that you visit to find inspiration, study the greats, and remind yourself to think big.

2. Spot the difference. To learn from your favorite examples, you need to pinpoint what makes them unique. When you encounter works that resonate with you, make a habit of reflecting on a single question: “What’s different about this example?” By comparing the stellar to the average, you can pinpoint key ingredients that give a work its flavor and identify particular elements that can be incorporated or evolved elsewhere.

3. Think in blueprints. Nearly every example you admire was developed using a blueprint: chefs utilize recipes, writers employ outlines, web designers work off site maps. Instead of attempting to recreate a fully realized work, inject a level of abstraction and draft a high level outline. By working backward and crafting a blueprint, you will find patterns that demystify complex works.

4. Don’t mimic, evolve. Copying someone else’s wildly successful formula wholesale is the fastest route to being perceived as unoriginal while contributing to a genre’s demise. It also won’t earn you the same results because of the (likely) mismatch between your abilities and the demands of a formula, and because audiences’ expectations evolve with time. Instead, chart your own path by adding new influences, adapting formulas from adjacent fields, or replacing elements you can’t learn with those you naturally perform well.

5. Embrace the vision-ability gap. Studying the masters comes with a price: it raises the bar on the performance you deem necessary to be successful. Chances are, you will not be able to meet these expectations, at least not at first. It’s natural to feel discouraged at this point or consider quitting, but remember: having great taste and a clear vision are strong indicators of potential. Often, simply recognizing that something is not yet great and having the drive and tenacity to revise for as long as it takes is the difference between an amateur and a professional.

6. Keep score selectively. Achieving at a high level is a lot easier when you’re measuring the key elements that drive success. By scoring crucial aspects of your performance, you instantly motivate improvement, become less susceptible to wasted effort, and encourage more mindful decisions. Over the long term, the right metrics can hold you accountable, provide feedback, and reveal game changing patterns. Just be careful not to obsess over any single metric or forget to update your metrics as you grow.

7. Take the risk out of risk taking. Risk taking is both essential to growth and inherently uncomfortable. One useful approach for making risk taking more palatable involves finding stretch opportunities that don’t impose a high cost to failure. Here, businesses provide a useful road map—one that is applicable to individuals as well. You, too, can test your ideas and shrink the cost of failure by running tiny experiments, publishing your work under a pseudonym, pre selling an idea before developing it, and diversifying your time investment over a range of projects. Stop wasting energy trying to build up the courage to take risks. It’s far easier to take risks when the price of failure is negligible.

8. Distrust comfort. In most cases, emotions provide valuable real time guidance on experiences worth pursuing and those to be avoided. One notable exception to that rule is the way we feel during skill acquisition. We don’t grow when we’re enjoying ourselves—we learn best when we are challenged, struggling, and occasionally failing. Whether at work or at home, top performers don’t view comfort as an indication that they’ve made it. Rather, they regard it as a signal that their development has stalled.

9. Harness the future and the past. Repetition and feedback can help you elevate your performance, especially when used to target your weaknesses. But if that’s the only practice you’re getting, chances are you’re only operating at a fraction of your potential. Two additional forms of practice are worth using: reflective practice, or analyzing your past experiences to extract important lessons, and imagery, or simulating a performance in advance. Both reflective practice and imagery provide a host of impressive cognitive and emotional benefits, and train you to anticipate more effectively—a hallmark of expertise.

10. Ask wisely. Despite what many of us assume, experts rarely make good instructors. Knowledge is a double edged sword: knowing something makes it impossible to imagine not knowing it. To get the most out of your conversations with experts, you need to come prepared with questions, elaborators, and clarifiers that prompt an expert to reveal his or her journey, process, and discoveries. Experts aren’t the only people who can help you improve—non experts can be just as valuable. The trick is to invite the right audience, ask for advice instead of feedback, and arrive with a series of strategic questions geared toward improvement.

Reverse Engineering 

• The practice of reverse engineering, of systematically taking things apart to explore their inner workings and extract important insights, is more than an intriguing feature of the tech industry. For a surprising number of innovators, it’s a tendency that appears to have emerged organically, as something of a natural inclination.
• Curiosity is one motivator for reverse engineering. Another, more practical reason developers in tech use the practice is that in many cases, the only way to write software that’s compatible with an existing operating system is to decode its underlying functionality.

Learn Quickly 

• So, how do you achieve that level of success? One major piece of the puzzle involves cultivating the ability to learn quickly so that you can continue to master new skills. Staying on top of new innovations and professional trends is no longer just for go getters—it’s a basic requirement for staying relevant.
• Of course, the right kind of learning does much more than just help you stay current. It also bolsters your creativity, empowers you to pluck valuable ideas from adjacent fields, and enables you to acquire a unique combination of skills. Over time, those factors add up, multiplying your chances of making meaningful contributions and enabling you to stand out from thousands of other professionals in your field.

Both Jobs and Gates reaped enormous benefit from studying the works of their contemporaries, extracting crucial insights, and applying those lessons to develop new products. And they are not alone. The history of computing is not a history of independent acts of brilliance. It is the story of probing innovators learning from one another, combining ideas from multiple sources, and introducing new products and technologies that evolve from those preceding them. Matt Ridley’s book How Innovation Works covers this 

The Art of Unlocking Hidden Patterns 

The path to skill acquisition and mastery- reverse engineering.

• To reverse engineer is to look beyond what is evident on the surface and find a hidden structure—one that reveals both how an object was designed and, more important, how it can be recreated. It’s the ability to taste an intoxicating dish and deduce its recipe, to listen to a beautiful song and discern its chord progression, to watch a horror film and grasp its narrative arc.
• Interviewing your idols can be an effective strategy for uncovering their secrets. Both King and Hill were utilizing forms of copywork, a technique popularized by Benjamin Franklin and practiced by literary greats F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack London, and Hunter Thompson. It involves studying an exceptional piece of writing, setting it aside, and then recreating it word for word from memory, later comparing your version to the original.
• Many of the painters we now celebrate as creative geniuses devoted a significant portion of their careers to Copywork. Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Mary Cassatt, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Cézanne all developed their skills by copying the works of the French painter Eugène Delacroix. Delacroix himself spent years copying the Renaissance artists he grew up admiring. And even those Renaissance greats—Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo—honed their craft by reproducing the work of their fellow artists, including one another.
• What makes copywork so effective is that it forces an artist or writer to do more than simply recall content. Reproducing a piece demands that he or she pay careful attention to the organizational decisions and stylistic tendencies reflected in an original work. It is an exercise that enables novices to relive the creative journey and invites them to compare their instinctive inclinations against the choices of a master. Ultimately, what the process reveals is decision making patterns. And once an artist or writer’s underlying code is broken, it can be defined, analyzed, and applied to producing original works. 

Examine Original Sources

• Popular among nonfiction writers, is to leaf through the endnotes section at the back of a book and examine the original sources an author used to construct their piece. It’s the writer’s equivalent of enjoying a delicious meal at a restaurant and then raiding the chef’s pantry to uncover the ingredients.
• The index is equally prized because it helps writers unpack an author’s thinking, sometimes even their own. The author Chuck Klosterman, for example, relishes the moment he gets to read the index of his new book because of how much of himself it reveals. “Exploring the index from a book you created, is like having someone split your head open with an axe so that you can peruse the contents of your brain. It’s the alphabetizing of your consciousness.”

6 Story Trajectories 

1. Rags to Riches (a rising emotional arc) 

2. Riches to Rags (a falling emotional arc)

3. Man in a Hole (a fall followed by a rise) 

4. Icarus (a rise followed by a fall)

5. Cinderella (rise, fall, rise)

6. Oedipus (fall, rise, fall) 

 The reason is simple: observing the greats opens your mind to fresh possibilities.

Entrepreneurship

• What separates celebrity entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban, and Richard Branson from everyone else? Research suggests it’s not just their creativity, intelligence, and drive. Successful entrepreneurs also excel at something else: pattern recognition. They possess an extraordinary capacity for identifying profitable opportunities by linking successes they’ve observed in the past with changes now taking place in the market.
• Studies indicate that it’s novice entrepreneurs who focus on novelty. More experienced entrepreneurs—those who spend decades leading successful businesses and reliably launch profitable ventures every few years— focus on something completely different: viability. Run the same idea by experienced business owners, and they’ll focus instead on customer demand, the logistics of production and deliverability, and projected cash flow.
• Decades of experience have taught them that successful businesses fit a pattern. A few key factors tend to predict whether or not a venture will flourish. And nowhere are these patterns more evident than in the business models of other profitable companies.

What sort of patterns might a discerning entrepreneur deduce? For one thing, that winning business strategies can be applied across industries.

• Chipotle Success -Ells’s story is so compelling that his shop’s success can, in large part, be traced back to a single decision: taking a product that’s popular in one location and introducing it to an entirely new geographic region. That’s an approach that applies to a lot more than tacos. By finding the underlying business strategies embedded within case studies like Chipotle, experienced entrepreneurs develop a mental database of proven blueprints. It’s what enables them to quickly identify opportunities as they arise and fuels their ability to generate more money making ideas than they have the bandwidth to implement.

Chipotle Case Study 

Business Blueprint

Introduce a proven product into a new market

POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS:

• What cuisines, beverages, or desserts are popular near me that I can introduce elsewhere?
• What physical products are popular near me that I can introduce elsewhere?
• What services are popular near me that I can introduce elsewhere?
• Then, of course, there is the flip side of this equation:
• What cuisines, beverages, or desserts are popular elsewhere that I can introduce near me?
• What physical products are popular elsewhere that I can introduce near me?
• What services are popular elsewhere that I can introduce near me?

To outside observers, entrepreneurs can seem like prodigies. They are a tornado of ideas and seemingly possess an uncanny ability to generate business ideas on demand. It’s only once you start thinking in formulas that you see for yourself: entrepreneurial opportunities are everywhere.

Today, more than 90 percent of the medications we consume are generics—pharmaceutical drugs modeled after formulas patented by large corporations. Copying works. 

The Wrong Way to Think About Creativity

• There is a stigma associated with sifting through and unpacking the works of others, especially in fields that involve creativity. It stems from the belief that creativity requires originality and that, by definition, originality can’t possibly be found inside the works of others.  
  • First, creativity comes from blending ideas, not isolation. When we’re exposed to new ideas and fresh perspectives, we are at our most generative. This is why one of the best predictors of creativity is openness to experience. Those who actively seek out novelty, embrace curiosity, and plunge down rabbit holes are far more creative than those who shut themselves off from the outside world.
  • Second, originality is not the same thing as creativity. Often, those who introduce new concepts are locked into certain ways of thinking, preventing them from identifying important and novel applications for their “original” ideas. The business world is bursting with examples of “first movers” being outmaneuvered by scrappier, more creative rivals. As the creators of the PalmPilot, Atari, Alta Vista, Friendster, and America Online will all readily admit: being first is not the same as being best.
  • Finally, far from short circuiting our creativity, reverse engineering enables us to acquire new skills, which empower us to be generative in entirely new ways. And that’s important, especially given the speed with which most industries are now evolving. If reverse engineering the world’s most successful blogs over a weekend enables you to launch an arresting new blog on Monday morning, blending the best practices you’ve identified with your niche area of expertise, you’ve effectively multiplied your creative capacity and reach.

Simply put: the alternative to reverse engineering isn’t originality. It’s operating with intellectual blinders.  

Creativity Research Around Drawing 

• So here’s the question: Which of you is more likely to be creative on the final day of the workshop? You—the one who spent all weekend drawing original works? Or your friend—who, in addition to generating her own drawings, paused to replicate the work of an established artist before resuming her original sketches?
• That was the precise question at the core of a fascinating 2017 paper published in Cognitive Science. Takeshi Okada and Kentaro Ishibashi, creativity experts at the University of Tokyo, ran a series of experiments, including a three day session similar to the scenario I asked you to consider. What they found poses a serious challenge to the way most of us have been taught to think about creativity.
• Not only did copying an artist’s drawing inspire far more creative illustrations later on, it did so by stimulating ideas that had nothing to do with the copied artist’s work. In other words, copying didn’t simply lead people to mimic an established approach. It unlocked a mindset of curiosity and openness that motivated them to take their work in fresh, unanticipated directions. 
• The process of copying—of carefully analyzing a particular work, deconstructing its key components, and rebuilding it anew—is a transformative mental exercise that does wonders for our thinking. Unlike the experience we get when we passively consume a work, copying demands that we pay meticulous attention, prompting us to reflect on both subtle details and unexpected techniques.
• But it’s more than just heightened scrutiny. Copying also forces us to contemplate the decisions an artist made and sensitizes us to opportunities we typically overlook. In so doing, copying challenges our default approach. It opens us up to novel ways of thinking, prompting us to find creative opportunities buried within our own work.
• In contrast, looking inward for creative ideas rarely gets us very far. Studies indicate that staying fixated on our own work and avoiding outside influences causes us to grow increasingly less creative over time. Psychologists have a raft of terms for the cognitive traps that result from staring at a problem for too long—the Einstellung Effect, mental sets, functional fixedness—all of which can be summarized in a simple dictum: there is a price to working in isolation. Invariably, we find ourselves considering fewer options, recycling the same tired ideas again and again, or falling back on familiar solutions that have worked in the past. It gets worse. Over time, we fall prey to unspoken assumptions about what a good solution looks like, which further limits our thinking. And the longer we spend turning over a problem in our head, the less likely we are to stumble upon a truly innovative idea.
• Copying breaks the spell. It challenges our assumptions, relaxes our cognitive constraints, and opens us up to new perspectives. No, deconstructing works we admire doesn’t weaken our creativity or lead us to produce derivative work. On the contrary: it’s an essential tool for breaking down the hidden barriers that keep us stuck.

Chapter 2 Algorithmic Thinking 

• In recent years, algorithms like Tinder’s have upended a wide swath of industries, in large part because of their ability to quickly detect patterns. The capacity to distill thousands of clicks, scrolls, and swipes into a formula and then apply that formula to predict future behavior has profound implications for the worlds of business, technology, and even romantic love. It’s also a process that shares obvious commonalities with reverse engineering. Converting a remarkable story, symphony, or photograph into a recipe similarly involves extrapolating beyond what is apparent in any single example. It requires stepping back, deducing patterns, and producing a formula. In many ways, identifying patterns is what humans do best. In fact, for generations, it was a basic requirement of staying alive.

Pattern recognition engines have four major components 

1. The first is data collection. 
2. Step two is unpacking those examples and finding important variations. The more variables you identify in this second phase, the better your chances of pinpointing a factor that prompts interest. 
3. The third step involves detecting similarities. 
4. The last step is when an algorithm applies its analyses to generate predictions

 Become a Collector! Create a “Wisdom Journal” 

• Why is collecting outstanding examples so important? Because the first step to achieving mastery is recognizing mastery in others.
• Immersing yourself in examples prompts skill building in ways we don’t immediately anticipate. For one thing, it enables us to absorb the conventions of a field without consciously trying. Studies indicate that simply consuming examples with an underlying structure leads you to detect their patterns, even when you’re not consciously trying to learn a thing. It’s a process cognitive psychologists call implicit learning. If you’ve ever found yourself captivated by the ingenuity of the first few episodes of a Netflix show, only to be bored by its formulaic predictability at the end of the season, implicit learning is likely to have played a role.
• It also expands our notion of the possible. We’re often told that mastery requires one thing above all else: practice. If you want to develop expertise, you need clear objectives, immediate feedback, and lots of repetition. There’s a glaring problem with this formula. You can’t practice an idea you’ve never considered. The best ideas don’t emerge from hours of isolated practice. They’re waiting to be found inside the work of masters.
• Gathering a broad range of examples also illuminates the unique contributions of different influences. Most novel writers, for example, can appreciate that it is a rare author who proves equally adept at plot, dialogue, character development, setting, mood, and word choice. Decades of sampling a range of works has taught them that different authors excel at distinct elements. That awareness enables them to blend influences in innovative ways and empowers them to call up specific models when refining their work.
• Patterns are more easily found in quantity. The more remarkable examples you have to admire, study, and dissect, the easier it becomes for you to detect an underlying thread.

So what do you do once you’ve gathered examples? After you’ve identified works you consider powerful and resonant, how do you figure out what makes them compelling? Spot The Difference! This same approach applies to unveiling patterns in examples we admire.

Spot The Difference Technique

• Here’s how it works in practice. Suppose you’ve come across a website from a health guru you vaguely recognize. The landing page is fresh and charming and instantly draws you in. You’re about to register to receive a free giveaway when you pause for a moment. “I don’t usually sign up for newsletters like this,” you think to yourself. “Why exactly am I drawn to this one?” This is where the average website visitor shrugs and goes about their day. But by using Spot the Difference, you can do more than wonder. You have a concrete set of questions to begin to peel away the features that make the landing page effective.
  • The first and most obvious question: “How does this landing page differ from other health guru landing pages?”
  • Variations on this question include:
  • What makes this enticing?
  • What can I learn from this?
  • How does this apply to a project I am working on?
• Ultimately, the precise question you pose is less important than the practice of pausing when you come across a striking example and making a concerted effort to deconstruct the reasons it works.

Curiosity & Entrepreneurship

• The late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen spent decades analyzing the differences between ordinary managers and disruptive innovators like Elon Musk, Reed Hastings, and Jeff Bezos. What he found is intriguing. According to Christensen’s research, the personalities of managers and innovators are surprisingly comparable. Entrepreneurs are no more intelligent than middle managers, and middle managers are no less risk tolerant than entrepreneurs. The difference lies not in their personalities but in their behaviors.
• Questioning. Compared to average managers, disruptive innovators are far more likely to act on their curiosity. It’s a signature characteristic, a leading indicator of an innovative mind. Founders question; managers comply. Founders ask big picture questions (“What’s the real problem here?”), pose whatif scenarios (“What would happen if we stopped accepting cash?”), and, crucially, try to expose root causes (“What leads customers to behave this way?”).
• The lesson here is that taking time to question what makes a work successful should in no way feel trivial, unproductive, or academic. If you’re looking to elevate your performance, questioning represents some of the most important work you can do.

Study Multiple Mediums 

• Another approach that can help you spot differences involves going deep and studying a single work through multiple mediums. Consuming text as audio is one tactic. Just as helpful: turning audio into text. If there’s a speaker you admire, record their presentation and have it transcribed. If there’s a show or film you want to study closely, purchase the script (or hire a transcriptionist to create one for you). If you’re a musician, convert a song into notes. The more modalities you have at your fingertips, the more likely you are to identify key features that make it distinctive.

 Zooming Out

• Zooming out to a higher level is a critical step to detecting a pattern that is impossible to recognize up close. What does zooming out mean on a practical level? One example, used in writing, captures this approach perfectly. It’s called reverse outlining. Reverse outlining is traditional outlining’s sneakier, more provocative cousin. It doesn’t involve listing the important arguments you intend to include in the future. Rather, it entails working backward and outlining the major points contained within a completed piece. But there’s another use for reverse outlining, one that’s considerably more valuable for aspiring writers: using reverse outlining to uncover the hidden structure of works by published authors.
•  Business writer Dorie Clark has developed an entire course showing writers how to reverse engineer published articles and unlock a hidden structure. Among Clark’s insights for producing viral business content: 
  • open by stating the problem in a way that gets your readers nodding along, 
  • break up a long body of text by inserting headers that pique curiosity, 
  • close by providing provocative, counterintuitive tips that help people look smart by sharing your content.

• Reverse outlining’s value extends to a wide array of creative fields beyond writing. It’s one that marketers can apply to reverse outline memorable advertisements and campaigns, consultants can utilize to reverse outline successful proposals and pitch decks, and live performers can use to reverse outline captivating speeches, presentations, or stand up routines. Podcasters can use it to outline a program’s structure. Directors can use it to reverse storyboard scenes.
• It works because it prompts us to do something unnatural: take in the entirety of a piece all at once. That’s vastly different from the way we typically experience a creative work. Reverse outlines eliminate that experiential limitation. By compressing staggered events into a single document, we effectively collapse time, freeing us to broaden our perspective and see a piece anew.
• A second reason reverse outlines are effective at helping us detect patterns is that, ironically, they force us to ignore details. In order to distill large blocks of information down to a single sentence, we need to sacrifice massive amounts of nonessential details. We’re made to adopt a more abstract view of the material, and that abstraction is critical. 

How to Illuminate Hidden Patterns Using Numbers

• There’s an important takeaway here: detecting patterns requires abstraction. Reverse outlining isn’t the only tool we have available for zooming out and finding patterns. Another involves turning ideas into numbers.
• When you go to the doctor, certain measures are collected at every visit: temperature, weight, blood pressure, heart rate. These are your vitals. Each of these indicators gives your physician a read on your condition and offers clues to aspects of your health that are worth investigating. What makes these metrics useful is that they standardize patients. That’s the power of quantifying features. By turning important characteristics into numbers, we can compare how often they appear from one example to the next.
•  When it comes to finding patterns in works you admire, all you need is an openness to numbers and a willingness to explore. It all starts with quantifying features. The more measures you have, the easier it is for you to hit upon distinguishing characteristics that make a particular work unique. What sort of metrics might be especially important? It’s hard to know at first. Which is why it’s best to embrace curiosity and measure everything that can be measured. By gathering examples, quantifying important variations, identifying similarities, and applying your insights to create something new, you too are formulating a prediction. One that leverages the hidden patterns that make exceptional examples so successful.

Chapter 3 The Curse of Creativity 

• In music, superstar artists rarely use the same blueprint for very long. They’ve discovered that the safest path to staying relevant is evolving their approach by tweaking some aspect of their image, style, or sound with every album. David Bowie was among the first to leverage this “pattern interrupt” strategy, revising both his appearance. Peter Thiel has observed, “Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.”
• Which is why simply cloning a formula that works for someone else is ultimately a failing strategy. What you need is a formula that works to compliment your unique abilities, interests, and situation.
• Jennifer Mueller is a University of Southern California social psychologist whose creativity research reveals an alarming trend: the more novel the idea, the more likely it is to be rejected. Worse, we don’t just quash creative suggestions—we also penalize those who raise them. Mueller’s studies indicate that when we encounter highly creative ideas, not only are we likely to dismiss them, but we also perceive those proposing them as weaker leaders.
• Why exactly are we so loath to embrace the new? Because novelty makes us uncomfortable, and that discomfort is unpleasant. Nowhere is this tendency more evident than at the office. At work, we vastly prefer ideas that make us feel safe and confident, especially from those in charge. When a leader exercises creativity in the workplace, it does the opposite. It introduces uncertainty and runs contrary to the reassurance we seek from those at the top.
• Too much creativity doesn’t just backfire in the arts. The business world is riddled with examples of massively successful concepts that were initially spurned simply because they arrived years ahead of their time. Often it’s not just the quality of the idea that matters. Just as critical is consumer receptivity. Amazon’s one hour delivery for office supplies, books, and groceries may seem like the epitome of modern innovation—until you realize that Kozmo.com fell flat on its face trying to sell an identical service twenty years ago. The same applies to high end food delivery platforms like Uber Eats and DoorDash. They provide precisely the same service offered by Takeout Taxi way back in 1987.

The findings confirmed Jennifer Mueller’s dictum: the more novel the proposal, the less likely the experts were to recommend funding. But there’s an interesting clue buried within the data that speaks to what audiences truly want. Which proposals were most likely to receive the experts’ stamp of approval? The ones that contained a small dose of novelty.

• In other words, if outright mimicry leads us nowhere and absolute novelty is met with scorn, the solution is to steer clear of both extremes. What gets noticed is the generally familiar with a minor variation. Karim Lakhani, one of the Harvard Business School professors who conducted the grant study, has another term for this: optimal newness. The secret to producing work with lasting significance is not absolute novelty. It’s leveraging a proven formula and adding your unique twist.

Creativity Is What Happens When Ideas Have Sex

• In the world of business, combining influences has a long, illustrious history. Many of the technological innovations we take for granted today, ones that have fundamentally transformed our world, are in fact simply mash-ups of widely available concepts harvested from different domains.
• Steve Jobs didn’t invent the MP3 player or the cell phone. But he led a team that found a way of combining the two, leading to the iPhone. Back in 1995, two Stanford University students took the way academics cite research articles and applied it to organizing information on the World Wide Web, resulting in Google. The history of innovation is so dependent on the blending of existing ideas that even books would not have come about had the wine press (which gave us ink) not been combined with the coin punch (which gave us typographic blocks for letters) to produce the world’s first printer. As author Matt Ridely put it, creativity is what happens “when ideas have sex.”
• And so blending influences is one way of finding your twist. But it’s an approach with one critical limitation: your ability to locate unique influences. Combining influences works best for those who, like Quentin Tarantino, hunt for inspiration outside the cultural mainstream and import the elements they love best. Another path to finding your twist: borrow an approach that resonates in another domain, and apply it to your own.

 The Magic of “Inexperienced Experience”

•  One of the ways Marvel has managed to prevent a formula from feeling stale is by introducing a novel element into its films: a director whose expertise lies outside the superhero genre. Instead of relying on the same accomplished team over and over again, Marvel deliberately places a leader with limited genre exposure at the helm for the purpose of introducing a fresh perspective. Harrison calls this approach “inexperienced experience.”
• One clear application we can draw from Marvel’s approach is to inject new team members and marshal their influence to evolve a formula in a new direction. Instead of enjoying the comfort of working with the same team of colleagues, no matter how successful you might be, if you’re looking to produce creative work, it pays to seek out new team members every few projects. 
• It is often said that the person you are today is largely determined by the five people with whom you spend the most time. It’s because our close friends, colleagues, and family have the power to shape our beliefs and expectations in subtle ways that we often fail to appreciate. All of us have some control over how we spend our time and with whom we surround ourselves, yet we rarely consider changing our social circle as a tool for sparking creative ideas. We should.
• One opportunity we undervalue is the practice of networking. Many of us have been taught to view networking as a transactional tool in the service of business development and career advancement. But not everyone views networking this way. Clayton Christensen, found that while executives use networking to sell themselves and their company or to strategically befriend those with access to valuable resources, entrepreneurs go about it differently. They use networking as a means for gathering valuable insights and cutting-edge ideas. By actively seeking out and curating a diverse network of friends and colleagues from a wide range of disciplines, anyone can increase the odds of finding novel ideas worth incorporating into their work.
• Research shows that simply calling to mind a specific influence shifts our mindset and changes our behavior.. Studies have found, for example, that seeing a Disney logo prompts people to behave more honestly, exposure to a Gatorade bottle motivates people to invest more effort, and reminders of Red Bull propels people to act more aggressively. 🤯
• What these examples demonstrate is the vast potential of calling to mind a specific influence when crafting original work. By actively reflecting on a particular model, we spark ideas that blend its attributes with our thinking, stimulating our creativity. Here, the question we posed earlier (“How would Stephen Colbert start a wedding toast?”) becomes “How would Amazon launch this product?” or “How would Target feature this on display?” or “How would Kim Kardashian make this offer go viral?” Each of these prompts provides a unique launching point for ideas, sparking strategies, tactics, and techniques that might otherwise have gone overlooked. 

The Unexpected Power of Willful Ignorance

• The fourth strategy involves being proudly selective about the information you consume and intentionally excluding influences.Choosing to pursue a strategy of “willful ignorance” – means being more selective about the works you pay attention to, with an eye for inputs that serve and diversify your work. That can mean favoring the classics over the new and even going back and reexamining exceptional works you’ve enjoyed in the past more deliberately.
• Being choosy about what you pay attention to and what you ignore is a vital precursor to differentiating yourself from others in your field. As Steve Jobs famously pointed out, “Creativity is just connecting things.” What Jobs left out is the strategic implications of this astute observation: if you want to stand apart from the other chefs, it helps to cook with different ingredients.
• Which leads us to the second reason for paring down the content you allow in: it lends the materials you do consume more weight. Bandwidth is a zero sum game. The more dispersed your attention, the weaker the impact of any one influence. By weeding out unhelpful inputs, you amplify the attention received by influences that are truly valuable. No longer are essential classics crowded out by a noisy stream of mediocre content. For all of these reasons, a surprising number of successful cre- atives have adopted the practice of strategically ignoring certain influences, recognizing that there are times when consuming less results in a more distinctive approach.
• Not too long ago, Gladwell published a book called David and Goliath. In it he argued that when it comes to advantages and disadvantages, looks can be deceiving. Often, what appears to be a strength is actually a weakness, and what appears to be a weakness is actually a strength. Gladwell’s thesis wasn’t intended as a commentary on his career, but it would be hard to find a more fitting example of an apparent weakness evolving into an unexpected strength.
• Yes, reverse engineering can reveal important patterns embedded within Gladwell’s writing, but working purely to recreate his formula is a mistake. Mimicry alone rarely results in greatness. It’s only by deconstructing the masters and then adding a twist that we produce extraordinary results. The right question, therefore, is not “How do I write like Malcolm Gladwell?” It’s “How do I take Gladwell’s formula and make it my own?”

Part II

The Vision-Ability Gap

The Cost of Recognizing Great Work

• It’s one thing to distill exceptional work into a formula and quite another to reproduce it effectively. And while a proven recipe is undoubtedly useful, it comes with a cost: high expectations.
• As the creator of This American Life, Ira Glass, observed, when you are developing your skills, there is often a gap between your vision and your ability:

“What nobody tells people who are beginners—and I really wish someone had told this to me—is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple of years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit.”

• The divide Glass is describing—the gap between vision and ability—can be debilitating, especially when you have high standards. The price of having a clear vision is not simply disappointment with your own work. It’s also a risk factor for quitting. The stronger your radar for excellence, the harder it becomes to stomach mediocrity. And that’s a problem, especially when deconstructing the work of masters will invariably raise your standards.

Developing Good Taste

 “Ninety percent of everything is crud.”

• Sturgeon’s contention, which has been immortalized as “Sturgeon’s Law,” can be extrapolated to suggest that within any field, 90 percent of what is produced is garbage. That is, 90 percent of art is forgettable, 90 percent of internet content is underwhelming, and 90 percent of restaurants fail to hit the mark. But Sturgeon’s Law does provide a useful figure in one respect: as a benchmark for determining whether or not your taste is adequately dialed in, particularly when evaluating work in a field you wish to master. If half of everything you encounter seems absolutely spectacular, chances are, you are not yet sufficiently attuned to what it is that you truly love.
•  The challenge, of course, is knowing how to bridge the divide so that the distance between where you are today and where you need to be feels inspiring, not deflating.

Chapter 4 The Scoreboard Principle

• Simply put, metrics motivate. They lead to better decisions, greater consistency, fewer distractions, and emotional investment. This is the Scoreboard Principle: measurement begets improvement. Which is why the first step to improving at anything begins with relentlessly keeping score. 
• Why does tracking have such a profound effect? Because it prompts dieters to reflect on their food choices and gives them an unvarnished look at their calorie consumption. But it’s not just reflecting back on past choices that’s useful—it’s also the effect tracking has on future decisions.
• I’ve observed a similar effect on time-strapped professionals. One of the first exercises I invite my coaching clients to do involves tracking their time over the course of several workdays, so we can get an objective look at how they spend their week. Afterward, we sit down together and review the findings. The results are always revealing. Invariably, we spot commitments that no longer serve their priorities and activities that take up more time than they should.
• But there’s a sneaky flaw in this “objective” exercise: the very process of keeping a time log influences the choices we make. That’s because it’s one thing to squander thirty minutes watching YouTube videos when that decision stays between you and your browser history. But it’s a choice you weigh a lot more carefully when you have to report it on a time sheet. Knowing that you—or you and your performance coach—will analyze your behavior later makes immediate rewards a little less appetizing and helps you reach wiser long-term decisions.
• The right measure can also expose wasted effort. Once you start collecting performance metrics, anything that doesn’t contribute to a desired outcome becomes impossible to ignore. Among my coaching clients, a number have transitioned from working within large organizations to starting small businesses. One shift these clients can’t help but notice is an evolution in their attitude toward meetings. They go from mildly disliking large, drawn out meetings to experiencing physical revulsion at the prospect of spending hours talking with colleagues.
• Tracking is especially useful when it draws our attention to valuable actions we tend to avoid. Turning a desired action into a metric makes you more likely to follow through. It’s because metrics introduce an emotional dimension. 

Why Our Brains Love Numbers

• Recent lab experiments reveal that even when scores are completely detached from people’s behavior, growing point totals motivate greater effort and higher performance. Researchers have a name for this phenomenon: Numerical Nudging. It refers to the fact that, as the experimenters put it, even “inherently meaningless numbers” are enough to “strategically alter behaviors.” 
• Decades of research suggest that all humans—regardless of their age, gender, or culture—are born with three basic psychological needs: the need for belonging, autonomy, and competence. It’s the last of the three that growing scores appeal to—the basic human desire for learning, skill acquisition, and mastery. By signaling progress and illustrating achievement, metrics satisfy our instinctive drive for growth.

Vanity Metrics

• Startups, Eric Ries noted, face an avalanche of vanity metric traps. Among the more common culprits: obsessing over total website visitors (instead of focusing on website conversions or sales), fattening up user numbers (instead of increasing paying customers), and maximizing user growth (when active or repeat users are far more valuable). From Ries’s perspective, optimizing the wrong metric isn’t just wasted effort, it can obliterate a business. By enticing founders with seductive, superficial goals and diverting their attention away from activities that legitimately contribute to a sustainable business, vanity metrics pose a crippling danger.
• A similar case can be made for ambitious professionals looking to establish a meaningful career. Socially desirable, but ultimately meaningless, metrics are everywhere. Any metric that seizes your attention but doesn’t contribute to your health, wellbeing, or career is ultimately a distraction. The more attention we devote to vanity metrics, the less attention we have for activities that matter.
• Our fascination with metrics suggests that anything we consistently measure receives enhanced attention. The opportunity lies in measuring the right actions and crafting a scoreboard that directs your attention to the right metrics—especially skills that bridge the gap between your ultimate vision and current ability.

How to Design Your Scoreboard 

• The metrics Roger Federer’s team used to turn his game around did something crucial: they broke down long, complex matches into distinct categories of behavior. That allowed Federer’s team to assess each element of his game individually. By isolating key components—including his serves, forehands, backhands, overheads, net points—they were able to uncover his unique weakness and formulate a plan to remedy it.
• To leverage metrics effectively, we need more than global feedback on performance. We need data that measure our key behaviors and tell us which we are executing well and which we have the potential to improve. 
• What should you measure? The precise elements worth monitoring will depend on the nature of the task, your level of skill, and your ultimate goals. With that in mind, here are three approaches worth considering.
  • The first involves breaking down a single activity into multiple subskills. In the same way that a tennis match consists of different types of shots, most intellectual activities can be broken down into several distinct categories of skill. Suppose, for example, that your job involves pitching your firm to new prospects and you want to develop metrics to track your performance. A number of subskills come into play when you present at meetings, including: memorization, delivery, body language, presence, and poise. Recording your pitch and scoring these elements individually will provide you with a clear sense of where your performance is strong and where it needs improvement.
  • The second approach is useful for tasks where success has less to do with combining disparate skills than hitting on particular features. Writing reports, articles, or client emails offers a useful illustration. In all three cases, effective writing is the main skill. And yet we can still develop metrics that help us assess the quality of a composition.
  • The next step involves transforming each element on your list into a scored item. Here’s one way to do it. After composing your email, evaluate your draft by scoring your performance. Ask yourself: On a scale of 1 (not well) to 7 (extremely well), how well does this email execute: 

By turning features into metrics, you create a measure that offers you immediate feedback on your performance and draws your attention to elements of your work that can be improved.

• A third approach for crafting metrics that track your performance involves looking beyond a particular task and evaluating the totality of your performance over the course of a specified time frame.
• Executive coach Marshall Goldsmith swears by this technique. – he insists that all his clients identify an ideal version of themselves and work backward, listing the specific behaviors their best self would execute on a regular basis. Then he has them rate themselves on each behavior daily. Goldsmith even uses this method on himself. Every evening, a little before bedtime, his assistant calls and reads off a list of questions. Having another person do the asking, he has found, provides accountability and ensures that he follows through.
• Goldsmith tracks thirty six items that range from work-related tasks (minutes spent writing, client check-ins) to health and hygiene (minutes spent exercising, taking vitamins) to showing kindness and empathy to others (complimenting or doing something nice for Lyda, his wife).
• Goldsmith’s daily questions provide a modern spin on a practice made famous by legendary innovator and American revolutionary Benjamin Franklin.To counteract his shortcomings, he developed a list of virtues that he hoped to instill into his character through the use of self report. A sample of Franklin’s daily tracker appears in his 1791 autobiography. Given what we now know of his spotty reputation, it’s easy to grasp why certain virtues appear on his list: they represent the inverse of habits he aimed to extinguish. At the very top of his list is temperance (no heavy drinking), followed by silence (minimize senseless gossip) and later chastity (avoid promiscuity).
• Franklin’s list encompassed thirteen virtues. Every evening, he would pull out his journal and review the list, marking off virtues he had failed to carry out that day.

Using Your Scoreboard to Level Up

• No matter which of these methods you use as your scoreboard— measuring subskills, features, or daily habits—certain advantages will be apparent right away.
• There is the added clarity you experience from having a concrete set of predefined goals. There’s the elevated sense of control that comes from limiting your attention to a modest set of outcomes. Tracking your performance also makes you more aware of your decisions, prompting you to make better choices.
• But then there are advantages that are less obvious—like the opportunity for immediate feedback.
• When I first learned of Humm’s approach, I was struck by its similarity to the way I develop articles for media outlets. As a writer, I run my ideas through a filter to determine whether they are worthy of an eight hundred word piece. Specifically, a prospective idea must tick off four boxes for me to consider it worth tackling. The topic must: (1) relate to work, (2) feature science-based insights, (3) include actionable takeaways, and (4) make the reader feel smarter for having read it. Any idea that fails to meet these fundamentals is quickly abandoned. It’s a process that ensures that I both produce valuable content and avoid hours of wasted effort.*
• A final non obvious advantage to using metrics is that they help illuminate the hidden patterns that underlie success by exposing leading indicators.
• A leading indicator is a metric that predicts an important outcome in advance, while the outcome can still be influenced. In contrast, a lagging indicator reflects the final result, after the outcome has been determined.
• Ultimately, the search for leading indicators is the quest for manageable antecedents of success. The better you are at pinpointing controllable behaviors that drive a desired outcome, the better your chances of elevating your performance and achieving your objectives.
• And it all starts with a single activity: tracking metrics.
• So far in this chapter, we’ve looked at all the benefits that come with developing a scoreboard and using it to track our performance. But it would be wrong to suggest that metrics are an unmitigated good. At times, numbers can lead us astray, as they did for Wells Fargo.* Psychologists have a term for the hysteria that swept through the offices of Wells Fargo: surrogation. It occurs when people become so consumed with hitting a number that they forget the outcome that number is intended to promote.
• The metric becomes a substitute, an end in itself. Once you learn about surrogation, you start to realize that it’s everywhere. Surrogation is the reason car dealerships are willing to give you a better price on the last day of the month. Surrogation is the reason baseball hitters with a strong average elect to sit out the final game of the season. Surrogation is the reason many of us pace in circles just so we can bask in the glory of having our pedometer declare that we have walked ten thousand steps.
  In many ways, surrogation is a natural consequence of metrics

Three Secrets of Personal Scoreboards That Work 

• The first best practice is the most obvious: collect multiple metrics. Wells Fargo made the fatal error of singling out one metric. Anytime you reduce your focus to a single number (sales, likes, meeting requests), you increase the likelihood of optimizing for that number at the expense of other crucial factors.
• The second best practice is to aim for balance in the types of metrics you collect. One example of balance is tracking a combination of behaviors and outcomes. For some, there is a temptation to focus only on behaviors because behaviors are controllable, while outcomes, in many cases, are not. That’s a mistake. The only way to find lead indicators is to record both actions and outcomes and work backward, uncovering hidden drivers. Another example of balance concerns time frame. The ideal scoreboard reflects both short-term and long-term outcomes. This is especially vital for goals that take a long period of time to complete. It’s easy to get discouraged when a project takes weeks or even years to bring to fruition. Measuring short-term outcomes makes progress easier to appreciate, keeping us motivated and making extended projects feel more achievable.
• A third example of balance comes about when we gather both desirable and undesirable metrics. It’s not enough to track positive behaviors and outcomes. The ideal scoreboard tracks both the measures we hope to boost as well as those we need to minimize.
• Undesirable metrics are especially valuable when they reflect more than just the inverse of an intended outcome. Used correctly, they reveal new information on specific aspects of performance that could be improved. In high-end restaurants, for example, many chefs track uneaten food left on customers’ plates after each course. Doing so helps them determine which elements of a dish were less successful. By tracking what didn’t work, they gain new insight into what they can do better. Another important function of undesirable metrics is that they can be used as guardrails, alerting us when desirable metrics are having too much sway. 
• Former Intel CEO Andy Grove, a metrics pioneer whose approach to quantifying performance influenced a generation of Silicon Valley leaders, believed that every metric has the potential to backfire. Grove is credited with introducing a crucial imperative: “For every metric, there should be another ‘paired’ metric that addresses the adverse consequences of the first metric.” What Grove is saying is that metrics are powerful motivators. Therefore, if you’re going to set up a scoreboard, you need to ask yourself: What if I’m too successful on this measure? By anticipating the negative consequences of a desirable metric, you can develop a second, paired metric that prevents you from losing sight of the bigger picture.
• A final best practice for creating an effective scoreboard that reliably improves performance is to evolve your metrics from time to time instead of mindlessly following an outdated formula. As we refine our skills, the measures worth monitoring will invariably change. Some metrics will no longer benefit from tracking, while other new behaviors and outcomes will suddenly be worth adding. Instead of viewing our scoreboard as a fixed benchmark, we are better off using it as a malleable tool that adapts to meet our evolving skills and objectives.

5

How to Take the Risk Out of Risk Taking

• Now let me ask you this: How likely are you to remember these facts a year from now? One element you probably won’t consider when estimating your likelihood of recalling these facts: the font in which they are printed. If you’re like most people, the notion that something as incidental as a font might affect your memory a full year from now will probably strike you as absurd. And yet research suggests that it can be surprisingly impactful. Why? Because it increases the amount of mental effort we put toward understanding a block of text.
• In 2010, Princeton psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer and his team brought students into the lab and had them learn about a fictional species. Their participants received one of two booklets. The first was printed in a large, easy-to-read font. The other featured a smaller, grayer font. Easy to read -Hard to read
• Both groups were allotted the same amount of time—ninety seconds—to read the material and then told to do an unrelated task so that the information would no longer be top of mind. When Oppenheimer’s team tested the students’ memory fifteen minutes later, the results were striking. The group given the easy-to-read font made more than twice the number of errors as those forced to decipher the hard-to-read text. Oppenheimer’s research makes a compelling case that increased effort leads to deeper learning. Education expert Robert A. Bjork has a term for this phenomenon: Desirable Difficulty. Over the past five decades, Bjork has conducted a mountain of studies illuminating the factors that contribute to sustained learning. His findings are unmistakable: we learn best when we’re challenged in ways that stretch the limits of our current abilities. The notion that desirable difficulties facilitate growth extends well beyond the domain of education. Bodybuilders, for example, develop their physique by methodically targeting distinct muscle groups and pushing them to exhaustion. Strain serves as an essential catalyst—one that unleashes a cascade of biological reactions that results in increased mass, stamina, and strength. A similar observation applies to sports. World-class athletes don’t acquire new skills by clinging to their comfort zone. They do so by practicing at the upper limits of their abilities, combining daring experimentation with a healthy willingness to fail.

What Successful Businesses Know About Failure

• To summarize: growth requires strain. A moderate degree of difficulty is essential to both mental and physical development. Yet what’s the one place where stretching our limits and experimenting with new techniques is most challenging? The workplace. Paradoxically, the one domain in which skill building is arguably most essential is the same domain in which learning is also hardest to achieve.

Why is learning at work so hard?

• For one thing, it’s because the cost of workplace failure tends to be substantial. Most managers show little tolerance for mistakes, no matter how well intentioned, and penalize those who make them. Unlike the fields of sports, music, and education, where there exists a profound appreciation that learning occurs through experimentation and feedback, the world of work is consumed with instant, reliable results. When it comes to failure, the workplace is unforgiving. Every day is game day. There are no opportunities for practice.
• Simone Biles illustrates, we don’t learn through simple repetition. We learn by attempting something difficult that lies just outside our comfort zone, observing the outcome, and making adjustments. That’s how learning happens. And when we are denied the opportunity to take intelligent risks, the chances of acquiring new skills shrinks.
• Then there’s a third barrier: even if we do somehow manage to endure the possibility of failure and identify an intelligent risk worth taking, there’s still one other crucial impediment to learning in the workplace: the absence of consistent, detailed, and immediate feedback. 
• Just how are these organizations able to jeopardize so much risk? By figuring out something crucial: how to take the risk out of risk taking. Using a set of strategic, nimble, and inexpensive practices, many of the most innovative organizations and entrepreneurs are able to reap the benefits of risk taking without putting everything on the line. 
• The key to improvement involves gathering feedback from a tiny segment of a population, minimizing risk, and using the input to make ongoing adjustments. For speakers and entertainers, live appearances are clearly a must. We are living in a golden age of feedback. Test audiences are everywhere. The question isn’t whether to test, it’s why aren’t you testing more?

 Pseudonyms 

• Pseudonyms allow companies to experiment with new products and identities without assuming huge risk. But there’s another benefit to leveraging pseudonyms. They can also be used to reintroduce existing products, placing them in a new light, without the baggage of a brand’s existing identity. Creating an offshoot brand to test new ideas is common practice in business, and it’s an approach that’s equally useful in the arts.

Sell First, Build Later

• Ultimately, the value in selling first and producing later isn’t just that it minimizes risk and provides early feedback. It empowers creative thinkers to take more swings, multiplying their chances of hitting on winning ideas. 
• By selling a prototype, Swinmurn managed to greatly diminish the risk involved in starting a retail business. He did so by selling first and procuring second. Swinmurn is not the first to leverage this approach. Preselling products that don’t technically exist turns out to have a long and storied history in the world of business.
• When we are developing our skills, our focus naturally tilts toward improving our execution. We want to write the perfect script, develop the perfect website, compose the perfect speech. There are times, however, when we would be better off postponing the pursuit of excellence in favor of first confirming that our approach is one that others crave.
• It does us no good to create the perfect version of something no one wants. One way to avoid that trap, and in the process mitigate risk, is by vaulting ahead to the next step. For many professionals, that next step involves selling an idea to a customer, client, or manager. Starting with sales is essential to helping businesses and creators alike steer clear of doomed projects, assess potential more quickly, and, critically, take lots more risks.
• Discovering the next step can be as easy as reflecting on the question: If I executed this successfully, what would I do next?   

To Grow, Think like a Venture Capitalist

• To this day, VCs are built on the idea that diversifying investments minimizes risk. And it’s not just investment firms that leverage this strategy—it’s also the game plan driving the world’s most successful conglomerates. Profitable companies rarely stick to one product or a single industry. They diversify. And with that diversification comes lower risk.
• This same principle of reducing risk applies to you. In much the same way as spreading financial resources across a range of offerings mitigates risk, so, too, does investing in a range of professional opportunities.
• The University of Wisconsin examined the success rates of entrepreneurs, comparing those who quit their job to run a new business against those who played it safe and kept their day job while quietly developing their business on the side. Surprisingly, full-time commitment to a business venture did not turn out to be the winning strategy. Cautious employees were significantly more likely to succeed. Why? Because they possessed the financial stability to reach more patient, strategic decisions—a luxury not available to those whose livelihood was constantly on the line. A base salary provides security—financial reassurance that no matter how poorly things go on a side venture, failure is salvageable. Which, in a way, is the unifying principle connecting the four business strategies we’ve explored together in this chapter. Whether we experiment with a small subsection of our audience, or perform under a pseudonym, or pre sell our ideas in advance, or diversify our portfolio, risk taking is dramatically easier once the cost of failure shrinks.
• We’re often told that growth requires courage—that the only way to improve is to somehow find the gumption to stomach more risks and embrace situations that make us uncomfortable. But as we’ve discovered in this chapter, that’s not the only path to personal development. Tackling difficult challenges and putting everything on the line are simply not the same thing.

Chapter 6 

Practicing in Three Dimensions-How Athletes See the Future

• The first thing we’re likely to discover is that when Tony Romo analyzes players on a football field, his brain is less active than the average fan’s. Surprisingly, experts use less energy than novices when processing information yet get better results.
• How can this be? Years of experience have taught experts to quickly distinguish relevant from irrelevant cues, enabling them to home in on just the bits of data that are worth evaluating. Their attention is highly selective, focusing on a small number of essential cues. Unlike the casual fan, Romo isn’t distracted by unruly fans or wacky mascots—he knows precisely what to look for and effortlessly ignores everything else. But it’s not just tuning out the irrelevant. It’s also squeezing more information out of seemingly benign signals. 

 In 1978, British psychologists published a clever study illuminating just how much more experts are able to glean by locking in on a few telling clues. In the experiment, two groups of tennis players— experts and novices—were shown film of tennis players serving. On each serve, the film was stopped precisely fortytwo milliseconds before the servers made contact with the ball, and participants were asked a question: Where will the serve land after it is struck? Inexperienced players didn’t have a clue. But like Tony Romo, expert tennis players were significantly more accurate in their predictions. They were able to tell where the ball was headed by scanning for information a novice player ignores, like the direction of the servers’ torso, the bend of their elbow, and the angle of their racquet.

A second reason experts like Tony Romo expend less brainpower is that they consider fewer options. Experience has taught them which events are likely to occur in a given context and which are not. As the Zen monk Shunryu ̄ Suzuki noted, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities but in the expert’s mind there are few.” MRI studies of artists, radiologists, and chess grand masters bear this out. Romo’s extensive knowledge of football enables him to eliminate plays with a low probability of transpiring, limiting his focus to a small universe of likely options, resulting in both lower cognitive load and sharper predictions.

In addition to seeing less overall activation on Tony Romo’s brain scan, the activity that does register is likely to be more widely dispersed throughout his brain. Unlike novices, experts utilize a broader mix of brain regions to analyze information because they’re not simply reading their environment. They’re reading their environment, interpreting the information, and preparing a response all at the same time. In contrast, novices perform the same tasks but do so consecutively, one at a time.

The third major difference we’re likely to find between an expert and a novice is anatomical. Certain features of Tony Romo’s brain are likely to be bigger than those of a casual football fan. That discrepancy reflects neuroplasticity—the human brain’s capacity for reorganizing itself to better meet demands it frequently encounters. Repeatedly performing the same activity prompts the brain to adapt. It does so both by quickening the connection between participating neurons and by forming additional neurons to take on some of the cognitive load. Over time, those adaptations pile up, contributing to physical differences between the brain of an expert and a novice.

What the Best Coaches Have in Common with Hollywood Directors

• How many hours does Jim Harbaugh spend watching film? A staggering amount: nearly six hours a day. Harbaugh devotes more time to reviewing previous games than any other activity, including running practices, meeting with players, and mapping out his team’s game plan—combined. As a strategic thinker, he understands that learning from past performance is one of the smartest things you can do to prepare for the future. Directors, athletes, and coaches rely on film to help them learn from the past and make crucial adjustments, ones that can make all the difference between dismal failure and colossal success.

Self-Reflection

• What effect did self-reflection have on performance? When experimenters tallied up the scores, the results were compelling. Self-reflectors outperformed breaktakers by a significant margin, solving over 20 percent more puzzles. A brief invitation to think about what they had learned and how they might apply those lessons in the future was all it took to spark considerable improvement.
• In later studies, the experimenters replicated this finding and showed that self-reflection aids performance even when no money is on the line. They then tested self-reflection in the real world and found that inviting employees to reflect on the lessons they learned during a training session increased their understanding of the material by a remarkable 23 percent. The benefits of self-reflection, or reflective practice, as it is termed in the field of education, are several.
  • First, reflective practice prompts us to do something we rarely do over the course of the workday: pause and consider our progress. In so doing, we are briefly jolted awake, freed from the fog of mindless reactivity and routine habits, and made to examine the value of our actions. If things are going well, we can plunge forward with renewed confidence. If, on the other hand, our outcomes prove lacking, we’re compelled to seek adjustments.
  • Reflective practice also facilitates deeper learning by prompting us to search for higher-order principles.
  • A final benefit of reflective practice is that it leads us to compare our recent experiences against our prior beliefs, stimulating the emergence of insight. In the early 1900s, philosopher and education expert John Dewey wrote extensively about the benefits of reflective practice, which he considered an essential tool for learning and development. Observation alone is not enough for education, Dewey believed. Knowledge only comes about when we reflect on our experiences, revise our beliefs, and test our assumptions. Reviewing past events with an eye for insights, patterns, and predictions is how we turn experience into wisdom.

A Beginner’s Guide to Reflective Practice

• One of the first lessons soldiers like Navy SEALs learn is that in battle, capturing the high ground is critical. It gives you much needed perspective. Without it, you can easily make fatal errors because you are missing the big picture. The same applies to everyday life, where daily emergencies and endless commitments are a constant threat to achieving larger strategic objectives.
• Developing a daily practice to pause, reflect, and strategize can yield substantial benefits that compound over time. We’ve already seen how reflective practice can foster quicker learning, higher confidence, and deeper knowledge. That’s just the beginning. Writing about daily events has also been shown to help us process emotions, quiet anxiety, and diminish stress. By placing our own narrative spin on events, we no longer feel as if events are happening to us. Writing about our lives tips the scales, restoring our sense of control.
• Journaling by hand, in particular, forces us to slow down. Because most adults think faster than they write, we’re compelled to pause and reflect as we wait for our hand to catch up, examining our thoughts in a way that rarely occurs on a busy day. useful in promoting self-reflection, learning, and skill development: the five-year journal.

 Among the many lessons I have come to appreciate about myself by keeping a five-year journal:

• Lesson #1: Communal experiences are usually better than I anticipate.
• Lesson #2: The most productive days are ones devoid of emails.
• Lesson #3: I tend to forget about negative interactions and am not very good at maintaining grudges.
• Lesson #4: On days when I neglect cardio training, my sleep suffers.
• Lesson #5: The greater the struggle involved in a project, the bigger the payoff when it succeeds.
  That last observation is worth expanding on. We often forget how much effort went into our past successes. Consequently, when new challenges arise, we overestimate their difficulty and underestimate our ability to overcome barriers. A five-year journal serves as a nightly reminder of conquered obstacles, overblown fears, and meaningful achievements. It also provides a running catalog of our past mistakes, which is equally useful because it prevents us from needlessly repeating them. by expanding our time frame from the immediate present to the distant past, five-year journals promote smarter, more thoughtful decision making. One of the essential keys to wisdom is the ability to zoom out and think about the long-term ramifications of a choice, beyond the immediate, short term gain. The more we reflect on our past experiences, the better positioned we are to reach wise decisions in the present.
  Keep in mind not all journaling needs to focus on life in general. You could instead focus on a single skill that you’re working to master, like writing, formulating new ideas, or pitching potential clients. Ultimately, the value of a five-year journal is that it automates reflective practice, prompting us to distill the lessons we’ve gleaned from the past and revisit strategies worth building on in the future.

The Case for Thinking More and Doing Less 

Mental Rehearsal 

• Why are so many athletes captivated with imagery? The short answer is because it works. And not just in sports. Studies show that surgeons who mentally rehearse procedures in advance of entering the operating room commit fewer errors and experience less stress during surgery. Musicians who practice playing a piece in their head before sitting down at the piano learn compositions more quickly. Public speakers who visualize their performance before getting up onstage experience less anxiety, appear less rigid, and deliver more compelling presentations.
• Researchers at UCLA led an experiment designed to quantify the value of visualizing success. The study involved just over a hundred freshmen in an introductory psychology class. A week before the students’ midterm exam, the experimenters divided the students into three groups. Those in the first group were instructed to visualize themselves receiving a high grade on the midterm. Those in the second group were also asked to use visualization, with one key difference. Instead of imagining a successful outcome, they were told to visualize the process of studying, including the specifics of where, when, and how they might prepare for the exam. Those in the final group were simply asked to monitor how much time they spent studying over the coming week. By now, you can probably guess where this is going. Which group performed best on the midterm exam? The group that visualized studying, of course. Visualizing the process led to more studying, lower anxiety, and a higher grade. But that’s not all the researchers discovered. They also found that compared to the control group (the students who did no visualization whatsoever and simply tracked their study time during the week), the students who followed the Bianca Andreescu/Jim Carrey method of visualizing success actually did worse. Their scores were the lowest of any group. 

Why would visualizing a positive outcome lead to a worse grade? The emotional payoff we experience when we imagine ourselves achieving a desired result diminishes our appetite for doing the work necessary to be successful. We’re temporarily sated, even when we’re logically aware that the entire experience is a fantasy. Yet that’s not the case when our mental simulation is focused on process. Mentally rehearsing the specific actions we need to take in advance reliably elevates our performance.

Five Ways the Visualizing Process Makes You Perform Better

• To prepare, like Michael Phelps, you lie down on your bed, close your eyes, and visualize the following day. What are the practical benefits of performing this exercise?
• The first is that mentally simulating a task helps you identify obstacles before you encounter them. A related advantage is that this exercise gives you an emotional preview of what you’re likely to experience when the time comes for you to start writing. Perhaps the notion of having to produce a lengthy document under a tight deadline causes you to feel overwhelmed. That’s useful information. Knowing how you are likely to react enables you to prepare a productive response before you begin. Now that you are alert to these challenges, you can begin to frontload decisions in advance of sitting down to do the work. You may, for example, elect to work from home the following day, so that you can avoid the commotion at your office. As you go about visualizing yourself sitting at your desk, focusing intently, crafting the various components of your draft, you are likely to shrink your anxiety and grow your confidence. Not only is this mental simulation helping you perfect your game plan in advance, it contributes to an expectation of success.
• Studies show that when we imagine ourselves performing an action, we activate the same neural pathways involved in physically doing the behavior. In other words, when Phelps closes his eyes and pictures himself leaping into a pool, parts of his motor cortex light up as if he is literally diving off the block and plunging into a crisp body of water.
• Over time, all that mental activation adds up, contributing to faster processing and deeper mental associations. And it’s not just Phelps’s brain that benefits. Imagery has also been shown to engage athletes’ muscles, as well as their cardiovascular and respiratory systems, without overtaxing their body and risking burnout in the way that additional physical practice might. In fact, one study found that compared to athletes who rely on physical practice alone, athletes using imagery can cut their practice load in half without negatively impacting their performance at all.

How to Use Mental Practice

• First, researchers use the term imagery (not visualization) for a reason. The more senses you involve, the more effective your simulation is likely to be. A second is that you can make your imagery more vivid by alternating between first and third person perspectives. Using an internal first person perspective (e.g., imagine looking out at your audience) will elicit a more visceral response, which is valuable when you want an emotional preview. But at times that experience can feel overwhelming or is no longer as evocative because you’ve done it multiple times. This is when it’s useful to alternate to an external third person simulation (e.g., imagine yourself sitting in the audience, watching the presentation). Doing so lowers the emotional temperature, helps you envision how an audience might respond to certain elements of your performance, and enables you to see yourself succeeding.
• Another useful tip is to occasionally picture yourself faltering or encountering an unexpected hurdle. The key is to keep going and think through exactly how you might navigate that momentary setback and then resume your typical routine. This practice will not only help you anticipate challenges, it will also elevate your confidence by instilling the belief that you can recover from whatever situation happens to arise.
• A final point worth noting: effective imagery does not require a major outlay of time. Research suggests that the optimal length is no more than twenty minutes, with some studies reporting benefits after as little as three minutes of focused simulation. Given the enormous versatility of mental rehearsal and the fact that it can be performed anywhere, anytime with no equipment, it’s hard to comprehend why imagery has yet to receive the attention it deserves outside the domain of sports
• Tennis icon Billie Jean King utilized imagery in precisely this way on her path to securing thirty-nine Grand Slam titles. In an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air recorded after King’s retirement, she revealed her approach to picturing every potential adverse scenario at the US Open and how she might respond, before stepping onto the court: “I always thought about the wind. I thought about the sun. I thought about bad line calls. I thought about rain if we had to wait, things that were probably out of my control, and how would I respond to them.” King’s preparation went beyond simulating her play. She also imagined her demeanor between points. “I would think about how I wanted to act. Like they teach in acting, act as if, it’s the same thing in sports. Do you stand up straight? Do you have your body language speaking in a confident way? Because 75 percent of the time when you’re on the court, you’re actually not hitting a ball. And I think that’s where the champions come through. So I would visualize all these different possibilities.” 

Why Your Brain Prevents You from Learning (and What to Do About It)

• Often your development stalls even when you rehearse in conditions entirely representative of real-life settings. In part, it’s because our brain is working against us.
• One of the benefits of extensive training is that certain actions start to occur quickly and automatically over time. We no longer have to think deeply about what to do next the way we did when we first started. One quintessential example is reading. Another is driving. The first time I drove a car, I squeezed the steering wheel so hard that my fingers were sore for hours. More than twenty years later, it often seems like I pay more attention choosing which pod- cast to play than I do to the actual driving. Psychologists call this Automaticity. It refers to our ability to perform complex skills while paying them very little attention. It’s a consequence of expertise.

Automaticity 

• Automaticity works by converting the conscious into the unconscious. Neurologists can map its progression in the brain using MRI scans. At first, complex behaviors require the attention of the brain’s evolved frontal region called the cerebral cortex. But then, as we grow more familiar with certain actions, they become the domain of lower, subcortical regions, including the basal ganglia and the cerebellum. Expertise frees up the more sophisticated cerebral cortex, allowing us to focus less on our actions and allow our minds to wander. But as it turns out, automaticity can make improvement harder to achieve. The less attention we pay to our actions, the harder it becomes for us to elevate our performance or acquire new skills. And herein lies a paradox. Experience begets automaticity. And automaticity stifles learning. How, then, do you improve on a task you already perform reasonably well? “10,000-hour rule”—the popular notion that mastering a skill requires focused, feedback rich practice over a lengthy period of time.*
• Drawing on decades of research into the lives of top performers, Ericsson identified the precise features of practice that contribute most to skill building and expertise.
• The most effective practice, Ericsson found, tackles perceived weaknesses, or elements of an activity that you find especially difficult to execute. Another key is to break down complex tasks and isolate specific aspects, focusing on them one at a time. Ideally, feedback is immediate, enabling you to make incremental adjustments and try again, thereby ensuring that the time you invest practicing translates into gradual improvement and growth.
• Experts don’t achieve mastery through mere repetition. They do so by targeting weaknesses, pursuing stretch goals, and relentlessly pushing the bounds of their abilities. It’s the only way to improve at a task you already perform reasonably well and elude the grasp of automaticity.
• There’s one other thing experts know: it’s not enough to reproduce game-time conditions when game-time conditions feel routine. Often, the only way to jolt an experienced mind awake is to force it to do something that feels entirely new.

Keep Practice Fresh, Rewarding and Productive

• Extreme workouts reflect a technique researchers call pressure acclimatization training. It involves practicing under extreme conditions that trigger even more anxiety than a performer is likely to experience in real-life settings. Practicing in pressure filled situations provides performers the valuable experience of managing their fears, tuning out unexpected distractions, and executing under duress.
• Dialing up the pressure is one path to ensuring that practice continues to stimulate learning long after we become familiar with a skill.

Create Challenge

• One simple approach is to seek out novelty. A crucial mistake to avoid anytime you’re working to develop a skill is to follow the same practice regimen for more than a few days. Predictability fosters boredom, and boredom is the enemy of focus, memory, and learning. Novelty, on the other hand, is an attention magnet. Our brains are naturally drawn to new features in our surroundings. It’s an instinct we inherited from our ancestors, for whom noticing environmental changes was a matter of life and death.
•  Among the first studies to unearth this unexpected insight compared the performance of basketball shooters after three days of practice. The first group practiced shooting the same shot, twelve feet away from the basket, for three straight sessions. The second group practiced a variety of shots that included the same twelve footer, as well as eight and fifteen footers. At the end of the week, the experimenters invited both groups to the gym and recorded which could hit twelve footers most consistently. The results weren’t even close. The group practicing a variety of shots was nearly 40 percent better.
• The most effective practice regimens avoid extended repetition, even if that means spending less time working on a target skill. Instead they harness the power of novelty and shake things up by blending an assortment of tasks, which results in sharper learning and stronger performance.
• A second method of ensuring that practice remains challenging is introducing new hardships. Michael Phelps coach had him practice in the dark so in the 2012 Olympics when his goggles filled with water and he couldn’t see he had already trained in this scenario. 
• The final approach to ensuring that practice continues to foster learning is by far the most surprising. It involves abandoning your standard practice regimen altogether and turning your attention to an entirely new task. For football players like Walker, ballet represents one example of cross-training—the practice of mastering a related activity in an adjacent field. Cross Training offers a slew of benefits, including keeping players fit, introducing transferable techniques, and strengthening underused muscle groups. It also offers athletes an activity they can practice all year round, while mitigating the risk of boredom or burnout.

7

How to Talk to Experts

The lesson is hardly unique: experts rarely make great instructors.

• We tend to assume that high performers are keenly aware of the skills that set them apart and possess the ability to impart that knowledge to anyone they choose. Neither of those assumptions is true. If they were, the most celebrated coaches in sports would be retired superstars, like basketball’s Magic Johnson and Isiah Thomas.
• A comprehensive analysis published in the Review of Educational Research assessed the performance of more than half a million professors by looking at the quantity and impact of their research, as well as their students’ evaluations. The conclusion? The relationship between a professor’s research output and teaching performance is essentially zero.*More alarmingly, there is also evidence that students have better educational experiences in classes taught by part-time faculty than tenured professors (most of whom secured their jobs by excelling in research). 
• Studies reveal that expertise actively hinders our ability to explain. As it turns out, the better we perform a task, the worse we get at communicating how we managed to do it.

Which raises an obvious question: Why?

When Knowledge Makes You Dumber

• Why are we so bad at simulating not knowing? Psychologists believe it’s because our brains evolved to gobble up new information, not banish what we’ve already learned. No matter how hard we might try or how motivated we might be to relate to those who don’t share our experiences, we’re simply not built to ignore useful information. Which makes sense. In the evolutionary past, keeping valuable intelligence top of mind and wielding it at every opportunity kept us alive.
• While the curse of knowledge may have served a crucial survival function thousands of years ago, today it wreaks all sorts of havoc beyond simply muddying our performance on inconsequential parlor games.
• The fact that we are incapable of imagining the thought process of those who don’t share our knowledge explains why business owners often make dreadful marketers. 

Why Experts Can’t Help Giving Lousy Instructions

• Not only are experts incapable of putting themselves in our inexperienced shoes, there’s also evidence that they can’t help but underestimate how long skill acquisition actually takes.
• Richard Clark has spent decades exploring. Clark relies on a painstaking technique called cognitive task analysis that involves extended interviews with experts, using questions designed to elicit a step-by-step account of everything they do. Next, he reviews video of the experts in action and determines how many of their behaviors they mentioned in their breakdown. Clark has analyzed experts in a host of fields, from tennis pros to intensive care nurses to federal judges. His conclusion? Experts leave out a staggering 70 percent of the steps required to succeed, because they rarely think about them. Most of their actions unfold unconsciously. Interestingly, when experts do pay close attention to behaviors that typically occur automatically, their performance often crumbles. We have a name for this phenomenon in sports: choking. It’s what happens when experts are placed under inordinate stress and responds by directing their attention inward, monitoring each step of a complex set of actions, instead of allowing their performance to flow automatically. It’s worth clarifying that it’s not the intense pressure that causes players to wilt—it’s the overthinking.
• So, what did the experimenters find? Verbalizing the process had disastrous ramifications for the experienced golfers. And no wonder. The pros had already mastered a complex set of intricate tasks. The last thing in the world they want to do is deconstruct an automatic process.
• The novice golfers, however, had a markedly different reaction. They benefited from the reflection exercise. When there’s no automatic process to disrupt, executing a list of steps is precisely how novices learn a new skill. 
• Which brings us to a final barrier to learning from experts: they can’t help communicating in ways that novices find overwhelming. Years of experience have taught them to shrink extraordinarily complicated ideas into time saving abstractions. Simply put, experts think differently. They apply shortcuts they’re not aware of, avoid contemplating their behaviors, and can’t begin to imagine not knowing the things they know.

What to Ask an Expert

• When talking to experts, three categories of questions are worth considering: journey questions, process questions, and discovery questions.
• Journey Questions are designed to achieve two objectives: unearth the experts’ road map for success and remind them of their experience as a novice.

Questions focused on an expert’s journey can include:

• What did you read/watch/study to learn your craft?
• What mistakes did you make at the beginning?
• What do you wish you had spent less time on that ended
  up not being very important?
• What metrics have you learned you need to keep an eye
  On?

Process Questions get at the nitty gritty of execution. They’re designed to illuminate the experts’ approach by drilling down on the specific steps they apply to bring their work to life. These answers are especially valuable for reverse engineering because they pull back the curtain to reveal how a complex work is developed.
it’s important to avoid asking general questions and err on the side of asking for specifics.
Questions focused on an expert’s process can include:

• I’m curious about your process. What do you do first? What’s next? And after that?
• Where do you get your ideas and strategies?
• How do you go about planning?
• What’s your daily routine when you’re in [planning/
  creating/marketing, etc.] mode? 

Discovery Questions focus experts on their initial expectations and invite them to compare those naive beliefs with what they know today. By directing experts’ attention to unexpected revelations, you get them thinking about useful insights they didn’t possess at the very beginning, back when they were in your shoes.

• Questions focused on an expert’s discoveries may include:
  • Looking back, what was most surprising to you?
  • What do you wish you had known when you first started?
  • What factors turned out to be crucial to success that you
    weren’t expecting?
  • If you had to do it today, what would you do differently? 

What Focus Group Moderators Know About Uncovering Secrets

• Let’s start with the first of these two requirements: getting experts to open up. Among the many tactics moderators use to extract useful information, first and foremost is embracing a mind-set of naive curiosity. They routinely ask basic questions and resist making assumptions because doing so puts participants at ease and yields fuller responses.
• “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” Moderators are never the smartest people in the room because they know that impressing others is the last thing you want to do when you’re trying to get them to open up. By subduing their ego and making themselves vulnerable, moderators are able to learn more.
• Focus group moderators also strategically sort their questions, and not by placing the most important items first. They prioritize questions that are easy to answer and make respondents feel comfortable. 
• But where moderators really earn their paycheck is by being exceptional listeners. One of the things you discover while moderating groups is that the quality of information you elicit often has less to do with the initial question than it does with your ability to nod, stay quiet, and wait for a respondent to elaborate. Effective listening is essential to demonstrating that you value a speaker’s contribution, which prompts them to say more.
• Professional moderators often come prepared with a list of phrases they can deploy to get respondents to elaborate on or clarify something they’ve said. Having a list of pre written statements makes it easy for moderators to interject respectfully when they need more information. Elaborators can take the form of “That’s interesting—what makes you say that?” or simply “Say more about that.” Given that experts are prone to speaking in jargon and abstractions, having a few go-to clarifiers handy is likely to prove especially valuable. There are phrases like “Can you say that another way?” and reporter Kate Murphy’s recommended clarifier: “Wait. Back up. I don’t understand.”
•  One approach to demystifying experts involves asking for examples. Experts are prone to using abstractions, complex ideas that beginners find vague. The opposite of abstractions is specifics. When it comes to learning, studies show that starting with examples—as opposed to abstract, theoretical lessons—leads to faster comprehension and fewer errors. It’s because examples are concrete, which both makes them easier to comprehend and prompts listeners to generate their own explanations, contributing to a deeper level of understanding.
• Another technique you can use to translate is to look for analogies. Analogies explain the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar. When examples and analogies aren’t enough, you can ask for a demonstration. “Can you show me what you mean?”
• Another technique worth using is one that therapists often wield to help clients feel heard. It’s called a repeat back, and it involves paraphrasing what you’ve heard to confirm your understanding. Saying “Let me see if I have this right” and then restating a complex idea using different words does two things. One, it leads us to process information more deeply. And two, it reveals gaps in our comprehension questions, both commonly used by investigative reporters: “Is there anything I didn’t ask that I should have?” and “Who else would you recommend I speak with to learn more?” The latter allows you to turn a single expert interview into several conversations, especially if your expert is kind enough to offer introductions.

Why Most Feedback Is Surprisingly Harmful

• Receiving useful feedback turns out to be surprisingly challenging, even when those providing input are genuinely trying to help.In person, the desire to maintain a positive relationship often prevents friends, colleagues, and family from serving as honest brokers. Online, the more provocative the review, the more likely it is to attract attention. The reward structure is one that incentivizes reviewers to focus on looking smart, not being helpful, which is easiest to achieve by being critical. 
• A comprehensive analysis published in Psychological Bulletin analyzed more than six hundred feedback studies and concluded that while feedback often improves performance, it’s by no means guaranteed to help. In fact, in a stunning number of instances—over one-third—feedback actively damaged performance.

How to Train Your Friends to Provide Useful Feedback

• When feedback is specific, it speaks to a particular element of a complex work. In so doing, it temporarily ignores the totality of a performance in favor of isolating a single component. It’s the difference between telling Tarantino that his script is a “piece of shit” and explaining that his protagonists are not relatable. It’s the precision that makes the feedback instructive. 
• Another method of securing specific feedback is to be intentional with the questions you pose. Instead of asking “What do you think?” or “Can you give me some feedback?,” which often results in vague responses along a positive-to-negative continuum, take time to pinpoint the precise notes your work needs to hit in order to be successful and ask about them. For example, if you are drafting an important proposal, instead of asking a colleague for feedback in general, you could ask how engaging he or she found your opening paragraph or whether the timeline feels sufficiently ambitious.* The more specific the feedback, the better positioned you are to make use of your audience’s response.

Second feature of useful feedback: it prioritizes improvement over assessment. The best feedback does more than tell us whether or not we’ve succeeded. It helps us uncover opportunities for getting better.

• One mistake people often make when seeking feedback is asking questions designed to elicit praise. “Do you like it?” Sometimes the desire to be liked and the desire to get better are competing goals, and it’s important to recognize that tension. That same desire to be liked can also compromise our audience’s willingness to share critical feedback. Which is why instead of making it easy for others to compliment us, we are better off making it easy for them to find opportunities for improvement.
• Ironically, one approach to soliciting better feedback is to avoid asking for feedback altogether. Instead, ask for advice. In 2019, a team of Harvard Business School psychologists ran a series of studies investigating the best approach to collecting input. Compared to asking for feedback, asking for advice resulted in fuller assessments of what worked and what didn’t, and led to more suggestions for improvement—in some cases over 50 percent more ideas.
• Why the dramatic difference? Feedback, the researchers believe, prompts reviewers to compare a performer’s current effort against how well they’ve done in the past. Advice, on the other hand, orients reviewers to the possibilities that lie in a performer’s future. Focusing on the future leads reviewers to consider opportunities for improvement, resulting in a richer, more fruitful critique.
• Another approach to generating higher quality feedback involves posing questions that target your weaknesses head on.
• Two other features of useful feedback are worth noting: audience and timing.
  • The audience you solicit feedback from, whose critique you take seriously, should be a select group. The takeaway is simple: when it comes to feedback, quantity is not the same as quality. We’re better off avoiding high-quantity, low-quality feedback, no matter how convenient or tempting it may be. Getting feedback from the wrong audience is worse than getting no feedback at all.
  •  A number of recent studies have discovered that when it comes to complex mental tasks, frequent feedback is not simply unhelpful, it actively undermines our performance and stifles our learning. It’s because executing challenging activities requires our undivided attention. Ongoing feedback breaks our concentration, preventing us from sustaining our focus.
  • Constant feedback is likely to be especially damaging for work involving creativity. Creative ideas thrive under conditions that feel safe and require time to mature, congeal, and evolve. Being on the receiving end of endless evaluations long before we’re ready makes it harder for us to play with ideas, take risks, and attempt the unconventional.

The upshot? Feedback is valuable, but only to a point. Too much feedback leaves us feeling vulnerable, frenzied, and overwhelmed. There are, however, two occasions when feedback tends to be especially helpful for knowledge work: early and late.

• Early feedback aligns well with a practice market researchers call concept testing. It’s input that reveals whether an idea is generally headed in the right direction and worth pursuing. Late feedback is designed to achieve a different purpose: to help fine tune execution. An outside perspective can once again be useful after we’ve taken an assignment as far as we can take it, when we feel too close to a project to evaluate it objectively.

 How Top Performers Convert Feedback into Growth

• We’re petrified of negative feedback. Encountering criticism triggers the release of cortisol, a stress hormone that elevates our anxiety, disrupts our focus, and prevents us from listening attentively. Feeling threatened, we assume a defensive posture, characterized by fight (respond defensively) or flight (end the conversation), neither of which comes remotely close to sparking self-reflection or stimulating growth. Often, the emotional fallout is made worse by the stories we tell ourselves about our setbacks. Negative feedback is never simply about a lackluster performance on a task. It’s about what that failing represents—what it reveals about our talent, ability, and potential.
• For all these reasons, learning from negative feedback doesn’t come naturally for most people. Yet doing so is a critical skill—one that enables top performers to grow from their misfires, remain confident in the face of disappointment, and harness the insights they receive to elevate their game.
• The first strategy is to translate negative feedback into corrective actions. In other words, identify changes you can apply to address the feedback. The moment you convert a critique into options, it feels less like a rebuke and more like an opportunity. Neurological research bears this out. Most of the time, making a mistake activates an area of the brain called the anterior insula, which is central to the experience of pain, sadness, and fear. In contrast, learning that we’ve succeeded activates the brain’s reward system, which is rooted in the ventral striatum. The ventral striatum is active when we think about winning an important new client, scoring a promotion, or going on an exciting date.
  • In 2015, researchers at the University of Southern California made a fascinating discovery. Not all mistakes activate the painful anterior insula. Sometimes they activate the pleasurable ventral stri- atum. What determines which area lights up? It turns out that when mistakes are combined with new learning, we experience them as rewarding. The wisdom we gain allows us to see new opportunities for avoiding mistakes and succeeding in the future. Turning negative feedback into corrective action is rewarding for another reason: it makes failure feel temporary.

• A second strategy is to take a break, step back, and introduce psychological distance between you and your work. When we are immersed in an activity, our focus naturally narrows. We experience tunnel vision, which makes us both defensive and resistant to suggestions that involve additional work. Taking time to reflect on big picture objectives, beyond the immediate task, promotes long term thinking and makes us more receptive to criticism.
• It’s important to remember that responding to feedback quickly and responding to feedback intelligently are not the same thing. Research suggests that taking time to sulk and contemplate our disappointment can actually benefit us in ways few people anticipate. Adopting a long-term perspective reminds us that we still have time to improve, that not getting this one task right doesn’t define who we are.
•  A final strategy is to reinterpret the experience of struggle. In Western cultures, struggle is considered a negative experience. It suggests that you’re “not getting it,” an idea that poses all sorts of threats to our sense of competence, intelligence, and self-worth. But people in Eastern cultures view struggle differently. For them, struggle isn’t an indication of inability—it’s a sign that you’re learning. Everyone is expected to struggle, regardless how smart or gifted they may be, because that’s how intellectual advancement comes about.
• Research conducted at Columbia University and the University of Chicago reveals that while beginners prefer receiving positive over negative feedback, experts don’t hold that preference. Those with experience and a track record of success are more interested in negative feedback because they recognize that it contains vital clues to improvement. While positive feedback is certainly flattering, it can’t help you get better. At best, it simply encourages you to do more of the same.