Video Transcript: Main Lesson - Week 3 Page 1 of 3

Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers created an enduring meme about the importance of practice. The
10,000 hour rule, that it requires just 10,000 hours to become world class at any skill, is originally
based on the research of Doctor Anders K. Ericsson, a psychologist. But does the research actually
show that anyone can become world class, if only they long enough hours at the skill? If you actually
look at the research, it’s clear that only a specific type of practice, what Ericsson calls deliberate
practice, qualifies. Simply spending a lot of time doing a skill is not a guarantee that you’re going to
improve it.

In fact, the research suggests the opposite-- that plateaus a skill, where you continue to put more
time in, but don’t actually see improvement is the norm, not the exception. To understand what a
plateau skill is, think back to the last time you started job. When you first started the job you were
probably overwhelmed with the amount of responsibilities and new things that you had to learn. You
had to quickly adapt in order to reach the threshold of performance that was expected of you. But
after a few months you got used to the tasks. You got used to the job performance requirements. And
your employers or clients or colleagues, they got used to whatever level of performance you were
outputting.

If you could see a chart of your skill, if you could graph your skill starting from when you joined the
job, you would see a quick burst of improvement. This accelerated period where you’re learning a
lot of new things. But then as your skills became adequate, they became sufficient for whatever the
task was at hand, it starts to level off. And in fact, if you look at the job that you’re working at, there’s
probably a lot of skills that you’ve been doing for quite a long time where they have not improved
at all after that initial period. This is why it’s so dangerous to rely on your day to day tasks to be the
motivator for improving the skills at your work. You may improve, you may experience that initial part
of the curve. But what’s far more likely is you’ll set into a pattern of comfort. And that will be a plateau
that can last perhaps, indefinitely. I have experienced this myself as a blogger. I write articles and
the people who read them and like them and subscribe to my blog, they want more of the kinds of
articles that I’ve already written. They like those articles and they’re going to want more of the same.
However, in order to improve my career, I don’t have to write the same kind of articles. I have to write
better ones. I have to write ones that are better researched, better storytelling, better edited, better
ideas. And all those pressures are not going to come from my existing clients, my existing readers.

And so similarly in your job, your boss, your clients, your customers, they have a certain expectation
from you. Once you’ve hit your level of adequacy, they want a consistent product from you. So even if
they might like it if you improve, they’re not going to put that strong pressure on you to take your skills
to a completely new level of performance. This is why Ericsson’s research was careful to separate the
idea of performing a skill, from deliberately practicing it. To understand, this is a little bit easier to see
the analogy in a sport, let’s say basketball. Performing the skill in basketballs’ case, is going to games
and playing against other teams.

Practicing this skill, means doing layup drills, dribbling drills, passing drills, and other types of
exercises designed to reinforce a very particular skill. Now, you may not do drills in your work, but
there is also a separation in your job. When you’re performing, the goal is not to necessarily improve
on your performance or learn a lot, the goal is to output the work that your clients or employers
expect. So how can you actually apply this idea? Obviously there might not be something akin to
dribbling in your work to actually do drills to improve your performance.
 Video Transcript: Main Lesson - Week 3 Page 2 of 3

So how do you do it? Well, the solution that we have a simple. Create a practice project where the
goal of the project is not to perform a particular piece of output, not to get some particular work
accolade, but to practice a very particular skill that is important for your career. So Cal actually
told me a story of how he used this to become a better writer. So this was back early when we met
about maybe 5 or 6 years ago. And he had written a couple of books for the college market. Some
of you may have even read those books. And he had been used to writing this how to style. He was
successful at it.

But he wanted to move into writing big idea books-- books that would not just apply to students, not
just be how to, but suggest a convincing thesis and have the research and argument to back it up.
And the way that he did it was he found a magazine called Flock magazine. It doesn’t exist anymore,
but at the time it had about 250,000 subscribers and it allowed for open submissions. And what’s
important is that as this process of accepting opens submissions it had very high editorial standards.

So you had to have a very high level of research, of essay writing, of also your argument in order to
get submitted on there. And so what he decided to do was write articles for this magazine, submit for
this magazine, as a practice project as a way of testing his abilities to reach a new level of standard
for his writing. And the end result of this, although there were a few years intervening, was that he
wrote, So Good They Can’t Ignore You. I’m sure you’ve probably heard of that book. It was the
basis of this course and it’s also been his most successful book in that way. A good practice project
improves on one of the skills that you identified in the previous two weeks of your research. Because
your time is extremely limited, you may only have a couple hours a week to work on a project like this
consistently.

It’s very important that you ruthlessly prioritize which skills you want to improve. That’s why we
had you do research in the first place. If it were easy to just improve every possible skill that might
potentially help your career, then it wouldn’t be a problem. The difficulty is that you only have a few
hours each week to invest it, you have to be very careful in choosing the right skill, and very careful
in choosing a project that will specifically laser in on that skill you’re trying to improve. One pitfall Cal
and I want you to avoid, is picking a project which is simply getting caught up on work or doing more
work of the kind you already do. When we did the practice pilots for this particular course, a common
tendency was people had a little difficulty thinking of a project that’s different from their normal work.
So their project idea was to do more of the work that they already have to do. So if they were writing
journal articles, then write more journal articles. If it was to be a speaker, was to give more speeches.

And while that’s OK, the truth is if just doing more work were the way to improvement, Cal and I would
just recommend that you do over time and this course would be finished. But that’s not what our
experience suggest nor what the research bears out. A deliberate practice project, remember, is not
just the performance of the skill, but focuses you deliberately on improving a skill you’re currently bad
at.

I know what some of you are thinking. You are very busy doing an additional project that’s a lot more
work added to your schedule, seems impossible. How can you fit this in your schedule on top of
doing this course, on top of doing your normal job, and life responsibilities? But I want to stress that a
practice project, if carefully selected, does not need to add substantially to the amount of time you’re
working.
 Video Transcript: Main Lesson - Week 3 Page 3 of 3

A good example of this came from one of the previous pilot versions of this course that we did. There
was a programmer who specialize in a particular set of database languages. And he realized in his
research that he wanted to become more renowned, a true expert at these database languages
so that he could get speaking opportunities and work for high-profile companies. So the project he
ended up deciding to do, which was focusing on the skill of becoming world class of these database
languages, was quite simple. He spent a couple hours a week designing a quiz online for this
database languages so that other programmers who are studying it could take this quiz and they
could practice their skills at various parts of language. And in creating the quiz he had to really learn
some of the more obscure parts the language, stuff that he would maybe not encounter in his day to
day work responsibilities.

The result of this, by spending only a few hours a week over a few months, he not only mastered the
database language that he was trying to program in, but he also attracted the attention of some of
the top people who were in that space. They offered him a job and he got to not only work with some
of his peers and mentors, but he got a 25% raise on top of it. Designing a practice project isn’t easy.
There’s no automatic formula to produce a particular project for you to push the skills that matter for
your career.

You’re going to have to think about it and you’re going to use your creativity. What we’re going to
suggest that you do is spend this week brainstorming for high-level types of project ideas, situations,
and projects that could push your skills, in the ones that you’ve identified in the previous two weeks,
to the next level. Use this time to just think of ideas. Brainstorm some options and consider how well
they match in terms of will they focus you on the skill? Is it something that you can do in the amount
of time that you have? And will it actually push improvement or just create more busy work? More
importantly, we don’t want you get started yet. It’s very easy to rush this phase-- to quickly think of
an idea, get enthusiastic about it, and rush into it. But we know that you are extremely busy and you
do not have a lot of time. So that means you have to be very ruthless in only focusing on the most
important ideas.

Rushing into projects that you’re not going to be able to finish is not going to be a successful strategy.
So here’s what success looks like for this week. Brainstorm some high-level ideas that will target one
of the skills that you found in your research from the previous two weeks. Importantly, do not start the
project yet. Just come up with these ideas and figure out if you can pick one, which is the best one
idea which you would like to pursue and develop in the next week. Next week, we’re going to go into
more detail and really plan and flush out this project. So it will turn from an idea that maybe you could
do it, to something you are 100% convinced that you can actually achieve and it will be successful.