The Path to Better Work

Two ideas for finding hidden things.

The path to producing better work, starts by producing a lot of work.

1.

A lightly edited excerpt from Art & Fear by David Bayles & Ted Orland (Specifically, Page 29):

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side would be graded on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his scales and weigh the work of the quantity group: fifty pounds gets an A, forty a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an A. Come grading time a curious fact emerged: the works of the highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.

2.

Seth Godin on episode #343 of the Tim Ferriss Show, shares this:

“I’ve done 7,400 blog posts, and I’ve done four perfect ones. So you just got to keep making the work with generosity, because then your lizard brain will give up on censoring you because it’ll realize that you’re not going to give up. And at that point, it’ll just say, well, we might as well make it better.”

3.

Jackson Dahl—my favourite podcaster at the moment—just interviewed Brie Wolfson, who talks about getting a finger feel for excellence on something. When asked how we develop this finger feel—in other words how do we become excellent at a thing—she says, “Probably the most reliable input if you want to get that finger feel thing is just time on the thing. It’s like so unsatisfying in some ways because we wanna like shortcut and I think that’s the whole point of it, you cannot shortcut this thing.”

***

Repetitions help us get better and repetitions take time.

You can get reps of anything, but I’ve found it’s easier to get reps of something that’s tangible, controllable, and doesn’t involve other people. Reading, writing, playing an instrument, shooting a ball into a hoop, lifting a heavy object ... that kind of thing.

So how do we become better at intangible things, that aren’t in our control, and involve other people? In other words, most things. Things like being kinder to our kids, having difficult conversations, or being vulnerable as leaders?

I have two ideas.

The first involves treating even the small instances of things as opportunities to put in reps.

These reps won’t feel like much. It’s like asking you to treat lifting your water bottle with the same level of intent as lifting a heavy weight in the gym.

When dealing with intangibles though—like opportunities to be kind—this approach is much closer to what reality presents us with. Intangible things don’t come in uniform sizes. They also don’t come with any level of consistency. Holding the door for a stranger and saying loving words to your child after they’ve just raged at you for 20 minutes, are different sizes of kindness with unpredictable timing.

If we only practice with the big sizes whenever they show up, we’re missing out on a whole lot of hidden reps.

The second idea involves finding themes.

Suppose you wanted to get better at having difficult conversations. The first step would be to identify the key ingredients you need to have a difficult conversation. Let’s take courage as an example. Finding themes would involve us turning courage into its own theme and looking for other instances to practice that theme.

Ideally those other instances are tangible, controllable, and don’t involve other people. They can also be very simple, like ordering something off a menu that you would usually avoid.

The path to better work start with reps.

Find the hidden ones.