Decoding Greatness | Ron Friedman

Decoding Greatness is a game-changing approach to mastery that will transform the way you learn new skills and generate creative ideas.

For generations, we've been taught there are two ways to succeed—either from talent or practice. In Decoding Greatness, award-winning social psychologist Ron Friedman illuminates a powerful third path—one that has quietly launched icons in a wide range of fields, from artists, writers, and chefs, to athletes, inventors, and entrepreneurs: reverse engineering.

To reverse engineer is to look beyond what is evident on the surface and find a hidden structure. 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.

Chapter 1: The Mastery Detectives

Throughout our lives, we’ve been told two major stories about extraordinary achievement and the human capacity for greatness.

The first story is that greatness comes from talent. According to this view, we are all born with certain innate strengths. Those at the top of their field succeed by discovering an inner talent and matching it to a profession that allows them to shine.

The second story is that greatness comes from practice. From this perspective, talent gets you only so far. What really matters is an effective practice regimen and a willingness to do lots of hard work.

There is a third story about greatness, one that’s not often shared. Yet it’s a path to skill acquisition and mastery that’s stunningly common among icons everywhere, from artists and writers to chefs and athletes to inventors and entrepreneurs.

It’s called 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 re-created. 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.

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.

Copywork is one method for revealing a hidden formula, but it’s far from the only approach. Another, 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.

Observing the greats opens your mind to fresh possibilities.

This search for underlying patterns—like the one David Chang used to place Momofuku on the map—isn’t limited to artistic endeavors. It’s not just writers, painters, musicians, photographers, and chefs who deconstruct the works of others in search of a hidden code. The same can be said of successful entrepreneurs.

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.

More experienced entrepreneurs—those who spend decades leading successful businesses and reliably launch profitable ventures every few years—focus on something completely different: viability.

In the 1980s, Starbucks consisted of a handful of stores selling coffee beans to connoisseurs. One day, Starbucks’ newly hired marketing director, a former Xerox salesman named Howard Schultz, visited Milan and encountered espresso bars. Schultz was riveted. There was nothing like this back home. Americans were used to tasteless supermarket coffee and so-called coffee shops that were little more than glorified diners. Could a coffeehouse culture take off in Seattle?

Starbucks’ leadership had no interest in finding out. They were adamant about avoiding the hospitality business. But Schultz persisted, eventually convincing the company’s CEO to allow him to run a pilot. It worked magnificently. But despite its popularity, the founders still opposed Schultz’s plan for creating more stores.

Reluctantly, Schultz quit the company and opened his own espresso bar. His original foray reveals just how much his business model relied on re-creating (or transplanting) the Italian experience into Seattle. Schultz’s store was called Il Giornale, after an Italian newspaper in Milan. Its baristas wore white shirts and bowties, its speakers played opera music, and its menu was loaded with Italian terms. A few years later, when Schultz’s old employer was ready to sell its coffee bean business, Schultz had enough money in the bank to pounce. He merged the two businesses under the original Starbucks name.

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.

Take the automotive industry, where reverse engineering has played a pivotal role for generations. In 1933, after disassembling a new Chevrolet, Kiichiro Toyoda convinced his family to branch out from building weaving looms by creating an automotive development program. Three years later, they had their first car and renamed the venture Toyota (a simplified version of the family name produced by eight brushstrokes—a lucky number in Japan).

Almost a century later, Toyoda’s once maverick approach has been co-opted into standard operating procedure. Today, car manufacturers routinely dissect their rivals’ cars, except they don’t call the process reverse engineering. They call it “competitive benchmarking.”

Like Stalin’s army, a team of engineers descend on a competitor’s car and systematically disassemble it, part by individual part, rigorously cataloging their findings in search of technological advances, potential cost savings, and clues on an automaker’s strategic direction.

What makes the automotive industry especially noteworthy is not just that all the major players in the field reverse engineer their competitors or that they openly acknowledge that reverse engineering is taking place. It’s the fact that in recent years, car manufacturers have begun collectively sharing the production cost of competitive intelligence, even when it includes proprietary insights into their own products.

Being first is not the same as being best.

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

Copying didn’t simply lead people to mimic an established approach. It unlocked a mind-set 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.

Chapter 2: Algorithmic Thinking

Not too long ago, the idea of searching for a romantic partner on a website was considered an act of desperation. Today, that stigma has disappeared. Studies suggest that nearly 40 percent of romantic relationships now begin online and that they tend to be considerably more successful than those initiated in person. In other words, they are more likely to deliver the sort of riveting storybook ending experienced by Alyssa and Josh.

One reason online dating apps are so effective at pairing couples is that they utilize machine learning to identify unspoken preferences—ones people themselves may not consciously realize they possess. Each time a user like Alyssa swipes right or lingers on an image or clicks to expand a profile or responds to a text, Tinder’s algorithm takes note. These actions indicate interest. The algorithm then takes all the men to whom Alyssa has devoted time and attention and analyzes the features they have in common. Are they tall or short? What’s their average age? Do their profiles suggest they are outgoing and adventurous or studious and shy?

What Tinder’s algorithm is searching for is a recipe—one that captures the features of Alyssa’s ideal man. The better the algorithm gets at identifying Alyssa’s preferences, the more effectively it can present her with suitors she deems attractive and the greater her chances of finding Mr. Right.

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.

Over the course of human history, our ancestors relied on pattern recognition to predict all kinds of things, including where food could be found, what color plants were likely to be poisonous, and the time of day it was safe to wander the savannah. To survive in a dangerous landscape, you needed to be able to read your environment and draw inferences about what would happen next. And while excelling at pattern recognition may no longer be a matter of life and death, psychologists believe it continues to play a vital role in predicting success and constitutes a central facet of high intelligence.

And yet, as many computer scientists have noted, thanks to technological advances, we have now reached a point where the ability of computers to detect patterns far surpasses our own.

Pattern recognition engines have four major components. The first is data collection. Before you can start to predict the type of men Alyssa finds attractive, you first need examples of men she likes and men she doesn’t. You can get both from her reaction to a handful of profiles, and that’s the first step: gathering examples.

Step two is unpacking those examples and finding important variations. What’s different about these men that could be contributing to Alyssa’s decisions? Obviously, there are physical features, like the men’s age, weight, and height. But then there is the quality of their profile: the number of photos they post, the length of their biography, and the personality type their description conveys.

The third step involves detecting similarities. What do the men Alyssa finds attractive have in common? What features do they share? Now, how about the men Alyssa rejected? What differentiates them from those she liked? By comparing the characteristics of both groups—men selected against men rejected—a dating algorithm can start to identify the elements driving Alyssa’s decisions.

The last step is when an algorithm applies its analyses to generate predictions of men Alyssa will find appealing. It’s here that the options Alyssa is presented with start to look a little cuter, a little more her type. And the more Alyssa swipes, the more accurate the algorithm gets, using Alyssa’s feedback to refine its predictions and improve its performance.

Why You Need a Private Museum

It’s noteworthy that the first action a computer program designed to detect patterns undertakes is not to analyze but to collect. Which is consistent with how many writers, musicians, and designers view themselves: not as master craftsmen but as collectors. They consume voraciously, pursue obsessively, and accumulate influences the way chefs hunt for ingredients.

History teaches us that a striking number of top performers appeared naturally drawn to collecting works they admired long before entering and later dominating their field. Andy Warhol collected artwork, David Bowie collected records, Julia Child collected cookbooks. Director Quentin Tarantino spent so much time consuming movies that his local video store hired him as its resident film expert to advise other customers, enabling him to watch even more movies during the day while also getting paid. Before his passing, Ernest Hemingway’s library exceeded nine thousand books and was growing at a clip of nearly two hundred new titles per year, suggesting that Saul Bellow was exactly right when he observed, “A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.”

Why is collecting outstanding examples so important? Because the first step to achieving mastery is recognizing mastery in others.

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 novelists, 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.

But there’s another benefit to curating examples and isolating those you find compelling. 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.

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.

On one set of behaviors, the gap between the two groups is especially striking: 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 what-if 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.

Another approach that can help you spot differences involves going deep and studying a single work through multiple mediums. For example, if there is an author whose code you can’t seem to crack, try listening to their audiobook for clues. Hearing authors narrate their own work reveals the voice they imagine inside their head when writing. The rhythm and cadence they utilize can convey valuable insights, and the inflection lavished on certain words can reveal an underlying intention.

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 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. If you’ve taken even a middle school–level writing class, you’ll probably remember having to write an outline. It’s the process of planning a paper in advance by listing the major points you intend to address in the various sections of your piece.

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.

By compressing staggered events into a single document, we effectively collapse time, freeing us to broaden our perspective and see a piece anew. We can finally stop staring at the brushstrokes and textures and cracks, take a few steps back, and admire the complete canvas. It’s a process that places us squarely in the upper deck, sitting snugly beside Wellington Mara and his trusty Polaroid, where we can’t help but notice patterns we would otherwise miss.

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.

today, Spotify captures the precise moment users hit “next” on a song, Netflix determines which episodes make a series binge-worthy, and Kindle identifies which sections of a book readers consume slowly, highlight, and altogether skip.

The good news is that you don’t need thousands of data points, a doctorate in statistics, or a supercomputer to start leveraging this approach. Not even close. When it comes to finding patterns in works you admire, all you need is an openness to numbers and a willingness to explore.

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

Nothing brings down a genre faster than a string of copycats. The reason is simple: the more often a formula is used, the more predictable and less appealing it becomes.

But there’s a more nuanced explanation for why simply replicating a formula rarely yields memorable results. It’s that exceptional work depends on much more than a proven recipe. It relies on a combination of factors.

At the most basic level, we have a formula on the one hand, and the person executing it on the other. Present two people with the same formula, and their results will likely differ. Why? Because they each possess distinct strengths, personalities, and biographical histories that contribute to their unique execution.

Then there is the issue of authenticity.

You need the right formula for the right person within the right context.

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.

Often it’s not just the quality of the idea that matters. Just as critical is consumer receptivity.

There’s the Apple Watch, a device that provides immediate access to news, weather, traffic reports, and sports scores. All of those features were available decades ago on Microsoft’s SPOT watch.

Which goes to show: sometimes quality ideas are rejected or ignored not because they lack merit. There are times when novelty is a liability. The market simply isn’t capable of embracing ideas that are completely new.

All of which leads us to an impasse. Outright mimicry leads us nowhere. Absolute novelty is met with scorn.

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 idea that success is more easily achieved by those who add a novel spin to an established formula should come as welcome news. It suggests that the pressure many creators place on themselves to invent something entirely original is not just unnecessary—it’s actually counterproductive. 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 Ridley put it, creativity is what happens “when ideas have sex.”

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.

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.

If you cook with your gut, you are different.

The chef’s job is not to copy. It is to reimagine and adjust, “massaging [recipes] to their aesthetic and sense of taste.”

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?”

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.

Ann Patchett is an extraordinarily accomplished novelist, the winner of too many distinguished literary awards to list in full. To this day, she wrestles with the vision-ability gap each time she starts a new book. For Patchett, there are three phases to writing: plotting, procrastinating, and producing. The first of these phases is by far the most blissful. When she is generating ideas, Patchett writes:

The book is my invisible friend, omnipresent, evolving, thrilling. During the months (or years) it takes me to put my ideas together, I don’t take notes or make outlines; I’m figuring things out, and all the while the book makes a breeze around my head like an oversized butterfly whose wings were cut from the rose window in Notre Dame. This book I have not yet written one word of is a thing of indescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its color, so wild and loyal in its nature that my love for this book, and my faith in it as I track its lazy flight, is the single perfect joy in my life.

It’s an intoxicating period, not unlike the morning after a romantic first date or the month between accepting a job offer and starting your first day of work. Patchett’s future feels rich and full of promise.

What follows is a period of procrastination. Having published many books, part of Patchett anticipates the grueling journey ahead and resists getting started. She finds herself occupied with productive distractions, consumed with pretend priorities.

Eventually the writing begins, and with it comes stomach-churning, soul-crushing disappointment, which Patchett recounts in gory detail:

When I can’t think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it…. Imagine running over a butterfly with an SUV. Everything that was beautiful about this living thing—all the color, the light and movement—is gone. What I’m left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled and poorly reassembled. Dead. That’s my book.

The journey from the head to hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which everyone who wants to write— and many of the people who do write—get lost.

On this point Glass and Patchett agree: 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.

Skill can be taught, but vision and taste are decidedly harder to develop.

Chapter 4: The Scoreboard Principle

Ritz-Carlton employees are taught that exceptional customer service does more than leave customers satisfied—it causes them to gush about the hotel to those in their social circle. And how in the world do you motivate such exuberance? By going beyond a customer’s “explicit requests” and addressing their “unexpressed needs.”

Turning a desired action into a metric makes you more likely to follow through.

It’s because metrics introduce an emotional dimension.

When we see our numbers surge, progress becomes more tangible, sparking satisfaction and pride. In contrast, seeing our metrics plummet generates disappointment, frustration, even shame. These emotional jolts are not trivial. They lend our actions psychic weight, leading us to work harder in pursuit of a higher score.

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, whether it be losing weight, acquiring a new skill, or mastering a formula you’ve reverse engineered, begins with relentlessly keeping score.

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.”

How, then, can we explain the power of metrics to influence behavior? What is it about numbers that makes them such a compelling motivating force? And why are there times when human beings are seemingly mesmerized by statistics?

Psychological needs provide one explanation. 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.

There is strong reason to believe that performance metrics can be even more valuable at work than in sports. It’s because in sports, objectives are blindingly obvious. To win a match, Roger Federer needs to do one thing and one thing only: score points. At work, our objectives are a moving target. They tend to vary from day to day, and in some professions, from hour to hour. That variety keeps work interesting but makes it all too easy to get pulled off track or mistake pointless busywork for meaningful productivity.

There is no scoreboard to tell us how we are doing at work. But what if there were? What if the same analysts who deconstruct Roger Federer’s game into constituent parts did the same for your performance at the office? What strengths would they find? What vulnerabilities would they reveal? And what if, like Federer, you could use those numerical insights to transform your hidden weakness into a signature strength?

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.

Let’s say you are drafting an outreach email to a client who has yet to sign an important contract. You need this contract finalized quickly. You’re hoping to prompt your client to sign, but you want to do so in a way that doesn’t come across as pushy or desperate. In fact, if at all possible, you’d like your email to strengthen your relationship. Fortunately, you’ve collected a handful of well-written emails and reverse outlined them to identify a number of important features.

You’ve deduced that that your email should include:

A non-work-related opening, preferably on a topic you’ve bonded over in the past

A brief mention of the action you need the respondent to take

A rationale explaining why taking action quickly will benefit the respondent

New information your respondent is likely to find valuable, such as an article or insight that illustrates that you are working toward shared goals

A closing that expresses enthusiasm for the relationship or for hearing back from the respondent

Needless to say, these particular features won’t feel appropriate for every email or every respondent. Let’s just assume for now that these are the ingredients that you consider essential for a well-executed “Where’s that thing you promised me?” email.

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:

A non-work-related opening, preferably on a topic you’ve bonded over in the past

A brief mention of the action you need the respondent to take

A rationale explaining why taking action quickly will benefit the respondent

New information your respondent is likely to find valuable, such as an article or insight that illustrates that you are working toward shared goals

A closing that expresses enthusiasm for the relationship or for hearing back from the respondent

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 is more holistic than the first two. It 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. A prolific writer and coaching pioneer, 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. Franklin wasn’t always the distinguished figure many of us think of today. Back in his early twenties, he was widely known as a heavy drinker and notorious gossip, a man whose behavior was fueled less by reason and rationality than by an insatiable sex drive. Franklin was all too aware of his personal deficiencies. 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.

Goldsmith and Franklin draw upon the same methodology to pursue drastically different goals. Goldsmith’s measure is designed to optimize his performance as an executive coach and spouse, while Franklin’s virtues were selected with the intention of reshaping his personal character.

That doesn’t just demonstrate the flexibility of a daily tracker approach. It highlights a crucial benefit of developing a list of target intentions in the first place. It’s a process that compels you to step back, reflect deeply, and identify the achievements you consider essential.

In sports, the outcomes that define success are unambiguous. To win, players must accumulate points, baskets, runs, or touchdowns. Life doesn’t work that way. In the real world, there are infinite paths to success. And the first step to winning is becoming clear on the points you’re trying to score in the first place.

Humm’s four fundamentals—delicious, creative, intentional, and beautiful—serve as performance metrics when applied retroactively to a dish that already exists, but they can also serve as a Chef Daniel Humm, a partner at one of Manhattan’s most celebrated restaurants, Eleven Madison Park, filter for evaluating whether a dish is promising enough to pursue. The same holds true for any creative endeavor.

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.

Productivity expert Cal Newport has identified his own leading indicator: hours of unbroken concentration. Newport tallies these hours manually on a piece of paper because he finds that one of the strongest drivers of his personal performance is the ability to work free of distractions. He admits that there’s one other benefit to keeping his tally visible: “the embarrassment of a small tally motivates a more intense commitment to finding time to focus.”

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.

Losing track of the big picture represents just one potential pitfall of tracking metrics. Listing every possible misstep could fill an entire book. So instead, let’s turn our attention to a few best practices for avoiding counterproductive metrics and designing the best possible scoreboard.

The first best practice is the most obvious: collect multiple metrics.

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.

Many authors don’t look at the number of published articles or books as a measure of their performance. They also monitor their daily word count.

By the same token, it can also be all too easy to overlook long-term outcomes at the expense of short-term results. The New York Stock Exchange has witnessed countless companies sacrifice decades of success at the altar of favorable quarterly earnings. In far too many cases, going public introduces unrelenting pressures on companies to produce short-term results, rendering long-term investments harder to justify.

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.

Invariably, the biggest benefits of using a scoreboard come at the outset, when we first start tracking and reflecting on our behaviors and outcomes. Evolving a scoreboard not only ensures that the metrics we track align with our current goals, it also serves to introduce a level of novelty that renews our interest and engagement.

Mastery begins with metrics. But it doesn’t end there. Because even the most insightful metrics are only part of the equation. Next, you need opportunities to stretch your skills on a regular basis.

Chapter 5: How to Take the Risk Out of Risk Taking

Among the many delights of reading a popular nonfiction book is the irresistible thrill of discovering a bizarre and surprising piece of trivia. So, let’s cut to the chase. Here are three deliciously esoteric facts, all on the topic of food:

Fact #1: The reason doughnuts have a hole in the middle is to eliminate the uncooked center.

Fact #2: Sandwiches were the accidental invention of a gambler. Historians credit their creation to a member of the British nobility, the Earl of Sandwich, who in 1762 asked to be served sliced roast beef between two slices of bread, enabling him to eat with one hand and gamble with the other.

Fact #3: Serving ice cream in waffle cones was unheard of before a quick-thinking ice cream vendor at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair ran out of bowls and desperately needed a solution. Fortunately for him, in the next booth over stood a Syrian cook selling a thin, crisp pastry, which he graciously agreed to roll up into cones. Little did they know that their spontaneous collaboration would unleash a worldwide food craze.

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.

Growth requires strain. A moderate degree of difficulty is essential to both mental and physical development.

When it comes to failure, the workplace is unforgiving. Every day is game day. There are no opportunities for practice.

A second reason skill-building at work is difficult is that the opportunities for taking risks are surprisingly limited. Businesses, after all, are optimized for efficiency, not employee growth.

The more often employees repeat tasks, the faster they get and the more efficient the organization becomes.

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 our 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. Simone Biles knows instantly whether a daring new jump is successful. She doesn’t need to wait for an annual performance review, hire an executive coach, or initiate an awkward conversation with her manager. That access to ongoing feedback is priceless. It empowers Biles to learn rapidly from her experiences and make informed adjustments in a way that is simply impossible for most workers.

There is something deeply ironic about the fact that risk taking and feedback are so hard to come by in the workplace. After all, successful organizations take on enormous risks and adapt to market feedback all the time. The best companies don’t play it safe.

They take these risks because they know that doing so is the only reliable path to thriving in business.

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?

Profitable companies rarely stick to one product or a single industry. They diversify. And with that diversification comes lower risk.

One way having a day job makes diversification easier is that it provides ongoing opportunities for experimentation. Those experiments can take the form of proposing a novel approach on an upcoming project, spearheading innovative collaborations with other departments, or testing out new client offerings. All of these experiments have the potential to grow employees’ skill sets and elevate their value by expanding the definition of their role.

Another way having a day job makes diversification easier is by empowering salaried employees to take smarter risks outside the office. In 2014, researchers at 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.

Chapter 6: Practicing in Three Dimensions

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.”

Knowledge only comes about when we reflect on our experiences, revise our beliefs, and test our assumptions.

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.

I want to highlight a particular kind of journaling that I have found to be especially useful in promoting self-reflection, learning, and skill development: the five-year journal.

A number of different versions of these journals are sold in bookstores, and they all have one thing in common: they feature five blocks for entries on the same calendar date—one for each consecutive year. Each day, journalers handwrite a few lines in the space provided. Then, one year after starting, something magical happens. They revisit the page of their original entry and, after entering a few observations on the present day, have the opportunity to review the entry they wrote on the same day the previous year.

I have found it to be an invaluable tool for discovery and growth. In addition to sparking self-reflection through nightly journaling, rereading entries strengthens memory for past events and helps you detect patterns in both your professional and personal lives.

Research tells us that memory is not the precise, enduring snapshot of events that we like to think it is. Rather, it decays with time, is subject to a host of cognitive biases, and changes slightly each time we recall an event. None of these deficiencies applies to written entries, making journals a far superior tool for learning from the past and improving our predictions of the future.

At the same time, 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.

Why are so many athletes captivated with imagery? The short answer is because it works. And not just in sports. Research indicates that the value of mental rehearsal extends to a wide variety of domains, and can even save lives. 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.

So mining the past.

Practicing in the future.

The Surprising Downside of Visualizing Success

Imagine that tomorrow morning, you’ll need to write a ten-page proposal. 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.

Now that you are alert to these challenges, you can begin to front-load 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. You might plan to download a few older proposals as a reminder of how you’ve produced similar presentations in the past. And to avoid feeling overwhelmed, you may decide to turn on your out-of-office email autoresponder so you can work without interruption and commit to taking stress-reducing walks anytime you need one.

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.

For athletes like Michael Phelps and those preparing for a physical activity, imagery provides even more benefits. 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.

So let’s say you’re sold on the value of using imagery. How do you do it effectively? A few rules of thumb are worth mentioning.

First, researchers use the term imagery (not visualization) for a reason.

If you’re preparing for an important talk, imagine the chatter of the audience before you begin, the feel of the clicker as you lift it in your hand, the heat of the stage lights warming your forehead. Those details help place you in the moment more effectively than merely visualizing yourself giving a speech.

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.

What makes practice useful? One obvious answer is that it’s a method of improving performance. Another is that it’s a tool for acquiring new skills.

Batting practice promotes neither.

So far in this chapter we’ve examined two underappreciated dimensions of practice: reflective practice, which involves unpacking the past, and imagery, which involves simulating the future. The third dimension of practice—practicing in the present—is both the most obvious and the easiest to get wrong.

Russian-born pianist Vladimir Horowitz once said, “The difference between the ordinary and extraordinary is practice.” It’s an appealing notion. If only it were so simple.

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.

It’s a consequence of expertise.

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?

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.

Working on our weaknesses is unpleasant, stressful, and hard. But it’s a process that does something crucial for skill development: it breaks the spell of automaticity.

By facing up to our shortcomings and tackling them head-on, we can’t help but pay close attention to the links between our actions and the underwhelming outcomes they produce. The discomfort we feel drives us to search for novel solutions and experiment with different paths, making performance breakthroughs more likely.

Progress without difficulty is impossible and that mastery isn’t a destination. It’s a way of life.

Chapter 7: How to Talk to Experts

To improve, we need feedback that meets a particular set of criteria. We need it to be specific, improvement-focused, reflective of the audience we are trying to reach, and properly timed. The good news is that all four elements are simple to achieve, so long as we stay mindful of the difference between feedback quality and quantity, and commit to asking the right people the right questions at the right times.

The relationship between feedback and success: “If you want to avoid criticism, it’s better to be good than it is to be great.”

If you’re looking to achieve a moderate level of success, positive feedback can help you get there. But if you’re aiming to surge to the top of your field, shatter expectations, and establish a legacy, negative feedback isn’t simply something you need to tolerate. It’s a promising indicator that you’re on the right track.

Conclusion: Stumbling on Greatness

The first thing van Gogh did when setting out to become an artist was identify models he could deconstruct, analyze, and reproduce. He mastered figures by replicating the dynamic paintings of Jean-François Millet and Jules Breton. He learned to paint landscapes by copying the works of Charles Daubigny and Théodore Rousseau. Through meticulous copywork, van Gogh worked backward to extract a wide range of lessons. He observed the way accomplished artists wield colors to convey emotion, the impact of brushstroke length on the way the eye perceives movement, and how shadows and reflections lend paintings nuance and depth.

Van Gogh was careful not to limit himself to art of a particular genre and enjoyed sampling from a wide range of artists. He studied his neo-impressionist contemporaries, scrutinized more established Barbizon masters, and became enamored by Eastern artists, whose works had only recently made their way into European markets.

Consuming a wide spectrum of influences sensitized van Gogh to subtle differences between genres, helped him develop and refine his palate, and exposed him to a range of artistic ideas. When he found works he admired, he added their prints to his collection and analyzed them intently. The simplicity of Japanese artwork, in particular, made an enormous impression on van Gogh. By the time of his death, despite the fact that he was always incredibly poor, he had more than one thousand Japanese prints to his name.

He also ventured outside his field for influences. Van Gogh was a voracious reader and found inspiration in the works of George Eliot, Émile Zola, and Charlotte Brontë. But he adored one writer above all others: Charles Dickens.

As he admitted to his brother Theo, “My whole life is aimed at making the things from everyday life that Dickens describes….”

Drawing from this vast trove of influences, van Gogh was able to combine distinct elements from disparate genres to produce strikingly original work. From Millet, he developed a taste for depicting the everyday lives of hardworking peasants. From Impressionists like Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, he borrowed bright, vivid colors and the practice of applying tiny dabs of paint. From Japanese art, he imported strong outlines and an absence of shadows.

The intense, vibrant style we now recognize as uniquely van Gogh’s did not arrive fully formed. It emerged slowly, the product of years of incremental change. It gradually manifests as van Gogh encounters new influences, applies new discoveries, and conducts tiny experiments.

Van Gogh experimented with everything. He began by sampling different materials, going from charcoal to pencil to pen to brush. He attempted a range of styles, shifting from realism to Expressionism to Neo-impressionism. He tackled multiple techniques, starting with thin watercolors at first and over time gravitating toward dense layers of paint—a technique he is now recognized for called impasto. And perhaps most strikingly, he evolved in his use of colors, moving from dark, complementary colors in his early years to bright, contrasting colors that pop from across the room.

Van Gogh’s growth and evolution as an artist would have been impossible had he continuously played it safe and avoided the ongoing challenges we now know are necessary for skill acquisition. Instead, he practiced relentlessly, producing more than two thousand paintings, drawings, and sketches in just ten years. Critically, he wasn’t just productive. He deliberately focused on his perceived weaknesses, testing the limits of his abilities. It was not uncommon for him to work and rework the same image repeatedly. As he explained in his letter to a fellow artist, Anthon van Rappard, “I keep on making what I can’t do yet in order to learn to be able to do it.”

We know all of this because of van Gogh’s long-standing commitment to stepping back, contemplating his progress, and committing his thoughts to paper. In so doing, he was benefiting from the many advantages of reflective practice.

How do you apply their strategies to your work? Let’s review ten major lessons and identify ways we can all utilize them in everyday life.

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 artwork, wine, or stamps.

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.

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 re-create 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.

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.

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.

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, preselling 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.

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.

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.

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—nonexperts 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.

By applying these lessons, we all have the potential for building our skills, elevating our performance, and making lasting contributions.