Do you know Tim Ferriss? No? A pity. You should. As Han Solo said about Lando Calrissian: “He’s a scoundrel. You’d like him.”
I’m not sure how he describes what he does nowadays, but at some point he said he “deconstructed world-class performance.” In other words, he figures out how outliers do the things they do.
If you know anything about outliers, you know it takes 10,000 of deliberate practice to become world-class at anything.
Which is why it’s surprising, at first, the Tim Ferriss has a hack, sandwiched right in the middle of The Four-Hour Chef, for learning how to get pretty good at anything, quickly.
“Pretty good”? For Tim Ferriss, that means “top 5% of practitioners”.
“Quickly”? That means 6 to 12 months or even — if you’re manic like him — 6 to 12 weeks.
So, you can choose: 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to get world-class, or 6 months of somewhat deliberate practice to get to top 5%.
What’s the system? Two acronyms: DiSSS and CaFE.
The main one is DiSSS, which is
- Deconstruction. What are the minimal learnable units, the Lego blocks, to start with?
- Selection. Which 20% of the blocks gives you 80% of the competence?
- Sequencing. In what order should you learn the blocks?
- Stakes. Set things up so you work hard at it.
You need help with this. Ferriss discusses several cases in Chef, a couple of which spoke to me:
Shinji Takeuchi is an ordinary Japanese gentleman who developed an approach to swimming which emphasized effortless pleasure instead of the usual competitive thing of maximum output. Terry Laughlin wrote a book about Takeuchi’s method, Total Immersion, which does you the favor of doing steps 1-3 for you. He tells you what “alphabet” you have to learn, which are the most important elements, and in what sequence to learn them. Alas, he doesn’t give you the stakes :-).
Ferriss also does a case study on shooting basketball three-pointers. What’s interesting here is that, like Tim Ferriss, I have very little interest in basketball, but a strong contributor to my lack of interest is that I’ve always pretty much sucked at it. So I was interested.
His recipe:
Find a guru. He suggests finding somebody who is 5-10 years past fame, so that they’re still fantastic but don’t have an ego about it.
Offer them something for their help. Probably not money, but a mention in your blog?
Ask them about 1, 2, and 3. 1) What is the “alphabet” of basketball shooting. 2) What the the most significant things that bad players do wrong? What are the most significant things that bad players can to to improve? 3) What does a progression of exercises look like?
There’s a lot more. And there’s a lot more in the book. Highly recommended.