This is post 5 in a series about being fast and good. Read part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.
Being fast and good has compounding effects.
First, it creates a virtuous cycle in which you improve over time. When you’re fast, you perform more work. The more you practice your craft, the better you get at it. I spend much less time on a given long-form blog post today than I did ten years ago, but I’m a much better writer.
There are intangible benefits as well. James Somers, whose article on speed helped inspire this series, explains the experience well1:
Being fast is fun. If you're a fast writer, you'll constantly be playing with new ideas. You won't be bogged down in a single dread effort. And because your to-do list gets worked off, you'll always be thinking of more stuff to add to it. With more drafts in the works, more of the world will pop alive. You will feel flexible and capable and practiced so that when something demanding and long arrives on your desk, you won't back down afraid.
As powerful as these compounding effects are, the most potent ingredient for impact is experience.
Skill, wisdom, and impact
Experience is the difference between skill and wisdom, and that distinction is the key to creating impact over the long run.
Skill gives you the ability to do things well; wisdom focuses skill on the right things.
Alex Estevez, the renowned former CFO at Atlassian, once told me that in a given year a business will do thousands of things, but only 2-3 of them truly impact the trajectory of the company.
If impact is the goal, the worst failure mode isn’t making a mistake or trying something new that doesn’t work. It’s doing something impressive that doesn’t matter.
Get experience, then learn from experience
There are at least two ingredients to experience that becomes wisdom: time and learning.
Time in the saddle
Merlin Mann tells a story about old butchers2 to explain the path from advanced beginner to expertise and mastery3. To paraphrase:
An old butcher shaves exactly 2.5lbs of pastrami every time, without weighing it. The new young butcher asks him how he does it.
The old butcher replies, “I have no idea.”
When the young butcher presses him for the secret, the old butcher replies, “be a butcher for 40 years.”
There is no shortcut to 10,000 hours. Mastery requires investing in your craft for a long time, demanding patience and vision (as opposed to near-term optimization).
This is simpler than it seems: show up, focus, and you’ll get better.
But hours in the saddle alone aren’t enough.
Learning from experience
Experience is valuable because you apply your craft in different contexts to solve various problems. As those successes and failures accumulate, you develop intuition for the specifics of how your craft should (or shouldn’t) be applied and what kinds of challenges you’ll face, as well as the unique ingredients for success within a context.
But this process requires reflecting on and learning from your experiences, which is more rare than it might seem.
We expect that skilled juniors need guidance in applying their skill correctly, but workers with more tenure who need the same often fall into traps that limit the value they mine from experience.
As simple as it sounds, not slowing down enough to reflect on an experience, and get honest feedback from people who know you well, limits your ability to extract learnings that can be applied to future situations.
Running from failure can look like subjectively applying blame, rapidly moving on to the next possible success, or even dwelling on the outcome so much that moving forward is difficult. But failure can be one the best teachers we have4.
Fighting the last war5 is a trap in which you apply specific inputs from past successes to new challenges. The error is failing to abstract learnings from the past into core principles that can inform decision making in new contexts.
Wisdom is for the curious and humble
The wisest people I know are also the most curious and humble.
Curiosity drives them to understand why things happen they way they did; to deconstruct past experiences and parse the component parts of new experiences.
Humility keeps them objective, even in the face of failure, and calibrates confidence to come from real reflection, not just success.
Life offers us experiences every day, it’s what we do with them that shapes who we become and the impact we have.
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Footnotes
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James Somers article on speed is a great read and helped inspire this series. ↩
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Merlin Mann’s video, Makebelieve help, Old Butchers, And Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now) was influential in my early thinking about productivity and impact. The video contains colorful language. ↩
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The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition is a framework for acquiring skill mapped across 6 stages (novice, advanced beginner, competence, proficiency, expertise, mastery). ↩
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I wrote about failure over a decade ago. Unsurprisingly, I reference another Merlin Mann analogy: the first pancake. ↩
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The Maginot line is the origin of the phrase "fighting the last war". At the beginning of WWII, the French used the same defences that had worked in WWI, which were no match for the German blitzkrieg, an entirely new kind of attack. ↩