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January 6 - April 4, 2025
If perfectionism were a medication, the label would alert us to common side effects. Warning: may cause stunted growth.
Wabi sabi is the art of honoring the beauty in imperfection. It’s not about creating intentional imperfections. It’s about accepting that flaws are inevitable—and recognizing that they don’t stop something from becoming sublime.
When divers tell him they had a bad day, Eric likes to ask two questions: Did you make yourself better today? Did you make someone else better today?
People judge your potential from your best moments, not your worst. What if you gave yourself the same grace?
I realized that success is not so much how close you come to perfection as how much you overcome along the way.
Pivoting is a popular concept in Silicon Valley, where it’s often said that done is better than perfect.
We have to be careful about how much weight we put on judges’ scores. A great deal of research shows that perfectionists tend to define excellence on other people’s terms. This focus on creating a flawless image in the eyes of others is a risk factor for depression, anxiety, burnout, and other mental health challenges. Striving for social approval comes with a cost: across 105 studies with over 70,000 people, valuing extrinsic goals like popularity and appearance over intrinsic goals like growth and connection predicted lower well-being. Seeking validation is a bottomless pit: the craving for
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One: Scaffolding generally comes from other people.
Two: Scaffolding is tailored to the obstacle in your path.
Three: Scaffolding comes at a pivotal point in time.
Four: Scaffolding is temporary.
We might look to a coach or a mentor to show us that what looks like an insurmountable block can be rotated into a stairway. We might rely on a teammate or a mentee to show us that the key missing piece is right around the corner. And we might have to work together to reach the next level when the odds are stacked against us.
Too often, it feels like our mistakes pile up, while our accomplishments disappear. With the right support at the right moments, we can overcome obstacles to growth.
Scaffolding unleashes hidden potential by helping us forge paths we couldn’t otherwise see. It enables us to find motivation in the daily grind, gain momentum in the face of stagnation, and turn difficulties and doubts into sources of strength.
We’re often told that if we want to develop our skills, we need to push ourselves through long hours of monotonous practice. But the best way to unlock hidden potential isn’t to suffer through the daily grind. It’s to transform the daily grind into a source of daily joy. It’s not a coincidence that in music, the term for practice is play.
Deliberate practice is the structured repetition of a task to improve performance based on clear goals and immediate feedback.
Research reveals that the actual number of hours required for excellence varies dramatically by person and activity. What’s clear is that deliberate practice is particularly valuable for improving skills in predictable tasks with consistent moves—swinging a golf club, solving a Rubik’s Cube, or playing a violin.
Whereas burnout is the emotional exhaustion that accumulates when you’re overloaded, boreout is the emotional deadening you feel when you’re under-stimulated.
Elite musicians are rarely driven by obsessive compulsion. They’re usually fueled by what psychologists call harmonious passion. Harmonious passion is taking joy in a process rather than feeling pressure to achieve an outcome.
persistence was more likely to translate into performance when passion was present.[*1] The question is how to build the scaffolding to bring that passion into practice. My favorite answer is called deliberate play.
Deliberate play is a structured activity that’s designed to make skill development enjoyable. It blends elements of deliberate practice and free play. Like free play, deliberate play is fun, but it’s structured for learning and mastery along with recreation. It’s built to break complex tasks into simpler parts so you can hone a specific skill.
With deliberate play, it’s easier to sustain enjoyment and achieve greater things.
Although it might sound similar to gamification, deliberate play is fundamentally different. Gamification is often a gimmick—an attempt to add bells and whistles to a tedious task. The aim is to offer a dopamine rush that distracts from boredom or staves off exhaustion. Sure, a leaderboard might motivate you to push through the pain, but it’s not enough to trick you into liking a routine you hate.[*2] In deliberate play, you actually redesign the task itself to make it both motivating and developmental.
we found that the more they loved their favorite task in their job, the worse they performed at their least favorite task. We replicated that effect in an experiment, giving people the boring task of copying names and numbers from a phone book. They made more errors if we had randomly assigned them to watch fascinating YouTube videos first. The contrast between the two tasks made the data entry even more mind-numbing.
Practice involves multiple skills, and it’s rare to love them all. Brandon started looking for ways to work harmonious passion into every element of practice.
Hundreds of experiments show that people improve faster when they alternate between different skills. Psychologists call it interleaving, and it works in areas ranging from painting to math, especially when the skills being developed are similar or complex. Even small tweaks, like shifting between thinner and thicker paintbrushes or slightly adjusting the weight of a basketball, can make a big difference.
Deliberate play “creates a game-like situation with pressure,”
Once about 24 hours have passed, information starts to fade from our memories—we fall down a forgetting curve. It’s well established that we can avoid that forgetting curve with spaced repetition—interspersing breaks into practice. At first, you might practice once an hour, and then start taking longer breaks until you’re practicing once a day.
Skills don’t grow at a steady pace. Improving them is like driving up a mountain. As we climb higher and higher, the road gets steeper and steeper, and our gains get smaller and smaller.
It’s often said that those who can’t do, teach. It would be more accurate to say that those who can do, can’t teach the basics. A great deal of expert knowledge is tacit—it’s implicit, not explicit. The further you progress toward mastery, the less conscious awareness you often have of the fundamentals.
Being a sponge starts with seeking their advice—but instead of asking to pick their brain, you ask them to retrace their route. The goal is to get your guides to drop pins—the key landmarks and turning points from their climbs.
Getting discouraged is a common obstacle after turning around. That’s because going backward doesn’t always lead directly to a new peak. Sometimes you end up stuck, and it’s not because you’re on the wrong path. It’s because your path is taking you in long circles toward the top, and you can’t even tell that you’re gaining ground. You’re not seeing enough progress to maintain your motivation. There’s a name for that feeling: it’s called languishing. Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. The term was coined by a sociologist (Corey Keyes) and immortalized by a philosopher (Mariah
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Research shows that languishing disrupts your focus and dulls your motivation. It becomes a Catch-22: you know you need to do something, but you doubt whether it will do anything. That’s when you need to pull off the freeway and refuel.
When I ask people what it takes to achieve greater things, one of the most common answers is that you need to be laser focused and single-minded in your dedication.
But the evidence tells a different story. A digression doesn’t have to be a diversion. It can be a source of energy. In one study, when people had spent engaging evenings on their side hustles, they performed better the next day in their regular jobs.
What looks like a big breakthrough is usually the accumulation of small wins.[*6]
When the odds are against us, focusing beyond ourselves is what launches us off the ground.
Extensive evidence shows that when we view hurdles as threats, we tend to back down and give up. When we treat barriers as challenges to conquer, we rise to the occasion.
Carol Dweck, has recently demonstrated that a growth mindset alone does little good without scaffolding to support it. Rigorous experiments with over 15,000 students reveal that nurturing a growth mindset among high schoolers boosts their grades only when their teachers recognize their potential and their schools have cultures of embracing challenges.
Considerable evidence shows that studying with knowledgeable colleagues is good for growth. In U.S. intelligence agencies, if you want to predict which teams will produce the best work, the most important factor to consider is how often colleagues teach and coach one another.
the best way to learn something is to teach it. You remember it better after you recall it—and you understand it better after you explain it.
Teaching others can build our competence. But it’s coaching others that elevates our confidence. When we encourage others to overcome obstacles, it can help us find our own motivation.
This is different from the tutor effect, which highlights how we can learn through sharing the very knowledge that we want to acquire. The coach effect captures how we can marshal motivation by offering the encouragement to others that we need for ourselves. By reminding us of the tools we already possess, coaching others raises our expectations of ourselves.
Receiving is passive—if you’re always the one being coached, it puts you in the position of depending on others for guidance. Giving is active—coaching others reminds you that you have something to offer. It convinces you that your bootstraps are strong enough to support you. You’ve already seen them support others.
Dozens of experiments show that at work, when leaders hold high expectations, employees generally work harder, learn more, and perform better. In
Whereas high expectations offer support for us to climb, low expectations tend to hold us back—it feels like our boots are made of lead. It’s called the Golem effect: when others underestimate us, it limits our effort and growth. These kinds of self-fulfilling prophecies are particularly pronounced among stigmatized groups, who are frequently inundated by low expectations.
“My fear of not making it again was not as strong as my desire to prove the naysayers wrong,” Alison tells me. “When someone ignorant doubts you, it feels like a challenge.
Having a partner can prevent rumination about your own abilities (Can I do this?) and boost determination (I won’t be the reason you fail). As Maya Angelou wrote, “I do my best because I’m counting on you counting on me.”
People raised in the top 1 percent of family income were ten times more likely to become inventors than people from families below the median income.
