I know this is obvious, but I think it bears repeating: the higher up you go in some skill tree, the smaller the improvements become.
Which leads to some interesting observations:
1) To a novice, an expert giving feedback to the merely good will seem like nitpicking.
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2) You know how in chess and tennis, people say that great players make less mistakes than good players? This is an instance of that.
3) You should expect to have to level up to notice ever smaller details and tweaks as you progress.
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4) Which in turn means that as you get better, refining technique can be vastly more boring than the early skill jumps of the novice-intermediate.
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This set of observations brought to you by my being consistently humbled in the judo dojo.
This competition coach I talk to notices some of the smallest, most trivial things that — when taken seriously — turns out to have a big impact on the technique working.
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Ok fine, an example:
Amandine Buchard specialises in something called kata guruma (or side takedown, depending on who you ask).
The technique requires you to be in an opposite stance situation (right vs left).
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But Buchard is able to do her throw to everyone from the same grip, regardless of their handedness. How?
The answer: she forces same side players into an opposite stance, and in that tiny window when the stance switches, she attacks.
Me: wtf?!
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Competition coach: it’s obvious when you know what to look for.
Me: wtf?
Which makes me wonder what the equivalent thing is in other skill domains like programming or marketing. What tiny tweaks am I missing?
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Important counter point:
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I've come around to the idea that:
Taking insights from bounded domains with known and fixed rules (i.e. games and sports) and transporting them to unbounded domains (real world problems) often gives bad results.
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This is such an interesting frame. It’s shifting how I perceive feedback. Thanks!
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