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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Replying to
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 feels like one of those times. When the rule set is fixed and known, then improvement consists of finding ever smaller edges optimizations to the convex hull of rule-obeying strategies.
Chess players memorize progressively more elaborate opening books as they improve.
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But the real world ISN'T like this. The difference between a highly successful entrepreneur and someone who's not as good ISN'T that the former has figured out more micro-cases and gotten good at them.
It's a different thing entirely.
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Someday I'll write something up about this.
I think it's an incredibly common and problematic cognitive bias. Taleb talks about the "ludic fallacy", but I think his view (i.e. probabilities in games are fixed) is a special case of a much broader mistake.
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Replying to
Oh yes, this is a good point. Probably not worth applying to marketing, though perhaps still ok to apply to computer programming (?) which is more bounded.
Actually even within marketing, if it’s a relatively bounded sub-skill, it’s applicable. But these aren’t the highest order bit thing for marketing/career success so your point more broadly still stands.
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Probably a mixture right? Usually for real world skills, a large component of the value comes from seeing relationships between skills ("synergies"). But you also unlock value by being a high level practitioner of said skills.
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