What’s the truth that lies behind perfection?
Part One - Perfectionism & the 10,000 Hours Illusion
Why do highly skilled people believe they have to achieve perfection?
There is something so blindingly obvious when you encounter the most highly skilled people in any field. They’re producing brilliant results every time.
Perfect even.
It’s the fact that they’re performing at the highest level that makes them so inspiring.
But people who are producing that level of perfection are also creating a problem for anyone who want to do the same.
2008. The Beijing Olympics.
Usain Bolt won gold in the 100 and 200 metres.
Four years later, he won the same races in the 2012 Olympics.
In 2016, he repeated his success in both events in Rio.
In 2010, chef Raymond Blanc demonstrated one of his most intricate desserts on his TV series, ‘Kitchen Secrets.’
The dish, entitled ‘café crème’ consisted of a cup and saucer, sculpted out of the thinnest chocolate and filled with a cappuccino foam.
It took Blanc ten minutes. He also revealed that his restaurant was producing at least 100 a day.
Each one perfect.
The greatest writers seem to able to craft the perfect story and the best musicians give a perfect performance with apparent ease.
It’s easy to see why anyone witnessing this would start to develop a particular mindset:
Perfectionism.
They want to produce perfect results. Every time.
But this is quite different from most people’s experience of developing a skill, which usually involves not producing the results you want a lot of the time.
Many people want to progress to reach the level of those who inspire them.
And we’re told that the key to this lies in completely over 10,000 hours of practice.
‘Practice makes perfect’ and all that.
But this is where people encounter a particular psychological illusion.
The more time you spend practising, the more experiences you have of not producing the results you want a lot of the time.
So as you’re progressing, it can seem like you’re actually creating more and more evidence that you’re just fundamentally different from those people who produce perfect results every time.
You must be doing something wrong or perhaps they have some magic gene that you don’t.
The truth that lies behind this illusion is completely counterintuitive.
The fact that you’re not always producing the results you want is exactly how you know you’re going through the same process as those who inspire you.
But how can that possibly be true?
The answer does have something to do with the 10,000 Hours of Mastery, but not in the way that’s commonly thought.
Whereas it certainly takes thousands of hours to master any complex skill, it’s not simply the number of hours that’s the defining factor.
After all, many people have driven a car for over 10,000 hours, but they’re not masters of that.
And there’s a very simple reason why.
Once someone can drive safely from A to B, they typically make no attempt to raise their level of skill or ability at all.
The 10,000 Hours of Mastery highlights one important principle:
People who master a skill spend most of their time working on the very areas where they’re not yet producing the results they want.
A classic example is that of the high-jumper.
The result every high jumper wants is fairly obvious. They want to jump over the bar without knocking it off.
And every high-jumper starts by setting the bar at a low level. At that stage of the process, they knock the bar off every time.
Once they can consistently clear the bar at that height, they have to raise the bar. Then they go through the same process, starting by knocking the bar off at the new height.
And they repeat this process again and again over days, weeks and months.
So over the course of a year, a high-jumper who’s progressing very successfully has spent a lot of the time not achieving the results they wanted. They’ve spent a lot of the time knocking the bar off.
But they’ve reached a much higher level than they had a year ago.
So strangely, the process is working perfectly precisely because they’re not producing the results they want every time.
And the example of the high jumper demonstrates an important principle that’s essential in order to become highly skilled in any field.
Someone is only able to reach a higher level by going through the process of not producing the results they want again and again.
The only way that any high jumper could clear the bar every time is by never raising the bar.
Now they’re producing exactly the results they want every time, but they’re not actually progressing.
In this case, the process isn’t working at all precisely because they’re producing exactly the results they want every time.
But anyone who watched the 2016 Olympics would have seen Canadian high-jumper, Derek Drouin win Olympic Gold without a single missed attempt.
As the bar was raised throughout the competition, Drouin cleared it every single time to become Olympic Champion.
This run of perfect results can be inspiring. But it can also be somewhat misleading.
It’s easier to forget one important point.
When you’re looking for inspiration, you only select people who are already producing the kind of results you want.
So of course they’re producing perfect results every time you see them.
But that doesn’t mean that they were producing the same level of results at every stage of the process leading up to that point.
The Olympic gold medalist went through the same process of raising the bar over time that every high jumper goes through.
Every great musician had a lesson years ago when they could only play one note on their instrument.
And every great writer had that moment as a child when they wrote their first word.
What are the chances that any of these people were producing exactly the results they wanted at every stage of the process from being a complete beginner to reaching the advanced level where we find them inspiring?
No chance.
Derek Drouin had his first experience of the high-jump when he set up a broomstick between two large speakers in his parents’ basement, aged 15.
Usain Bolt started running at school when his teacher, Mr Nugent, spotted his potential and asked him compete in school sports day.
He was 8 years old. And he came second.
Bolt later commented on that first race, “World records and gold medals were a long way off”.
In fact, the most inspiring people in any field will have gone through the process of raising the bar many more times than people who have not yet reached that level.
Raymond Blanc revealed the story behind his intricate chocolate cup:
“The café crème dessert took me six months to create; there were so many things which could (and often did!) go wrong and so many techniques to master - the thickness of the chocolate, the textures, the presentation, the eating experience...
After six months’ total focus, this dessert was ready…”
So every time someone goes through the process of not producing the results they want again and again, they’re going through the very same process that those who inspired them went through to become even more highly skilled.
But that’s not quite the end of the story.
The people who inspired us aren’t even producing perfect results at the very stage of the process where we know they are.
Part Two. Coming soon….
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