To Get Better is to Work Twice as Hard

Have you ever noticed if you’ve worked out for a long enough period of time or played an instrument long enough, you hit points that feel like you just can’t get any stronger or any better?

Similarly, it seems when writing or working on a project, you can spend about an hour working to get something to 80% good, but that last 20% may take 10x as long as the whole 80%.

What I realized is that it seems like it’s the same kind of thing as trying to reach the number 100 by only adding half of the distance between you and it. That’s confusing. Here’s an example:

In football, there are penalties that if applied when you are right next to the other teams’ endzone, you simply get half a distance to the goal. If you are at the 5 yard line and this happen, now you’re at the 2 ½ yard line. If it happens again, you’re now at the 1 ¼ yard line. If it happens again, you’re at the ⅝ yard line…and so on and so forth.

But at using this calculation, it is impossible to ever get to the goal. You can never acheive 100. You may be able to get to 99.9999999, but 100 will never be attainable.

When you are working on getting better at something, it seems like it works like this. The intial phase often goes qucikly. You get from the 0 knowledge to the 50 knowledge fast and it looks really impressive. Then getting to the 75 requires about twice as much work as it did to get to the 50, but still attainable. Then it starts to get really hard. Getting to the 87 ½ from the 75 required four times the work it took to get from the 0 to 50, but it looks way less impressive.

The most world-class performers and athletes in the world undersatnd this better than most. Every day, they’re working on cutting that half again. Getting better and better, but at very small rates. They put the time in.

What is worth putting this kind of effort and time into? Are there things that you’re doing this with right now that don’t need that kind of effort?

Getting better is working twice as hard each time, but sometimes the things we work the hardest on shouldn’t even be things we work on in the first place.