Question 1: Could their success have happened by accident?

Imagine 64 guys get a job in stockbroking one year. Let’s say that their chance of making money in any given year is 50%, and it’s completely down to chance (the real thing is probably more complicated than this, but bear with me). After one year, 32 make money and 32 are fired (and probably replaced, but that isn’t relevant at the moment). Of the remaining 16,  make money the next year and 16 are fired. And so it goes, down to 8, then 4, then 2, then 1. After six years, one guy has made money every year – so he’s apparently a genius – and 63 people have been fired. The question is: do you buy that guy’s book on how to play the stock market? Maybe you do: it’s possible that he got something right. This is really a question about probability – just how possibly/likely is it that the person you’re listening to could have done what they’ve done completely by accident? If the answer is ‘quite likely’, maybe reconsider whether their advice is worth gambling on.

Question 2: Are you only hearing about them because they’re a success? 

It’s probably fair to say that lucky breaks are important in every field of human endeavour but they’re much, much more important in certain fields than in others. Unfortunately, the people working in these fields don’t always like to acknowledge that, because it makes them feel less special. That’s why Will Smith is always saying things like:

“There’s no reason to have a plan B because it distracts from plan A.”

This, of course, is a fine thing to say if you’re Will Smith. But then again, you’re only hearing Will Smith’s opinions because he’s Will Smith. I don’t have any statistics on this, but I’m willing to bet that there are quite a few people working terrible jobs or in mountains of debt who, if you listened to them, would tell you that they should have given a bit more thought to their plan B. But you aren’t going to hear from them, because they aren’t Will Smith. Oh, and this isn’t strictly relevant, but check out this quote:

“The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be out-worked, period. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me, you might be all of those things you got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there’s two things: You’re getting off first, or I’m going to die. It’s really that simple, right?”

Hear that, Mo Farah? If you can somehow get Will Smith on a treadmill alongside you, you could kill him. For the record, if anyone wants to set up a treadmill race between me and Will Smith, I am absolutely prepared to make that happen.

Question 3: Did they do something to lay the groundwork for their success that they aren’t talking about?

Rich Froning has won the CrossFit Games for four years in a row. He is legitimately the fittest man in the world. And to be fair, Richard Froning is not telling anyone to follow his training plan: in this documentary, he claims to just decide on his workouts (he does about five a day) as he goes. But if he posted his exact training regime, day after day, on the internet, would that make sense for you? Well, no, because Rich Froning grew up on a farm, doing hours of manual labour every day, and then became a strength and conditioning coach. He has an insane tolerance for physical work, and you (probably) don’t. Following his plan would probably be a terrible idea for you. And this isn’t specific to CrossFit Games champions: in the 4-Hour Body, Tim Ferriss makes an (apparently) strong case for the idea that doing a single set to momentary muscular failure will pack on muscle faster than almost anything you can do. I’m not going to comment on the validity of that, except to say that Ferriss was absolutely not starting from the same point as most people reading his book. He’s a former wrestler with a ton of weightlifting experience – even detrained, his neurological pathways are aligned to allow him to shift more weight, more efficiently, than any first-timer. I’m not saying he’s wrong: I’m just saying it’s something to consider.

Question 4: Have they succeeded in spite of what they’re doing, not because of it?

Cain Velasquez, experts agree, is an absolute beast. He’s one of the most dominant heavyweights ever to fight in MMA, with off-the-charts cardio and a fighting style that mimics being mauled by a series of bears. And yet, Cain Velasquez trains his legs by doing high-rep leg extensions. 

Again, I’m not saying that this is definitely wrong. Maybe that fat guy in the video is a genius, and so far ahead of the curve that the dozens of strength and conditioning coaches who’ll tell you leg extensions are pointless – and dangerous – from a functional point of view will soon be changing their tune. But maybe Cain Velasquez is a monster because he’s got an excellent team around him (which he does), a fantastic grappling coach (Dave Camarillo certainly qualifies) and an absolutely insane work ethic. And maybe if he stopped doing leg extensions, he’d be even better. Did I mention that he’s had at least two rounds of knee surgery? It’s worth considering.

This isn’t a complete list. It never is. But if you’re thinking about doing something new: whether it’s a diet, or financial plan, or training regime, these are questions worth asking yourself. Because sometimes, the people giving you advice aren’t lying to you: they just don’t know they’re getting it wrong.

HOMEWORK: Try asking these questions of whichever self-improvement guru you’ve been listening to most recently. See what you come up with.

‘I really like your fashion sense.’

What do junior-level chess players have in common with pickup artists? This isn’t a trick question.

Once, for a thing I was writing, I spent a couple of weeks hanging out (online and In Real Life) with a group of self-proclaimed pickup artists. I’m not going to make generalizations about them: some were nice but shy, some predatory to the extent that I wanted to punch them in the face, some genuinely just wanted to get better at talking to girls and some wanted notches on the bedpost. How successful were they? We’ll get to that in a second.

More recently, I read Josh Waitzkin’s Attacking Chess, a book well worth ploughing through even if you don’t care about pawn storms or the concept of zugzwang. In it, Waitzkin discusses the problem with memorising openings. There are plenty of superficially good reasons to memorise openings – every game starts with them, they’re a good way to get an early advantage against inexperienced opponents, and having a tricky King’s Indian variation in your arsenal is a great confidence builder. The problem is that they go on forever: there are entire books full of them, with new ones being invented all the time. You could spend your life learning new ones, but it still wouldn’t give you the deep understanding of chess fundamentals that it takes to be a genuinely great player. Ultimately, argues Waitzkin, you’re better to learn the principles that will get you through the opening in a fairly decent position, rather than relying on a set of rote traps that do nothing for your long-term chess improvement.

This, obviously, made me think about talking to people.

If you’ve got ten minutes and a Private Browsing option on your computer, check out one of the big pickup forums. You’ll find hundreds of ‘openers’, routines, ‘foolproof’ lines and other canned dialogue that will probably make you feel uncomfortable about the whole thing. Some are good, some are bad, some are face-palmingly awful. They mostly follow the same theme, which is that they’re an innocent-sounding thing that can spark up – or continue – a conversation, and some of them definitely work. But the thing is, just like memorising the Queen’s Gambit or the Sicilian Defence, saying the same thing to every person you meet isn’t going to help you talk to anyone in the long run. You could memorise a thousand of these lines, and all you’d be is a Turing machine (you know, like Cleverbot) firing out predetermined conversational strings with no intelligence behind them.

This was the problem with some of the pick-up artists, one of the few sub-sets of the population who actually make a genuine effort to improve their conversational skills. They’d go into bars starting conversations with ‘Quick question: is it cheating if my friend’s girlfriend kisses another girl?’ or ‘I need your opinion: does my friend look like a drug dealer?’ but then they’d be reduced to firing out more and more pre-memorised ‘quick questions’, with nothing original to say.

Now: most pick-up artists will tell you that these ‘openers’ are supposed to be training wheels which you eventually take off, but to get better at talking to people, I think there are better ways: ways that don’t leave you relying on your ability to memorise canned lines.

Here’s one: next time someone asks, ‘How was your day?’ don’t just respond with a tired ‘Fine, I guess,’ or ‘Okay, I didn’t do much.’ Instead, make it your mission to tell them an engaging little anecdote about how your day *actually was*. It doesn’t matter if your day was exciting: something happened that was interesting, that helped you reflect on who you are, or how you can get more excellent as a person. You’ll find this tough at first, so use the days when nobody asks to work on the skill yourself. Example days I’ve had where ‘nothing happened’ include:

‘Nice. I saw a really heartwarming thing at the train station; there’s this one station attendant who always notices when couples are seeing each other off, and lets the person who doesn’t have a ticket through the barrier. It makes people really happy. I love it when people step outside the boundaries of their job to make people’s lives a little bit better.’

‘Dreadful. I got all over-excited in the gym, did too many squats, and then I had to lie on the sofa feeling sick for most of the afternoon. On the plus side I only really feel like I can binge-watch TV when I’m physically incapable of doing anything else, so I managed to catch up on Breaking Bad.’

‘Worrying. I was walking through the park and I saw a badger. Aren’t badgers supposed to be really vicious? I’m basically more scared of badgers than muggers, at least I know how to fight muggers. I don’t know any self-defence moves that work against traditional badger attacks.’

The point is that you don’t need a wildly exciting life every single day: that’s not possible. Instead, you need to think about the world in a way that lets you talk to people about your feelings and values without sounding like you’re reading from a script. Because then they’ll talk back.

HOMEWORK: For the next five days, whatever you do, sit down – with a notebook if it helps – and work out how to tell an interesting anecdote about what happened, good or bad. How was your day? Probably more interesting than you think.

I contend that there is another way. Announce your plans to everyone, then shut up about your progress.

This serves several purposes. Firstly, by telling everyone your plans – especially if you go about it with the right amount of confidence – you ensure that you’ll have at least a few people asking you how the novel/six-pack/running is going. Hopefully some will mock you about it, which should give you the right amount of rage to maintain steady progress. Secondly, by shutting up about the actual process, you avoid the feeling that you’re being productive when you aren’t. Thirdly, when you turn up one day with your trapezius muscles bursting out of your shirt and a fully-fledged novel on Amazon, it’s a nice surprise for everybody except the people that doubted you.

More importantly, you avoid the problem of internalising the idea that what you’re doing is hard or special, when it really isn’t. This is the problem with diets, Crossfit, and most people who start writing books. Think about it: if you’re treating every training or writing session as some sort of heroic effort, posting what you did on Facebook or Twitter or otherwise looking for approval, then it will always, always seem difficult, something that you should be lauded for doing and shouldn’t feel too bad if you skip or give up. If, on the other hand, you can start the process and then regard the actual work as something that just gets done, it’ll eventually become as integral to your life as brushing your teeth. I’m still not great at this, but I’ve been going to the gym and writing for years now, and I get jittery if I can’t do either – it’s actually harder for me to stop.

Need more inspiration? I’ll leave you with a quote from Mark Twight, formerly top-flight alpine climber, now trainer to the likes of the 300 cast and Henry ‘Superman’ Cavill, and a man who I have enormous respect for – especially since he doesn’t talk about his own achievements all that much.

‘If you keep saying it’s hard, it will be. If you treat training as a chore, it’s drudgery. The pretense of difficulty is just an invitation for social feedback. Change your attitude. Unfuck your head. Make an honest, unsentimental accounting of your present condition. Define what you want instead, clearly. Give yourself a deadline, and a penalty for missing it. Be realistic. Be consistent. Insist. And the road will rise to meet you.’

HOMEWORK: Whatever project you’re working on, shut up about it for the next seven days. No Tweeting that you’ve just been to the gym, no Facebooking about the thing you’ve just written. Treat making an extra effort as normal, and soon it will be.

I used to think I had a natural talent for writing, but then I ran the numbers. Years of being read to, taken to the library, bought books and – on a couple of memorable occasions – being giving merciless punctuation pop-quizzes by my parents. More years of writing thousands of words that I never sent to anyone, followed by a year of sending out scattergun on-spec features to a variety of magazines, with something like a 1:10 success ratio, to magazines while I was at university. Then a few more years writing for videogames magazines – traditionally more tolerant of interesting/ridiculous ‘concept’ pieces than more established media – which, I figured out once, totalled more than a million words. All of it accompanied by relentless self-criticism, and loads of it was terrible. Some of it is still terrible. Conclusion: I might be pretty decent at writing, but I’m not naturally talented at it. I spent a long time getting here. 

The idea that constant, deliberate practice is both necessary and sufficient to succeed in almost anything is pretty well-established these days. Anders Ericsson was the first man to popularise what’s now known as The 10,000 Hour rule, which suggests that nobody at the top level of chess, music, business or fighting has got there without putting in roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice…and that anyone who puts in that much practice will definitely be able to compete at the very highest of levels (in the absence of some genuine non-arguable setback, like being 5’0 if you want a career in the NBA). Even if you haven’t got 10,000 hours – a long time, considering how demanding ‘deliberate’ practice is – this should reassure you that you aren’t wasting your time, no matter how futile your early attempts at anything are. Books like The Talent Code, Outliers, Bounce and Talent Is Overrated all tackle the same body of research from different directions, and you should definitely read one/all of them.

What they won’t do, though, is make you believe it.

Understanding the theory is important, maybe even essential, but you’ll never know – instinctively know, like you know that gravity happens and fire is hot – that you can improve at anything without improving at one thing you think you’re bad at. The key is picking the right thing.

Writing is a terrible choice for your ‘thing’. You could ‘fail’ at writing for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with your writing talent – maybe you pitch to the wrong people, the market isn’t there for what whatever you’re doing, you’re too self-critical to let anyone see anything, and so on. You can ‘succeed’ with shitty writing for almost as many. Fighting is better, but only just. So what’s the best ‘thing’? Easy.

Weight training.

Weight training is great because the numbers don’t lie. However ‘talented’ you are, however strong or weak you are when you start, if you do the work the numbers will go up. They’ll go up quickly at first, then you’ll hit a brick wall. At that point you’ll need to find a programme, make a plan, put it into practice, tweak things, experiment, work harder…and ultimately, watch your lifts go up. There: you’ve improved, thanks to your own efforts. After you’ve done that, maybe you take up climbing, and go from a V2 to a V4 – because, again, you’ve put in the time, done the work, and improved. Then maybe you read up on some basic science, even though you thought you weren’t ‘talented’ at it at school, and realise that it wasn’t actually that hard after all. Then you learn Japanese, or take up ballroom dancing, or do another one of the hundred things you thought you weren’t good at, when actually what happened was that you just never put the time in. When you work this out, it feels miraculous – but you have to start somewhere.  

I’m not naturally talented at anything. But I know that I can do anything I want. Do you know the same?

HOMEWORK: Read either The Talent Code, Outliers or Talent Is Overrated. Pick something you think you’re ‘bad’ at – preferably with easy-to-quantify results. Get good at it. Repeat until you’re Lex Luthor. 

Things to think about:
What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:
(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?
With dearest love,

I trust you’ll agree that that’s pretty sensible advice to anybody, 11-year old or otherwise. Pie (yes, his nickname for her was Pie) apparently grew up to work for the New York Times and Washington Post and become a respected member of the Democratic party, and this sort of thing probably helped. But more than that, I’d say that the act of sitting down and giving the advice probably did more for F. Scott himself than for his daughter.

Think about it. How often do you actually think about your own values, or question what you consider to be important? Probably not often, maybe never. And if you do, how do you make sure your answers are genuine? Here’s how I think you do it: write to your children. If you don’t have children (I don’t), that actually makes things easier – write to your hypothetical baby. Try and express, in clear terms, what you think is important in life. To be nice to people? To stay healthy? To amass as much money as you possibly can, no matter how many people you have to tread on along the way? To get a load of Twitter followers? I’ve done it – I won’t share the results, though I will tell you that my pretend-baby is named Hercules – and it brings a clarity to your thought processes that it’s tough to get any other way. Write to your hypothetical baby. If it helps, name her after your favourite bakery snack.

HOMEWORK: Write to your child, real or not. Tell him/her what you think is important in life, what you think he/she should be focusing on, and what he/she shouldn’t worry about. Save the results somewhere, and revisit them occasionally. Oh, and watch Midnight In Paris. Tom Hiddleston as F. Scott is dreamy.

Unlike the vast majority of people in the entire history of the world, you, person reading this on the internet, weren’t born into circumstances that dictated that you’d have to spend most of your waking life worrying about food or shelter. Without getting up, you can access more knowledge than Plato and Galileo and Newton had available over their entire lives. You can travel faster, further, and in greater comfort than any Roman emperor. You can eat like a caveman, or you can pick up the phone and access a greater selection of food than any monarch born before WWII could summon from the farthest corners of his/her kingdom.

Similarly, it’s never been easier to reshape your body and your mind. Whether you want to look like Ronnie Coleman or Eugen Sandow or Brad Pitt, the principles behind getting to that size and shape are pretty well-established. If you want to rewire your brain and become cleverer, happier, more confident, better, those tools are out there too. They’re not even terribly well-hidden.

So the only question left is: how much do you care? This isn’t a flippant question, and answering it on a regular basis is the key to self-improvement, being happy and staying sane.

Probably best to explain via an example. I, for reasons to do with playing a lot of Street Fighter 2 as a teenager, would quite like to be the best fighter in the world. Or at least better at fighting than I am, which I would describe as ‘good in comparison to most of the population, but not nationally competitive.’ It occupies quite a lot of my thinking time. I know, right?

Could I be much, much better at fighting than I am? Absolutely. While maintaining my job and relationship, I could make sure I never miss a class (at the expense of nights out with friends) make time to drill or ask questions or take notes or get private lessons. If I wanted to change things around a bit I could work less, save money by spending less on , and go to more classes. If I was really committed, I could get a job at the gym/dojo, train all the time and split up with my girlfriend.

I don’t do any of these things, obviously. I don’t do them for the same reason that you don’t do any of these things: I like going out with my friends, I love my girlfriend, I like my job and having spare cash to spend on stuff I want. I like cooking elaborate breakfasts on a Sunday morning, not being punched in the face.

So that’s how much I care about being brilliant at fighting: enough to train quite a lot, not enough to give up elaborate breakfasts. And that’s the key. By consciously embracing the process I can fine-tune it. Instead of blaming non-existent obstacles (lack of time or cash, lack of parental involvement when I was three, lack of talent), I can concentrate on the only real one (don’t care enough), identify steps I can take to change it, then apply them at a level I’m comfortable with.

And here’s the actual secret: this is the way everyone thinks about everything, but acknowledging the process is the difference between being happy and productive and being a frustrated mess. Do you want to get leaner more or less than you want to get wasted on Fridays or eat doughnuts for breakfast? Do you want to write a book more than you want to spend your weeknights hanging out with your friends? Do you want to improve yourself, or carry on the way you are? There’s no wrong way to answer, except for pretending that the question doesn’t exist. Don’t say you can’t do what you want: admit that you don’t care enough.

It’s never been easier to do anything you want. How much do you care?

HOMEWORK: Choose something you want to do: write a book, drop two percent bodyfat, learn Mandarin or whatever. Write down five things you could do this week to get you closer to that goal – ideally one simple, a few slightly trickier, and one totally outlandish. Stop eating crisps, write a plot outline, move to China, whatever.  Decide whether or not you’re actually going to do them. Congratulations: you just realised how much you care.