WHEN PEOPLE GET BETTER at talking about how to do something than they are at doing it—that is, their theoretical knowledge far surpasses their applied skill—they drift further and further into the field of talking. And this leads them deeper and deeper into abstraction, until all that concerns them is sounding interesting enough to secure more speaking gigs, even if what they say at those gigs provides nothing that’s useful. (See: Appendix, “Ted Lasso, Rick Rubin, and The Rise of Coach Class.”)
In his book Antifragile, the essayist and statistician Nicholas Nassim Taleb confronts how this kind of abstraction—in the form of complex mathematical models—pollutes the world of financial trading.
“Nobody,” he writes, “worries that a child ignorant of the various theorems of aerodynamics and incapable of solving an equation of motion would be unable to ride a bicycle.”
Yes, Taleb is absolutely right that you don’t need to know physics in order to ride a bicycle. Nor would the manager of a baseball team take time out of batting practice to lecture his cleanup hitter about the principles of gravity. But Taleb’s point, while true, runs contrary to the current incentives at work in the marketplace. Doing is difficult, underpaid, and often thankless. Doing things well is even more difficult, and often costs the practitioner money. Talking, on the other hand, is easier, more lucrative, and can be done at a safe distance from results.
So it should come as no surprise that people with, say, two years’ experience will read an article like the one Laura Belgray wrote and then attempt to pole-vault right over time as a practitioner straight into the role of seasoned expert by posting best practices and hawking an online course.
In fact, some people don’t even feel the need to pursue any subject-matter expertise. They jet-pack straight to guru topics like “maximizing your potential” or, in the case of James Clear, “Getting 1 percent better every day” (the subtitle of his book, Atomic Habits).
What this brand of scammer realizes is that only amateurs pick a specific topic such as writing, because that limits their audience to only those who harbor that particular ambition. Something as broad as “Getting 1 percent better every day,” however, appeals to almost everyone. Today, more than 15 million people have read Atomic Habits. Despite this, I’ve yet to encounter anyone who can explain what “1 percent better” looks like. Nor have I met anyone who gets home at the end of a long day and asks themselves, “So did I improve by 1 percent?”
That’s because it’s an abstract idea—and regular people don’t talk or think like that until a self-help author pedals a book about it. This is to say, the line “1 percent better” is a selling point, not a talking point. It suggests the fantasy of perpetual linear progress even though anyone who’s ever tried to do anything knows that’s not how progress works. We all have good days and bad days, streaks and slumps.
Even from the standpoint of basic math, the concept of “1 percent better” means that if you’re getting better every day or week, then the work for the following day or week gets harder because the number “1 percent” is based on gets bigger. Your improvement curve gets steeper while the law of diminishing returns increases.
Still…more than 15 million copies have been sold—of what amounts to an aggregation of all the books about deliberate practice that came before it—because getting better is an attractive idea.
And with every guru who makes retirement-level money on a fantasy, it inspires several million more people to believe work isn’t the answer, becoming a guru is.
When Taleb presented the fact that people don’t have to learn physics to ride a bicycle, he was ultimately arguing the purest, most-productive form of learning is through trial-and-error. Again, he is correct. But trial-and-error is time-consuming and does not guarantee success. With today’s current cost of living, trial-and-error is often too expensive for most folks to pursue. Nor do many companies want to indulge that method. There’s too much pressure to achieve obvious short-term wins, which in turn compels people to do what they’re told or otherwise act in a way that enables them to avoid risk.