How to instantly be better at things

Just pretend you're someone else

Illustration by Alexander Naughton

This post is an excerpt from my forthcoming book. I’ll be running a few excerpts here in the next couple months, in hopes of getting feedback on the kinds of content people are excited to see in the book (which tells us what to expand or scale back). Let me know what you think!

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It’s a funny quirk of the human condition that sometimes simply asking, of a given task, “how would someone much, much better than me approach this?” immediately makes you better at it. Like, right away.

Weird! It shouldn’t be so easy. But sometimes it is.

Let’s say I’m applying effort to keep up in a conversation that’s a little awkward. There is a pregnant silence, and I think, ah, what should go in that silence? Maybe I could ask an open-ended question, or tell a short amusing anecdote about my recent life. After quickly flipping through a few possibilities, I settle on one and utter a few words. They work fine, but there’s not that effortless fluidity of real skill. And as a result, the conversation remains leaden — people don’t feel comfortable responding to me because I don’t sound natural. (This happens to me all the time, by the way.)

Sometimes I fare better by simply telling myself to act like a charismatic person. I know some of those, and I can slip into a passable imitation of one much more easily than I can break their talents down into steps. My personality naturally distorts the imitation, but that’s fine — I tell myself that’s just my own spin on being a charming conversationalist.

Something like this works in lots of other places. I’ve productively pretended to be someone else on fundraising calls, while singing in the shower, or when doing my makeup for a special occasion. I’m convinced I could do a halfway decent restoration job on an old rusted tool, just for all the My Mechanics I’ve osmosed over time.

I.

This is not totally strange. It’s clear that humans are mimicry machines — this is a huge part of how babies learn. We pick up the marvelous talent of native speakers long before we can consciously understand the concept of “grammar.” Same goes with walking, facial expressions, and social scripts.

Only later do we develop explicit reasoning: the ability to break the world down into representations, descriptions and symbols that float above it, in the mental plane of experience. Much of our knowledge acquisition takes place there, in simulated reality. It’s miraculous: we can absorb and combine symbols that tell us how to use our new appliance. We can take a string of language like “push your heels through the floor” and use it to lift weights more capably. But in the process, we let our mimicry muscle atrophy, and we forget its power. When we want to learn to play tennis, for example, we might think to ask questions like, “what makes a good tennis player,” rather than trusting our ability to pick it up via pure observation.

This is roughly what Tim Gallwey discovered when coaching tennis players, as described in The Inner Game of Tennis. Like most coaches, he gave students verbal instructions, which they asked for. But when he tried to break down a perfect swing into a set of explicit steps, the students made awkward and jumbled movements. On the other hand, when he simply showed them what great form looked like and asked them to act like a baby and figure it out, their bodies adjusted on their own.

The improvement came not from explicit reasoning, but from letting a deeper, more intuitive system take over. It’s easier to imitate wholeness than it is to assemble it from parts.

II.

Beginner chess players often know that grandmasters don’t recommend getting their queen out early, because the queen can be threatened by other pieces and chased around the board. It’s one of the first early-game principles that players learn. But beginner players do it anyway because it’s fun to engage in unstrategic aggression, and beginners lose lots of games this way. However, if they simply think, “what would a better player do,” their instincts improve.

I think this should be at least a little bit surprising, the fact that our mimicry abilities can extend to latent space like this. Some combination of largely unconscious mental processes gives us the ability to simulate the thinking of others, even though we have no direct ability to observe it. Think of how quickly you can tell, just from an unusual text message, that a friend is unhappy. Even if we have only a small sample of observations of someone whose instincts we trust deeply, we probably have enough material to ask, “does it seem like they would do this?” Trying to explicitly reason about the basis of ethical action is complicated. But it’s pretty simple to ask, “what would Jesus do?”

III.

Also surprising: I’ve had luck harnessing mimicry for performance gains even when the person I call to mind isn’t an expert in the specific task at hand, but rather just a generally competent person.

Once, when I was staying with friends an hour outside of London, another American came to visit. When she showed up in a rental car, she announced that she’d learned to drive stick on the way over. As in: she landed at the airport, realized all the rentals were manual, and just decided that it couldn’t be that hard. She looked up instructions, grabbed the shifter, and set out driving on the wrong side of the road, on the highway.

Now, it might sound reckless when I say it that way, but you are missing the context that this woman was incredibly cool. She was so self-assured that it seemed like the most natural thing in the world for her to have done. She narrated the story without apparent amazement about her learning. And, I thought: oh, that is what a generally competent person looks like.

For some time after that, whenever I stepped up to a wholly foreign task, like learning archery, rather than asking myself what an archer would do, I would ask myself what that woman would do — how she would approach this totally alien endeavor. And hand to God, much of the time, it made me better at it immediately.

Beginners are often neurotic, alternating between I better not fuck this up and I’m going to fuck this up. Pretending I was that woman allowed me to skip all of that, until I eventually became enough like her that I could stop relying on it.

IV.

What happens when you get good enough at something that there’s no one obvious left to mimic? If you define excellence the way most people do — by reference to the people around you — you might simply declare yourself magnificent and be done with it. But bizarrely, the ability to simulate and mimic higher levels of capability sometimes seems to generalize to higher and higher levels of capacity, even beyond the apparent top of the scale. (Cf. this tweet from Nick Cammarata.)

It’s the most natural thing in the world to define excellence based on what we see around us. We might deem ourselves to have had a productive day if we were focused a little bit longer than our colleagues, or maybe we did well at the gym if we matched the performance of our friend who’s been coming for 6 months longer. However, often, these comparative metrics are completely arbitrary. More likely than not, everyone around you is operating at a lower standard than they’re capable of.

Throughout most of history, it seemed impossible that someone could run a 10-second 100m, climb Everest, or land a 900 on a skateboard. But once someone did, they were followed in relatively quick succession by many others. At a certain point in history, physiologists believed that the human lung would collapse under water pressure at a depth around 30m, making deeper free diving impossible. This was proven false by Jacques Mayol, who in 1968 hit a 70m free dive. Since then, the record has been surpassed many times, and currently stands at 214m — over 7x what was once deemed physically impossible for the human body.

These breakthroughs did not happen because an update to the laws of physics was rolled out by the game developers of Earth. The most straightforward explanation is that once a certain standard was shown to be achievable, many more people successfully aspired to it and then set about to improve on it.

This means that setting the standard of “I’m going to be better than anyone doing it today” is not necessarily unrealistic.

Poker provides an interesting illustration.

Basically every poker pro today is better than every pro 20 years ago — and plenty of people in 2005 believed they were good at poker! But they were actually nowhere near the ceiling of excellence. In hindsight, poker in 2005 was basically pre-competitive — people had no idea how much better they could be.

When I started playing poker, I discovered that physical reads seemed to still be pre-competitive — as far as I can tell, there had not been a genuinely determined effort to figure out just how much information could be extracted from the body language of opponents. This was true despite the fact that most pros believed all the juice had already been wrung out of tells in the early days, that people had figured out how to not leak information while engaged in the “real work” of math and game theory.

I capitalized on this by systematically improving my physical reads, to the point where I was among the best in the world at it for a period of time, along with a few friends who put in the same effort. In my mind, besides luck, this is what explains nearly all of my success in poker — I was never exceptional at the level of the mechanics of the game.

If you asked, about physical reads, “what would someone much better than me do to improve,” you would probably come up with an answer similar to mine: read everything on the topic, then on adjacent topics, then on vaguely related topics; watch hundreds of hours of streams on silent with hole cards covered, trying to find patterns; find other people who were similarly obsessed and trade tips with them; relentlessly make notes of the mannerisms of every person you ever played twice with so you could combine observations from multiple sessions. You know, take it seriously.

Whatever you’re working at today, you might consider the possibility that it’s also pre-competitive, even if it feels “late” to other people. Many, many human beings had engaged in distance running before the four-minute mile was achieved in 1954. So, if a given skill plays a crucial load-bearing function in your life, try to completely ignore the standards others set and assume there’s a much higher standard to which you can aspire. Try to internalize this insane belief: “I’m going to be better at this than anybody I’ve ever seen.”

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