It might just be that I’m a mark, but yeesh do I love the idea of talking about how we get better at things and The Curiosity Shop pod is really scratching that itch for me.

And I’m going to set aside the awful both sides ism that happened in the latest one, where Adam tried to conflate the extremism on the right with the extremism on the left (let’s be real here, comparing the extremism on the right of just excusing paramilitary forces killing civilians in the streets to CANCEL CULTURE which DOESN’T EVEN EXIST is insane. If Cancel Culture was real and not imaginary, Kanye and Louis CK wouldn’t be able to continue performing - AND WHILE I WANT THAT TO BE THE CASE it just isn’t). Which clearly, I’m not at all upset about and didn’t make me rethink (that’s right, I’m using your own book title against you Adam lol) whether I actually think that Adam believes everything he’s saying or if he’s actually trying to be more political than I originally would have thought.

Anyway lol. The reason I want to talk about that podcast episode isn’t just to rant about the evils of both siderism and how intellectually honest people wouldn’t ever do that – it’s actually about things that they said that made go “woah.” To the point where I TOOK A NOTE about it. Like went to my notes app and typed something lol. Which probably for most people sounds like… nothing at all… but for me that’s a big deal.

I’m a notorious “I don’t take notes” guy. I remember one of my first jobs at a summer camp, we were in a big team meeting before camp started, going over things and making sure we were all aligned on operations and all that jazz, and the camp director looks at me and goes “why aren’t you taking notes, this is important” and I said “I got it it’s in my head”. And they were appalled lol. I mean, in retrospect, it probably would have been better for me to be a note taker or at least PRETEND to be a note taker, but that’s a different story.

This story is apparently about tangents lol.

But the point is I wrote two things down because I thought they were so important and revelatory.

1. When you lack the skills to produce excellence you lack the skill to identify excellence.
2. Performance = potential - interference

I wanna tackle them both and really focus on why they stood out.

---

When you lack the skills to produce excellence you lack the skill to identify excellence.

This one just sent my brain into a tailspin.

Admittedly their entry point into the conversation was clunky, because it’s just all about Brene loving pickleball but not being great at it yet lol. Which is a thing that she’s REALLY latching onto lol. And it was part of a larger dunning Kruger conversation that I also don’t really want to get bogged down in, because I think that the point of this statement is its precision.

If you don’t already have the skill to produce excellence, you can’t identify it.

It’s really easy to see that at work when you start layering in AI. Because the thing that’s happening right now, is that everyone is just trying to produce as much as they can with AI whether it’s their domain or not. And the results are exactly what you would expect if after reading this section.

For example, I built out a prototype at work. It looked just fine, and operated like you would expect it to in all its happy path scenarios. But the underlying code was a hot pile of garbage. I couldn’t get API’s to consistently return valid results, I couldn’t get any error scenarios to work properly, and on top of that the UX was really lame.

But I confidently sent it off to people acknowledging the UX problems, but not even KNOWING the other underlying problems that the code had. It had sections that were duplicates, it created classes that it never used, it created paradigms that were totally illogical for the problem we were solving – I’m probably not even describing all the things that were wrong correctly right now because honestly I just don’t understand it well enough.

And that’s the point, I couldn’t differentiate between great and working.

Every engineer that saw my code chuckled or outright laughed at me lol. And that was the right response. Not because I’m bad or anything, but because my code was obviously amateurish. And I couldn’t improve that from an amateurish attempt to a more polished one because I didn’t have the skills to move to something more polished. And as a result, couldn’t identify that difference between my working code and excellent code.

That being said I feel an underlying tension with whole heartedly agreeing with this as a take.

Because there’s a definitiveness to the statement that I feel like misses the mark, but I don’t know how to necessarily articulate it better.

And I think what I am bumping against is the “produce excellence” part – because it sounds very concrete but in reality I think it’s more ambiguous and that ambiguity is where I think the beauty in this theory lies.

Producing excellence doesn’t mean that you have to be an expert or even that you have to be able to perform whatever task you’re evaluating. What it means is that you can extract the intended value out of your experience. So I am not a professional musician. But I have enough musical chops to be able to produce excellence (i.e. I can recognize the difference between someone who can control their vibrato vs someone who is just screaming into a mic vs someone using auto tune because they can’t stay in tune vs someone using auto tune for an effect they’re trying to create), and so I can evaluate it.

There are levels of that where I start to break down, if we’re talking something more avant garde or something that’s more technical I might not be able to fully evaluate it.

Same thing for movies - I have taken a number of movie making classes, learned about film theory, all that jazz. So I can evaluate the execution of a movie’s themes, but I don’t know about the filmmaking process enough to say “oh that editor did a bang up job there” or “the sound mixing on that is incredibly complex because of something something something”.

And I’m realizing, my point here is that the statement at first blush feels exclusionary. It feels like you’re saying you’re better than other people. And I think in that context, I’d go “fuck you I can do anything I want” in response lol – but the idea I think is more democratic. Or at least that’s how I’m going to interpret it. It’s that there’s levels of understanding in every aspect of life, and you can only evaluate that which you understand. I can’t go tell you who the best cricket player in the world is by watching one match, because I don’t understand the game. But I can tell you who the best basketball player is, even though I am terrible at basketball because I understand the game.

---

Performance = potential - interference

This one hit me like a ton of bricks.

(Yes I had to look back and go “is this what I said about the last one?! I hope I didn’t… oh it’s a little different… meh it’s fine lol”)

But the reason it hit me like a ton of bricks is because I see this one EVERY DAY. The problems most of us encounter aren’t problems of inability. In my normal work day, there’s not too many problems I encounter where I think “I don’t even know what to do” or “I don’t know how to solve this issue”.

Most of the problems are simply solved. It’s through communication of expectations and limitations. But in the spirit of “humans are messy” we add complications through assumptions, misinterpretations, lack of clear understand, etc.

Now, most of you are probably reading this going “fuck Scott, I was kinda with you but you’re WAY over simplifying things”. And sure, I am. But, so what? That additional complication you’re thinking of… isn’t it something you can communicate? Isn’t it something you can clarify?

And, what’s more frustrating is, a lot of the time the thing that comes out of that additional communication isn’t more detail – it’s actually LESS detail. Because the more simple you can make your statement the easier it is to understand and the less likely it is to be misinterpreted. In most situations, the problem isn’t that you aren’t being heard, it’s that you’re not being understood. And the best way to move toward being understood is precision of language.

Even the prompt for this section’s GOAL is precision of language. Performance equals potential minus interference.

And the beauty is that performance can relate to almost anything, potential can relate to almost anything and interference can relate to almost anything.

Our ability to ship an app for our client, is equal to our potential to build applications (i.e. what’s the best we can do), minus any interference (communication, contracts, inter company politics, sick time, process arguments, etc).

So another way to look at it is, the only way to increase your performance is to either increase your potential, or decrease the interference.

Increasing your potential has limitations – you can learn something new, add skilled team members, upgrading your tech stack… but in the end there’s a limit to the methods you can use to increase that potential.

Decreasing your interference is an infinite pool though. Because there’s so many things that get in the way. It can be the tech stack, or the medium in which you’re providing your product, or it can be organizational. You could be organized incorrectly to achieve your goal. You could have limitations on what software you can download. The speed of your internet could be interference. So could distractions in your personal life. So could team dynamics. And so on and so on.

We tend to focus a lot more on increasing our potential because it feels within our control more. I can learn more! I can work on the weekends! I can work nights! I can do this or I can do that!

But a lot of the interference feels outside of our control. I can’t control my CISO to give me access to the right tools, because he might think that they’re not secure. I can’t control my org structure because I’m just an individual contributor. I can’t control my clients expectations gap because I’m not the one communicating the expectations and validating them. I can’t control the speed of my internet because I’m limited by my ISP that covers my house.

And yet, the interference is where the money is made and where the growth happens.

Sometimes that just involves… asking to talk to someone. I reached out to my bosses boss recently to ask about a project I was working on and how it could be more successful, and the response was essentially “We just need to start working”. And so I clarified, what did that look like to him, and he gave me a very pointed answer, something along the lines of “I need this so we can do that”. Oh, well, that’s easy enough. I can do this, knowing that it will enable that.

I’d been fretting for days about what the purpose was, seeing document after document that I needed to complete, and knowing that… no one was using it at the moment. Thinking it wouldn’t have much value. But the quick clarification, the understanding that yes, people aren’t using this right now, because it doesn’t enable that. So we need to make it enable it, and make it easier for people to use and understand because that’s how we uplevel ourselves… well that made sense.

The removal of my internal interference (being “I don’t think people will use this” followed by “I don’t know why this is useful anyway” followed by “aren’t there more important things for me to do” followed by “I really want to just lie down and take a nap” lol) enabled better performance. Granted, I still have to do the work (I promise I’m on it lol), but now the work has a layer of interference removed that will make the outcome better.

And that’s all this really meant to me is, that if you want to get better results, you either need to add skills or remove interference. And I’ve been working on removing interference for decades.

I used to get scolded for not writing more words in my essays (I know reading this it’s hard to believe right lol) and I would always get frustrated and say “but I am saying everything I mean to say, why use more words unless it’s necessary” (hey claude, please rewrite that in the tone of a 15 year old pain in the ass). Because the point shouldn’t be “you need to write more words” it’s “you need to more clearly explain yourself and give examples as to why you think that way”. And that’s what people were asking of me – to clarify myself and provide clear examples that validate my point of view.

---

So what even is my point of view? It’s that for both of these statements, you need to be clear about your own expectations and understanding because if you’re not clear, then you’ll never be able to figure out how to be better. If you don’t know that you’re not a good writer, then your writing will never get better. If you only write with your left hand, but you’re right handed, it won’t matter how brilliant your writing is, the sloppy left handed version will never be seen as anything but sloppy.

I know that I should never design anything, because I know nothing about the tenants of design that make a design “great”. I can appreciate it, but I also have a hard time telling the “fine” from the “great”. I know that limitation, so if I need to have a high performant well designed application… I’m gonna add a talented designer to my team.

I know that I shouldn’t ever write code, because I would need to spend a lot of time learning before I got to the level of something we could sell to a client. So if I’m on a project where coding is required, I’d make sure we have some talented engineers on the team.

I know what good user stories look like, so I’m going to be a pain in the ass to my product owner, because I can actually hold them accountable for writing bad stories.

It’s all about calibrating your understanding of yourself, so that you can make decisions that create better outcomes.

Last example, I promise.

I’m a terrible planner. Like one of the worst you’ve met. And anyone who knows me from the last 15 years is probably like “whatever dude, you seem like you’re on top of shit”. But it’s a myth. My wife is an AMAZING planner. Like you have no idea lol. And on our first real trip together, I completely forgot to bring: shirts and underwear. And so she decided “I’m doing all of your planning from now on you just execute the plan”. So she’d write lists. She’d dictate all the things that needed to happen. And I would go make them happen. At first, I would have a lot of questions, things like “what does this mean” and she’d then very generously tell me what on earth the thing meant, I would gain knowledge, and then would ask less and less.

And now, when I’m packing, she still makes me a list, I still check every item off. Every month, she gives me the things that need to be accomplished that month and I go and accomplish them.

Otherwise, nothing would happen.

The fun part is, she hates the executing of her plans. So a part of why we’re a great team, is that we have complementary strengths and weaknesses. We are better together than we are individually.

And isn’t that all we’re trying to do at work too? Just create a team full of complementary strengths and weaknesses to create the best possible outcomes?