I love when someone tells me that something is “simple, but not easy.” Many of the best things in life fit this saying. Fitness. Nutrition. Confidence. Meeting women. Day game. These areas have simple rules for success, and then they require hard work applying those rules.
Expert performance is the same way. It’s simple, but not easy. How simple? The path to becoming an expert can be broken down into three steps that anyone can understand and apply immediately.
1. Focus
This doesn’t mean a general sense of focus. This is referring to taking a microscope on the skills that comprise expert performance. In this step, you break down the skills required of an expert into components you can do repeatedly.
An example of this concept for approaching looks like this:
- Describe signals women give off that demonstrates they want to be approached
- Go out into the world and find women giving off these signals
- Perform the hook and swoop
- Deliver the 1,2,3 in a conversation
- etc.
Another example from health and fitness- eating healthy:
- Understanding what macronutrients are
- Identifying your physique goals
- Understanding what macronutrient composition you need to reach your physique goals
- Learning the principles behind meal prep
- Being able to prepare meals that will help you reach your health goals
- etc.
Any individual skill that seems daunting to master becomes simple when you break it down into the tiniest components possible. Instead of asking big questions like “How do I get better at dating?”, ask little questions like “What is something I can do today in 5 minutes that will make me more attractive?”
2. Feedback
There are two ways to get feedback when you’re developing a skill. The first is to analyze your performance and pay attention to the result. If you go out and approach 15 women and 14 tell you that they have boyfriends, that’s a piece of information you can use to assess your skills. If you attempt a new type of joke in a conversation and get a big laugh from it, that’s another piece of information. Every micro-bit of information you gain in actual conversational practice teaches you something about whether your actions are working, or if you need to correct something.
The other method of obtaining feedback is to have a coach or mentor who can do this for you. Self-experimentation and practice is essential to becoming an expert, but it can’t ever happen at the same rate as when you work with a coach. Learning from a true expert gives you all the advantages of years of experience and highly developed mental models. They can take knowledge from their vast range of experiences and provide you with all the specific cues that you need to be successful.
Osmosis is a powerful concept that’s related. You gain feedback automatically when you surround yourself with people who are successful in the areas you’re working on.
3. Fix it
You get good at things by practicing your skills, applying them effectively, assessing the results, and by modifying as needed. Gaining confidence is a process of constant iteration. When you’ve determined your weaknesses, either on your own or with a coach, the next step is to figure out ways to address them.
This is actually a straightforward process when you’ve broken each skill into the smallest possible parts. If you say one line and you don’t get a good reaction, it’s easy to go out and practice that line multiple times, changing little things about it each time. You can change your delivery, you can change your facial expressions, and you can change the situation you deliver it in. By constantly iterating on this skill, you will slowly learn what works and what doesn’t work.
That’s how experts are created. The difference between an expert and a beginner lies in their mental models of their skill. Everyone has ideas about how a skill should be performed, and beliefs about the natural state of the world in relation to that skill. An expert just has much more thoroughly detailed mental models compared to a beginner, and the expert has a lot more models.
These models are developed through real-world feedback, the kind that the 3 F’s make simple.
