How to get better at things instantly
How to get better at things instantly
By Cate Hall | Published: 2025-08-11 15:23:00 | Source: Smart Skills – Big Think
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It’s one of the funny oddities of the human condition that sometimes, of a given task, you simply ask, “How could someone so much better than me handle this?” It makes you better at it instantly. Like, instantly.
strange! It shouldn’t be that easy. But sometimes it is like that.
Let’s say I’m making an effort to continue a slightly awkward conversation. There’s a pregnant silence, and I think, oh, what should happen in this 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 settled on one and uttered a few words. They work finebut there is not that easy smoothness of real skill. As a result, the conversation remains tense – people don’t feel comfortable responding to me because I don’t seem normal. (This happens to me all the time, by the way.)
Sometimes I’m better off just telling myself that Act like a charismatic person. I know some of these, and I can slip into an agreeable imitation of one much more easily than I can break down their talents into steps. It’s normal for my personality to distort tradition, but that’s okay – I tell myself that this is just my way of being a charming conversationalist.
Something like this works in a lot of other places. I’ve productively pretended to be someone else on fundraising calls, while singing in the shower, or when applying my makeup for a special event. I’m convinced I can do a halfway decent restoration job on a rusty old instrument, just for the sake of it My mechanics It has ossified over time.
I.
This is not entirely strange. Obviously, humans are imitation machines, and this is a big part of how children learn. We pick up on the amazing talents of native speakers long before we can consciously understand the concept of “grammar.” The same applies to gait, facial expressions, and social texts.
Only later do we develop clear thinking: the ability to divide the world into representations, descriptions and symbols that float above it, at the mental level of experience. Much of our knowledge acquisition takes place there, in a simulation of reality. It’s a miracle: we can absorb and integrate the codes that tell us how to use our new devices. We can take a series of words like “push your heels through the floor” and use them to lift weights more powerfully. But in the process, we allow our mimic muscles to atrophy, and we forget their strength. When we want to learn to play tennis, for example, we might think about asking questions like: “What makes a good tennis player?” Rather than trusting our ability to capture it through pure observation.
This is roughly what Tim Galloway discovered when he was coaching tennis players, as shown in Indoor tennis game. Like most instructors, he gave the students verbal instructions, which they requested. But when he tried to break down the perfect swing into a set of clear steps, the students made strange, jumbled movements. On the other hand, when he simply showed them the cool shape and asked them to act like children and figure it out, their bodies adapted on their own.
Improvement did not come from explicit heuristics, but from allowing a deeper, more intuitive system to take control. It is easier to imitate perfection than to assemble it from parts.
secondly.
Beginner chess players often He knows Grandmasters do not recommend removing their queen early, because the queen can be threatened by other pieces and chased around the board. It’s one of the first early game principles players learn. But novice players do it anyway because it’s fun to engage in non-strategic aggression, and novice players lose a lot 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 surprising, the fact that our simulation capabilities can extend into latent space like this. A combination of largely unconscious mental processes gives us the ability to mimic the thinking of others, even though we have no direct ability to observe it. Think about how quickly you can find out that your friend is unhappy, just from an unusual text message. Even if we only had a small sample of the observations of someone whose instincts we strongly trust, we would likely have enough material to ask: “Does it look like they would do this?” Trying to think explicitly about the basis of moral action is complicated. But it is very easy to ask, “What would Jesus do?”
Third.
Also surprising: I’ve had good luck harnessing imitation for performance gains even when the person I remember is not an expert at the specific task at hand, but just a generally competent person.
One time, when I was staying with friends an hour outside of London, another American came to visit me. When she showed up in a rental car, she announced that she had learned to drive a stick on her way. As in: I landed at the airport, realized all the rentals were manual, and just decided it couldn’t be that hard. I looked up the instructions, grabbed the gear, and drove off on the wrong side of the road, on the highway.
Now, it may seem flippant when I say it that way, but you’re missing the context of who this woman was Incredibly cool. She was so confident in herself that it seemed like the most natural thing in the world that she had done. She told the story without apparent surprise about her learning. And I thought: Oh, this is what a competent person generally looks like.
For some time afterward, whenever I approached a completely foreign task, such as learning to shoot, instead of asking myself what an archer would do, I would ask myself What will that woman do? – How will you handle this completely bizarre endeavor? Thankfully, more often than not, it made me better at it right away.
Beginners are often nervous, and take turns I better not fuck with this and I’m going to fuck this. Pretending to be that woman allowed me to get through it all, until I finally became enough like her that I could stop depending on her.
Fourth.
What happens when you become good enough at something that no one can imitate you anymore? If you defined excellence the way most people do—by pointing it out to the people around you—you might simply declare that you’re awesome and be done with it. But strangely enough, the ability to imitate higher levels of ability sometimes seems to generalize to higher and higher levels of ability, even beyond the apparent top of the scale. (See 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 consider ourselves to have had a productive day if we focused a little longer than our colleagues, or perhaps we did well in the gym if we matched the performance of our friend who has been coming to us for 6 months longer. However, oftentimes, these comparative metrics are quite arbitrary. Everyone around you is probably operating to lower standards than they are capable of.
For most of history, it seemed impossible that someone could run 100 meters for 10 seconds, climb Mount Everest, or rappel 900 meters on a skateboard. But once one person did so, many others followed in relatively quick succession. At one point in history, physiologists believed that the human lung might collapse under the pressure of water at a depth of about 30 metres, making deep freediving impossible. This was proven wrong by Jacques Mayall, who in 1968 performed a 70-metre skydive. Since then, the record has been surpassed several times, and currently stands at 214 metres, more than 7 times what was previously considered physically impossible for the human body.
These hacks did not occur due to the introduction of an update to the laws of physics by the developers of Earth games. The most obvious explanation is that once it was proven that a certain standard could be achieved, more people successfully aspired to it and then set about improving it.
This means that setting the standard of “I will be better than anyone doing this today” is not necessarily unrealistic.
The game of poker provides an interesting illustration.
Basically, every poker pro today is better than every pro 20 years ago — and a lot of people in 2005 thought they were good at poker! But in reality, they did not come close to the ceiling of excellence. In hindsight, it was basically poker in 2005 Pre-competition – People had no idea how much they had improved.
When I started playing poker, I discovered that the physical readings looked like this Still Be Before the Competition – As far as I can tell, there has been no really determined effort to see how much information can be extracted from opponents’ body language. This was true despite the fact that most professionals believed that all juice contained… actually It was ripped from the news in the early days, as people figured out how not to leak information while they were engaged in the “real work” of mathematics and game theory.
I took advantage of this by systematically improving my physical readings, to the point where I was among the best in the world at it for a while, along with a few friends who made the same effort. In my opinion, besides luck, this explains almost all of my success in poker — I’ve never been exceptional in terms of game mechanics.
If you asked, about physical readings, “What could someone much better than me do to improve it,” you would probably come up with an answer similar to mine: read all about the topic, then in adjacent topics, then in vaguely related topics; Watch hundreds of hours of silent broadcasts with overturned cards, trying to find patterns; Find other people who were similarly obsessed and share tips with them; Take relentless notes on the behaviors of each person you played with twice so you can combine notes from multiple sessions. You know, take it seriously.
Whatever your business is today, you might consider that it can also be a primer for the competition, even if it seems “late” to others. Many, many people participated in distance running before the four-minute mile was achieved in 1954. So, if a particular skill plays an important role in your life, try to completely ignore the standards set by others and assume that there is a much higher standard you can aspire to. Try to embrace this crazy belief: “I’m going to be better at this than anyone I’ve ever seen.”
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