Skill ceilings across humanity is quite high. I think of super genius chess players, Terry Tao, etc.
A particular individual’s skill ceiling is relatively low (compared to these maximally gifted individuals). Sure, everyone can be better at listening, but there’s a high non-zero chance you have some sort of condition or life experience that makes it more difficult to develop it (hearing disability, physical/mental illness, trauma, an environment of people who are actually not great at communicating themselves, etc).
I’m reminded of what Samo Burja calls “completeness hypothesis”:
> It is the idea that having all of the important contributing pieces makes a given effect much, much larger than having most of the pieces. Having 100% of the pieces of a car produces a very different effect than having 90% of the pieces. The four important pieces for producing mastery in a domain are good feedback mechanisms, extreme motivation, the right equipment, and sufficient time. According to the Completeness Hypothesis, people that stably have all four of these pieces will have orders-of-magnitude greater skill than people that have only two or three of the components.
This is not a fatalistic recommendation to NOT invest in skill development. Quite the opposite.
Most people do not approach anywhere near their individual skill ceiling because they lack the four things that Burja lists. As Luu points out, most people don’t care that much to develop their skills. People do not care to find good feedback loops, cultivate the motivation, or carve out sufficent time to develop skills. Certain skills may be limited by resources (equipment), but there are hacks that can lead to skill development at a sub-optimal rate (e.g. calisthenics for muscle mass development vs weighted training. Maybe you can’t afford a gym membership but push-ups are free).
As @sunwillrise mentioned, there are diminishing returns for developing a skill. The gap from 0th % → 80th % is actually quite narrow. 80th % → 98% requires work but is doable for most people, and you probably start to experience diminishing returns around this range.
98%+ results are reserved for those who can have long-term stable environments to cultivate the skill, or the extremely talented.
Feedback loops I think are the principle bottleneck in my skill development, aside from the fact that if you’re a novice you don’t even know what you should be noticing (even if you have enough awareness to be cognizant of all signs and outputs of an act).
To give an example, I’m currently trying to learn how to generate client leads through video content for Instagram. Unless someone actually tells me about a video they liked and what they liked about it, figuring out how to please the algorithm to generate more engagement is hard. The only thing that “works”—tagging other people. Nothing about the type of content, the framing of the shots, the subject matter, the audio… nope… just whether or not one or more other Instagram accounts are tagged in it. (Of course since the end objective is - ‘get commissioned’ perhaps optimizing for Instagram engagement is not even the thing I should be optimizing at all… how would I know?) Feedback loops are hard. A desirbale metaskill to have would be developing tight feedback loops.
Skill ceilings across humanity is quite high. I think of super genius chess players, Terry Tao, etc.
A particular individual’s skill ceiling is relatively low (compared to these maximally gifted individuals). Sure, everyone can be better at listening, but there’s a high non-zero chance you have some sort of condition or life experience that makes it more difficult to develop it (hearing disability, physical/mental illness, trauma, an environment of people who are actually not great at communicating themselves, etc).
I’m reminded of what Samo Burja calls “completeness hypothesis”:
> It is the idea that having all of the important contributing pieces makes a given effect much, much larger than having most of the pieces. Having 100% of the pieces of a car produces a very different effect than having 90% of the pieces. The four important pieces for producing mastery in a domain are good feedback mechanisms, extreme motivation, the right equipment, and sufficient time. According to the Completeness Hypothesis, people that stably have all four of these pieces will have orders-of-magnitude greater skill than people that have only two or three of the components.
This is not a fatalistic recommendation to NOT invest in skill development. Quite the opposite.
I recommend Dan Luu’s 95th %-tile is not that good.
Most people do not approach anywhere near their individual skill ceiling because they lack the four things that Burja lists. As Luu points out, most people don’t care that much to develop their skills. People do not care to find good feedback loops, cultivate the motivation, or carve out sufficent time to develop skills. Certain skills may be limited by resources (equipment), but there are hacks that can lead to skill development at a sub-optimal rate (e.g. calisthenics for muscle mass development vs weighted training. Maybe you can’t afford a gym membership but push-ups are free).
As @sunwillrise mentioned, there are diminishing returns for developing a skill. The gap from 0th % → 80th % is actually quite narrow. 80th % → 98% requires work but is doable for most people, and you probably start to experience diminishing returns around this range.
98%+ results are reserved for those who can have long-term stable environments to cultivate the skill, or the extremely talented.
Feedback loops I think are the principle bottleneck in my skill development, aside from the fact that if you’re a novice you don’t even know what you should be noticing (even if you have enough awareness to be cognizant of all signs and outputs of an act).
To give an example, I’m currently trying to learn how to generate client leads through video content for Instagram. Unless someone actually tells me about a video they liked and what they liked about it, figuring out how to please the algorithm to generate more engagement is hard. The only thing that “works”—tagging other people. Nothing about the type of content, the framing of the shots, the subject matter, the audio… nope… just whether or not one or more other Instagram accounts are tagged in it. (Of course since the end objective is - ‘get commissioned’ perhaps optimizing for Instagram engagement is not even the thing I should be optimizing at all… how would I know?)
Feedback loops are hard. A desirbale metaskill to have would be developing tight feedback loops.