How To Become The Best At What You Do

by Paul Graham, Rick Rubin and Mark Zuckerberg

Hey friend!

Today I bring you a few great insights from Paul Graham, Rick Rubin, and Mark Zuckerberg.

If you have ever come across the so called “80/20 Rule” (where 20% of the input makes 80% of the results), this letter will give you a new lens to understand its implications. And if you have never heard of it, now you have (it’s a very simple rule 😹 ).

👤 Doers

💡Nugget

🟠 Paul Graham:

This sounds like a paradox, but a great painting has to be better than it has to be. For example, when Leonardo painted the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci in the National Gallery, he put a juniper bush behind her head. In it he carefully painted each individual leaf. Many painters might have thought, this is just something to put in the background to frame her head. No one will look that closely at it.

Not Leonardo. How hard he worked on part of a painting didn’t depend at all on how closely he expected anyone to look at it. He was like Michael Jordan. Relentless.

Relentlessness wins because, in the aggregate, unseen details become visible. When people walk by the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, their attention is often immediately arrested by it, even before they look at the label and notice that it says Leonardo da Vinci. All those unseen details combine to produce something that’s just stunning, like a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune.

Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too. I'm not claiming I write great software, but I know that when it comes to code I behave in a way that would make me eligible for prescription drugs if I approached everyday life the same way. It drives me crazy to see code that's badly indented, or that uses ugly variable names.

Source → Blogpost “Hackers and Painters”

Related to this insight, legendary music producer Rick Rubin inserted a quote from renowned basketball coach John Wooden on his book The Creative Act...

🟠 John Wooden:

The first thing I would show players at our initial day of training was how to take a little extra time putting on their shoes and socks properly.

The most important part of your equipment is your shoes and socks. You play on a hard floor. So you must have shoes that fit right. And you must not permit your socks to have wrinkles around the little toe—where you generally get blisters—or around the heels. I showed my players how I wanted them to do it. Hold up the sock, work it around the little toe area and the heel area so that there are no wrinkles. Smooth it out good. Then hold the sock up while you put the shoe on. And the shoe must be spread apart—not just pulled on the top laces. You tighten it up snugly by each eyelet. Then you tie it. And then you double-tie it so it won’t come undone—because I don’t want shoes coming untied during practice, or during the game. I don’t want that to happen.

That’s just a little detail that coaches must take advantage of, because it’s the little details that make the big things come about.

Source → Book - The Creative Act

Here's Rick Rubin reflection on Wooden's words...

🟠 Rick Rubin:

It must have been frustrating for these elite athletes, who wanted to get on the court and show what they could do, to arrive at practice for the first time with this legendary coach only to hear him say, Today we will learn to tie our shoes. The point Wooden was making was that creating effective habits, down to the smallest detail, is what makes the difference between winning and losing games. Each habit might seem small, but added together, they have an exponential effect on performance.

Just one habit, at the top of any field, can be enough to give an edge over the competition. Wooden considered every aspect of the game where an issue might arise, and trained his players for each one. Repeatedly. Until they became habits.

The goal was immaculate performance.

Wooden often said the only person you’re ever competing against is yourself. The rest is out of your control.

Source → Book - The Creative Act

All these insights suggest a very different approach from the one that leverages on the so called Pareto principle or 80/20 rule. 

But my point of view here is exactly the same as Mark Zuckerberg, so I'm just gonna quote him below :)

🟠 Mark Zuckerberg:

There’s the famous 80/20 rule where you get 80% of the benefit by doing 20% of the work.

But you can’t just 80/20 everything. There have to be certain things that you are just the best at and that you go way further than anyone else on to establish this quality bar and have your product be the best thing that’s out there.

Source → Video from Startup Archive

"Be the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true."

- Naval Ravikant

All of the insights in this letter are saved and classified in a searchable Database, which (as of June 14th) contains over 1,800 insights.

I call it the “Doers Notebook” and I’ve recently opened it for anyone who wants it.

🤔 Why did I build this?

Well, as the Latin motto goes, “A chief part of learning is simply knowing where you can find a thing.”

And since it’s all 🔎 searchable, I only have to type a keyword, and I’ll immediately get a filtered list of insights related to it!

For instance, if I’m unsure about how to get more sales in my business, I can simply type the word “sales” and immediately get 65 search results! In this case from Peter Thiel, Naval Ravikant, Paul Graham, and many other remarkable individuals…

It’s like having a 🧠 second brain from which I can pull wisdom on demand.

And this is super valuable because it helps to decrease the error rate in my judgment.

“In an age of infinite leverage [code and media], judgment is the most important skill.”

- Naval Ravikant

So, if you wanna watch how I personally use this database and how you can get immediate access to it, just click on the 🍿 YouTube video below!

💥 Stuff I Loved

I hope you enjoyed today’s edition!

Happy Friday ;)

Julio xx

P.S. If you liked this article, you'll definitely enjoy my free 80-page ebook. It’s packed with 23 big ideas (from top influential doers and entrepreneurs) to become better, richer and wiser. Download your copy here!