How World-Class Achievers Do So Much More With the Same Amount of Hours
The routines they follow are just the tip of the Zuckerberg.
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Look, if Usain Bolt wins the race, we don’t give the medal to the shoes. But CEOs harvest success because of their “routines”?
I think of routines as a mere garnishment to one’s capabilities. Especially those of world-class achievers we love to copy — because according to the Internet, success is a better routine — and wear like expensive lingerie.
So you may discover that Arianna Huffington takes bubble baths every night and go, “Well I’m gonna try that and see what happens.” Don’t mind that she is CEO of Thrive Global, co-founded The Huffington Post, and wrote 15 books. Her success is definitely due to sinking her butt on soapy water before going to bed.
I think we are giving too much credit to the way we organize our days, over to what happens during them. And I also think I know why we look up to world-class achievers and try to copy their wake-up time, journaling routine, and monochromatic wardrobes.
Not that we think Bill Gates washes the dishes by hand because he’s got a genie trapped in his porcelain cutlery. We copy their routines because it’s simply the only thing we can copy.
At least until Elon Musk comes up with the tech to copy neural connections and muscle memory. “I tried da Vinci’s synapses for a week and this happened.” Now that’s a video I’d want to watch.
The thing we should copy from world-class achievers is not their routines
Deep down, we’re enamored of routines because we fear their brains. So let’s demystify their brains and learn how to copy them.
To do so, here’s one of those experiments where they teach monkeys unnecessary skills in exchange for food, getting the real world closer to being an installment of the Planet of the Apes. This one involves a group of 6 adult squirrel monkeys (they are impossibly cute. Google them) working their fingers into cups of increasingly narrower diameter to get the banana-flavored pellet inside.
That is what we have to emulate from world-class achievers: not routines, but the assimilation of skills.
It’s not surprising that, with practice and repetition, all these monkeys mastered the narrowest cups and all of them got their food pellets. It’s not surprising that, by the end of the experiment, every squirrel monkey had become extremely skilled with their fingers.
What is awe-striking though, is what happened in the brains of those squirrel monkeys. Michael Merzenich, the guy conducting the experiment at the University of California, had implanted electrodes in the region of their brains that coordinates the movement of the fingers.
Here’s what happened: as the monkeys worked their ways into the cups and learned how to use their fingers to reach the food pellet, those regions got enlarged. But once the monkeys mastered the skill, the same areas shrunk to their original size.
The same phenomenon has been observed in human brains. When learning a skill, high levels of focus recruit more cortical neurons to deal with the massive flood of new information. But then, once the skill becomes automatic and hardwired by repetition and practice, those neural pathways are delegated to less conscious regions of the brain, and the area in the cortex that was expanded to master the skill is freed up to learn other things.
That is what we have to emulate from world-class achievers: not routines, but the assimilation of skills. Because here’s the thing: you may have heard that Zuckerberg and Obama’s monotonous wardrobe helps their decision making, but if you suck at decision-making, no routine will make a big difference.
Here’s the good news: if squirrel monkeys can do it, so can we.
To improve your daily output, improve your brain this way
From now on, imagine skills as beautiful chairs. You don’t think about the chair once it’s already built, fulfilling its purpose alongside a dining table.
But there was a time when that chair was at the center of a carpenter’s workshop — or, if you bought it in IKEA, then its pieces were scattered on your parquet while you read the manual upside down with a grimace of know-how. But bear with me: the carpenter’s workshop is the frontal cortex, that region of the brain that becomes enlarged when you’re learning a skill.
The same happens in a workshop. The piece under construction is surrounded by all kinds of tools and materials: it’s the center of attention. But then the chair is made, taken out of the workshop, and turned into just one element of the dining room landscape. It’s not necessary to think about the chair anymore, you can just use it.
This carpenter analogy reminds me of Stephen King and that memoir of his that everybody likes to machine gun-quote in articles about writing. You’ll see this quote everywhere:
I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2000 words. That’s 180000 words over a three-month span.
The enthusiastic routine voyeur might think he just stumbled upon a Stephen King-certified routine he can take to eleven and a half before he reads the second part of the paragraph:
That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.
Do you know what makes a tale well-done and fresh? The brain of Stephen King, neatly prepared with cutlery of brilliant writing skills — and maybe a genie. He even tells you how he acquired those skills:
By the time I was fourteen, the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it.
King’s 2,000 daily words have decades of weight in experience, during which King’s frontal cortex had to be the size of a cathedral to accommodate all the neural pathways that proper storytelling requires. But the skill is already mastered; now he can write a memoir and be casual about it.
The 2,000-words-a-day routine is just an embellishment. He could’ve said 1,000 words a day, 5,000 words a day, or go full excentric with exactly 2,584 words a day. It doesn’t matter; maybe he just chose that quantity because it meant he would be finished by lunchtime most of the days.
What it seems like a superfluous benchmark, is actually a very advanced routine that only works if you have the skills to support it. It may sound obvious, but writing 2,000 words a day won’t make me write a Stephen King novel in 3 months — or in 3 years.
Create your own routines — even if they suck
We all know that famous proverb, “When a wise man points at the moon, the imbecile is already sleeping for he wanted to wake up at 4:30 am like the winners.”
And you may think, “well, all of this routine-copying is just trial and error to find out what works for me.” But isn’t it contradictory that we try to find what works for us, by copying someone else?
Even Stephen King started with nothing more than a pile of rejection letters.
I think there’s a better way to find out what works for us. We should not be wasting copying someone else. We should be in the workshop, with no company but the chair we want to create. Your chair might be a company, a novel, a space rocket. I don’t care: it’s your chair, not Arianna Huffington’s chair.
So you’re gonna need a unique set of tools and skills to make it a reality. Yes, maybe you find that waking up early or wearing only shades of grey helps the clarity of your mind, but you’ll reach those conclusions by experimentation, not by imitation.
You’ll also discover that routines create themselves. If you think about something long enough, your actions will start to gravitate to whatever is most productive. Think some more, and you will take those actions more efficiently. This means that at the beginning, our hand-made routines are going to suck — hence, the temptation to go and copy other people’s — but that’s the difference: world-class achievers allow themselves to suck.
There’s no other way to assimilate the skills that make routines effective. Even Stephen King started with nothing more than a pile of rejection letters. My point is, you can’t shortcut this process.
And then, when people ask you what’s your secret for prodigious, productive output, the answer will be strikingly simple. “Well, I just follow my routine.” But read between the lines: that routine is supported by the dozens of skills you’ve mastered along the way.
Concluding:
Don’t just copy routines, master the skills.
For the same reason you don’t hang the medal on Usain Bolt’s shoes, don’t give too much credit to routines. Give credit to developed skills.
And if squirrel monkeys’ brains can do it, yours definitely can too. World-class achievers have reached that status because they are not wasting time thinking about “optimizing their routine.” They’ve optimized themselves, so the routine follows.
It’s about making routines feel as natural as taking a food pellet out of a narrow cup — or in the case of Stephen King, write a novel in 3 months. If you’re thinking too much about something, perhaps you haven’t mastered it yet.
