Badass: Making Users Awesome

103

The Challenge What Experts Do

Science of Badass Building Skills



Unconscious/automated skills are often

the cause of “intermediate blues”

Intermediate Blues

Time

Ability

Getting stuck here even when we’re still

trying

to

improve often means there’s an automated skill

that MUST change for us to move forward.

Expert ski instructor Lito Tejedas-

Flores has been helping people break

out of the “intermediate blues” for

more than two decades. He found

that the secret to breaking through

to advanced and expert skiing is

about changing just one specic

previously-automated skill. One.

By the time most people are skiing

at intermediate level, this particular

skill is usually unconscious, fully

automated, deeply locked-in. Fixing

it means rst bringing it back to

conscious “inspection” so we can

then do the hard work of actually

changing it. (Hint: it’s about weight shift)

Example

If you’re helping people get better

at ANY physical activity, sport,

etc. you might want to watch the

Breakthrough on Skis videos.

104

The Challenge What Experts Do

Science of Badass Building Skills



Another reason to de-automate skills:

Use it or lose it is a myth.

Using it is not enough.

Time

Ability

This takes work just to maintain

Skills you USE but no longer

consciously work on will

deteriorate over time. Even if

you use those skills every day!

If you don’t use a skill for a while it becomes rusty. But what

about skills you do use every day? Many professionals, for

example, reach a level of expertise and think, “I can nally quit

practicing and now just use my hard-earned skills.”

But something scary happens.

The skills we use but don’t consciously practice can slowly

deteriorate, even if we’re using them every day. The phrase

“use it or lose it” is misleading. “Using it” is not enough.

A B C

A

Skills left automatic/

unconscious for too long can

slowly degrade no matter how

often we use them.

105

The Challenge What Experts Do

Science of Badass Building Skills



This is how experts build expertise

Experts (i.e. those who perform in a superior way, more

reliably, in a representative task in the domain) build skills

from Can’t do to Mastered.

• Experts never stop adding new skills.

• Experts build skills both consciously and unconsciously.

• Experts rene existing skills.

A B C

Can’t do

Can do

with effort

Mastered

reliable / automatic

STILL doesn’t answer the question...

ANYONE can follow this framework,

but not everyone becomes badass.

106

The Challenge What Experts Do

Science of Badass Building Skills



Those who became experts did two key things

differently than experienced non-experts.

Now we have the right question:

Given this framework, what did experts do differently from

experienced non-experts who followed the same framework?

(And how can we help our users do this?)

The rst one won’t be a big surprise...

107

The Challenge What Experts Do

Science of Badass Building Skills



Experts practiced better

The rst common attribute across all domains in which people

become badass is this: experts practice better.

Those who became experts practiced more effectively than

experienced non-experts with the same amount of practice hours.

What we think:

What’s actually true:

natural

talent

Sorry, but NO.

I

practiced forever at piano and it didn’t make

me

amazing. It REALLY can’t be just “they practiced more.”

practiced

practiced

practiced