Badass: Making Users Awesome

113

The Challenge What Experts Do

Science of Badass Building Skills



Practice makes permanent.

Most practice doesn’t guarantee better performance.

Most practice locks-in whatever is practiced.

We must help our users spend as little time as possible

practicing being a beginner at the bigger context (and our tool).

Now we have a big problem: what happens when you’re still

in the Suck Zone? How can you practice being better than you

actually are? We’ll get into that later in the book.

The more time we spend

practicing mediocre,

the better we get at...

being mediocre.

How does Deliberate Practice

help prevent mediocre lock-in?

114

The Challenge What Experts Do

Science of Badass Building Skills



Mastering one tiny useless-on-its-own sub-skill at a time

is nearly always a more effective, efcient way to move

explicitly-practiced skills from A all the way to the C board.

Half-a-Skill beats Half-Assed Skills

A B C

A B C

Typical

learning and

practice skill/task size

Too big

, too many

simultaneous sub-skills

Divide it into ne-

grained sub-skills

Work on THESE,

one at a time

This

NOT this

Effective

learning and

practice skill/task size

Half-a-skill

HERE...

Can’t do

Can do

with effort

Mastered

reliable/automatic

...beats a full

skill THERE

“Half beats Half-Assed”

inspired by Jason Fried

and David Heinemeier ...