I write these letters to encourage you to take action on your personal and professional goals.
A year ago, I started off with a few ideas on my phone.
I sat down, set a challenge to write every business day for 15 minutes over 2 months. Some days were better than others. A few of those days I didn’t want to write at all.
But I stuck with it.
When I was done I compiled the manuscript of my next book in a word document. It was 49 thousand plus words.
A few months ago, I finally sent the manuscript to my development editor. She was nice enough not to tell me that it was crap. A bunch of disjointed lines, disguising as a coherent story.
Over 9 weeks, we plugged holes in the story, fleshed out characters, and refined the plot.
As I edited the book on my livestream last week, it was miles away from those unhinged ideas on my phone. It finally felt like a book.
It reminded me that quality is a process. But it’s often seen as a one-time destination and that’s what hinders joy.
The Skill-Taste Gap
Most high-performers have a high taste.
This is good, in terms of standards, but it can hinder progress.
Chill fam, let me explain.
There’s a reason you have certain interests.
You:
– like basketball, you watch a lot of it.
– enjoy stories, you read a lot of books.
– like business, you read up about or support businesses.
The more interest you have, the more you see and set high standards for it.
“He played basketball in college…psssh..he ain’t Kobe though”
“The book just lacks, you know, Chinua Achebe type narrative”
“I wouldn’t solve the problem that way, I would have raised at least 10x the capital to really tackle the issue”
The problem is that your high taste is on the consumer side and the higher your taste the more you become a spectator.
When you decide to attempt the other side, that’s when things fall apart and you come to a devastating realization:
That your skill level is so low compared to your high taste level.
This is the skill-taste gap.
This gap has hindered a lot of greatness.
This gap has stopped so many from living a happier life.
This is why aspiring writers hate the blank page. They want to wave a wand for words to appear on the page to match the skill level of their favorite authors.
They want to write great lines like “Okonkwo was a great man.” But as soon as they begin, tragedy strikes, befalling their greatness in a literary noose.
Even the computational messiah, ChatGPT, ain’t gonn’ save you.
There’s only one way to overcome this and it’s by closing the gap. You will not match your high-level of taste, coming out of the gate. You have to accept where your current skill level is and close that gap over time.
This requires a certain level of persistence, practice, and patience.
Your level of happiness depends on how small your skill-taste gap is.
The 5 Ps to Close the Expertise Gap.
There’s only one way to close your skill-taste gap: stop planning, start becoming an expert.
A lot of people have become expert planners. Always planning and strategizing but hardly taking action. We regularly underestimate what it takes to get a task done. The only way to know what it takes is to actually do it.
This gives feedback to adjust your expectations. With more reps, you gain expertise in skill and expectation.
When you close your skill-taste gap you take charge of your personal growth, find motivation in your competence, and live a more meaningful life.
Here are the 5Ps to close the gap.
1. Path (Be intentional):
The worst person to lie to is yourself.
The easiest way to know how big your skill-taste gap is, is to actually test.
Try doing what you want to achieve.
Try to:
- start a business.
- write a book.
- make music.
- go to the gym.
Reading more content will not help (finish this letter though).
Because when you know where you are and have a sense of where you want to go, you can be intentional about laying a path to get there.
If you don’t know what ‘done’ looks like, you will never finish.
Be intentional.
Set clear deadlines.
Lay out a path to get there.
2. Process (guard your attention):
Drive attention to your intention with processes.
It’s so easy to get distracted today. The human mind has not evolved to deal with the fast growing pace of information. The only way to thrive requires diligence. It becomes less about what you want to do and more about what you don’t want to do.
Any easy way to stay on your path is to set up processes that make it easy to stick to it.
- What time do you work on your business?
- How many sales emails do you send out?
- How many draft articles to write per week?
- How many discovery calls?
If you have a path, the process is like your vehicle with a GPS that keeps you on that path.
It’s the guardrails for your attention.
Focus on the process.
3. Practice (just show up):
Just do what you said you’d do.
This little practice will put you ahead of most people. Most people say they want to do something but resistance is a conniving con artist. Resistance will do all it can to make sure you don’t do your work.
- Procrastination
- Overthinking
- Distraction
- Resentment
You name it. It’s all resistance and it’s a multiple headed agent. It is the tiny veil between the life you’re living and the unlived life within.
Resistance’s goal is to pull you away from doing work that will make you happy.
You can use this to your advantage.
Whenever resistance shows up, pulling you towards short-term gratification and away from long-term unhappiness, just go the other direction.
Just show up.
4. Progress (Feedback is your friend):
You can only grow what you monitor.
When you show up on your path and focus on the process, one thing you’ll lack is immediate gratification. The dopamine that you’ve become used to will not be easily available.
To counter this, you have to build your own feedback system.
You need a way to measure progress. If you’re building a business, perhaps it’s how many sales emails you send out per week. If you’re writing a book, it’s how many pages you’ve edited in a month.
Feedback is a very important piece of getting into flow states. You have to see that you’re getting better to make it worthwhile.
Track your progress.
5. Patience (pace yourself):
Take your time.
The reality is when you close your skill-taste gap, your taste increases again. You begin to find the nuances of the game that amateurs can’t see, realizing that your “high taste” was actually not that high to start with.
You become a lot more humble but confident at the same time. You’re no longer delusional about what it takes.
You realize It’s an eternal journey.
You realize there is really no destination.
Final Thoughts…
You’ll always have a skill-taste gap.
Without taking action, you can’t know how wide that gap is. You’ll live a more enjoyable life when your skill-taste gap is at its minimum.
To shrink the gap, you need a path to your high taste, a process to systematically get you there, continuous practice, a way to track your progress, and most importantly patience.
Everyone starts with a blank page.
What you write into your pages of life is up to you. Eat your Ps.
Yours truly,
Nifemi
