High expectations and high slopes of growth

In most fields of expertise, there can be an enormous difference between a regular and a best-in-class person's outcomes.

The slope, the 'growth over time' coefficient, is one way to explain the widening of this gap, and a crude way to foresee where things will eventually land.

Increasing the slope, the speed of growth, is really hard. Hard for me, at least. So those on a higher slope tend to just get further and further away..

We don't know what's the best way to increase the slope.

I explore that maybe a necessary condition for it is high expectations.

Watching people pass me by in BJJ

I train in a competitors Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu gym. Many of my training partners compete at BJJ competitions across the country. Many are trying to make a living out of BJJ – though that's really hard and none of them do.

What you get really used to there is watching people pass you by.

• You both start as white belts, but after a while they're a belt higher than you
• Your sparring sessions used to be really competitive, but now you're frequently beaten, unless they take it easy on you
• You watch them sparring with others and marvel at their evolution

Interestingly, the longer time goes by, the larger the gap between their skill level and mine. The gap widens instead of closing.

They have a higher slope of progress.

The same is true of many areas of expertise. I like writing, playing the guitar, and strength training, but my progress in those areas is nowhere close to that of some of the best in the world.

Even if the area has diminishing returns, if my slope is lower than theirs, when I get to the same point as they are, I'll make less progress than they did.

I'm not planning to be a professional fighter, guitar player, or writer though. Not growing as quickly sounds fine to me.

Curiously, in my professional life, I have a high slope – particularly when compared to people from a similar background and set of opportunities as mine.

But I can't fool myself – the gap between my slope and best-in-class is still enormous. Huge.

In their professional life, some people are just incredible outliers. And unless I found out a way to make drastic progress on my professional slope, they'll just keep widening their gap to me.

And if I so desired, I have no idea if increasing slope is even possible for this.

Or how to do it.

Jerk – the increase of acceleration

It's hard to define slope.

While slope is the rate of one's progress in outcomes from a field of expertise, there are several acceleration factors that go into it.

Borrowing from physics:

• Velocity: the speed at which the outcomes improve.
• Acceleration: the speed at which velocity, the improvement of outcomes, improves.
• Jerk: the speed at which acceleration, the rate of improvement of outcomes, improves.

I think there's something about "jerk," the term borrowed from physics (and super funny when applied to people's outcomes, hehe), that plays the biggest role here: what are the factors, the skills, behaviors, and characteristics, that leads someone to have the highest positive .. er, jerk, hehe.

And I suspect that while outcomes in career, guitar, BJJ, and writing can be varied, and acceleration has some common factors, the jerk, the speed at which we improve our acceleration, is pretty similar no matter what you do.

And I'll try to explore at least one of these factors:

High expectations.

There's no speed limit to Derek Sivers

In Hell Yeah or No, Derek Sivers tells the story of how "a teacher can permanently change one's life" when he was 17 and about to start his first year at Berklee College of Music.

It's a somewhat long story, but worth reading in full:

When the studio owner heard I was going to Berklee, he said, “I graduated from Berklee and taught there, too. I’ll bet I can teach you two years of theory and arranging in only a few lessons. I suspect you can graduate in two years if you understand there’s no speed limit. [..]”

Graduate college in two years? Awesome! I liked his style. That was Kimo Williams. [..]

The pace was intense, and I loved it. Finally, someone was challenging me — keeping me in over my head — encouraging and expecting me to pull myself up quickly. I was learning so fast, it felt like the adrenaline rush you get while playing a video game. He tossed every fact at me and made me prove that I got it.

In our three-hour lesson that morning, he taught me a full semester of Berklee’s harmony courses. In our next four lessons, he taught me the next four semesters of harmony and arranging classes.

When I got to college and took my entrance exams, I tested out of those six semesters of requirements. [..] By doing this in addition to completing my full course load, I graduated college in two and a half years. I got my bachelor’s degree when I was twenty.

Kimo’s high expectations set a new pace for me. He taught me that “the standard pace is for chumps” — that the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you’re more driven than most people, you can do way more than anyone expects. And this principle applies to all of life, not just school.

Before I met Kimo, I was just a kid who wanted to be a musician, doing it casually. Ever since our five lessons, I’ve had no speed limit. I owe every great thing that’s happened in my life to Kimo’s raised expectations.[..]

Derek Sivers. Hell Yeah or No (Kindle Locations 466-477). Hit Media. Kindle Edition.

Kimo's teaching that "the standard pace is for chumps," in this case, applies to Berklee College of Music, perhaps the most renowned music school in the country.

If the people that make it to Berklee are the chumps, what about the rest of us?

But Kimo and Derek raise something even more interesting than just that the standard pace is for chumps:

The bar.

The power of high expectations

Within velocity, acceleration, and jerk, many factors explain outcomes through time: opportunity, luck, money, intelligence, grit, motivation, conscientiousness, mentorship, tutoring, curriculum, materials, concentration, free time, etc, etc.

These characteristics (and many others) all seem correlated to positive outcomes, defined as getting closer to an intended goal.

But which of these characteristics affect velocity, which affect acceleration, and which affect jerk? If we want to increase our growth the most over time, which characteristic will create the growth of the others?

Honestly, I don't know.

But I thought it was interesting that Derek Sivers, despite being talented and smart, having a strong work ethic, living in the right location, meeting an incredible tutor in Kimo, and studying at Berklee, attributed his increase in slope to high expectations.

Kimo’s high expectations set a new pace for me [..] I owe every great thing that’s happened in my life to Kimo’s raised expectations.

Of course, this characteristic is prone to survivorship bias, as we don't know the proportion of people with high expectations and poor outcomes. Maybe high expectations are necessary but not sufficient.

But the more I think about it, the more I correlate the highest slope people with the highest expectations.

Reflecting on your expectations and growth

In this article, perhaps better called this exploration, we covered a few things:

• The rate of growth towards a desired outcome varies wildly across people.
• There are likely factors that increase the acceleration of this growth – the jerk of growth.
• Nobody knows precisely which factors those are.
• I hypothesize high expectations are one of them.

So here's my suggested reflection to you:

1. Looking back, for the areas you care about, how much has the acceleration of your growth increased?
2. What are your expectations for that area? Are they best-in-class high?

I suspect evaluating jerk, the increase of acceleration, and expectations, will yield some interesting insights about your life.

And perhaps lead you to raise the bar.