Week 18: My system for self-improvement
One way to think about starting a business is all of the activities you do: you open your laptop, you join a Zoom meeting, you write some code.
But a different way to think about it is making a series of decisions: Do I work on this feature, or that one? Do I start the cold email with this sentence, or that one? How do I respond to the customer’s question?
Make better decisions, get closer to your goals. Make worse decisions, move further away.
If that’s true, then the obvious question is: how do you get better at making decisions?
Unfortunately, it’s not simple to do. In business, decisions and results are decoupled for two reasons:
It’s usually a long time before you see the direct outcome of your decisions
Luck influences everything
What can you do?
Like much of the world, I took this week off for Christmas, so this edition is about my system for self-improvement. In short, I use a process that helps me focus decisions on what I can control, regardless of short-term outcomes.
My system
Before I dive in, I have to give credit where credit is due. These techniques come from performance psychologist Jared Tendler.
The ideas were primarily honed to help poker players and stock traders perform better, but they work well in any context where short-term results aren’t always a direct reflection of ability. I’ve been using them for about 3 years with great results. I highly recommend reverse engineering his books for your area of interest.
A-C analysis
When results are delayed or unreliable, you need some way to know how you’re performing the short-term. That’s what the “A-C analysis” is for.
Take each of your skills and map out:
Your C-game: what your absolute worst looks like
Your B-game: what your average looks like
Your A-game: what your absolute best looks like
A few examples from me:
Sales calls:
C-game: Reactively answering questions, getting pushed around
B-game: Focusing in the customers problem, but not controlling the pace of the call
A-game: Controlling the agenda of the call and zeroing in on a concrete customer problem
Programming:
C-game: Blinding attacking a big problem
B-game: Thinking about related problems I’ve seen before
A-game: Breaking down big problems into small, approachable ones
Notice that neither of these descriptions say anything about outcomes. I might be on my A-game in a sales call and still get no where. It doesn’t matter, because with the right process, I’ll eventually get good results.
Plus, by focusing on concrete skills, you learn the little details of your craft, which is where mastery comes from.
Mini-warm up
With my A-C analysis mapped out, here’s how I use it during the day.
For every task I work on—say I’m iterating on the product’s website copy, or working on a piece of social content—I do this warm up:
In a notepad on my desk, I write down what exactly I’m about to do, phrased in terms of the outcome I want to achieve. Then I write down the key elements of my A-C analysis for that activity, and the corrections to any common mistakes I make.
So say before a sales call, I might write down:
Run a sales call that converts to a qualified lead: Control the pace, hone in one a real problem, offer a clear deal. Don’t pitch from the deck before understanding their problem.
Physically writing it down serves as a timely reminder of how to perform my best. I use short-hand so the whole thing is a lot quicker than it sounds.
After the activity, I do a mini-cooldown: I write down the elements of my game that showed up and some quick notes to think about later.
If this all sounds a little nutty, think about what’s happening: with every single at-bat I get, I’m making micro-improvements, and the same mistakes show up much less often.
Daily/weekly retrospective
At the end of each day, I take 2 minutes and write down a quick retrospective: overall, was I in my A-game, B-game, or C-game? What elements of my skill mostly showed up? Why?
I do the same thing at a weekly cadence, focusing on bigger issues.
I use the output from those exercises to come up with corrections to mistakes, feeding back into my A-C.
If you want to see more, email me and I’ll send you my current, complete A-C analysis, plus a few real examples of a mini warm up and cooldown.