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[!summary]The greatest experts aren’t afraid of starting again Apparently, my tennis is rusty Here in Australia the Christmas holidays take place in mid-summer, and my family spent a few days at a house with a tennis court. It was an amazing opportunity, for which we were hardly prepared. I hadn’t played in years. One family member had barely held a racquet before. But we all shared the same problem: our serves were terrible. The ball hit the net, or it veered wildly off court. The serve seemed like some monolithic, unreachable skill you either had or you didn’t. The view from the court — that was amazing, but the tennis, to say the least, wasn’t flowing. That was until someone suggested we break it down: grip, swing, ball toss, contact. We stopped trying to play and started drilling. Within a short while, the court was alive with movement and we were laughing instead of frowning with effort. Our natural talent hadn’t changed; it was just that our willingness to break the seemingly impossible into achievable parts made it somehow seem doable. And after a short while, it actually was doable. We were delivering serves that made it over the net, that you could also imagine returning. This experience was a reminder that expertise is hardly ever about making a single massive effort to achieve something that seems impossible. You don’t get good at tennis all at once. Playing the game well is really a whole portfolio of tiny pieces of expertise you have to master one by one and piece together smoothly before you can reach actual proficiency. And even when you get there, that’s not the end. There’s always something, some element of your play, you can improve. Is mastery a destination to reach and then enjoy forever? No. It’s more like a spiral that requires us to return to the beginning again and again of a long series of micro-skills.
Experts Get Stuck Because They Stop Looking But you can reach a point where it’s hard to see how to improve, or if it’s even worth it. For creati…
Highlights
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expertise is hardly ever about making a single massive effort to achieve something that seems impossible. You don’t get good at tennis all at once. Playing the game well is really a whole portfolio of tiny pieces of expertise you have to master one by one and piece together smoothly before you can reach actual proficiency.
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In their book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool show that expertise is built through deliberate practice: the systematic isolation and refinement of specific sub-skills.
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The traditional Japanese framework, Shu Ha Ri, maps this growth as a recurring cycle, a sort of beautiful, never-ending loop that keeps things interesting no matter how far advanced you become. In the Shu phase, you just dive into the work. It’s this foundational, deeply immersive period of copying a master’s handwriting or holding a racquet in that specific, stiff posture that eventually starts to feel like it’s natural (please don’t challenge me on this — as I say, I still can’t actually play tennis). Early on you’re essentially acting as a mirror, reflecting something great until it sticks. Eventually, you move into Ha, the breakout phase. This is where the tinkering starts. It’s the time when you really start to play. You begin questioning the rules and adjusting your grip, or just messing around with sentence rhythm to see where the tradition ends and your own unique voice begins to shine through. Then there’s Ri. In this Zen-like space, the rules have been digested so deeply they just… click. The skill happens through you rather than by you, which is a pretty incredible feeling when you finally hit that flow. I certainly haven’t reached this level with tennis, but I have had such moments while playing squash. It’s not so much that you’re playing the game as that the game is now playing you. But the best part is when the top of that mountain reveals a much bigger, sun-drenched one hiding right behind it. You’re invited back into Shu. The master becomes a student again, starting over with a fresh sense of humility and a genuine, open-eyed curiosity for what’s next. The danger is that as an accomplished expert it all gets so serious that you might forget you can go back to the start, you can still play, you can have fu