Two Ways To Get Better At Something

I know I’m being a bit hard on the boot camp notion. It does have its place. But I think that place is mostly to get you onto some sort of gentle ramp. Some place you can actually live, and enjoy.

The boot camp idea is certainly superior in one way: its marketability. It’s an ideal selling proposition—you’ll pay a lot now, yes, but reap great benefits ever after. Just get to the end of a short, painful “cost” phase and then enjoy your improved self. Temporary sacrifice, enduring benefit. It’s the same angle used to sell us luxury vehicles an... See more

In other words, the gentle ramp allows for that fabled “lifestyle change” to actually happen. Your identity has time to catch up with your aspirations. The effort required to advance along a gentle ramp is doable for a regular person with other commitments and limited willpower, which describes pretty much everyone. (When you get into advanced terr... See more

That is exactly the gentle ramp’s strength: you can live on it. You’re not trying to just get through it.The gentle ramp demands things of you that the boot camp doesn’t. Staying on it requires you to develop certain aspects of character. You have to accept, for example, that when you’re on a sustainable trajectory, improvement takes time, and that... See more

And precisely for that reason, I haven’t had trouble sticking to it. There are extra-challenging days, but because they aren’t the norm, I can always be ready to meet them. Excited even. The improvement has been very consistent. There’s no more bargaining, no dread, and no compromise. I can live here.

One thing I had to get used to was not going all-out in my training. On most days, I was clearly doing less than I could have. I would do my scheduled sets or miles and call it a day, even though I could have done more. I wasn’t “leaving it all out there” or “giving every ounce” very often.

Rather than going for the maximum challenge you can handle (for a mercifully short time) you’re looking for that “just challenging enough to improve” window. And once you find it, you live in it.

A much less sexy approach to getting better at something is a “gentle ramping” sort of approach. You get yourself on a regimen where you do a little of the thing in question—writing, running, meditating, whatever—then a little more, and so on, always pushing the performance level slightly, without ever clobbering yourself with challenge. You gradua... See more

However, real military boot camps come with two additional factors that make them work: once you sign up, you can’t slack or quit without severe consequences. There’s no way forward but to suffer and adapt. Afterward, you’re kept from backsliding by peer pressure and institutional standards, for a few years. So they work really well.