Step 3: Define “Good”
It’s at this point, once you’ve identified exactly what skill to build, that you can, for guidance, begin to draw from the research on deliberate practice. The first thing this literature tells us is that you need clear goals. If you don’t know where you’re trying to get to, then it’s hard to take effective action. Geoff Colvin, an editor at Fortune magazine who wrote a book on deliberate practice,7 put it this way in an article that appeared in Fotune: “[Deliberate practice] requires good goals.”8
When you ask a musician like Jordan Tice, for example, there’s little ambiguity about what getting “good” means to him at that moment. There’s always some new, more complicated technique to master. For Alex Berger, the definition of “good” was also clear: his scripts being taken seriously. To give a concrete example, one of the projects he was working on while still an assistant was the development of a spec script to submit to talent agencies. For him, at this early stage of his career capital acquisition, “good” meant having a script good enough to land him an agent. There was no ambiguity about what it meant to succeed at this goal.