On ‘prescriptions’ and attaining excellence

I have friends at two early stage companies (one seed-funded recruitment software, one pre-launch consumer wellness mobile app) who are both getting to grips with the process of testing new features on their products with groups of users. As I’ve watched their businesses come along over the past two years, I’ve also watched them develop as individuals and as teams. They have progressed through the four stages of competence in different disciplines and it has been fascinating to watch.

At the same time, I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of Kapil Gupta MD. He says things about performance and society which some people don’t like; namely that we are obsessed with ‘prescriptions’ - and not just medical ones. Meditation, mindfulness, spirituality, yoga - all prescriptions in the wellbeing world in the same way that get rich quick schemes, '‘how to’ guides, tutorials and playbooks are in the business world. The people who talk about society being so wrong; who paint themselves as spritually enlightened in some form, are guilty of exactly the same prescription-isation that they judge the rest of society on, it’s just that their narrative and signalling is different to the mainstream. This is perhaps a blog post all of its own, how the modern world has bastardised beyond all comprehension ancient Eastern spiritual teachings…

Invariably, so many of these prescriptions only work temporarily for people. They believe they must follow a meditation practice for the rest of their days, or that as long as their business exists they must strictly adhere to The Lean Startup manual. The focus becomes the prescription itself, as opposed to the outcome. Failure is further compounded as the prescriptions are almost always given to the seeker as opposed to the seeker coming to a natural conclusion, unforced, by themselves (think about how you learnt things best in school which stay with you to this day, and compare it to the ‘knowledge’ [or rather, total lack thereof] that stemmed from when you felt like you were simply memorising answers for an exam paper)

I am currently mesmerised by his teachings on this because I can relate so much of it to my own experience at things I have been ‘naturally’ good at or bad at and tasks which I have ‘gotten better at' over time.

To re-state the example Naval Ravikant used on a podcast they did together; take driving a car. It is useful to have a prescription for this mechnical task so you can correctly control the vehicle and pass your driving test. But racing it around a track to achieve the fastest time possible in a race is a different task entirely. It is closer to art, than a mechanical task. For this, prescriptions are counterproductive.

If I read a biography of Steve Jobs and copy his actions meticulously and correctly, I will not achieve the results that Steve Jobs did. In fact, even if Steve Jobs could come back and copy his actions again, he would not achieve the same success. This links tremendously with the concept Peter Thiel describes in his book ‘Zero to One’ - that each moment in business happens only once.

Once we have extracted the value of a prescription to the point where we can complete the mechanical task in a manner of conscious competence, we must unlearn the prescription, less it becomes a prison for us. Many of the greatest athletes seemingly break the rules of the game they’re in when they achieve their best accolades, and so many of those rules are based purely on perception (consider Roger Bannister and the psychological barrier surrounding the 4 minute mile).

Naval says there is no skill called business, and I am inclined to agree. What the successful entrepreneurs I have in my network have in common is that they have immersed themselves in the knowledge disciplines surrounding their products, their markets, their revenue models, and so on. They have progressed through the four stages of competence to a point where the deadwood - the now unhelpful models, guides and prescriptions - are cast off, so that unconscious competence can be assumed. They all describe this state as a ‘State of no mind’ (‘Mushin’) - a flow state, of sorts. So similar, yet simultaneously so far away, from the unconscious incompetence of having no idea about what to do and not even being aware of why. Grapplers, jiujitsu players and other combat sports athletes often talk about this state and how it cannot be achieved through chasing it.

As in sports, as in business, as in life. I’ll finish by again paraphrasing Kapil’s unmatched brilliance on this topic: “Monks can meditate for 16 hours a day and almost none of them ever reach enlightenment - what makes you think your 20 minutes is going to do anything?”