How quality reps trump natural talent every single time

In the mid-1980s, Canadian psychologist Roger Barnsley attended an ice hockey game with his family. His wife flipped through the leaflet with the player information, and noticed something odd: most of the players had their birthdays early in the year. Barnsley thought she was crazy.

But when he looked at the leaflet himself, he could confirm: most players’ birthdays were in January, February, or March. 

Wait, what? Is this a Q1 genetic mutation? 

The explanation is rather simple: January 1st is the cutoff date for youth ice hockey leagues in Canada. Around age 9 or 10, traveling squad coaches start selecting the best players to their squads. At that age, being one more year mature makes a huge difference – and therefore, players born early in the year would simply be better. 

So at age 10, players born early in the year would make traveling squads. 

They’d get more and better repetitions with other good players. Which makes them better, both by increasing their reps and improving their competition. 

This cycle continues, until they make the pros – and somehow, they’re all born early in the year. 

The difference between the kid you used to play soccer with who’s now a professional could just be a few days between December and January. 

In 1991, another psychologist at Florida State University began the most extensive investigation ever made into high performance.

Their subjects: violinists of the Music Academy in West Berlin. They clustered them into three groups: super talents (ie. people that were expected to be the next stars), very good (ie. would likely make the top orchestras but only as second fiddle) and ordinary (ie. training to become music teachers. 

The psychologist’s name: Anders Ericsson. If that name sounds familiar, it's because his work has been cited everywhere. 

The only striking difference they could find between the three groups was simply the amount of conscious work (or, as Ericsson called it, “deliberate practice”) they put in.

The super talents – the ones that would go on to become top soloists –  had honed their craft for more than ten thousand hours; the very good ones were sitting between 6-8k, and the ordinary ones between 2-4k. 

Assuming this is true, the only factor determining your success is the amount of conscious work you put in. 

What Ericsson calls deliberate practice, I’ll call “quality reps”.

Sounds more like the gym bro that I am. “Doing the work” isn’t enough.

If I’m sitting at my desk and my time tracker is currently set to “writing”, but in reality I’m just scrolling through Google Maps (which is a fantastic way to procrastinate), then I’m not getting quality reps in.

Sure, I might write a sentence here and there, but it does not compare to sitting down with full focus, zero distractions, and just plain old mental effort. 

Hence, what we need to do is to optimize for quality reps.

We can do this in 3 simple steps: 

1. Put ourselves in situations where we can get quality reps in
2. Do the work 
3. Recover well enough after so that we can do it again tomorrow

Let’s break it down. ⬇️

[1] Getting into the right situation

The Canadian Youth Hockey players clearly got a lot of quality reps in – mostly because they were put into the right situation. Now, we can’t control our day of birth, but what we can control for is our environment. 

Imagine wanting to become better at skiing. Well, if you live nowhere near snow or mountains, that’s going to be hard. 

Or take startups: if you want to get quality reps at founding a company, you’re probably better off in San Francisco, Berlin, or Stockholm than in the tiny village you grew up in. 

Rep quality increases with the quality of others around you. 

I started playing Lacrosse in 2010. For most of my career, I wasn’t very good: for years, I wouldn’t even make the first team despite playing at one of Germany’s better clubs. My breakthrough came when two factors converged. 

First, I started attending every open tryout for the national team. Both the quality of players and coaches there were higher, and these tryout weekends are hard. Think: two days of six hours of well-coached practice each. So in one weekend, I’d get the equivalent of six practices (3 weeks if you practice twice a week), and at a much higher quality. 

Second, I stopped being injured so much. I began working with a Strength & Conditioning coach in 2018, and that (sounds cliché) changed my life. I finally got a handle on my ankle injuries, became faster, stronger, better. By being injured less, I got to practice more, and thus got better. 

“The best ability is availability.” — Coach Marshall 

I was able to do the work.

In 2022, I made the national team – to this day one of my proudest achievements:

[2] Doing the work 

Once you are in the right surroundings and situation, it’s time to do the work. Day in, day out. These ten thousand hours don’t come from nowhere. 

So whatever it is that you do, you need to show up consciously by being physically and mentally present.

The difference between a lifting session where you dabble around for sixty minutes vs a lifting session where you follow a program to the letter is massive. 

The same is true for knowledge work. When I was still working as a full-time employee, I probably could’ve generated most of my output in 2-3 hours every day. But I was stuck in tons of alignment meetings, had to deal with political issues where you’d have to get buy-in from every stakeholder before making a decision, and generally just procrastinated a lot by chatting with colleagues in Slack. 

So while I may have “worked” 8 or 9 hours in a day, the number of quality hours was more like 2 or 3. Which is perfectly normal for knowledge workers – even "deep work professionals" that Cal Newport describes in Deep Work struggle to hammer out more than 4 hours of focused work in a day.

Now that I’m self-employed, I notice that the number of quality reps is higher, for the very simple reason that my paycheck depends on the output I generate, and not on the end of the month coming around. 

[3] Recovering well

“Yeah bro, you just gotta get the reps in, the more the better”, hustle porn bros will rejoice reading this. 

Not so fast. 

We’re still talking about quality reps. How good is the quality of your work after ten hours?

Depending on your mental endurance, it’s somewhere between mediocre and so bad that you have to spend more time fixing it the day after. 

When doing heavy squats, you also don’t do ten sets of ten reps at 90% of your one-rep max and expect the quality of these reps to be great.

(Even in German Volume Training, a hypertrophy protocol that pushes you near exhaustion, you only do ten sets of ten reps at 60% of your 1RM). 

You can only get quality reps in if you’re well recovered. And this means that you have to allocate some time to rest:

• sleeping for 7-8h every night,
• getting your mind off work,
• doing things that are fun, etc.

There’s no point in pushing yourself super hard daily. It takes time to get to ten thousand hours – and by attempting to accelerate this process by simply doing more, you might not make it that far. 

In a study of the most important 120 scientists and 123 poets of the 19th century, it was found that ten years elapsed between their first and their best work. Doing quality work for 1000 hours a year seems reasonable – hence the 10.000-hour rule. After that, quality probably goes down. 

There’s one way to hack this: doing mental work when attempting physical mastery and vice versa.

If you look at professional athletes, then you’ll see they actually don’t train that much: 2-3h per day, with at 1-2 off days per week. 

What you usually don’t see is how much time they spend studying and breaking down film. Tom Brady allegedly spent 40 hours per week studying film on top of his normal practice volume.

These are also quality reps. 

If you’re a knowledge worker, when the mental work doesn’t come easily anymore, go do something physical instead. It’ll set you up for great mental work the next day. 

"Mens sana in corpore sano". — Latin Proverb (often falsely adapted by recreational alcoholics to “mens sana in Campari Soda”)

Most of all, getting really good at one thing takes time. There are no overnight successes. But there might be unseen factors that you’re missing. 

Recently, I received a flattering piece of feedback: “man, you’re such a talented writer.” 

Why, thank you. 

But also: motherf**ker, this shit ain’t talent. 

Because what they didn’t see is that I don’t just spend at least five hours per week writing, it’s that I’ve written for most of my life.

• At age 8, I joined the school newspaper and wrote articles for that.
• At age 13, I joined Germany’s biggest Magic: the Gathering forum and proceeded to write 5.2k posts within 3 years, becoming the youngest moderator that forum had ever seen.
• My first job at 15 was writing 2.500 word articles for a now-defunct German Magic: the Gathering publication. (When they were trying to send me my first paycheck, they asked for my tax number. I told them I couldn’t get one. They asked “why?”, and I answered: “because I’m 15.”).
• In my year abroad, I’d write extensive weekly reports.
• And I’ve been writing regular blog posts since 2014, before becoming a “professional email writer” (aka. knowledge worker) in 2015. 

I’m sharing all this because you might have undiscovered thousands of reps in your past too.

Go back, and think about what you really enjoyed doing as a child. There might be a few things hiding somewhere that you haven’t used in a while, but where you’ve already accumulated thousands and thousands of hours of quality reps. 

In short, the secret to getting good at things is: 

1. Put yourself into the right situation to get good at it
2. Do the work for a very long time
3. Recover so you can do quality work again the next day 

Now, does this have to be in one specific discipline?

Not necessarily. This is a newsletter for Generalists, after all. 

While it likely requires 10.000 hours of quality reps to make a professional sports league, in the business world, it’s not black and white. 

The business world is a “wicked” environment – there are no rules, and adaptation, problem solving, and lateral thinking are key skills.

So instead of specializing in one thing, it might well be worth to it to get “2.000-hours-good” in five different disciplines, and then working at the intersection of these. 

Take Louise. She’s spent a lot of time studying psychology, marketing, and content creation – which lead her to become partner in her agency at age 27. She’s not a “10.000-hour-type” expert in any of these fields – but by living at this intersection, she’s doing really well, and can have unique insights that most others wouldn’t. 

One thing you can be sure about: she did get the quality reps in, in all three of these disciplines. 

You don’t have to specialize. But you do have to get the quality reps in for anything that you do. 

This will take time and effort. 

And it’ll be worth it.

Do hard work. Good things will follow. 

Note: the studies quoted in this newsletter are taken from Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” and Matthew Syed’s “Bounce” books. Both very good reads. 

Whenever you're ready, there are four ways I can help you:

[1] Reclaim up to 4 hours per day and find time to do the things you've always wanted to do by enrolling into Personal Productivity OS.

[2] Hire your next Founder's Associate or other business generalist position with my startup, Generalyst Recruiting.

[3] You could also find your next startup job in Europe by simply applying as a candidate.

[4] Learn how you can build your career as a generalist by subscribing to this newsletter. ⬇️