by Pat Flynn
Now, I know I’ve repeated “80 percent” a bunch of times. But I don’t want you to think of this principle as something you need to measure with exact percentage points. It’s more of a perspective than anything. The bottom line is that you should just enter training for any skill with the idea that good enough is good enough, and that the closer you get to 80 percent at that skill, the less likely it is that the skill is contributing to your overall goal.
For example, let’s say your goal is to increase general physical preparedness. Well, then, don’t spend most of your time trying to take your bench press from 320 pounds to 350 pounds and miss out on everything else. Let your bench press stay at 320 pounds and go work on handstands or sprints or whatever. This is not to say you can’t still make improvements to your bench press, but once you’ve gotten what you need out of the exercise, the focus should be shifted.
I’m saying that the Rule of 80 Percent is used to inform Short-Term Specialization; in other words, once you’ve reached the point of “good enough,” it’s time to switch it up.
But how do you know when good enough is good enough? Well, that depends on the goal and what you expect to get out of whatever you’re working on. But the general idea is that you’ll need more of the fundamentals and less of the things that aren’t.
For strength you’ll need more of the big lifts like squats and deadlifts and fewer of the isolation exercises, and for business you’ll need to know more about sales and less about web design. Isolation exercises can support the big lifts but not replace them, just like a good-looking website can support an effective sales process but is by no means a sufficient substitute.
This is where the Rule of 80 Percent meets another concept, one that is far more famous but shouldn’t be confused with the principle we’re talking about, though they can certainly go together: the 80/20 rule. And what the 80/20 rule says is that 80 percent of your results will come from 20 percent of your efforts—most of the time, anyway. So in strength 80 percent of your progress will come from 20 percent of your exercise selection, and in business 80 percent of your profits will come from 20 percent of your sales efforts, and so on and so forth.
The reason for knowing the 80/20 rule is not to get rid of the stuff that is less productive but to allocate your time and effort toward the stuff that is, to be more efficient. Say, for example, you know that deadlifting is one of those “vital few” exercises that offers significant return on investment (little hint: it is); well, that should tell you it’s more worthwhile to develop the deadlift to a higher percent than another exercise that isn’t as useful such as, for example, the hamstring curl. What I’m saying is “good enough” at the deadlift will be closer to 80 percent than “good enough” at the hamstring curl, because the deadlift is more useful for building strength than the hamstring curl is.
Let’s move on. These numbers are getting to be a bit much, and we still have two more principles to go. Next, we’re going to see how we can better practice our chosen skills through integration.
PRINCIPLE 4: INTEGRATION > ISOLATION
As anybody who’s started a business knows, there are a million things you don’t know about starting a business, which can give you a lot to worry about. (And not because you didn’t just drop out of college to make all your dreams come true by starting a blog about how you got started exercising again—no human could ever be that imprudent . . .) Starting a business is overwhelming, so it’s hard, like really, really hard, to decide what the right efforts are.
My business coach was always direct about this and said that when it came to business, there were a few things I needed to be great at and a lot of things I needed to be at least OK at. He said the things I needed to get great at were attracting attention and making sales, and after that I should perhaps know a little something about management and taxes and whatnot. But he made it clear that if the goal was to make money, there were a lot of things I could focus on but only a few things that I should focus on. He said the essential skills of any business owner come down to getting attention, making sales, and retaining customers. He said any skill that doesn’t contribute to any of those can be initially ignored.
This reminded me of when I was a younger tae kwon do student. Som told me that while there are a thousand and one kicks, you need to know only about five to ten to be a competitor—roundhouse, back kick, front kick, and so on. There is no need, he said, to put too much effort into flying side kicks or tornado rounds because you’ll hardly ever use them—at least not in sparring, anyway. Well, it’s no different with music, because my guitar instructor said pretty much the same thing: “Don’t worry so much about studying all these obscure jazz chords or exotic Indian scales because most of the stuff you’ll be asked to play will involve a lot of the same few things in various forms—think of the Rolling Stones. Think of all the blues-based rock bands. Get the basics down. Stick to the fundamentals.”
The principle of Integration > Isolation starts with the end in mind. What is the goal, and how are you going to get there?
Not coincidentally, Integration > Isolation is a little bit like the 80/20 rule we just discussed because this principle is supposed to help us focus on what’s important. We need to narrow things down so we know what to practice and how. Integration > Isolation says practice only the things that produce an effect necessary for the achievement of a goal and ignore whatever doesn’t.
But the principle also states that we should practice the skill as best as possible within the context of the goal we want to achieve. Meaning that if we want to play a particular song and we need to learn a G chord to do that, then we should practice that G chord in the context of the song we want to learn—that is, in relation to the other chords in the song, at the appropriate tempo, and so on.
Only we may not be able to do that at first because the song may have a fast tempo, and we may not be familiar with any of those other chords, so we might have to pull the G chord out of context and practice it by itself a while, which would indeed be isolation. Integration > Isolation doesn’t mean a practice should never isolate an element; it only means a practice should isolate only the specific techniques or skills you need that will later become integrated toward the achievement of the goal. In fact, we often will have to isolate because the skill or technique is new to us and putting it into context right away just won’t be feasible. So we have to extract that skill or technique and practice it on its own, and maybe we have to practice it very slowly or in stages at first. We strum the G chord or maybe even just the first two notes of a G chord, or we drill roundhouses on a heavy bag or maybe before that we work on balancing on one leg. But as soon as we can put that G chord into the context of the song or practice that roundhouse in a sparring match, we should do that. So even if we aren’t able to integrate right away, our goal is to integrate as soon as possible and to practice only the skills that we will integrate. There are a potentially infinite number of ways to isolate. In the above example, you could strum a G chord using three strings on the guitar.
And just to be clear on our terms: to integrate means to perform something within the context that it is intended to be in, and to isolate means to extract something and practice it on its own so you can get it up to speed. Isolation is a tool for learning a skill or technique by itself, but the problem is that a person can get caught in a pattern of isolation and begin learning skills or techniques for the sake of learning them, without actually producing anything with them or using them for any sort of greater project.
An example would be practicing every conceivable tae kwon do kick rather than learning only the few you need to win sparring matches, or strumming every conceivable guitar chord instead of practicing only the few you need to play your grandma’s favorite Elvis song.
Generalism isn’t about learning every skill or technique in the world “just because.” It’s about being better at just the right number of things and then combining those things to form a competitive and creative advantage.
So that means figuring out the fundamental skills and then the fundamental practices within them. Writing is a fundamental skill, but you don’t need to learn every word in the dictionary to be good at it. In fact, you probably already know all the words you need to be an effective wordsmith—you just need to arrange them more clearly, which is a matter of integration, not isolation.
Though maybe you don’t know enough words, so you do need to spend some time with a dictionary or thesaurus. But even if that’s the case, you shouldn’t spend any more time with that book than you need to get the job done. Simply, as you begin writing and come to discover you can’t think of the word you want, you should then open the reference to find it. In other words, the practice of isolation is informed by your integration: When you need a word, find it. But don’t spend all your time finding words you don’t need.
Integration tells you what to isolate. Because if you’re integrating—that is, practicing something within the context of an outcome—and realize you’re coming up short on a particular skill or technique, then you’ll know what skill or technique to isolate. Again using the example of an AC/DC song, if you’re strumming along to “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” and realize you’re struggling because you don’t know how to play a chord “on the and of one,” that tells you it’s time to isolate playing chords “on the and of one” until you’ve got the rhythm so perfected that you can play the chord in context without even thinking about it. But you wouldn’t sit around isolating every possible rhythmic configuration on the guitar. That would be wasteful. Instead, you let the integration tell you what to practice in isolation, and then you practice in isolation for as long as you need to, until you can achieve integration. Make sense? Yes? No? Some grunt of acknowledgment would be nice.
How we isolate and how we integrate will themselves be informed by the next and last principle of generalism—Repetition and Resistance—but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The principles have flowed in this order because I have decided that’s the order in which they should flow, which makes perfect sense, of course. It’s a sort of topdown hierarchy, if you will, where we start by understanding what our goal is (Skill Stacking > Specialization), how to achieve it generally (Short-Term Specialization), how much to achieve of it (the Rule of 80 Percent), and then how to proceed specifically (Integration > Isolation, and finally, Repetition and Resistance).
PRINCIPLE 5: REPETITION AND RESISTANCE
When I began working out, people couldn’t believe it because, of all my friends, I was always the most out of shape. I was never good at sports, and I was clumsy and hefty, so none of my so-called chums took me seriously when I started going to the weight room. In fact, nobody did.
But as time went by, I began losing weight and building strength, and after not too long, all the people who initially doubted were soon asking for advice. And what I would say is this: you need to understand Repetition and Resistance. That’s our starting point.
If you want to get stronger, if you want to build skill—because, remember, this principle extends far beyond the weight room—you need to practice what you want to get good at, and you need to find ways of making it harder as you go. So when it comes to working out, you need to do the exercises that are challenging, and you need to make them more challenging because eventually you’ll adapt. In other words, you need to do reps and add weight.
Part of the reason people don’t progress (in the gym or otherwise) is that they’re doing reps but not adding weight. They’re in a routine, but they’re not making their routine challenging—they’re not using progressive resistance, in other words. They’re just keeping things the same. They keep military-pressing the same weight or keep doing the same number of push-ups or keep running the same number of miles. Well, it’s similar with any other skill. Repetition will get you only so far. If you want to get stronger, you need to add “weight” to whatever you’re doing.
I think a lot of people understand that to improve at a skill, you have to practice it, but I don’t think a lot of people understand that to really improve, you have to find ways to practice that skill under increasingly difficult demands. It’s not enough to merely write; you also have to try writing at a higher level or in different styles. It’s not enough to merely pluck notes on the guitar; you also have to pluck notes at different tempos and time signatures. It’s not enough to merely practice what you’re already good at; you have to practice the things that strain your capabilities—the things that you’re not already good at it.
Here’s the litmus test: if you ever have a practice session in anything and you’re not challenged by it, then you’re not using the principle of Repetition and Resistance. You’re not really practicing, at least not in an optimal way. So you can ignore all the terrific nonsense one is so accustomed to hearing about only perfect practice being effective, because whoever said that never did a workout with any significant weight.
When you’re struggling, your practice is never going to be perfect, but it is going to improve. At the same time, your goal should always be to improve the quality of your repetitions even as you are met with difficulty—to keep your knees out as you squat more weight, to keep your notes clear as you build speed—in other words, to not allow intensity to produce slop. There will, of course, be some competition between consistency on one hand and intensity on the other. It is obviously easier to maintain the high quality of your reps if you always keep your reps the same, but that would be defeating the purpose. At the same time, however, you should never give yourself permission to slack on quality just because the assignment is difficult.
If you want to make progress in the gym, you need to employ progressive overload—that is, increasing resistance. In fact, if you want to make progress at anything, you need to employ increasing resistance, as well. But how you apply increasing resistance will depend on the skill and how far along you are with it. We’ll talk specifics later, but for now there are some general factors that can help you gauge what is appropriate and what isn’t. To start, I would suggest memorizing the following motto: “Challenged but successful.” Training to failure is often training to fail; that is, purposely pushing past your known limits, rather than working intelligently up to them, is a mistake. Thus, the secret to successful practicing—if there is one—is to push yourself up to, but not necessarily beyond, your capabilities. If quality has become degraded in an exercise because of the intensity at which you’re doing it, then you are no longer getting better at the exercise—you’re serving slop. And the goal of an exercise is not to serve slop. The goal is to get better at the exercise—squats, chord sequences, writing sentences, whatever it is.
Occasionally you may exceed your limits (that’s called “strategic overreach”), and that’s not always a bad thing, but it can be a bad thing if that’s all you’re doing. Challenged but successful. Challenged but successful. Challenged but successful.
But let’s not forget about repetition either, which resistance is destined to rely on. You can’t add weight to something you’re not doing—or something you’re not already familiar with—and that’s the point of repetition: you need to practice specifically whatever it is you want to get better at. Do reps at the thing you want to improve; do reps at the thing you want to improve; do reps at the thing you want to improve. Don’t expect to get better at pull-ups by running. (Aside from indirect carryover, that is. For example, running may help a person lose weight, which in turn, would make pull-ups easier. But running itself does not develop the strength for pull-ups.) That may sound ludicrous—who would ever think to do something so silly as that? But we make this mistake all the time. We avoid doing the things we’re not good at and continue to practice our strengths, hoping that one day our areas of weakness will somehow take care of themselves. But this simply confuses solving a problem with ignoring it. The rule of repetition takes that option away. If you want to get good at something, you have to practice it.
All right, let’s wrap this chapter up. I thi
nk we’ve laid the necessary groundwork to launch into the specifics of this fantabulous little enterprise—generalism. The principles are there, and they’re what we’re going to be basing our practice upon. What comes next is more difficult, not in a theoretical sense but in a practical sense, because the onus will soon be put entirely on you. I hope I’ve been exceptionally clear about this: just reading this book won’t actually make you better at things. Did anybody think that coming in? Oh God, I certainly hope not. Because if so, boy, are you going to be disappointed when you see just how much I’m about to ask you to do. The good news? The work will be efficient. We’ll adhere to these principles, so our efforts will be swift and scientific. No time will be wasted and no energy will be dispersed simply because we feel like experimenting with things. There are no experiments here. Just a process. And it is to that process that we now turn.
Chapter Five
WHERE TO BEGIN: METASKILLS
In my house, up in the attic, there’s a picture of me from around third grade. I don’t remember having this picture taken—probably because I never wanted it taken—and I don’t recall how it got into my house, since it’s a school portrait that probably my mom should have, hanging above the staircase next to my sister Bridget’s. But somehow it found its way onto my desk, and I haven’t been able to put it away because, for some reason when I look at it, I can’t help but feel a certain way about it. Why is that? Is it because I knew this kid would have a somewhat shaky start in life? Not exactly. This isn’t about feeling bad for myself. This is about wanting to elevate myself so if I ever could go back in time, I’d be able to assure this little version of me that everything would turn out more or less OK.