How to Get Better at Anything as Quickly as Possible

In three easy-to-remember steps.

Welcome to HEAVIES, a spiritual and modern Substack about health and wellness.

I was talking to a friend at the gym on Friday about the sports we played in high school, which for me consisted of volleyball (very briefly; I stopped growing freshman year), tennis (even briefer; I had a girlfriend and we were teenagers), and surfing (I haven’t paddled out in over a year). I play basketball for fun once in a while, but otherwise, Muay Thai is the longest meaningful relationship I’ve had with a sport, in part because it tends to attract an appealing taxonomy of nerds and punk/hardcore kids and other weirdos. The jock ratio is shockingly low.

One of the other things that makes Muay Thai addicting is that, as an art, it’s similar to writing in that getting better requires a high tolerance for embarrassment. You have to callous the part of your brain that alights with cringe during a PET scan, which can be hard, especially when reading something you wrote six years ago induces the same reflexive wince as watching an old video of your front kick. 

Even though I feel pretty meh at both pursuits, I’m appreciative at how far I’ve come. So, I wanted to share a few of the common threads I’ve observed that have made a steady, sustainable progression in these two sorta-hard things possible—even for me, a clumsy idiot who couldn’t tell you what the second-person imperative is without googling.  

That said, I sincerely hope that this framework doesn't come across as trite self-help bullshit, because I really do believe that the below is the not-so-dirty secret to progressing in just about anything. The best part is that these principles can be broadly applied to every form of art, from writing fiction to tennis to jiu-jitsu to Valorant to hooping to sewing to surfing single-fins or whatever it is you’re trying to get better at. 

1. Prioritize Play 

I love what Sam is building over at Liberation Martial Arts, one of my favorite Substacks, which brings a progressive lens to combat sports. I was watching this video of a session he posted from UC Irvine, my alma mater, which succinctly captured his pedagogy, emphasizing movement-based play and having fun above everything else. I found myself nodding along to this part: 

“A stressed out mind, a scared mind, cannot learn anything. Fear is a terrible motivator. It’s like, ‘I’m scared to die! I’m gonna hit the gym.’ No you won’t! … What you want to do is you want to play. Because how do people get good? They get good through competency. You have to practice a lot. How do people do that? It has to be fun.” 

Fear can be a useful and even healthy tool for learning how to perform at a high level—like if you’re walking into the ring about to get your ass beat in front of all your friends—but it’s a terrible daily motivator, especially when it’s freezing outside and you’re cozy underneath the comforter. Consistency is far more important than going all-out once in a while; in time you’ll just gas yourself out. You need that little bit of spark, that twinkle, that nugget of fun that transforms your chosen proclivity into an obsession. 

Who’s going to practice more on their own: The kid who’s constantly getting berated by his pops for not dribbling around the cones properly? Or the kid whose parents take him to watch Caitlin Clark swish stepback 30 footers live, who then goes home and falls asleep watching YouTubes on how to fix his jumper?  

2. Make Your Goals Tiny and Achievable

I wrote about this in a post about building farmer strength, but after interviewing him for GQ, I learned that reason that the cellist Yo-Yo Ma was able to excel at his instrument was that his father made him practice just two measures of music a day—in his case, Bach’s “Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major”—and nothing more. Breaking down your chosen pursuit into tiny achievements is the only sustainable way to level up. 

So what does that look like in practice? Before every bags class, I try to set a goal. This morning, I told myself I was going to focus on throwing my right cross without flaring my elbow, Point A to Point B, as linearly as possible. And ta-da: In doing so I leveled up .05% today. 

Clear and easily distillable goal-setting is why, I think, skating is an ideal sport, especially for kids: it allows for open-ended creativity, but the path to getting better—to landing the next thing—is clearly laid out. It’s iterative. You have to learn how to ollie before you can heel flip. And learning how to be comfortable with failure—literally falling on your butt—is what creates resilience.

Over time, you build a cathedral that houses your body of work, itty-bitty brick by itty-bitty brick. 

3. Solicit Honest Feedback

One of the reasons my jumper is so busted is that, as a tween, I was shooting for hours in the backyard with incorrect form and no corrections. My elbow flared out like UCLA Lonzo Ball. (Which is why my stat line tends to resemble his: 1 for 4 shooting, with 9 assists lol.) I wish I had YouTube.

In Muay Thai, very early on, my friend and coach Alma told me that one of the keys to getting decent is to take videos of yourself and to relentlessly self-critique. (Why is your balance off when you throw X thing? etc.) Similarly, with writing, it wasn’t until I was eight years into my career that I was regularly getting rich (and occasionally brutal) notes, notes that we’d spend a long time talking through. (Thanks to my longtime editor, Geoff Gagnon 😘.) As an editor I try to give my writers a similar level of care and attention. (Try!) That’s all to say: Get feedback and corrections from sources you trust.

Criticism keeps you sharp. 

Little goals help you inch forward.

Keeping it fun and playful is what keeps you coming back for more.

Thanks as always for reading HEAVIES. New post later this week.