Nerds should train like professional athletes
How to dominate knowledge work
When I was in undergrad, I had a love-hate relationship with the Princeton varsity athletes. Certain members of the crew team were known to "borrow" bikes for the long commute to the boat house, so I learned to invest in a secure bike lock. I was also bitter because the weight facilities at the varsity athlete gym were incredible, while the plebeian facilities only had one squat rack for the entire student population (I kid you not).
On the other hand, the first ever alley-oop pick and roll I ever successfully executed was aside a varsity high-jumper who was able to defy physics. For you non-hoopers out there, an alley-oop is when someone catches a pass near the hoop and dunks the ball — it is a very dominant display of athleticism. And no, I was unfortunately not the one dunking.
However, I also spent quite a bit of time with athletes outside of their sporting domains, in the classroom. And what I discovered was that many of these athletes were quite smart. Certainly not the "dumb jock" stereotype that I had been drummed into my head by American pop culture, but they were a group of students who were able to balance hours of daily training plus the rigors of the Princeton pedagogical experience. Some of them weren't even just balancing academics, but actively dominating their classes.
Certainly, there's a selection effect at play, because Princeton attracts a certain type of athlete (compared to other schools, you do have to "play school" as a Princeton athlete). But nevertheless, it caused me to wonder, was there something they had figured out? Were there lessons from peak performance athletic training that we — mere mortal non-athlete knowledge workers — could learn?
So I started lifting and training, as both an athlete and a mathlete.
While I can’t know the counterfactual, I am convinced that this mode of analysis and training served me incredibly well, in both my athletic and knowledge pursuits.
In other words, nerds should train like athletes.
How much can you lift?
When I was in fifth grade, my neighbor gave me Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers book to read. Outliers is probably most famous for introducing the 10,000-hour rule, the idea that it takes approximately 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. Besides the fact that Gladwell took this idea from Anders Ericsson's seminal research in peak performance and flubbed many things about it, the idea is directionally correct — in fields like music and athletics, it takes tremendous amounts of deliberate practice to build up the skills that comprise expertise. Indeed, athletes are known because of their dedication to training (or in other circumstances, their aversion to practice).
So in the same way that athletes lift weights and exercise, what do we — as knowledge workers — do to train?
When I first ran into this idea, I was stuck. It was easy to figure out how it worked for athletes.
Take a tennis player for example. Overall fitness can be broken down into a few categories — strength, power, endurance, flexibility, mobility, etc. — each to be trained with particular sets of exercises. Perhaps this fitness is supplemented with some sport-specific fitness drills, like footwork or agility training. Finally, we layer in sport-specific skills: forehand drilling, volleys, point construction, and so on.
For an athlete, building capacity for their sport seems obvious: athletes train their overall fitness and then drill sport-specific skills. For a knowledge worker, building that trainable foundation seems trickier.
But after deeper thought, there are similar parallels between athletic training and mental training. Just as fitness can be broken down into strength, endurance, and other components, mental fitness is a combination of concentration, working memory, and other factors.
Physical strength is similar to mental concentration. Cardiovascular endurance can be aligned with working memory. Muscle memory is similar to your actual memory and how much information you've internalized.
Certainly it's not a one-to-one mapping, but what's important is that we can decompose mental fitness into distinct components, and then proceed to train these individual components.
Mental concentration: train concentration intervals where you focus intensely (i.e., no context switching) on a singular task for a set period of time. As you develop comfort with the current interval of time, extend the concentration interval to be longer and longer.
Working memory: practice productive meditation by going for a walk with a clear and complicated problem. Every single time you notice your attention wandering from the problem, move your attention back to the problem. It forces you to get very comfortable with holding lots of information in your head, trying to manipulate it, and to synthesize new things from it.1
Information: read across a variety of different topics that interest you. When you find something particularly interesting, spend more time on those topics and read secondary and complementary sources to deepen your understanding.
And just like there are sport-specific tasks, there are the analogous knowledge work-specific tasks too.
For a software engineer, it might be reviewing code, creating design documents, or researching new technologies to upgrade the technical stack. If you're a business analyst, it might be creating Excel models, building analytics reports, or writing memos.
While it might be harder to break down these tasks in knowledge work than in athletics (because it's tacit knowledge), you can still get better. As you work through things, you can naturally figure out what are your personal bottlenecks. Find people who are masters of the craft and study them. Even better, spend time and work with them — you will get better just by immersing yourself in their presence.
We will benefit if we take our knowledge work training as seriously as professional athletes take their training. Ask yourself:
What mental fitness training am I doing?
How am I training my domain-specific skills to become even better?
What’s your calling card?
Think of your favorite athlete — picture them clearly in your mind.
My guess is that you didn't think of their official headshot. Most likely, you visualized them in-game, in-motion, in-action: Michael Jordan levitating through the air, Roger Federer floating on the court to hit a forehand, LeBron James rising behind a player in a chase-down block, Usain Bolt raising his hands in victory as he chills his way to another victory, Lance Stephenson blowing into someone's ear.
Athletes tend to have a calling card. It's often their signature move, the result of years and years of grueling training, distilled into an otherworldly expression of dominance against their opponents.
It's what our minds instinctively jump to when we think of them.
So why shouldn’t I — a nerd — also have a calling card?
It seems reasonable that we should have a similar concept like that to strive for in knowledge work, something that encompasses a person's comparative advantage.
Indeed, many of history's most brilliant knowledge workers had a calling card:
Richard Feynman: Feynman was a famous physicist who, in addition to being wildly entertaining and interesting, was well-known for solving particularly difficult problems that stumped his brilliant colleagues. His colleagues facetiously introduced the Feynman Algorithm:
1. Write down the problem
2. Think real hard
3. Write down the solution
Tyler Cowen: Cowen is an economist at George Mason University and host of the Conversations with Tyler podcast. He interviews an incredible diversity of guests in their respective fields, and somehow knows an incredible amount of things about seemingly everything.
Paul Erdos: Erdos was a brilliant mathematician who worked on an incredible breadth of topics. He was famous for often showing up randomly to fellow mathematicians' houses, his suitcase containing all his worldly possessions, and declaring, "My mind is open!"
Just like for an athlete's signature move, each of these individuals worked tirelessly through years of deliberate practice to develop these calling cards.
Many people can read. Few read consistently over years, and even fewer have consumed close to as many books as Tyler Cowen has. Virtually no one has read as voraciously and broadly across a multitude of subjects as he has.
These calling cards are also not straightforward skills, but often a composition of numerous skills. Feynman's incredible problem-solving ability isn't just raw intellect (in fact, he famously "only" had a tested IQ of 124), likely paired with an incredible sense of curiosity and irreverence.
Of course, it's often easier to figure out an athlete's calling card than the nerd's calling card. And, once you have a calling card in sports, it's clear how to use it. Juan Martin del Potro has one of the best forehands in tennis history; it doesn't take a genius coach to figure out that he should just hit more forehands. In athletics, if it works really well, you should just do more of it. Simple.
Though, perhaps it's actually just as simple in knowledge work.
Let’s say that you're great at analysis. A great first step is to find opportunities where you can use it. Leverage those opportunities into building an even greater analysis skillset.2 Rinse and repeat until you're analyzing something bigger and bigger, like the federal debt of the United States.
Sure, it often takes longer for a knowledge worker to figure out their comparative advantage.
But that's fine. Luckily, we nerds have the advantage of time on our side: the average knowledge worker's career is an order of magnitude longer than that of an athlete. Be patient — explore, train, and test your skills.
So how do you figure out your own calling card?
Ask other people: you'd be surprised how much is obvious to the people around you that you miss.
Ask yourself: what comes easily to you that is hard for others? What types of activities did you gravitate towards as a child, when there was no social pressure dictating your direction?
Where are the coaches for mathletes?
One of the most interesting things I see in NBA basketball games is the interaction between the players and the coach when the opposing team goes on a run. When the timeout is called, the players — these absolute giant instantiations of men — walk over to the bench, their dejected heads lowered, and gather around the coach, who is often a much smaller, more well-dressed, less sweaty person. These players tower over the coach and stoop their heads, as the coach draws diagrams on a whiteboard and yells and gesticulates wildly.
For some reason, I think of what ancient Stonehenge must have looked like: a person dancing within a circle of hulking objects, performing a sort of strange ritual.
Yet, inevitably after the timeout is called, the team's performance improves. Even though no NBA coach would be able to outperform their roster's worst player, they can have a tremendous impact on the quality of the team. At this stage in our respective basketball careers, I think even I could hold up favorably against Jeff Van Gundy in a game of 1 on 1, but I wouldn't hold a candle against his ability to lead and inspire a team to victory.
It shows you the power that a thoughtful, experienced, external perspective can have on your performance, even when you have reached the pinnacle of athletic performance.
So why don't nerds have coaches?
The best athletes have armies of coaches. Take our NBA player for instance. They have their team’s head coach. The head coach has a bunch of assistant coaches. The team will also employ a strength and development coach, who often leads a collection of athletic trainers and physiotherapists. In addition, there's often a sports science performance coach, nutritionists, psychologists, and more. Plus, individual players often employ their own set of separate coaches too.
Coaches fit seamlessly into an athlete's natural learning and development arc. When professional athletes are young, they often start their training in academies and training camps. Under the watchful eye of an army of coaches and trainers, they hone their skills to an even higher degree. If they're lucky enough to make the jump to professional sports, they have even better coaches and trainers to guide every step of their development.
Contrast that with knowledge workers. At least in the US, we have public education from kindergarten to high school, where we learn all the core subjects. If we're lucky, we get to go to college. But once we're done with formal schooling, we're tossed out into the real world and told to figure it out. Most of us get only one piece of feedback during our annual performance reviews, and we're managed by people who themselves were never trained in management.
So I repeat, why don't nerds have coaches?
Yes, it's certainly related to a money and resource question. It's not uncommon for an NBA player to spend more in one day than what the average American makes in a year, and NBA owners aren't exactly bereft of financial resources. Realistically, we're not going to have the same level of coaching for knowledge work as the best professional athletes — there's not enough money or time.
But my point about coaching is less about hiring fancy, expensive armies of coaches, but rather more about creating external feedback loops so we can improve our performance. Do not underestimate the power of feedback from an external perspective.
Here's something an athlete does that everyone can do: watch gameplay film. Athletes review film of their performances and of others in their field, to dissect their own weaknesses, detail their strengths, and learn from their competition. It doesn't even take an expert to analyze gameplay tape, nor is the benefit limited to top-level athletes.
Take me as an example. Thanks to a series of battles with my friend Sanjay, I started recording my tennis training sessions. After I watched the first video of my play, I was aghast. What was happening with my forehand? Was that really what my footwork looked like? And why was I moving so sluggishly on the court?
Editor’s note: These “highlights” are mostly me being destroyed by Sanjay.
When I realized these problems from watching film, I figured out my biggest weaknesses and what I needed to train.
I got better and better, and improved tremendously. And it was just through reviewing my own gameplay tape and training those weaknesses.
What is the gameplay tape for a knowledge worker?
One easy way is to record yourself. Find a friend to practice a difficult conversation, or record yourself presenting to an empty room.
I can guarantee that 99% of you will read this, nod to yourself — This makes sense!, and then never actually record yourself. If you’ve never done it before, there's something insanely painful and cringe-inducing about watching yourself on video. You will uncover speaking tics that you didn't know existed. You will be shocked at how you stumble through your words.
But, you will adapt your strategies as you figure out what works best for you. You will slowly gain confidence with each incremental practice session. And you will feel a profound satisfaction when you finally hear the marked difference in your speaking style.
Beyond the tangible improvement you'll have, one of the best parts of recording yourself is that it gives you a concrete representation of your improvement. When I watch my old recordings of my old presentations, I don't know whether to laugh or cry (probably a mix of both). However, it's especially gratifying to see the stark contrast between my current recordings against the old ones — there's a tremendous improvement.
In 2023, I had the chance to train with a former top-30 ATP player, Julio Peralta. I still got annihilated, but it sure was exhilarating and I learned a lot from it!
But don't just watch your own gametape. Watch other people practicing their craft. Study their habits and systems, and use that to improve your own. Use YouTube — it's not just for cat videos, memes, and over-the-top Mr. Beast videos — it is the world's best knowledge repository of peak human performance. YouTube gives us free access to the people in the world who are the best at what they do, demonstrate and teach their craft. You can watch how investors dissect businesses, how the best technical minds think through technical tradeoffs, and even how to take notes.
Athletes have been getting coaching and feedback for centuries. Knowledge workers should too.
At the end of the day, feedback — whether it's from a coach, your own reflection, or some other source — is the fuel for us to get better. There are so many different ways receive feedback:
Ask someone: When was the last time you asked someone for feedback to get better? A simple question to start with: "What is one thing I could be doing to do a better job?"
Find a coach: Find a coach for something tactical (executive presence, communication, etc.)
Record yourself: Like I pointed about above, it's often the most painful thing to do, but it has tremendously impactful benefits.
Spend time with high performers: Simply by spending time with high performers (and asking questions), you will get better.
By endurance we conquer
I used to struggle with writer's block.
I no longer do — and that's because I now reject the mere premise of writer's block.
Writing is hard. It is the effortful process of wrangling complex ideas in your head, colliding them against experiences you have in the world, and trying to spit out something intelligible and interesting to your readers. The idea that we'll reach an effortless state when we overcome this "writer's block" to compose our magnum opus is an utter fallacy.
Writing is like weightlifting. Weightlifting is hard and you have to struggle during a training session. Sure, sometimes you'll have good days and you'll be able to move the weight a lot better than most days. But obviously, you don't expect that to happen every single day. If someone told you that they had "weightlifting block" because they just didn't feel good, you'd probably laugh and tell them to push through it.3 It's the exact same thing in writing: the point of writing is to struggle against the writing and make yourself stronger through the struggle. It is the capacity to endure pain, to hone your craft through training.
I don't think this attitude is limited to writing, because it extends to all knowledge work. The best knowledge workers approach their work as a craft to hone, and by extension, realize that it's an exercise in pain endurance.
As my friend Cameron puts it, this is why clever people should lift — you can't clever your way around it. Even intelligence can be casted as will to think: as much as intelligence is about raw intellect, it’s more about epistemic honesty and the will to truly think.
Often, the difference between a top performer and a very good performer can be reduced to a mental component. In sports, we can all recall the athlete endowed with incredible physical attributes that fails to capitalize on their talents. It's similar in knowledge work, where there are some people who are so incredibly gifted, yet are hamstrung by their inability to weather adversity.
It's hard to know exactly what makes up that mental component, but this "mental game" is undoubtedly the part that separates the great from the merely good. And I claim that the mental game is largely just pain endurance.
It's managing through the extreme volatility of a career, bringing yourself back to earth after the sky-high elation and managing through inevitable suffering. Athletes also need to manage exogenous shocks like injuries, which can be career-ending. In many ways, I am grateful that thinking about AI and investing doesn’t have the same injury potential as deadlifting 1000 pounds.
Different athletes have different ways to endure and fight through their pain. Some of them are motivated by a childhood slight. Some of them are chasing history and want to carve their names into history. Some of them simply seek the pain to feel alive. It's probably a combination of all of the above, but there's one motivation that resonates with me the most: true genuine interest.
Novak Djokovic is the greatest tennis player of all time (as much as it pains me, a Federer fan, to say). When he was asked about the "secret" to his success, he responded:
“I like hitting the tennis ball.”
The greatest athletes have to endure hellish physical training, caustic public scrutiny and criticism, and so much more. The best ones are able to endure because they have an intrinsic interest in the sport they practice, an interest that outweighs the pain of the struggle.
Pain is unavoidable in the pursuit of excellence. The most realistic long-term solution is the one where you truly enjoy the day-to-day of your craft, whether it's basketball or programming — you choose the pain because it provides sustenance to you.
"We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret." — Jim Rohn
If there was no money involved, if there was no prestige, would you still practice your sport?
If you were the last person on earth, would you still do what you do?
It's obvious that I've found a lot of inspiration from the world of sport. In fact, I used to joke that I got my MBA because it was the closest I would ever be to the NBA.
But there's a tremendous amount of wisdom from studying great athletes. Observing their training habits, their dedication, their sacrifice; it's all inspirational.
The simplest lesson is that success in athletics is going to take a lot of discipline, reflection, and hard work. And even so, you still can't guarantee that you'll be successful.
For knowledge workers, we shouldn't expect our paths to be any different.
So we better enjoy hitting the ball.
Thank you to Vivian Yu for reviewing earlier drafts of this piece.
From Cal Newport’s Deep Questions podcast episode 278 “How to Think”.
This is the foundation of Cal Newport’s theory of career capital that he presents in his tremendously underrated book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You.
Wow, look, this is another gem from Cal Newport here!
This is excellent. I've spent a tremendous amount of time thinking about mastery and finding approaches to apply lessons from pro athletes to knowledge work (just finished reading about 800 pages on Kobe!)
This articulated it well and is a case for performance coaches. I hope you continue to write more on the subject!
P.S. I played tennis my whole life as well, and it also pains me to say Novak is the goat..
--
Btw, originally commented this on Kevin Gee's recent re-posting of this, but then realized it wasn't the original post