When you actually scratch the surface of a great performer, when you actually look into what made a Hemingway or a Jordan or a Baryshnikov, what you will invariably find is an elite environment. A bunch of relationships, a bunch of connection. Oh, […] Mr. Hemingway? He’s a great writer. Well, who taught him to love words? What models served him as he began to develop? What kind of environment was he in? And when you begin to take this environmental lens and put it on, it opens up new opportunities for leadership. It’s really in the end about creating conditions where people can grow together.

There’s a great saying in the Tao Te Ching, where there’s a good leader, people say, “What a good leader that is.” But where there’s a great leader, people say, “We did it ourselves.”

I spent 5 years visiting talent hotbeds all over the world, like places that produced impossible numbers of talented performers. A Russian tennis club that produced more top 25 players than the entire United States or a Bulgarian chess club. And the places that I visited had a sort of common features in their environment that I saw over and over again. The first thing is that they were kind of junky. I started to call them chicken wire Harvards. You know, you’d go to the music camp and there’d be like cinder blocks holding up the stairs and the camp hadn’t been repaired in a long time. They didn’t put their attention on creating a luxurious environment. They explicitly did not. They actually kept it very spartan. An elite development environment is not one where every luxury is given to you. It’s a place of work. It’s a place of craft.

[At] Meadowmount School of Music, they would take a sheet of music that they’re learning, and this is a place where some of the top musicians on the planet have trained. They would take their their sheet music and cut it into strips, each line. Cut it up and mix them up in a bowl. Pull one out, play it, and try to learn bit by bit, chunk by chunk.

I call it the rule of 20%. If you’re making mistakes about 20% of the time, you’re probably in the sweet spot. If you’re not making any mistakes, you are not learning. If you’re making 80% percent mistakes, you’re not in the sweet spot. That’s pretty sour to be there. And the great irony of the sweet spot is that it feels kind of bitter. It’s really hard to hang out making 80% success and 20% mistakes. It’s hard. So, it takes that extra bit of focus. It takes that, what they would call, deliberate practice. There was this embrace of struggle, where the struggle was validated, the struggle was expected, the struggle was noble.

There was also this sense that um you could steal ideas. There wasn’t a sense that everything was individual, like that you had to figure out your way to do it. It was a sense you could borrow and beg and steal ideas from other people. An elite environment where a person has the opportunity to learn from others, to stare, to stare and learn. That’s really the first moment of deep practice when we look at a skill and say, “I want to do that.” And kind of fall in love with it. Fall in love with that baseball swing, fall in love with that poem, fall in love with that music, fall in love with that dance move. To really take it inside yourself. And that’s that same pattern that I saw. A social environment where you can stare and learn. A place where you’re not focused on yourself, but you’re using other people’s ideas. And a place where struggle is not just not just accepted, but validated and made noble.

You know, one of the greatest mysteries in the world is why did the Renaissance happen? Why did the Renaissance happen in Italy at that time? And there’s all kinds of reasons historians give. Oh, it happened you know, because Florence was emptied out by the plague and because the Medici existed. But when all those all those reasons also happened in other places, why was it there? And what you find out when you dig into that, is that Florence was where craft guilds evolved.

A guild was a workshop where young people were brought in and taught the craft of mixing paint and carving stone and making frescoes and preparing pigments. And they would get hundreds of reps, thousands of reps, thousands of hours spent learning about the fundamentals of their craft. Each one of those reps putting them into that zone of deep practice. That’s the kind of environment that’s an elite development environment. It’s not one where they got put in a kind of a country club environment and given lessons from painters. It’s ones where they were working every day with other people on real projects, you know, learning as they went. First as a young apprentice learning how to prepare the surface, then mixing the paints, learning how the medium worked, watching great masters at work. They’re staring, they’re struggling, and they’re stealing. And that to me is an elite environment.

I think the most mind-blowing thing that I see people astonished by is the compounding effect. If you improve 1% a day at piano, at public speaking, at dance, at at at whatever you’re trying to improve at. 1% a day for a year, by the end of that year you’re 37 times better than when you started. Compounding, exponential growth is mind-blowing. And so that’s why I think we’ve all had experiences in our lives where we’ve had people around us who’ve just took taken off like rocket ships. Kids in our neighborhood who have grown up to be incredible musicians maybe, or people we used to go to high school with who are very unimpressive who are now incredibly impressive in terms of their skill and their talent level. And that speaks really to all that potential that’s that’s that’s right there waiting for you when you take off that individual focus when you start looking at it through a more holistic kind of ecological lens. When you stop treating talent as a magical gift and start treating it as something you can grow.

The question this leads us to is how do you get that’s a big project like growing that much skill spending that much time it’s not an easy thing to spend all that time at the edge of your ability. What makes someone do that? And the answer is ignition. We tend to think of motivation is this internal trait and yes it feels that way but in fact it’s about this relationship this interaction that we have with the culture around us. Motivation doesn’t happen from the inside out it always happens from the outside in. When we see someone that we want to become when we see some a vision of our future self that is what unlocks motivation. Somebody who is sort of like a person on the horizon toward which we want to travel.

There’s all kinds of fascinating experiments that that that they’ve done to do this. One of my favorites is this birthday experiment. They have a class read a biography of a mathematician and it gives some information about the mathematician. It talks about where they were born talks about how they developed and at the end of it as part of the bio they give the mathematician’s birthday.

But here’s the twist for half of the students the birthday of the mathematician matched their actual birthday. The experimenters made it match. And then they gave everybody in that experiment a math test. Like okay you read about this mathematician how hard will you work on the math test? And the people’s whose birthday matched worked three times as hard on the math test. There was an unsolvable problem on the math test and they spent three three times as much time working on that problem. Which is kind of crazy cuz all it was was just this little moment like you and the math teacher are connected. This little guitar string inside them got plucked. Like, oh, that math teacher is connected to me in some way. And that social connection unlocked energy. And that’s how we’re built. When we see something that we really connect with in our windshield, that we feel that guitar string get plucked, it unlocks energy. And that’s that moment of ignition.

If you’re a new employee at Pixar on your first day, you come to an auditorium and you sit there and Ed Catmull tells you a couple things. He makes a very short speech. The speech goes like this. Whatever you did before, you’re a movie maker now. We need you to help us make our films better. That’s the end of the speech. It’s a very short speech.

And then they have these things where they’ll bring everybody together and watch versions, rough versions of the Pixar films. The whole company, baristas come together, engineers, IT folks, and they watch them and they they ask for suggestions. Do you notice anything could be better? And I met an IT guy who had suggested a badge on the character in Up. They had some like funny message in his in his scout badges. There was a boy scout in the movie Up. And the IT guy had raised his hand and made a suggestion and they had put it in the movie. It’s about creating a moment where you’re inviting someone in, inviting someone in to play a role of active contribution to that to that goal, to that task, to that larger thing.