how many people have seen curves that look like these progress against time right everywhere reading 00:48:14 scores test scores people love these yay oh no yay oh no it's bad because our 00:48:32 nervous system is only set up for relative change and in fact there's cause for cheering if that's the threshold but in fact for reading 00:48:43 threshold is this this is all oh no doesn't matter whether it goes up or not because there are many many things that where you have to get to the real 00:48:58 version of the thing before you're doing it at all in the 21st century it doesn't have help to read just a little bit you have to be fluent at it so this is a 00:49:09 huge problem and once you draw the threshold in there immediately converts this thing that looked wonderful into a huge qualitative gap and the gap is 00:49:20 widening and we have two concepts that are enemies of what we need to do perfect and better right so better is a 00:49:36 way of getting fake success we had improvement see it all the time it's the ultimate quarterly report we had improvements here and perfect is 00:49:51 tough to get in this world so both of those are really bad so what you want is what's actually needed and the exquisite skill here which I'm going to use these 00:50:06 two geniuses Thakur and Engels to labor it I'm going to call that the sweet spot the way you make progress here is you pick the thing that is just over that threshold that is qualitatively better 00:50:21 than all the rest of the crap you can do you can spend billions turning around and once you do that you widen up you give yourself a little blue plane to 00:50:34 operate in and for a while everything you do in there is something that is actually going to be meaningful