I was in a hotel room in Zurich, scrolling through practice methodology articles at midnight, when I stumbled across the story of Shawn Lane.
If you don’t know the name, Shawn Lane is widely regarded as the fastest and most technically precise guitarist who ever lived. Not the most famous — that title belongs to people who sold more records. But among guitar players, among the people who actually understand what’s happening on the fretboard, Lane occupies a category of his own. The kind of speed and precision he achieved shouldn’t have been physically possible.
What caught my attention wasn’t his ability. It was his method.
Because the way Shawn Lane built that inhuman speed was the exact opposite of what every practice guide I’d ever read recommended.
The Conventional Wisdom
The standard advice for building speed in any physical skill goes something like this: start slow, get it perfect at that tempo, then increase the speed by a small increment. Maybe five percent. Get it perfect at the new tempo. Increase again. Repeat.
The metronome approach. Gradual, methodical, incremental. Build the highway one meter at a time.
This is exactly how I approached card technique when I started. I’d practice a sleight slowly until it was clean, bump the speed up slightly, practice until clean again, bump up. Rinse and repeat. It felt disciplined. It felt correct. Every practice resource I’d encountered endorsed some version of this progression.
And it worked. Up to a point. Like everything else I’ve discussed in this practice series, the incremental approach produced results initially and then plateaued. I’d reach a speed that was maybe seventy percent of what a polished performance required, and the metronome method would stop producing gains. Each tiny increment would just introduce errors without the corresponding adaptation to fix them.
I assumed I’d hit my natural ceiling. Some people are fast, some people aren’t. Genetics. Hand size. Neural wiring. Whatever story you need to tell yourself when you’re stuck.
Then I read about Shawn Lane.
The Opposite Approach
Lane didn’t slowly turn the metronome up. He attempted to play faster than he could.
Not five percent faster than his current maximum. Significantly faster. He’d take a passage and try to play it at a speed that was frankly impossible for him at that moment. His fingers would stumble, notes would blur, accuracy would collapse. By any conventional standard, he was “practicing wrong.”
But something happened during those impossible attempts. His neuromuscular system was forced to find shortcuts, to reorganize its approach, to discover more efficient pathways simply because the demand was so far beyond the current supply. And when he stepped back to his previous maximum speed — the tempo that had felt like his ceiling — it suddenly felt manageable. Even easy.
The ceiling hadn’t moved because he’d slowly pushed against it from below. The ceiling moved because he’d launched himself past it, forced his system to operate in an entirely new range, and then stepped back to find that the old range had been recalibrated.
It’s not that the incremental approach is wrong. It’s that it addresses the wrong mechanism. Slow incremental increases maintain the existing neural framework and ask it to do slightly more. Lane’s approach broke the existing framework and forced the construction of a new one.
The Critical Caveat
Before I go further: Lane’s approach comes with a massive prerequisite that’s easy to overlook.
He had the fundamentals locked in. His basic technique — hand position, picking mechanics, fretting accuracy — was sound before he started pushing past his limits. The “Art of Practice” material is explicit about this: you must learn the basics correctly first. Then and only then do you train at your limits.
This isn’t a minor footnote. It’s the entire foundation. Attempting to play faster than you can with bad technique doesn’t produce adaptation. It produces injury. Or it reinforces terrible habits at high speed, which is worse than reinforcing them slowly because they become exponentially harder to undo.
Lane could attempt impossible speeds because his fundamental mechanics were solid. The system he was stressing was capable of adapting because its foundations were properly built. If the foundations are cracked, the stress just breaks them further.
I think of it as the “rip your arm off” warning. Trying to execute a sleight at twice your current speed with improper grip, bad angles, and sloppy mechanics isn’t Lane’s method. It’s a recipe for tendon inflammation and deeply grooved bad habits. The basics have to be right first. Then you push.
Testing It on Card Technique
I was fascinated enough to try Lane’s approach myself. Not with guitar — with cards.
I’d been working on a particular sequence that required speed and fluidity. Months of the metronome approach had gotten me to a respectable pace, but nowhere near performance speed. The gap between what I could do in a hotel room at my comfortable tempo and what needed to happen in front of an audience felt uncrossable.
Instead of bumping the speed up by five percent, I tried to execute the sequence at roughly one-and-a-half times my current maximum. Not a precise measurement — I wasn’t using an actual metronome for card work — but a deliberate, significant overshoot.
The first attempts were ugly. Cards went everywhere. The sequence bore almost no resemblance to what it was supposed to look like. My hands were trying to execute movements faster than my neural pathways could coordinate, and the result was chaos.
But I kept at it. Not for hours — maybe ten minutes of deliberate overspeed attempts, interspersed with returns to my normal pace.
And the returns to normal pace were where the magic happened. Not the magic you show audiences — the magic of neuromuscular recalibration. My normal pace, the speed that had felt like my maximum for weeks, suddenly felt slow. Almost leisurely. Like I had extra time between movements that hadn’t existed before.
Within a week of this approach, I’d blown past the plateau that months of incremental work hadn’t budged.
Why It Works
I’m not a neuroscientist, but the adaptation principle I’ve been writing about in this series explains the mechanism well enough.
The incremental approach — five percent faster, stabilize, five percent faster — asks the existing neural framework to do slightly more. The adaptation signal is weak because the gap between demand and capacity is small. The system makes minor adjustments. Progress is real but glacial.
The overspeed approach — attempt fifty percent faster, fail spectacularly, step back — creates a massive gap between demand and capacity. The adaptation signal is powerful. The nervous system doesn’t make minor adjustments; it fundamentally reorganizes. New pathways are explored. More efficient motor patterns are discovered not through careful construction but through the necessity of survival.
When you step back to your old speed after your nervous system has been forced to grapple with a much higher speed, the old speed exists in a completely different context. It’s no longer at the edge of your capacity. It’s well within the range your system has now been exposed to, even if it couldn’t actually perform at the higher range yet.
Think of it this way: if you’ve been driving at a hundred kilometers per hour on the highway and then you exit into a fifty zone, fifty feels like walking. The car hasn’t changed. Your perception has recalibrated based on the higher demand.
Lane’s approach recalibrates the perception of your nervous system by exposing it to demands far beyond its current capacity, even if it can’t meet those demands yet.
The Rhythm of Push and Recover
The overspeed approach isn’t just “always try to go faster.” There’s a rhythm to it that I had to learn through trial and error.
Push phase: attempt the technique at significant overspeed. Accept the chaos. The goal isn’t clean execution — it’s exposing your system to higher demands. This phase is short. Five to ten minutes. Beyond that, fatigue compounds the chaos and you stop getting useful adaptation signals.
Recovery phase: return to your normal speed. Notice the recalibration. Practice at the speed that now feels more manageable. Clean up the execution. Lock in the gains. This phase can be longer — twenty to thirty minutes of quality work at a speed that feels newly accessible.
Integration phase: test whether the gains have stuck by attempting the technique at a speed between your old maximum and the overspeed target. This is where incremental progress actually shows up. The gap between what you could do before and what you can do now becomes measurable.
Then repeat. Push beyond the new maximum. Recover. Integrate.
I found that two or three push-recovery cycles per practice session was the sweet spot. More than that and the quality of the push phase deteriorated. My nervous system needed time between sessions to consolidate the new patterns.
The Consulting Parallel
My consulting brain saw the broader principle almost immediately.
In business strategy, there’s a concept called stretch goals — targets set deliberately beyond what the team believes is achievable. The purpose isn’t necessarily to hit the target. The purpose is to force the team to abandon its current framework for thinking about the problem, because incremental thinking can’t get you there. The stretch goal breaks the existing mental model and forces construction of a new one.
Lane’s approach is stretch goals for your nervous system.
And just like stretch goals in business, they only work when the fundamentals are sound. A startup with no product-market fit doesn’t benefit from a stretch revenue target. It benefits from getting the basics right. A magician with bad grip and poor angles doesn’t benefit from overspeed practice. They benefit from getting the technique correct at slow speed first.
The sequence matters: build the foundation, then stress the structure, then let it adapt.
What I Wish I’d Known Earlier
If I could go back to those early hotel room sessions, here’s what I’d tell myself.
First: the metronome approach isn’t wrong. It’s just Phase 1. Use it to build correct technique at manageable speeds. Don’t skip this. The fundamentals phase is non-negotiable.
Second: when the metronome approach stops producing gains, don’t assume you’ve hit your ceiling. You’ve hit the ceiling of that method, not of your capability. Switch to overspeed work.
Third: overspeed practice should feel uncomfortable and messy. If it feels clean, you haven’t pushed far enough beyond your current maximum. The chaos is the point. It’s the signal that triggers reorganization.
Fourth: the recovery phase is where the gains actually consolidate. Don’t just push and push without returning to your working speed to let the recalibration express itself. The push creates the potential. The recovery realizes it.
Fifth: keep the overspeed sessions short and intense. This isn’t about volume. It’s about signal strength. Ten minutes of genuine overspeed work creates more adaptation than an hour of incremental grinding.
The Bigger Lesson
Shawn Lane taught me something that extends beyond card technique or guitar speed.
Our intuitive approach to limits is to push gently against them from below. A little harder each day. Patient, methodical, incremental. And this approach works — until it doesn’t. Until the adaptation mechanism needs a bigger signal than incremental pressure can provide.
Sometimes the way past a limit isn’t to keep nudging. It’s to launch yourself past it, let the chaos reorganize your system, and then step back to find the limit has moved.
The fastest guitarist in the world didn’t get there by turning the metronome up one notch at a time. He got there by attempting the impossible, failing spectacularly, and discovering that the impossible had redefined what was possible.
I’m still working on applying this principle consistently. It’s counterintuitive every single time. My consulting brain wants precision and control. Overspeed practice is neither precise nor controlled. It’s organized chaos — emphasis on chaos.
But the results don’t lie. And in a hotel room at midnight, when the gap between where you are and where you need to be feels insurmountable, knowing that the gap itself is the tool — that attempting the impossible is the mechanism for making the merely difficult feel easy — that knowledge changes everything.