There’s a meeting I sat through early in my consulting career that I think about constantly. The client was a mid-sized manufacturing company, and they were losing market share. Their response, for two years running, had been to work harder. More shifts. More overtime. More output. They’d increased production by forty percent and their market share had continued to decline.
The problem wasn’t effort. Their people were working incredibly hard. The problem was that they were making more of a product the market no longer wanted in the quantities it once had. The harder they worked, the more efficiently they produced something fewer people were buying. Two years of maximum effort in the wrong direction had left them exhausted and worse off than when they started.
The fix wasn’t more effort. It was a strategic pivot — a fundamental rethinking of what they were producing and for whom. It took about three months to design and begin implementing. Within a year, the market share trend had reversed. Not because anyone worked harder. Because the work was pointed in the right direction.
I tell this story because it’s exactly what happens in practice. And it took me longer to see the parallel than I’d like to admit.
The Default Response
When I read the survey data from “Art of Practice” — five hundred athletes, artists, and performers across disciplines — one finding was particularly stark: the overwhelming first response to stalled progress was to increase effort.
Practice more hours. Do more repetitions. Add more sessions per week. Push harder. Grind through it. The implicit belief being: progress is a function of effort, so if progress has stopped, the effort must be insufficient.
This belief is so deeply embedded in how most of us think about skill development that it barely registers as a belief at all. It feels like common sense. It’s reinforced by every motivational poster, every training montage, every well-meaning coach who says “you just need to put in the work.” The effort narrative is the water we swim in. And like all water, it’s invisible to the fish.
But the survey data said something different. Over seventy percent of respondents had tried the “practice more” approach to breaking through plateaus. Over sixty percent reported that it had failed. Not that it was slow. Not that it was partial. Failed. More effort had not produced more progress. In many cases, it had produced less — through fatigue, frustration, injury, and the psychological erosion of working hard with nothing to show for it.
The Consulting Lens
My consulting background gave me a framework for understanding this that I don’t think I would have reached otherwise.
In strategy work, we make a fundamental distinction between effectiveness and efficiency. Efficiency is doing things right — minimizing waste, maximizing output per unit of input. Effectiveness is doing the right things — ensuring that the activities you’re optimizing are the ones that actually produce the outcomes you want.
Most practice advice is about efficiency. Practice with focus. Minimize distractions. Use your time well. Don’t waste repetitions. This is all valid. But it’s all in the “doing things right” category. It assumes that what you’re practicing is correct and that the approach you’re using is sound. It optimizes within a given strategy.
Almost nobody talks about effectiveness in practice. Whether what you’re practicing is the right thing. Whether the approach you’re using is the best approach. Whether the entire strategic framework underlying your practice is producing the results you want or just producing the feeling of productive effort.
The difference matters enormously. You can practice with perfect efficiency — focused, disciplined, consistent, well-structured — and still make no progress if the strategy is wrong. You can optimize the hell out of an approach that doesn’t work and end up with a beautifully optimized version of failure.
My Own Wrong Strategy
I’ll give you a concrete example from my own experience, because this isn’t abstract theory to me. It’s something I lived through.
For the first year or so of my magic practice, my approach to learning a new technique was straightforward: watch the tutorial, try to replicate what I saw, and repeat until I could do it. When I got stuck, I’d slow down and repeat more carefully. When I was really stuck, I’d watch the tutorial again and repeat some more.
This is the most intuitive possible approach to learning a physical skill. See it, try it, repeat it. It’s what almost everyone does. And for the first stage of learning — going from zero to basic competence — it works reasonably well. The early gains are real. Progress is visible. The approach feels validated.
Then the plateau arrives. The technique is partially learned but inconsistent. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The success rate hovers around fifty or sixty percent and refuses to budge. And the natural response is: repeat more. Practice longer. Try harder. Put in the hours.
I did this for months with a specific set of techniques I was trying to master. Hours upon hours in hotel rooms. Repeating. Refining. Focusing. And the success rate barely moved. I was efficiently executing a strategy that had stopped producing results, and my response to the lack of results was to execute it harder.
The breakthrough came not from more effort but from a strategic insight. Instead of repeating the full technique over and over, I needed to isolate the specific moment within the technique where it was breaking down. The failure wasn’t random — it was happening at the same point every time. Once I identified that point and practiced just that micro-movement in isolation, progress resumed almost immediately. The success rate went from sixty percent to eighty-five percent in about two weeks.
Two weeks of the right strategy accomplished what months of the wrong strategy hadn’t. The total practice time was probably less — significantly less. But the practice was pointed in the right direction.
The Arrow at the Bow
The “Art of Practice” framework uses a metaphor that captures this perfectly: the arrow at the bow.
When an archer releases an arrow, a tiny change in angle at the point of release — even a single degree — creates an enormous difference in where the arrow lands at distance. At the bow, one degree is barely perceptible. At the target, fifty meters away, it’s the difference between a bullseye and a complete miss.
Strategy works the same way. A small strategic shift — changing what you practice, how you structure your sessions, how you identify and address weaknesses — is a tiny adjustment at the point of release. But the trajectory it sets extends over months and years. The cumulative difference between practicing with the right strategy and practicing with the wrong strategy, compounded over time, is not incremental. It’s transformative.
And here’s the thing about strategic adjustments: they’re cheap. Understanding a new approach takes minutes. Reading about a better method takes an hour. Implementing a strategic shift in your next practice session takes no additional time at all — you’re still practicing for the same duration, you’re just doing it differently.
Compare this to the effort approach. Doubling your practice hours costs you double the time. Working harder exacts a physical and psychological toll. Grinding through plateaus burns motivation and goodwill. The effort approach is expensive and, as the survey data shows, frequently ineffective.
Strategy is cheap and, when it’s the right strategy, extraordinarily effective. Yet most people reach for effort first. Every time.
Why We Default to Effort
This is worth understanding, because the pull toward effort over strategy is not stupidity. It’s psychology.
Effort is visible. You can see yourself practicing. You can count the hours. You can feel the fatigue. Effort produces tangible evidence that you’re doing something about the problem. And when you’re stuck, the desire to do something — anything — is overwhelming. More effort is always available as an option. It requires no analysis, no reflection, no vulnerability. It just requires showing up and grinding.
Strategy, by contrast, is invisible. A strategic shift might look like sitting quietly and thinking about your practice structure. It might look like reading something. It might look like doing less work, not more. And it requires confronting the possibility that your approach has been wrong — that the hours you’ve already invested were invested in the wrong direction. That’s an uncomfortable thought. It’s much more comfortable to believe that the approach is right and you just need more of it.
There’s also a cultural dimension. We valorize effort. The story of the person who worked hardest is more compelling than the story of the person who thought most strategically. “She practiced eight hours a day” is a more dramatic narrative than “She spent twenty minutes redesigning her practice structure and then practiced two hours a day more effectively.” We’ve been taught since childhood that hard work is the answer to everything. Strategy sounds like a shortcut, and shortcuts sound like cheating.
But this is a misunderstanding. Strategy isn’t a shortcut. It’s the thing that makes effort productive. Without strategy, effort is undirected energy — heat without light. With the right strategy, the same amount of effort (or less) produces dramatically better results.
Five Minutes That Change Five Years
There’s a line from the practice literature that I come back to constantly: “People are willing to practice hours for decades without ever taking five minutes on learning how progress actually works.”
That’s not an exaggeration. It’s a description of what I saw in the survey data and what I experienced myself. Hours upon hours devoted to the activity of practice. Almost zero time devoted to understanding the process of improvement. The assumption being that practice itself is the process, and that understanding the process requires nothing beyond doing the activity and logging the time.
Imagine applying this logic to anything else. Imagine cooking for twenty years without ever reading a recipe. Imagine driving cross-country without ever looking at a map. Imagine running a business without ever studying your market. You’d get somewhere — random effort produces some results — but the gap between where you’d end up and where you could have ended up would be enormous.
Five minutes spent understanding how adaptation works. Five minutes spent learning about the sweet spot of difficulty. Five minutes spent thinking about whether you’re practicing at the right level, on the right material, with the right structure. These are the five-minute investments that redirect years of practice.
I think about all those hotel room sessions in my first year — hundreds of hours of genuine effort, much of it pointed in the wrong direction. If I’d spent one evening reading about practice strategy before starting, I’d have saved months of stalled progress. The effort was never the problem. The direction was the problem. And the direction could have been corrected with a trivially small investment of time.
The Leverage Point
In consulting, we use the concept of leverage points — places in a system where a small intervention produces a large effect. The leverage point in practice isn’t effort. It’s strategy.
A strategic shift costs nothing in terms of time or energy. It requires only the willingness to step back, examine your approach, and ask: is this working? And if it isn’t: what could I do differently? Not more. Differently.
The survey showed that most practitioners never take this step. They stay locked in the effort paradigm, working harder at the same approach, like my manufacturing client running extra shifts to produce more of what nobody was buying. And they experience the same result: exhaustion and stagnation.
The few respondents who had broken through multiple plateaus shared a common trait. They’d all, at some point, made a fundamental strategic shift. They’d changed not just what they practiced but how they thought about practice. They’d moved from effort-first to strategy-first. And once they made that shift, their trajectory changed permanently.
I’m not saying effort doesn’t matter. It does. You have to show up. You have to do the work. You have to put in the repetitions. But effort is the minimum requirement, not the differentiator. Everyone who’s serious about their craft puts in effort. What separates those who improve continuously from those who plateau permanently isn’t how hard they work. It’s how intelligently they work.
Strategy first. Then effort. Not the other way around.
This is the principle that ties together everything in this series. The compound improvement, the survey findings, the specific practice methods — they’re all strategic insights. Small adjustments at the bow that produce massive differences at the target. And any of them can be implemented in the time it takes to read a blog post and walk to the next practice session.
That’s where the real leverage lives. Not in how many hours you log. In whether those hours are pointed at the right target.