How to become one of the Greatest of All Time: Becoming a GOAT- Part 1

When you think of the word “GOAT”, the Greatest of All Time, different names come to mind depending on your area of interest.

Book lovers would agree Jane Austen is up there. The GOAT would be Messi, Ronaldo, or Pele for football fans.

In marketing, figures like David Ogilvy, Philip Kotler, and Seth Godin are often considered the GOATs.

Art lovers would cite icons like Picasso, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Van Gogh. while music lovers might name Michael Jackson, Eminem, The Beatles, and, for Nigerians, Fela Kuti and Onyeka Onwenu, as their GOATs.

Contemplating these Goats,

Have you ever wondered what made them attain the status of GOAT? And if you know them,

DO YOU DARE to achieve such greatness yourself?

Can you become one of the GOATs? Without bleating — pun intended.

While I lack the insights of a cognitive psychologist nor an animal science professor on the subject. I have not conducted studies on GOATs, but I would share the closest thing to a GOAT that has been studied. An Elite Performer. In simpler terms, an expert. My in-depth exploration of the subject stems from my drive to become an expert. This exploration began with the works of the late Professor Anders K. Ericsson, whose significant contributions, especially in his book ‘Peak.’

Elite Performers are top performers in a field. They are the most skilled and accomplished sets of people who have deep knowledge of a field and are often regarded as leaders in an organization and later on leaders in a field. They are synonymized with Experts. They are the crème de la crème, who go on to become GOATs. You don’t attain the status of a GOAT without elite performance.

Pondering these thoughts, a more fundamental question pops up:

Can you become an Elite Performer?

And the answer to that is: Yes, you can.

Is it going to be easy? No. And you knew that already. I bet you have an idea of who an Elite performer or an expert is, even if you can’t always point to the particular moment the “expert” status was attained. You know how hard it is to attain. You also know such a person has to work at being exceptionally skilled to be considered an expert.

But when most people are asked: “What makes an expert?” We dumb down the criteria for achieving expertise to a few things like experience, passion, working hard, or talent.

For instance, People assume you become experts automatically after years or decades of experience, emphasizing the popularized 10,000 hours of practice or that people become experts by working hard and smart, by being consistent, or through finding their talent or passion.

These assumptions are not entirely wrong. But they are insufficient in answering the question of what makes an elite performer. It is like putting puzzle pieces together without seeing the full picture- some parts make sense and the others leave you scratching your head in confusion, ultimately changing your perception of the picture.

Some people have a passion for something yet never attain any sort of expertise around it. For all his ingenuity, Benjamin Franklin never mastered the game of chess to a competitive level regardless of how passionate he was about it.

Consistently working hard at doing the same thing over and over again, and gaining experience along the way, doesn’t make you an expert in a field. It merely makes you very good at doing that task. A guitarist that only plays the same set of 5 songs over and over again in the same way or progression from the moment they decided to become a guitarist wouldn’t be an expert guitarist but an expert at playing those same songs in the same way with a guitar.

And that hardly screams expertise.

We also can’t attribute the success of elite performers to mere talent or genes.

Consider Mozart. Was he born with musical wiring or genes that allowed him to compose the masterpieces he created? I think not. He wasn’t born with music-specialized brain matter, nor was Magnus Carlsen born with a brain built for chess. However, this is not to diminish the impact of talents or genes in the journey to becoming an elite performer.

I prefer to term it an advantage, as I did in my article, “I am not successful yet, these are my thoughts on successful people”, where I delve into advantages and how some individuals possess them while others don’t. It remains true that the nature of upbringing, genes, environment, luck, those we meet, those we learn from, opportunities, and early exposure can provide merited or unmerited advantages that aid individuals in becoming elite performers but I wouldn’t call that talent, even if it did exist in the real sense of it.

Some people are ordinary in so much that they lack any sort of talent yet grow to become elite performers. As a child, Einstein was considered slow and mentally handicapped by his teachers, yet he defied expectations to become the genius of the 20th century. So being talented or not doesn’t necessarily add or take away much from achieving elite performance.

As Professor Ericsson asserted in his book Peak, Everybody has the potential to become an Adele, a Steph Curry — an elite performer. This underscores the central theme that the basic determinant of elite performance is the ability to develop a skill, a potential inherent virtually in every able-bodied person.

The subject of developing skills is not strange as you have had to learn some basic skills such as reading, writing, singing, drawing, driving, etc. at some point in your life.

But what differentiates you from Elite performers is how you practice.

When learning a skill, most people follow a certain pattern: seek guidance, practice enough times up to a level of competence, and then plateau.

The growth stops and they get stuck. However, Elite Performers consistently challenge themselves, pushing beyond their comfort zones until their skill level becomes extraordinary and, at some point, seemingly magical compared to the rest of us — Sheep, who plateau in the comfort of familiarity.

They take it to the next level by consistently putting themselves in the line of hard fire-sleeping in, waking up, and embracing discomfort, frustration, and patience to grow.

You must, however, not forget that the goal is to become the GOAT (Greatest of All Time), not just an expert.

But before I dive headlong into the nitty gritty of “Becoming a GOAT”,

I divide the process into three stages:

a passive learner -> an elite performer -> GOAT (One of the Greats)

Each stage is a prerequisite for the other.

Without intentionally moving from a passive learning mindset, you cannot progress to be an expert, let alone become the GOAT. Every step is deliberate. It would be too much of a coincidence to achieve greatness without purposeful learning.

Foremost, in the transition from passive learning to elite performance,

it is essential to understand the process of forming and strengthening neural connections and how it all fits into achieving elite performance.

Building the Mental Picture

As we acquire new knowledge through learning and practice, we organize this information into recognizable patterns for swift recall.

Initially, the brain makes a fresh neural connection as it gets new information. But that neural connection would naturally get weakened with time, causing a loss of access to that information.

Revisiting the information becomes important to strengthen the connection for quicker and easier recall.

For example, the more you read a particular subject, the more you remember what is in it. When you first read a particular text on a subject you make a new neural connection, and as time goes on you forget that text. But when you revisit it, you recall that information better than before because the neural connection has been reinforced.

While reading this article, if you had to repeatedly check the meaning of each word to understand the meaning that each sentence conveys because your brain can’t recall new information. You would not only hate reading, but you would hate learning, as the experience would likely be unpleasant.

If a strong neural connection is formed for every new piece of information you come across, you will accumulate useless data etched into the walls of your memory with no active use.

The strengthening of these neural connections over time pushes access to this information into the subconscious, eliminating the need for active engagement of the brain compared to initial learning.

For instance, a pianist plays scales repeatedly until the fingers move instinctively across the keys. This process might be an initially unpleasant experience, but with time becomes instinctual.

Let’s do a little exercise:

Make a mental note of how long it took you to understand this sentence.

“heygo ingth ewe mallgr ocer iest ot om orroware getto”

Except it is not a sentence but a string of alphabets that doesn’t mean anything. So, Google Translate won’t be helping you on this one, as it is not a language.

How about this?

“Hey going the we mall groceries to tomorrow are get to. “

It seems a little clearer but you still don’t get the message being passed and some of you, I bet, might be challenged to rearrange the words in patterns you recognize.

If it was written

‘Hey, we are going to the mall to get groceries tomorrow”

You only need a second to perfectly understand the meaning of that sentence.

This exercise reinforces this concept, demonstrating how arranging seemingly random letters into recognizable patterns aids understanding. And as we gain more information, experience, and skills, these patterns create a mental picture.

Imagine presenting the same sentence

‘Hey, we are going to the mall to get groceries tomorrow’

to an average English college student and a seasoned novelist for a story assignment.

The difference in the level of detail between the two in conceiving the story would be striking. The novelist can craft a horror story from that simple sentence, building a complex narrative with twists, turns, and character arcs.

They will consider factors such as prior discussions, character backgrounds, personalities, and motivations, enriching the setting for a more immersive scenario.

This level of depth is not easily achieved by the average student unless they have built expertise in storytelling. However, it’s important to note that the novelist’s expertise is specific to fiction writing; they might face challenges in non-fiction genres like historical or journalistic writing.

This underscores that expertise is often domain-specific and not easily transferrable between vastly different fields, highlighting the unique nature of expertise in each domain

This phenomenon of forming, strengthening, and pushing neural connections into the subconscious is an essential blueprint for mastering a skill and, ultimately, mastering a field.

The objective is to elevate the level of detail of the mental picture in the subconscious.

This entails continuous learning, unlearning, and relearning various aspects of the field, each contributing to a more profound understanding and a richer mental representation.

This serves as evidence or metric of one’s level of expertise.

But the question remains:

What makes an Elite Performer?

Continue here

References

• “Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise” by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
• “Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success” by Matthew Syed
• “Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment” by George Leonard
• “Mastery” by Robert Greene
• “Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts” by Ryan Holiday
• “Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction” by Derek Thompson
• “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi