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Insights From Decoding Greatness by Ron Friedman: Collect

There are three ways to attain greatness: leverage talent, practice extensively, or reverse engineer greatness. Reverse engineering greatness involves collecting examples of great work, analyzing them to uncover common patterns and structures, then using those blueprints to guide your own work. Specific techniques for reverse engineering include copyworking great works, outlining works backwards to identify their structure, and contrasting great and good works to see what distinguishes greatness. Iterating blueprints over time by incorporating new influences helps keep standards of greatness evolving.

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Shubham Jadhav Gujjar
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178 views

Insights From Decoding Greatness by Ron Friedman: Collect

There are three ways to attain greatness: leverage talent, practice extensively, or reverse engineer greatness. Reverse engineering greatness involves collecting examples of great work, analyzing them to uncover common patterns and structures, then using those blueprints to guide your own work. Specific techniques for reverse engineering include copyworking great works, outlining works backwards to identify their structure, and contrasting great and good works to see what distinguishes greatness. Iterating blueprints over time by incorporating new influences helps keep standards of greatness evolving.

Uploaded by

Shubham Jadhav Gujjar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Insights 

from Decoding Greatness by Ron Friedman 
 
Most people see two ways to greatness: leverage a talent or practice more than anyone else. But there is a third way to attain greatness: 
reverse engineer greatness.  

Great work and great performances contain a blueprint, that if uncovered, will save you hours of practice and allow you to leap past 
people more talented than you. Start reverse engineering greatness by collecting examples and then using various techniques to decode 
greatness to discover an underlying blueprint. 

Collect 
Most masters were collectors of other masterworks: David Bowie collected records, Julia Child collected cookbooks, and Van Gogh had 
more than 1000 Japanese prints to his name despite being incredibly poor.  

Award‐winning chef Michelle Bernstein tells aspiring master chefs to spend whatever money they have on eating at great restaurants and 
expose themselves to greatness. Friedman says, “Studies indicate that simply consuming examples with an underlying structure leads you to 
detect their patterns, even when you’re not consciously trying to learn a thing. It’s a process cognitive psychologists call implicit learning.” 

Create a greatness library. If you're a marketer or a writer, start a Google Doc and capture great headlines or excellent openings to articles. 
If you're a stand‐up comic or aspiring podcaster, start an audio library with clips of the greatest jokes and interviews.  

Decode 
Decoding great work requires uncovering a structure underlying great work. Here are three effective techniques you can use to uncover 
hidden blueprints to greatness: 

Copyworking 
Study an exceptional piece of work or a remarkable performance, and then recreate it from memory, 
word for word or movement by movement. Copyworking will teach you the stylistic tendencies and 
organizational decisions of extraordinary people in your field, alive or dead.  

 If you're an aspiring athlete, study and mimic the practice routine of your favorite athlete to get a feel for how they prepare for 
competition. As you copy their movements from memory, ask yourself, “How does this contribute to greatness?”  
 If you're an aspiring chess master, study masterful games and recreate them on the board from memory to get a feel for a 
Grandmaster’s decision‐making process. 

Reverse outlining 
Great creators go from outline to finished product. Your job is to work your way back from a finished 
product to an outline. By working backward, you can craft a blueprint to do great work.  

When you hear a great speech, watch a great video, or listen to a great interview, imagine an outline the 
creator could have used. For example, if you're listening to the most popular TED Talk of all time, “Do schools kill creativity?” by Sir Ken 
Robinson, identify the structure: Introduction (13%), Thesis (2%), Anecdotes to support the thesis (21%), Explain status quo (25%), Discuss 
current challenge (5%), Potential solution (10%), Close with an inspiration story (25%). Then, collect metrics:  

 Number of times the thesis was repeated: 3 
 Number of questions posed: 25 
 Percentage of script devoted to stories: 35%, persuasive arguments: 52%, supporting data and facts: 1%. 

Now, you have a rough blueprint to craft a great speech. 

Contrasting 
Take a piece of work from your greatness collection and put it next to a similar work that is good but not 
great. Then ask, “What's the difference?” and “What makes the great work special?”  

Note the differences between the good and the great in a greatness notebook. After several months of doing this exercise, find patterns in 
your notebook and collect the common insights to generate a greatness checklist that you can use before starting your next project.  

Evolve 
Copyworking, reverse outlining, and contrasting are reliable ways to discover a greatness formula. However, you cannot simply follow that 
formula and expect to be great. The threshold for greatness is constantly moving, and people’s tastes are constantly evolving. Therefore, 
you must iterate a greatness blueprint. 

Use outside influences to iterate a greatness blueprint and chart a new path. Hire new contractors and work with different team members, 
spend time with people who excel in different fields, and seek a broad range of experiences and skills that you can bring into your work in 
unexpected ways.  

The path to greatness is not easy, but attaining greatness is easier through reverse engineering. 

www.ProductivityGame.com

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