Imagine a scale for “quality” that goes from 0 to 100, where quality is “anything that makes something good or special.”

As a novice, I look at that scale and trick myself into thinking it is linear: the difference between what it takes to be able to produce a quality of 40 vs a 30 might be the same as the difference between what it takes to go from 90 to 100.

As in: when I started played guitar, I couldn’t reliably pluck the string I wanted to, let alone do it rhythmically.  (0 to 10)

Then, I could find the string most of the time, but I only plucked down, not up and down. (10 to 20).

Now that I can do that well, and now that I’ve mastered ten other plucking skills, I’ve been told that my picking technique has too much wrist, I’m holding my pick perpendicular to the string when it should be at a slight angle, I should be executing a relaxed figure 8 pattern over each string….all this just my first year of lessons. Imagine what next year will hold!

The expert knows that, as we make progress, we learn about nuance and details that were previously invisible.

This is why quality is not linear, it is logarithmic: the closer we get to “great” the more skill, will, and effort it takes to improve a little bit more.

This means that the move from 40 to 41 could take as much time and effort as getting from 0 to 10: because improvement at the beginning was relatively easy, it was the work of going from terrible to OK, and maybe all the way to decent.

But good to really good? Really good to great? Great to exceptional? Exceptional to best in class?

Each of those is a full journey: being open to the idea that better exists; taking the time to understand what it entails; building that new skill on top of your already-strong foundation; having the attention and patience to master the next micro-skill and the one after that.

This is why greatness is both expensive and rare. It’s why, at the 3-star Michelin restaurant Sukiyabashi Jiro, apprentices, who train for 10 years, aren’t allowed to touch the fish for the first few years. The same goes for expert watchmakers, knifemakers, and makers of F1 racecars.

If we’ve had the patience and discipline to develop mastery of any skill in any domain, we understand this intuitively, because we’ve walked that path. We just need to retain the humility to see that each new journey, each new skill, will have as much depth and nuance as the skill we’ve already mastered.

And if we work with people who haven’t yet developed mastery—of other skills or these skills—it can be difficult to communicate clearly about “the distance from here (where you are) to there (where you’d like to be).”

As in: we’ve all met the bright-eyed newbie who “wants to do strategy” as if that’s something that is 6 months away and just requires “good analytical skills”—when the reality is that good strategic decision-making is the accumulation of years analyzing, thinking, putting yourself on the hook, making the tough call, being right or wrong, living with the consequences, and doing it all over again.

The job of the expert, then, is to cultivate curiosity in the novice, to point out all the progress he’s made, and, also, to show, with patience and a commitment to detail, the difference between “90% there” and “100% there.”

And the job of the novice is to have the humility to say “I got to this point quickly, it’s possible that I don’t fully understand what it takes to be great, but I’m willing to keep being curious and keep on putting in the work.”