The Courage to Be Boring

Before 2003, British cycling had won a single Olympic gold medal in nearly a hundred years. Then Dave Brailsford took over performance and began doing things that looked faintly ridiculous. He had riders taught to wash their hands properly to reduce illness. He worked out which pillow each rider slept best on and took it to hotels. He tested fabrics, tyre pressures and the exact temperature of a warm-up.

Within a decade British riders dominated the velodrome and won the Tour de France. The idea got a name - marginal gains - and it has since been oversold considerably. But the part that holds up is the unglamorous part: nothing on that list is impressive on its own, and none of it works unless it is done every single day.

Students are sold the opposite

Almost everything marketed at students is intensity. The crash course. The twenty-hour weekend. The transformative bootcamp. Intensity is easier to sell because it is easier to imagine, and it produces a satisfying feeling of having done something.

It is also mostly wasted. A weekend of intense study followed by three weeks of nothing loses more than it gains, because the interval between exposures is doing the real work and there is no interval - only a gap.

We designed Learnacy as 25 weekly sessions across a year rather than an intensive fortnight for exactly this reason. A capacity is practised. It cannot be installed.

What boring looks like in practice

• Twenty minutes a day on the thing you are bad at, rather than three hours a week on the thing you enjoy.

• Reading one long thing a week to the end, including the parts that drag.

• Writing badly on schedule instead of well when inspired. The schedule is the skill; the quality follows it.

• Returning to something after failing at it, which is undramatic and is most of what a learning life consists of.

Why it takes courage

Because nothing visible happens for a long time. A student doing twenty minutes a day has nothing to show at the end of week two, while a classmate who did a dramatic weekend course has a certificate and a story. The quiet version wins comfortably over three years and loses every conversation in the first month.

Brailsford's riders were not doing anything a competitor could not have copied. The hand-washing was available to everybody. What was scarce was the willingness to keep doing something that dull for long enough for it to matter.

More on the idea underneath this in What Is Learnacy, and current cohorts on Upcoming Programs.