Ten days. One job a day. Every one is built to fit inside thirty minutes and every one is done on work you already have to do. Days eight and nine depend on somebody else's diary, so those two can run longer, and that's the only reason any of them will.
Do not read them all now. Read day one, do day one, come back tomorrow.
I spent thousands of hours getting to what is in these ten days. Fourteen and sixteen hour days, seven days a week, for months, because nobody could tell me the order to learn it in and I had no way to find out except by doing all of it badly first. That isn't a boast and you should not copy it. It is the reason this chapter is thirty minutes.
Everything below is what survived. The order isn't arbitrary either; it is the order in which each thing stops being hard, which is not the order I learnt them in and is the single most useful thing I can hand you.
This is the part that matters, and it's why the days are in this sequence rather than any other.
Each day produces one artefact you keep. By day ten you're holding all of them, and together they aren't ten exercises. They are the evidence.
| Day | What you keep |
|---|---|
| 1 | A written brief you will reuse for a year |
| 2 | Proof the first answer was not the best one available |
| 3 | One instance of the feeling, in your own handwriting |
| 4 | A claim that survived an attack, or did not |
| 5 | A number, on work you had already called finished |
| 6 | One disagreement you would never have found alone |
| 7 | One honest answer about your own exposure |
| 8 | Work that got acted on in the meeting instead of taken away |
| 9 | One other person doing something they could not do last week |
| 10 | Three sentences you could say out loud in a review |
Look at that list again as a single object. A reusable method, a before and after, a piece of your own work scored honestly, a risk you named before anybody asked, and someone else who is better because of you.
That isn't a training log. That is the case, and the next chapter is the conversation where you put it on the table. You cannot assemble it the night before. It takes ten days, which is why they're here and not in an appendix.
If you read the last nine chapters passively, nodding, without ever opening the tool and trying it, this chapter is where that catches up with you. That isn't a scolding. It is just how it works. Nobody has ever got better at anything by agreeing with it.
Ten days of this on live work, with your name on every output, is a very good way to make yourself careful. Careful is the wrong setting for learning. So don't start there.
The failure I expect for most people reading this is being told to press one button, at one time, in the approved way. Do that for a year and you have a dependency instead of a skill, and nothing anybody would pay extra for. You are operating a lever.
What you want is a sandbox. In a technical team that means somewhere you can press everything and break nothing. You probably can't requisition one of those, and here is the good news: you don't have to ask anybody, because you already own the ingredients.
Pick work that is genuinely yours and genuinely finished. Last quarter's report, filed. A decision already made and gone. An email you already sent. Nothing live, nothing confidential, nothing anybody is waiting on. That is your sandbox and you can assemble it this afternoon without a single conversation.
Then use it the way pilots use a simulator. They do not practise on passengers. They fly the failure, over and over, in a room where the failure costs nothing, which is exactly why they are calm on the day it stops being a simulation.
Go back to it every few months. These systems change underneath you, the model behind the tool you use will be replaced while you aren't looking, and the thing that didn't work in March will work in June. If the only place you ever meet the new version is live work, you will meet it badly.
---
Your outcome: one instruction that a stranger could follow without asking you a question.
1. Pick a task you already hate. Something you do weekly and resent.
2. Write the six lines from chapter four before you write the request. Identity, who it should act as. Goal, what outcome for whom by when. Good, what a finished one looks like. Bad, what it must not do. Challenge, what it should argue against itself. Proof, what counts as evidence.
3. Now write the request underneath those six lines and send the whole thing.
4. Compare what comes back with what you usually get.
Most people have never written the six lines. They have written the request a hundred times and wondered why the answer keeps arriving generic.
The part that matters most sits inside line two: who the outcome is for. Not the topic, the person. Their role, what they already know, what would waste their time. It changes the vocabulary, the length, the sophistication and what gets left out, and it costs you nine words.
Keep the six lines. You will reuse them tomorrow.
---
Your outcome: proof that the first answer was not the best available one.
1. Take yesterday's output. Do not ask whether it's correct.
2. Ask instead: what is this missing that the reader would notice?
3. Then: show me the same thing organised completely differently.
4. Then: what would make this useful rather than just accurate?
5. Put the first answer and the fourth side by side.
Three asks. Under four minutes. Notice that none of them was are you sure and none of them was about accuracy.
The gap between those two versions is what you have been leaving on the table every time you accepted the first thing that appeared. Look at it properly before you move on, because tomorrow depends on you believing it.
---
Your outcome: one instance of the feeling, written down.
Today you don't produce anything. You watch.
1. Work normally. Use the tools as you always do.
2. Every time you notice the sentence in your head. I hope this is right, I didn't know that, that's not what I expected. Write down what you were looking at. One line. A note on your phone is fine.
3. At the end of the day, count them.
Most people get between two and six. Some get none on day one and four on day two, once they know what they're listening for.
You have had that signal your whole career and treated it as noise. Today it becomes data. Tomorrow you act on it.
---
Your outcome: a claim that survived an attack, or did not.
1. Take one thing from yesterday's list. Just one, the one that nagged most.
2. Type: use an adversarial agent. Give me the sources as clickable links, in a grid, one row per claim, with a certainty score from 0 to 100 on each row.
3. Look only at the rows scoring under 60.
4. Chase one of them to its actual source.
Time it. It will be about six minutes.
You will find one of two things. Either something was wrong, and you've just saved yourself. Or nothing was wrong, and you now have the right to put your name on it, which you didn't have yesterday.
Both outcomes are wins. Only one of them feels like one, and that's worth knowing in advance.
---
Your outcome: a number under your own threshold, on work you thought was finished.
1. Before you do anything else, write down your bar. This doesn't go out below 92. Write it where you can see it. Chapter eight explains why the bar goes above the normal range rather than inside it.
2. Take a piece of work you have already decided is fine.
3. Ask: score this out of 100 across five named dimensions. For each, give the score, one sentence on why, and the single change that would raise it most. 95 and above is exceptional and rare. Most first drafts land between 76 and 88. Score accordingly.
4. Read the lowest-scoring dimension's reason.
5. Make that one change.
Those numbers are mine, not a standard. Seventy-six to eighty-eight is where my first drafts land and ninety-two is where I set my bar. If your work has a different normal, use yours. What matters is that a range is stated at all, because without one it hands you ninety-one every time.
The threshold goes first for a reason. If you look at the score before you set the bar, you'll set the bar just underneath the score, and you'll do that every time without noticing.
The uncomfortable part is step five, on a piece of work you had already finished. Do it anyway. That is the whole day.
---
Your outcome: one disagreement you would never have found.
1. Take a decision that actually matters this week. Not a task, a decision.
2. Put the same question into two different tools. Different companies, not the same one twice.
3. Ignore both answers for a moment.
4. Find where they part company. Write down that one point.
5. Spend your attention only there.
Four minutes. The gap is the map, and it points at the single paragraph where the difficulty actually lives.
While you're there, sort yesterday's tasks into judgement and typing. Put the typing on the cheaper, faster option tomorrow and see whether anything gets worse. Usually nothing does, and that's the day's second lesson arriving free.
---
Your outcome: one honest answer about your own exposure.
1. Ask yourself, before you ask anybody else: what is the most sensitive thing I have personally typed into one of these tools?
You will remember something. Everybody does. Sit with it for a second rather than moving on.
2. Now go and look at two settings on the tool you use most. Whether your inputs are used for training. How long they're kept.
3. Take one thing you were about to type today and rewrite it so the identifying part isn't there. The name becomes a long-standing client. The number becomes a six-figure invoice.
4. Send both versions. Compare the outputs.
They will be the same. That is the point and you have to see it yourself to believe it, because the identifying details feel essential right up until you remove them and nothing happens.
---
Your outcome: work that gets acted on in the meeting rather than taken away.
1. Take something you've finished and would normally send as prose.
2. Ask: give me this as a table with the decision in the left column. Read both. Keep the better one.
3. Go through every number in it and mark where it came from. Verified. Estimated. Unknown.
4. If a whole section is unverified, say so at the top of that section.
5. Send it.
Step four is the one that feels wrong and is worth the most. A document that admits which parts are soft makes its firm parts believable. A document that presents everything with equal confidence tells the reader nothing about any of it.
Watch what happens in the meeting. Somebody will act on it instead of asking for more time.
---
Your outcome: one other person doing something they could not do last week.
1. Pick the single most useful thing you've learned in the last eight days. Probably day 4 or day 5.
2. Find one person with the same problem.
3. Show them in ten minutes. Give them the actual instruction you typed, not a description of it.
4. Do not explain the whole system. One technique, working, on their own real task.
The instinct against this is that the method is what makes you valuable. It is not. The method is a paragraph. The judgement about when to use it's the valuable part, and that doesn't transfer in ten minutes.
What you get instead is a change in what you're. Not an employee with strong output. Somebody who made three other people better, which is a different category and is priced differently.
---
Your outcome: three sentences you could say out loud in a review.
Today you produce the only artefact that matters for what comes next.
1. Look back over nine days and find one thing you caught that would otherwise have gone out. Write one sentence. What it was, what it would have cost.
2. Find one thing you produced faster or better than you could have two weeks ago. Write one sentence. Be specific about the before and the after.
3. Find one person you made more capable. Write one sentence.
4. Read the three sentences out loud.
That is it. That is the whole ten days, and it fits on an index card.
Those three sentences aren't a diary entry. They are the evidence, in the form the only conversation that matters requires, and almost nobody walks into that conversation holding anything at all. They walk in with a feeling that they've been working hard, and a feeling isn't something the person opposite can act on.
You now have something they can act on.
---
Be honest with yourself, because nobody else is going to check.
If you read these ten days without doing them, you've read a description of a method rather than acquiring one, and the difference will show up in about six months when somebody who did the work is doing things you can't.
Go back to day one. It is thirty minutes and it's on a task you have to do anyway.
The only thing standing between you and the last chapter of this book is ten short days of doing rather than agreeing, and the person who decides what you're paid doesn't know or care which one of those you chose; they will only see the output.
Which brings us to them, and to the conversation you're now, for the first time, actually equipped to have.