Key Takeaways

  • After interviewing over 400 investors, David Weisburd pinpoints “seeing what excellence looks like” as the number one predictor for someone succeeding in their craft.
  • He advises aspiring top performers to humble themselves and work directly for the most competent person in their desired field—even as an executive assistant or chief of staff—to gain daily, direct exposure to mastery.
  • Building a career in the top 5% of any field requires an "obsessive commitment," which organizational culture can normalize, reducing the social friction that often prevents individuals from reaching peak performance.
  • Weisburd believes social friction, not intelligence, is the primary barrier keeping most people from achieving true success and excellence.
  • His strategies for compressing learning and accelerating career success are detailed in "Weisburd's Accelerated Career Growth Method."

The Weisburd's Accelerated Career Growth Method

Step 1: Seek Proximity to Excellence: Go to the most competent person in the profession that you're want to be in and to either volunteer or work for them as their executive assistant or their chief of staff. It's extremely humbling, but the closest you could get to that excellence where you're literally observing it on day-to-day basis, again, that is the most predictable path to actually succeeding in that craft.

Step 2: Leverage Organizational Norms: You need that level of craziness and you need to have that level of commitment. And in order to do that, one big hack is you want to be in an organization that embraces that. So you might be odd when you're at Thanksgiving with your cousins and with your uncles and they might be thinking, 'Well, David, why are you working on Thanksgiving? It's Thanksgiving. Oh, take it easy.' But within your organization, it's normative behavior. So that's why it's so important to be within an organization because it gives you the space and the time to build that muscle of excellence.

Step 3: Overcome Social Friction: Social friction, not IQ, is the thing that keeps most people from being successful.

When This Works (and When It Doesn't)

David Weisburd states that “the sooner you could compress that, the faster you could get to what excellence looks like is more predictive of success in the career than any other factor.” This method shines brightest for ambitious individuals early in their professional journey, particularly those seeking to master a well-defined craft or leadership role within an existing industry. It offers a powerful shortcut to internalizing best practices and decision-making patterns that might otherwise take years to discern.

However, this approach isn't a silver bullet. It asks for a significant ego check and a willingness to temporarily step back from a perceived senior role to take an assistant position. It might be less effective in highly nascent or experimental fields where "excellence" is still being invented, rather than observed. If your goal is truly radical innovation without a known blueprint, a pure apprenticeship model might limit your independent thought. Furthermore, the success of adopting organizational norms depends heavily on finding an organization that actually has a culture of obsessive commitment, rather than just lip service.