➔ Leadership in practice

In 2008, Pete Nowalk walked into his first writers' room at the US drama series Private Practice. Before that, he'd been a Hollywood assistant. Six years later, he was showrunning How to Get Away with Murder, achieving record-breaking viewership.

Most showrunners spend 10 to 20 years learning the craft before getting their own show. Nowalk did it in six. The standard explanation would be “he was talented, he worked hard, he learned from the best.” But that misses what's actually interesting about how Shonda Rhimes, TV legend and founder of the production company Shondaland, develops talent.

The conventional approach is apprenticeship. You watch, learn, absorb, then eventually get your chance. Rhimes did something different. She made Nowalk “think like a showrunner” and practice showrunner decisions early in his career.

When he pitched How to Get Away with Murder in 2013, Rhimes bought it and made him showrunner. During production, they disagreed about scenes Rhimes wanted to cut from the pilot, but Nowalk wanted to keep. This is where most mentors step in. Rhimes didn't. "Good," she told him. "Do your version."

It's a small moment, but it reveals the value of "learning by doing." Certain skills can't be acquired by observation alone. You can watch a thousand decisions being made. But until you make decisions that matter, with real consequences, you're not building the same capability.

Nowalk admitted he often struggled but could always call Rhimes when he got stuck. She read every script, but her response was almost always: "It's yours. Do it your way."

The Rhimes’ safety net wasn't there to prevent failure. It was there to prevent catastrophic failure while leaving room for instructive failure. That distinction matters. Nowalk was learning to “think like a showrunner”, not by watching Rhimes think, but by doing the thinking himself.

Nowalk didn't get good, then get authority. He got authority, struggled publicly, and got good. It’s a pattern of career advancement that runs through Shondaland. “Think like a showrunner” is how Rhimes has achieved remarkable success in helping many members of her team transition from junior positions right through to showrunning in record time.

The thread running through this week’s newsletter is developing talent.

Enjoy,

Hugh

Go deeper:

Notes:

#1 Rhimes was the first Black woman to create and executive-produce a top 10 network series and the first woman to create three shows with 100+ episodes each.

#2 She explicitly sees it as her job to “raise a generation of showrunners” who reflect a wider range of experiences, not just to staff her own shows.

#3 Adam Grant argues that we overrate innate genius and underrate environments that stretch people. Students and employees often thrive when someone quietly raises the bar and gives them room to grow into it.

➔ Systems and frameworks for thinking

In her TED talk, psychologist Carol Dweck describes hearing about a Chicago high school with an unusual grading system. When students didn't pass a course, instead of receiving an 'F', they got two words: "Not Yet." Dweck was fascinated. A failing grade says "I'm nothing, I'm nowhere." But "Not Yet" creates a timeline. A path forward.

This captured something Dweck had spent years researching: students who believe their abilities can grow outperform those who think they're fixed. When students learned their brains could form new, stronger connections through challenge, their declining grades reversed.

The magic was a simple model. "Not Yet" implies a specific future where what you can't do now becomes what you can do then.

Ed Catmull was a brilliant computer scientist. PhD from Utah. Pioneer in computer graphics. Co-founded Pixar. But when it came to managing creative people, he was lost.

He tried an "open door policy," telling everyone they could walk into his office anytime. He waited. Nobody came. People assumed he was too busy, too senior, too far removed. The door was open. The distance remained.

During A Bug's Life production, production managers said they felt like second-class citizens to the artists. Communication choked because of invisible hierarchies Catmull couldn't see. He was a genius at technology. But nurturing talent? Not yet.

The turning point came when he stopped trying to lead like an engineer and started building systems for candor. He created the Braintrust - recurring meetings with no hierarchy, no formal power, but one very important rule: tell the truth, early.

The Braintrust changed everything at Pixar and gave Catmull the learning he needed. The moment Catmull admitted he didn't know how to lead creative people was the moment he became the leader who could build the most creative company in animation.

Notes:

#1 Dweck gave 400 fifth-graders the same puzzle. Kids praised for being "smart" then avoided harder puzzles. Kids praised for "working hard" chose them. Same kids, different praise, opposite behaviour.

#2 Growth mindset isn't just effort. It's effort plus strategy plus seeking help. Praising aimless hard work is as harmful as praising intelligence.

#3 When Catmull graduated with his PhD from the University of Utah in 1974, he set himself a clear goal to make the world's first computer-animated feature film. He estimated it would take 10 years. Toy Story was released in 1995, 11 years later than his prediction.

➔ Lifting the lid on what’s happening inside our brains when we do creative work

Economist and writer Tyler Cowen has a great question he asks knowledge workers: “What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?”

My answer to that question is I write OK BRAIN! every week. I’ve been writing a weekly newsletter since 2013. Before that, I wrote a regular blog. The weekly demand forces my curiosity muscle to find new things that push my thinking. But if you could look inside my brain during this learning process, you’d see something that looks less like flashes of insight and more like insulation.

The insulation is called myelin, and it wraps itself around the neural circuits you use most for a particular skill. As the wrapping thickens, the signals travel faster and more cleanly. The skill begins to feel easier, more fluent, more yours. This is what improvement looks like at a biological level.

But myelin has a quirk. It doesn’t respond to simple repetition. Running the same circuit again and again doesn’t impress it. What gets its attention is strain. That moment when performance is just slightly unstable, when extra effort is required, when the brain has to pay closer attention.

You can see this in how experts actually practice. Musicians linger over the bar that trips them up. Athletes slow movements down to the point of awkwardness. In his book Range, David Epstein refers to these as "desirable difficulties" - learning techniques that feel frustrating and slow in the short term but create deep, durable, and flexible long-term knowledge. Progress shows up not during the smooth run-through, but during the deliberate struggle.

This matters for creative work and leadership because many forms of practice feel productive without being developmentally useful. Familiar conversations, well-worn ways of thinking, polished explanations. They may be useful, but they rarely ask the brain to rewire itself. From the brain’s point of view, growth begins at the edge of comfort.

Once you see practice this way, moments of difficulty change meaning. Hesitation, friction, and failure may be evidence that the brain has been given a reason to adapt. Mastery is mechanical. And with the right kind of stretch, it’s something that can be intentionally built.

Go deeper:

Notes:

#1 Elite violinists practice more slowly than amateurs, because slowing down exposes tiny errors the brain can’t detect at full speed.

#2 Chess grandmasters often don’t “see more moves”; they recognise patterns faster because years of strain-based practice have compressed complex positions into simple signals.

#3 Michael Phelps trained so precisely that his coach estimated he’d rehearsed race turns more than 20,000 times before Beijing - not to get fitter, but to make them automatic under pressure.

🔗 Quick links to more stories 📖

David Epstein: 7 things I’ve learned from 20 years studying human development - Steal this excellent list from the author of Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. (list)

The Architecture of Ideas - Steven Johnson is my favourite writer and thinker about innovation. His book Where Ideas Come From should be on all your bookshelves. Steven, who worked with Google to develop Notebook LM, has made his own notebook on the architecture of ideas public. It’s full of videos, audio, slide decks, flashcards, all the things that make Notebook such a brilliant tool. (notebook)

Deliberately Unpredictable: Why You Should Pursue the Most Unlikely Solution - “AI is a prediction engine. Its job is to predict the next most likely answer, solution, or reply. It’s really, really good at providing what is most likely. We need to pay attention to these words! Predictions are predictable. Most likely is… very likely. If our work is predictable, we’ve already lost. So instead, I am focusing on being the most unlikely answer, solution, or reply. I want to be unpredictable. By design. Why? Average is now a commodity. The only value left is being the most unlikely. The most unlikely stands out.“ (6 min read)

Job Satisfaction and Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory of Motivation-Hygiene - I’d never heard of Herzberg’s Two-Factor theory of job satisfaction until this week. I’m still not sure about it. I’d love to hear your thoughts. (4 min read)

Adam Grant and Malcolm Gladwell Discuss The Science of Achieving Greater Things - A great video conversation between two old friends. (70 min watch)

Run tiny experiments for mastery - Regular readers will know how much I love the work of Anne-Laure Le Cunff. I love this idea of letting go of mastery as a destination ⬇️⬇️⬇️

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