Most people who aren’t improving fast aren’t lacking effort — they’re lacking awareness. The gap between working hard and actually getting better is metacognition.
What metacognition actually is
It’s not just a fancy word for journaling. Metacognition is thinking about your thinking. Not just what you did, but how you went about it, and why it worked or didn’t.
Think about it like this: you can do 100 reps in the gym and just be tired, or you can do 100 reps, notice your form is off, fix it, and actually get stronger. Same effort. Very different result. The difference is the awareness you bring to what you’re doing.
The problem: pure execution mode
Most people run in execution mode by default — head down, tasks getting done. That’s good. You need to execute. But execution without reflection means you repeat the same mistakes, never see your own blind spots, and start confusing being busy with growing.
I fell into this for a while. I was tracking time on tasks (something I picked up from building a productivity system) and realized I was consistently underestimating how long design and planning took. I thought I was fast at that part. I wasn’t. I just wasn’t paying attention.
Without deliberately stepping back, you optimize for output. Not for the system producing the output.
What a coach actually does
A coach doesn’t just cheer. They watch your technique, notice what you can’t see from inside the game, and give specific feedback. They close the loop between what you’re doing and what’s actually happening.
The question is: who’s doing that for you?
For most people — no one. Which means you have to do it yourself. That’s the whole idea.
The closed loop
I have this written down in my mental models note:
Feedback is everything. Make the system closed loop. Take feedback faster, act on it & grow.
Most people have an open loop. They act, but never circle back. Closing the loop means deliberately collecting signal on your own performance. A few things that actually work:
End-of-week debrief — 10 minutes. What worked? What didn’t? Why? Not a journal, not a feelings dump. A debrief. Treat it like a post-mortem on your own week.
Track where time actually goes — Most people think they know where their time goes. They don’t. Even a simple tracker (I use a session counter next to each task) reveals gaps between intention and reality fast.
Ask the coaching question — “What would I tell a friend who did exactly what I did this week?” You’d almost always give them sharper, more honest feedback than you give yourself. Use that.
Notice patterns across weeks — One bad week is noise. The same mistake three weeks in a row is a signal worth acting on.
Closing
You don’t need an external coach to get coached. The most useful feedback is already inside you — you just need to build the habit of stepping back, analyze objectively and actually listening to it.
The people who grow fastest aren’t always the hardest workers. They’re the ones who learn the fastest. And learning fast means closing the loop on what you’re doing.
You only improve what you measure.