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When he was 14, Wayne Gretzky moved from his small hometown to play in a more competitive hockey league in Toronto. He was undersized and during the first practice, he got pushed around. After practice, his coach pulled him aside. “When you go home tonight,” the coach said, “the Toronto Maple Leafs are playing the Philadelphia Flyers—watch Bobby Clarke play.” Bobby Clarke was an undersized player on the Flyers who went on to be inducted into the NHL Hall of Fame. “He's not very big,” Gretzky’s coach told him, “but he's very smart.” “And I studied him and I studied him and I studied him,” Gretzky said. “I would take out a piece of paper and draw a rink and then without looking at the paper, I’d watch the hockey game on TV, and I would take my pen and I’d follow the puck.” When Clarke got off the ice, Gretzky would look down at the paper and look for patterns. He began to notice two things. First, that Clarke “played the game mostly out of the corners.” Second, that players almost never went behind the net. So, Gretzky said, “I started playing out of the corner and from behind the net…I started using the net as a decoy. Consequently, I wasn’t standing in front of the net, getting knocked over, and being on my keister the whole time.” Takeaway 1: In his books and on his podcast, Tim Ferriss talks about the question he likes to ask when setting out to learn a new skill: “Who is good at this despite being poorly built for it?” The idea is to study those, like Bobby Clarke, who found ways to excel even without the prototypical characteristics or advantages. Then you yourself can use what you learned and, like Gretzky, excel even without the prototypical characteristics of advantages. Takeaway 2: Early in his career, in his lab, the neuroscientist Andrew Huberman kept a list of the scientists he loved and admired. “I would read that list over and over,” he said, “I didn’t realize it at the time, but this is what is called introjection.” In psychology, "introjection" is the process of absorbing the qualities and behaviors of others. If you regularly listen to so-and-so’s podcast, Huberman explains, “the nervous system begins to ask questions like, what would so-and-so do? That’s a very real thing, and we’re not always consciously aware of it.” As he regularly watched and doodled the play of Bobby Clarke, Gretzky introjected Clarke’s style, stopped spending so much time on keister, as he put it, and consequently, went on to set 61 NHL records—many of which he still holds—including most career regular-season goals (894), assists (1,963), and points (2,857). - - - “I started playing out of the corner and from behind the net because nobody had ever done that before…and by the time they sort of kind of figured it out, I’d retired.” — Wayne Gretzky Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!