Before I was a novelist, a salesman, or a pizza guy, I studied criminalistics at Wallace State and got certified in fingerprint science.
If you’re picturing a TV crime lab with moody blue lighting and a computer that says MATCH FOUND in giant red letters, I need you to lower your expectations.
Fingerprint work is squinting. It’s sitting under a lamp with a magnifier, staring at tiny lines until your eyes cross, counting ridges one at a time.
It was also the best lesson I ever got about getting good at anything.
Three shapes
Here’s the first thing they teach you. Almost every fingerprint on earth falls into one of three basic patterns: loops, whorls, and arches.
That’s it. Billions of people, three shapes.
What makes your print yours isn’t some exotic pattern. It’s the tiny details inside a very ordinary shape. A ridge that ends here. A ridge that splits there. A little dot of a ridge sitting by itself like it wasn’t invited to the party.
Mastery is the same. It isn’t found in the fancy stuff. It’s found in the boring fundamentals, done so many times that you start to see details nobody else can.
The world’s worst puzzle
My fingerprint course was split into two halves.
The first half was the basics. Learn the vocabulary. Learn the patterns. Learn exactly what you’re looking for and why it matters. Then take a test on it.
The second half was the final exam. The whole second half.
They handed you 20 prints and 50 fingerprint cards. Every card has ten fingers on it, so that’s 500 prints. Your job was to take each of those 20 and find the exact finger it came from.
Fail the exam, and you failed the course. Miss more than two, and you didn’t get certified.
It was the world’s worst puzzle. Hours of squinting at lines that all start to look the same after a while. There were no shortcuts and no tricks. The only thing that saved you was how well you had learned the boring stuff in the first half.
And once you were done, you were done. You took your grade and walked out.
Every beginner wants to skip to the exciting part. The new writer wants to talk about plot twists before they can write a clean sentence. The new guitar player wants to shred before they can change chords. The new manager wants to give a TED talk before they can run a decent Monday meeting.
But when the real test comes, nobody asks about the exciting part. Amateurs chase advanced technique. Masters just keep doing the fundamentals better.
The second call
I don’t lift prints anymore. But I use that training every single week.
These days I work with call centers, and one of the biggest topics in that world is first call resolution. The idea is simple. If you solve the customer’s problem the first time, they don’t have to call you back. That’s better for them, and it saves the business real money. Every callback costs something.
Fixing it is a lot harder than it sounds.
Most people attack the problem by studying the calls where everything went right. It makes sense on the surface. Find what works and do more of it.
But the answer isn’t in the good calls. It’s in the second call.
When somebody calls back, you have to dig into it like a print under a lamp. Why did they call back? What happened on the first call that made the second one necessary? What policy needs to change so this stops happening every day?
It’s tedious. It’s one call at a time. And sometimes what you find is maddening. I’ve seen centers fighting with everything they’ve got to prevent callbacks while their own agents are on the phone telling customers, “Just call us back.”
You’d never spot that from a dashboard. You only find it by slowing down and looking closer.
The lie is almost always in the details. So is the truth. You just have to be willing to sit under the lamp long enough to see it.
Find your three shapes
Whatever you’re trying to get good at, try this:
- Name the three fundamentals. If you could only practice three things, what would they be? For writing, mine are clear sentences, honest dialogue, and knowing when to end a scene.
- Practice them when nobody’s watching. The basics are boring on purpose. That’s what keeps most people from doing them.
- Study the second call. Don’t just look at what went right. Look at what keeps going wrong, and ask why.
Billions of people, three shapes. The difference was always in the details.
There’s always a story under the story.
If this one stuck with you, I’ll send the next one straight to your inbox.