Leah Gerber

Under what conditions does a particular person become unusually good?

I study the conditions that shape how different people think, create, learn, work and flourish. Not people on average. One person at a time.

The question

Hypothesis The conditions that sharpen one person seem to flatten another. And my own output swings from day to day, under conditions nobody was tracking.

So instead of asking what makes people perform well, I want to ask a smaller and harder question. What makes this particular person perform well?

This is a research notebook. It starts with questions, not answers.

Topics

The same question, pointed at different rooms.

Everything here is one inquiry. These are the places it keeps turning up, and the questions waiting in each.

Work & Business

  • What changed around you before your work did?
  • Why do two people leave the same meeting with two different meetings?
  • What have you never told a manager because there was no safe way to say it?

Creativity

  • What happened in the 24 hours before your best work?

Memory & Learning

  • Why do I remember everything about you except your name?

Relationships & Family

  • Can two people be in the same room and not be in the same environment?
  • What happens to your conditions when you live inside someone else’s?
  • What does a relationship need before either person can say what they need?
  • What happens to a marriage lived in a second language?
  • Do two people become each other’s environment?

Age & Time

  • Do your conditions change as you age, or does the world stop making room for them?
  • What did you need at twenty-five that you no longer need?

Identity

  • What happens when your environment changes who you think you are?

Education

  • Are we measuring ability, or performance under conditions we chose?

Health & Performance

  • How much sleep do you need, and how would you know?
  • What kind of break do you actually need?
  • When does time speed up for you, and what was true when it did?

Home & Environment

  • What environment reliably makes you worse at something you’re normally good at?

Life Design

  • What if productivity isn’t the right outcome?

Two ways in