Limit Breaks #3: Actions Per Minute

IN THE HOT SEAT

“Now it was my turn. I was sitting in a leather armchair in one of the rooms of the Shooting House. The place was furnished like a living room with sofas and chairs, coffee and end tables, mirrors, pictures, and bookcases. There were even books on the shelves.
 
The lighting was dim. Manikins and paper targets were positioned around the room. Some held guns and some were empty-handed. They were terrorists and I was their hostage. There was an armed manikin crouched behind me with one hand on my neck and the other on my shoulder, pointing a pistol at the door. Another terrorist stood on my other side, pointing a submachine gun at my head.
 
Within the next ten minutes, the door be blown in and four of my classmates would assault the room using the close-quarter battle techniques we had learned. Within three seconds of the explosion, they had to kill the terrorists, gain positive control of the room — and rescue me.  Bullets would rain throughout the room and someone would be firing live rounds within inches of my head.  If they misses a single terrorist or hit me by mistake, the team would fail the training.
 
I sincerely wanted them to pass the exam.”
 
-- Eric Haney,  Inside Delta Force
 
***
 
30,000 ACTIONS PER HOUR
 
“How many things do you think you can do in an hour? How many problems can you locate, think through, come up with a solution to, and then actually solve in this short time? Stop and think about this, and get into your head a figure that you think is reasonable.
 
What if I told you the answer was 30,000. Would you think that was ridiculous? I certainly would. We live life with a mindset determined by our experiences and our surroundings, and hence each one of us has our own understanding of what is and isn’t reasonable. Clearly 30,000 logic-related decisions and actions in an hour is an absurd expectation – one that no one would take seriously.
 
This was my outlook, just like all other beginners, when they first play a game called StarCraft.”
 
-- Ivan Mazour, “ The APM Principle – what StarCraft teaches us about real life success ”
 
***

LIMIT BREAKS #3: ACTIONS PER MINUTE
 
One of the strangest realizations I had – and it wasn’t original to me, many people have discovered and rediscovered this – is that most of the largest innovations in a field come from outside of the field.
 
It makes sense, of course. After a profession, industry, or skillset becomes firmly established, people tend to observe what the leaders in that field are doing and copy what’s worked in the past.
 
If you take this idea to its logical conclusion, you get all sorts of strange counterintuitive realizations: biggest of all, it suggests that actively studying other fields might be one of the faster ways to make innovations in your own.
 
This isn’t a new idea – Steve Jobs famously studied calligraphy at Reed College out of personal interest, and was the first to bring really aesthetic font choices to personal computing. There’s many examples of people who entered a field with a background in something like engineering, took a rigorous and analytical approach, and greatly innovated in their new field.
 
I’d like to go one step further, though: the largest overlooked  gains in a field are likely to come from other fields that seem either (1) totally irrelevant, or (2) are completely lacking in mainstream prestige.
 
I’ve studied a lot of fields. A few years ago, I recognized three that have nearly universal application, but which other people might not realize as having such: finance, warfare, and athletics.
 
All three of those have multiple sides competing within them, so you can see how competition forces each side to improve. Success is relatively easy to observe and measure in each of them: you can see financial returns easily on a graph, you can view the results of battles and wars, you can see the final scores and winning histories of individual athletes and sports teams.
 
Thus, I’m always interested in how top financiers and investors think and analyze, how top military units and soldiers train and innovative, and how top sports teams and athletes are coached, practice, and train.
 
Recently, I’ve added a fourth field to the list of “almost definitely worth studying”: competitive video games.
 
You could even argue that competitive video games function like athletics – lately, tournaments have been growing in popularity in what’s called “eSports” – taking a cue from athletics.
 
Most people won’t consider video gaming a sport, and that’s fine; the definitions aren’t as important. But certainly, at the highest levels, games involve muscle memory, reflexes, strategy and tactics, and training.
 
This chapter, we’re looking at both high-level competitive video games, and modern counterterrorism, to be able to identify and hone in on a key mental model – actions per minute  – that we can train into our own lives.
 
***
 
PROFESSIONAL STARCRAFT
 
“The Koreans have 12 professional StarCraft teams with top players making fat six-figure salaries. Even the average pro gamer makes more than the average Korean.
 
“Not only do Korean pro gamers rake in the dough, but also national attention. 120,000 people gathered live in a stadium to watch a 2005 StarCraft championship--over 40K more than attended the Super Bowl that year.
 
“And if you had any doubt that Korea as a nation takes this seriously, note that the Korean Air Force actually started their own gaming team so that top players wouldn't have to stop playing when the joined the military for their compulsory two-year service.
 
“If you're wondering if it's like this anywhere else, well, no. Almost half of all copies of StarCraft (4.5 million out of 9.5 million) were sold in South Korea. Note they have one sixth the population of the U.S. […]
 
“They're measuring their speed in "actions-per-minute," the number of times in one minute they can move a unit or do something else in the game. In that video, one gamer talks about how at the top levels you need about 300 actions-per-minute. That's five actions per second.
 
“My enthusiastic StarCraft-playing friends estimate themselves at about 30 actions-per-minute. Me, I can do about two, but if you count erratically zooming all over the map trying to find the ramp to your base as an action, maybe three.
 
“They get up to that speed by first being born with a Rain Man-like perfect storm of genetics and then training for a minimum of 10 hours a day, six days a week. Teams actually live together in barrack-like quarters...”
 
--  5 Insane True Things about Starcraft: The Professional Sport  
 
***
 
FROM TOTAL WAR TO SPECIAL FORCES
 
World War I, World War II, and the Korean War had been “total war” – tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of combatants taking the battlefield against each other.
 
In that environment, the individual precision of an individual soldier was far less important than figuring out how to coordinate thousands of people moving and attacking together, along with the logistics and support to coordinate mass-scale battles.
 
With the Allied victory in World War II and the advent of nuclear weapons, the era of total war had almost passed. During the stalemate in the Korean War, the Soviet Union had been able to develop nuclear weapons of their own, which was largely the end of total war for this chapter of history.
 
Going into the 1960s, poorly equipped guerillas would be wiped out in a large scale battle against modern artillery and aircraft. Therefore, the world saw a rise in insurgent warfare, terrorism, and hostage-taking taking as a way for small groups to put military pressure and the threat of violence against larger and more well-equipped countries.
 
***
 
DELTA FORCE TRAINING
 
Delta Force was formed in 1977 and modeled on the British Special Air Service (SAS), a top commando unit. The SAS had been one of the most effective units in counterterrorist and anti-guerilla operations in the aftermath of the Korean War era.

When American Army Special Forces officer Charlie Beckwith served with the SAS as an exchange officer, including on combat duty in British Malaya, he saw the need for an American-equivalent organization that could handle similar missions.
 
Those missions called for unique and intense amounts of precision and coordination, levels of marksmanship, self-control, and small unit coordination among operatives.
 
Delta Force rose to become the premier counterterrorism unit in the U.S. Army to meet those challenges – the challenge of what to do in the event of terrorist operations like what happened at the Munich Olympics, or in response to the rapidly-increasing amount of airline hijackings happening in the era.
 
After going through an intense selection process that weeded out 90% of the candidates applying, the soldiers of Delta Force repeatedly honed their marksmanship in the “Shooting House” they built.
 
Pay attention to the progression of how they worked on their skills; it is illuminating. In all cases, “targets” are either paper shooting range type targets, or human-sized shaped manikins.
 
 From  Inside Delta Force  –
 
“We started in the Shooting House as we had on the range: first walking through without weapons, then with, but dry-firing. Next walking through live-firing with one target, then adding targets. We increased our speed until we could move at a full run.
 
It was exciting. Standing outside the door to a room in ready position, muscles tensing, wound up like a coiled spring, guns going off in the other rooms. Bill, Mike, Allen, or Bob holding the handle to the door, counting down with voice and fingers — "Three...two…one — Execute! Execute! Execute!”
 
You blast inside and immediately make a turn left or right. Sometimes a target is right in your face — right inside the doorway. You have to shoot on the move; shoot and keep moving at full speed and keep shooting until all targets are taken out. Then you assess the room for other dangers, other threats. Your heart is still pounding from the burst of energy, but your mind has to remain calm and detached. It’s like when you have to observe yourself and the scene from outside your body — from a spot on the ceiling where you can take it all in with a fish-eye lens.
 
Soon it feels good; it feels fluid. You start to clear the room with a style that feels automatic. If a target is in your sector, you shoot it without even looking to see the hits — because you know where the shots went before they were fired. Your pistol or submachine gun follows your eyes while your mind ranges ahead. You can feel the gun moving in your hands, sense and count the shots as they’re fired, but you never really hear the sounds of the shots going off.
 
Somewhere about that time, we added hostage targets to the equation. Then our instructors switched to cartoon targets that sometimes held weapons and sometimes didn’t. That caused a little hesitation and embarrassment at first, but soon it made no difference at all. We either shot for the weapons held by the targets or at targets identified as “bad” (whether they held weapons or not) just as the instructor flung open the door and we hurled ourselves inside to do battle.
 
Then we started working in pairs. Two men in at a time, the first man in taking the heavy side, the second man going to the other side of the room. That added a whole new dimension and feel to the exercise. Hearing and feeling the fire from a partner, knowing the angles of fire were shifting and changing and that a “friendly” was in the room. The angles and elevations of your shots took on added importance. You didn’t want to hit your mate — or he, you — but sometimes the rounds you fired would miss him by inches and his pass just as closely by you.
 
Next we added teammate-down drills: how to pick up a partner’s side of the room if he was shot and incapacitated or his weapons malfunctioned. We shifted from room to room and partner to partner, and each scenario was different from the one before. […]
 
When we could function well as two-man teams we formed into four-man teams. We shifted around the Shooting House between rooms and team members. An instructor was in charge of each room, and we rotated from station to station. Every room presented a new problem and a different situation to overcome.”
 
***
 
PRECISION TACTICAL SHOOTING
 
The type of training the Delta Force soldiers were undergoing is typically called “tactical shooting” or “tactical marksmanship” – as distinguished from target shooting, where you stand in one place on a shooting range and shoot at targets down range.
 
I’m not a particularly good shot and don’t stay in practice, but I learned basic target shooting in the Boy Scouts as a teenager, and also had the opportunity to learn the basics of tactical shooting – the same thing the Delta Force operatives were learning to a much higher level – where you and a partner are moving and shooting in coordination.
 
It’s a lot more dangerous. A lot more can go wrong. Obviously, an error can lead to a grievous injury or fatality. And the whole thing can be quite confusing: firearms are loud , the recoil from firearms is painful in one’s hand whenever a gun goes off, spent shell-casings are automatically ejected from modern guns and roll around on the floor, and that’s before getting into a bunch of edge cases of what to do if your gun gets jammed.
 
Given that the stakes are so high in this discipline, it forms a uniquely valuable place to study the mechanics and form of human thinking and human action. I universally recommend everyone and anyone learn the basics of marksmanship at some point in their life; I’ve introduced a number of men and women to basic shooting. Even in countries where firearms are highly controlled, there’s usually gun ranges you can pay to shoot for an afternoon that are surprisingly affordable.
 
But even if you never try marksmanship (though again, I recommend it), even if not, the basic mental models of how elite soldiers and law-enforcement officers learn to navigate these difficult and inherently chaotic situations to safely do them at high-speed can be a highly instructive mental model.
 
***
 
STEADY AND PERSISTENT PRACTICE
 
Starcraft – even professional-level Starcraft where tens of thousands of dollars are at stake in a given competition – is inherently lower-stakes than something as intense as counterterrorism.
 
But, surprisingly – or perhaps unsurprisingly – the aspects of training, competency, and mastery in Starcraft looks strikingly similar to elite-level tactical marksmanship.
 
A famous overview video of Starcraft actions-per-minute, linked by both Ivan and the article on professional Starcraft play –
 
Korean Gamers: APM Demonstration
 
“Interviewer: What is APM?
 
Player: APM stands for Actions Per Minute. It is an average rate of how quick your fingers move. To win a championship, it should be at least over 200’s and in the lower 300’s.
 
Interviewer: Why is APM important?
 
Player: It is a rate that shows how quick you can draw your picture in the game with a keyboard and a mouse. 
 
Interviewer: What do you do to increase your APM?
 
Player: I have tried this and that, putting my wrists on sandbags and so forth... Steady and persistence practice seems to be the only way.”
 
***
 
ACTIONS PER MINUTE AS A GENERALIZED MENTAL MODEL
 
We are in the midst of our series on Limit Breaks  – we are looking to figure out what the limits that are holding us back from higher performance and more thriving, and systematically navigate and break through them.
 
All of your life happens throughout time , and this chapter, we’re looking at the smallest units of time.
 
Actions Per Minute.
 
If you complete more per minute  than other people, you can do more things than other people.
 
That sounds obvious, but most of life is not very high-stakes. In a counterterrorism operation, being 10 seconds faster might be the difference between a bad guy getting off a shot to kill one of your teammates or a hostage. In those cases, being able to make two precise and accurate shots in a three-second window might be the difference between life and death.
 
It makes sense, then, for counterterrorism soldiers to train to be able to take an action that’s naturally clumsy and awkward – shooting a firearm is not an intuitive or natural behavior – and train to be able to do it finely, precisely, accurately, and quickly.
 
Lower-stakes than counterterrorism is competition – traditional athletics or video games – where an American football quarterback being able to “read the defense faster” and throw the ball where the defense isn’t can lose or win the game. The same applies to competitive gaming; getting to the enemy’s base in Starcraft when he isn’t ready wins you the match.
 
But why do we care in our own lives, if we’re doing things like answering email, getting our taxes done, working on project proposals and descriptions, and getting routine work done?
 
Well, when we realize that we all only have 168 hours each week, being able to do more per minute  means being able to do more in life.
 
To take something trivial, if you have 20 emails you need to answer, if that takes 5 minutes (one email answered every 15 seconds), then you have more time to spend doing what you want  than if it takes 20 minutes (one email answered every 60 seconds).
 
The person who answers 4 emails of the same type in a minute has 4x the “Actions Per Minute” as the person who answers 1 per minute.
 
This seems small if we’re talking about 20 emails, but what if you have 100 emails to answer? The difference between 25 minutes in your email and 100 minutes in your email is a pretty big deal; it’s the difference between a quick chore and the activity consuming a significant part of the day.
 
In everything you do, if it completes faster, you have more time to deploy on whatever is most meaningful to you – in competitive and fast-moving and high-stakes environment, this is essential. But even in lower-stakes environments, it means more time to do what matters most to you.
 
Training towards a higher APM in the regular activities of your life means more achievement  but also, paradoxically, more meaningful things done  and lower stress in the process.
 
The last point is counterintuitive – lower stress by going faster? Let’s explore.
 
***
 
SPEED AS A BYPRODUCT OF DOING THINGS CORRECTLY
 
“Inside Delta Force” is an excellent book, but it’s not a how-to guide. It’s a memoir; you have to extract the mental models for yourself from it.
 
If you want an excellent how-to guide from a veteran elite solider, you can’t do much better than Richard Machowicz’s “ Unleash the Warrior Within .” A veteran Navy SEAL who served as Naval Special Warfare Scout/Sniper Instructor, Machowicz emphasizes that speed comes only after a progression of mastery.
 
Machowicz –
 
“How you practice determines the quality of your performance in deploying a weapon. Perfect performances can’t exist without perfect practice. The Training Pyramid is a systematic method that allows the progression of learning to occur naturally. This provides a way to acquire more weapons (i.e., skills) you don’t already possess.
 
My experiences in training for close-quarter battle honed my thinking about training in general, and introduced me to the ideas behind the Training Pyramid. Close-quarter battle essentially means clearing and securing rooms from terrorists who have taken hostages. In other words, we get rid of the bad guys. This is the most volatile situation imaginable: You have merely a fraction of a second to determine who are the “tangos” (terrorists) and who are the hostages. Not only that, it’s highly possible to shoot one of your own people, because a full- fledged battle will be raging in a space that might be the size of a bedroom. Bullets travel through plasterboard and wood, and if the room is made from concrete or steel there is the danger of ricochet. It’s not uncommon for explosives to go off before and during your entrance.
 
How do we prepare to face this absolute chaos? Reduce the entire process down into distinct increments, second by second. Then, after everyone knows exactly where he is supposed to be, what he is supposed to do, and how he is supposed to move, all the pieces are slowly and gradually put back together . It is a dangerous piece of choreography. People have been shot and killed just in the training. ”
 
Machowicz describes a “Training Pyramid” that goes:
 
Correct Fundamentals
Concentration
Consistency
Accuracy
Speed
 
You don’t start by looking for speed and just start moving frantically when untrained; that’s not what elite soldiers are doing, and it’s not what elite competitors in their field are doing.
 
Machowicz compares speed and mastery of anything to typing –
 
“The process of learning to type—or not learning to type!—is exactly what I’m talking about. First you have to familiarize yourself with the keyboard, exactly where all the letters, numbers, and symbols are placed. Then you have to learn how to position your hands so that you can strike the basic keys you need to learn first. These are examples of the correct fundamentals. Next you have to concentrate to be able to physically move your fingers over the keyboard in a way that will produce legible words. To concentrate fully in the beginning, you need to fully, slowly focus on the fundamentals you were given. You repeat those concentrated movements over and over again to be able to be consistent, hitting the keys you want to hit, get- ting the same correct results over and over again. Assuming that you have applied the correct fundamentals, concentration, and consistency, you will find that you are over time able to make fewer and fewer typos and look at the keyboard less and less. Now you are developing accuracy. Finally, as your typing gets more accurate until it feels like second nature, your speed will gradually and naturally increase. Over time you will find you are able to type as fast as you talk! But if something breaks down in the process—you don’t learn correct fundamentals, or you don’t concentrate on what you learn, or you don’t have the patience to practice often enough to develop consistency—you’ll end up like me. A rotten typist.”
 
Speed comes as a byproduct of mastery, starting with the fundamentals. Then, practicing fully concentrating and removing distractions, then consistently outputting the right action, then consistently and accurately outputting the right action, and then – and only then – speed.
 
***
 
TAKING A FUNDAMENTAL SKILL, MASTERING, AND FORGETTING IT
 
If you look at guides of high-level Starcraft online, they follow similar principles.
 
For instance  –
 
“The following techniques can be looked upon as the basic requirements to achieve Master-level rank. It’s important to understand that Master League is only the beginning of high level play. As such, these requirements may appear to be overwhelming, but as Spanishiwa once said:  “The way to get really good is to incorporate one thing at a time and focus on it until it becomes second nature, then add the next thing.”  (paraphrased) Therefore, picking skill-level-appropriate actions to focus on and integrate into your play and mastering them is the way to eventually acquire all of these mechanics.”
 
The author then makes a simple point that generalizes to everything –
 
“Always use a dedicated hotkey for scouting. Mine was ~ (tilde). I bind this to early scouter drone, then to the first overlord closest to my opponent’s base to fly in around 40 supply or 7 minutes. […] Whatever the hotkey, use that and ONLY that hotkey for scouting and ONLY for scouting. Why? Because in this way, scouting will become second nature and will never have to be remembered again. ”
 
This might seem small or trivial, but is actually the root of Actions Per Minute.
 
Scouting – moving around to reveal the edges of the map and the opponents – is one of the core things that needs to be done in Starcraft.
 
Here, the expert is recommending you (1) always use a single dedicated key on the keyboard for scouting, (2) use that key only, and (3) practice until it “becomes second nature.” Then, you never have to remember or think about it again.
 
***
 
TRAINING IN THE FUNDAMENTALS
 
Starcraft guides written by master-level players have many similarities, that largely hold across domains.
 
Here’s  another one  –
 
“You should be able to go through your macro cycles fairly quickly, somewhere around 2 seconds will suffice. If it takes longer than 2 seconds you are too slow. I can do them in 1 second. You want to aiming to slim down that number because macro is such a core part of the game that if you do slim it down imagine the amount of time you can use for micro and other things. Its also very important turn down your key press delay in your control panel keyboard settings.
 
“ The way I was able to learn to hit these keys as quickly as I can was to go into notepad and just ferociously spam these. As well as keys that were hard to hit for me. Do my macro cycle over and over until it was smooth and quick. Until you get to a point where you don't even think about doing your cycles.  You need to get to a point where you build a sort of cycle in your macro rotation. Here's an example of my thought process while macroing.”
 
Interestingly, this player recommends practicing and improving, not by playing the game, but by repeatedly and accurately typing the keystrokes into a basic text editor until it’s second nature. He recommends practicing the common “macro” keystrokes, as well as any keys that are hard to hit due to lack of typing skill or unusual hand motions.
 
***
 
MAPPING THE FUNDAMENTALS
 
Everyday life differs in a major way from known domains – you need to map the fundamentals for yourself.
 
The fundamentals of playing Starcraft are now known at a high level.
 
The fundamentals of clearing a room of terrorists, even, is now known at a high level – after decades of refinement by elite military units.
 
It’s likely that aspects of your work have not  been mapped to such a high degree.
 
That means, in order to implement these principles, you need to sit and think,
 
“What would be the perfect way to do this?”
 
A period of self-study is required to make this work well. You look at what outputs you’re creating, the key things that go into creating those outputs, and then you search for the most efficient and effective way of doing them – followed by practicing them until they’re second nature and forgotten.
 
In this way, you diagnose and map “big actions” into smaller pieces, and practice the smaller pieces until they’re second nature.
 
***
 
A FEW EXAMPLES
 
This can seem like a lot of work.
 
It is  a lot of work.
 
It’s worth it.
 
If there’s an activity you do regularly, spending 1-3 hours studying and mapping it might make you 10%, 20%, or even as much as 90% faster – forever.
 
It’s worth remembering, first, that every standardization and mapping of a domain started with experimentation. In any area you’ve learned to a high level, someone  did the work of standardizing the field.
 
In Inside Delta Force , the author described the immense amounts of experimentation they did to find the perfect way to do everything. Eventually, an eight-person team clearing a room would work in four pairs of two men – the first pair would break into the room and take the “strong side” of the room (either the larger side or the one with more hostiles), followed by the next pair immediately taking the other side. There was then a couple-second delay before the third pair took the strong side, and fourth pair the weak side.
 
They spent a lot of time experimenting, at chalkboards drawing and re-drawing rooms, and looking for what the “best” way to do it was, in order to establish that as doctrine and then practice it until it was second nature.
 
Everyone’s work differs a little bit, but here are three examples from my own life.
 
1. Typing: given that so much of what you do involves the keyboard, training typing speed up is very valuable. I already quoted Machowicz on the theory of it; I also practiced using typing games like  Z-Type  until I could type fast. It’s a little bit boring training one’s typing speed up, but more than pays for itself across life.
 
2. Complex writing: getting into a more advanced domain, writing long essays used to take me 20+ hours; I cut that time roughly in half by hard-separating brainstorming, outlining, writing, and editing. I did a modified version of Bob Pozen’s guidelines in  Extreme Productivity  – his chapter on writing is excellent and works very well.
 
When I moved from being an “inspiration writer” to a writer who had mastered the mechanics and fundamentals of writing, I was a lot slower for my next 30-60 of writing, but then I moved at double the speed forever.
 
This came, again, from breaking down writing into discrete stages – Brainstorm, Outline, Write, Edit – and practicing each of them individually. As I developed my own mechanical style, I also looked to identify problems where a piece wasn’t coming together well, naming these: “Lack of thesis”, “Transition problems”, etc. I then developed specific techniques on how to get through those problems as quickly as possible, and practiced those as well.
 
3. Processing photos and videos: doing activities like the GiveGetWin Tour tend to produce a lot of photos and video worth sharing.
 
The first year we did it, we just took photos and video, and afterwards we had a big pile of unprocessed photos and video that was a massive hassle to go through.
 
In subsequent years, we pre-decided (1) exactly the file system in Dropbox everyone would upload photos and videos to, (2) exactly where we’d look to upload photos and videos online, and (3) most importantly, we’d go through a cycle of doing this after every Tour date.
 
The first time, we had a huge backlog of photos and videos and not knowing what to do with them. After developing protocols, it was 15-30 minutes after a single event to upload all of them to the write place, delete and free up memory on all our cameras and phones and videocameras, and get everything online. What had been a slow and unwieldy process became a standard part of debriefing an event.
 
These are small, maybe almost trivial things, but if neglected, it takes way too long to get anything done. By diagnosing and mapping out how work should go in advance, and practicing that, you eventually get a lot of “free speed” – and things become easier and less stressful as the actions become automatic.
 
***
 
THE FINAL TRIAL

Haney -- 

“Now that I was here, I realized it was harder to be the shooter than the hostage. To be on the assault team required great confidence in your abilities. To be the hostage required faith in your comrades. It was easier to think of being shot than of shooting a mate.
 
As the minutes ticked by so slowly, I thought about the long, hard path we’d taken to this point. We had spent untold hours on the range, and in the Shooting House, and had fired hundreds of thousands of rounds to get here, to this room, to this chair.
 
I heard an explosion down the hall, then the immediate stutter of pistols and submachine guns in another room. The firing was over in just a few seconds.
 
I hope that went well. I glanced down at my watch. The assault should be any time now. I hope these guys pass their test, I most sincerely do. The door exploded with a flash and a clap, and a shock wave hit me like a punch in the face.
 
I could see the team hurling themselves into the room, see the splashes of fire from the muzzles of their guns, and feel the slap of overpressure as bullets flew by my face. But I can’t honestly say I heard any one distinct sound or that my brain registered any one distant image. It happened so fast, so suddenly, that even though I was expecting it, it was so completely overpowering that my system was unable to respond until it was all over. The ferocity of the attack stunned me. It was like being struck by lightning – a pure and elemental force.
 
J.T. was the team leader. As he gave commands to his team to conduct the search, I unfroze enough in my chjair to check the terrorist over my shoulder. The manikin’s head was lying on the floor a few feet away, with one hole just under the right cheek and another slightly in front of his ear.
 
The terrorist on my side had a pair of holes at the base of his throat. The rest of the manikins and cartoon targets around the room had at least two hits in the kill zone; some had four where the three and for men had added their shots to an already hit target.
 
When the team finished their room search, J.T. gave me a toothy grin from under his lush mustache. “You okay, Bubba?” he asked as he looked me over from head to toe.
 
“Yeah J.T., I’m fine” […]
 
It all came off without a hitch. Everyone had multiple turns as a hostage, and as an assaulter with a live hostage in the room. Nobody was hurt and no targets were missed. And the confidence that life-or-death final examination gave us – in ourselves as much as in our mates – stuck with us for life.”
 
***
 
FINAL GUIDELINES
 
To increase your Actions Per Minute,
 
0. If it’s a brand new field or a unique part of your workflow, diagnose and map out the best way actions can go. This takes a while. If it’s an established field or workflow, search out some best practices on how to do it.
 
1. Break your actions into the fundamentals  and practice how to do the fundamentals correctly.
 
2. Aim for full concentration and consistency  first, before worrying about how good the output is. When you slow down and start doing any action correctly from a blueprint, quality can suffer a little bit at first, but that’s okay.
 
3. Aim to increase accuracy  and quality  while following the correct fundamentals.
 
4. The speed comes from there – with practice and more repetitions, you get faster. You also can start addressing edge cases and make things more complex at this stage.
 
5. If desired, you can also start measuring  how long things take, and perhaps evaluating the quality of how good  things came out. Marksmanship gives pretty clear feedback on if you hit the target or not, but in other fields, you might need to develop your own way to evaluate quality.
 
We’ll talk more next chapter about how to standardize and automate activities; we’ll go deeper into that.
 
For now, start thinking on how to increase your Actions Per Minute. Given that time is the fundamental limit of life, being able to complete things faster gives you more time to do whatever you like – whether that be more work, more leisure, or something else, getting things done faster makes a lot more possible.
 
And finally, do remember when you’re going faster in the correct way, it should be easier  and more enjoyable  and less stressful.
 
Speed isn’t franticness – it’s mastery.