Rachel L. says: <GOOD>
This course was the most useful professional advice I have seen, because it provides an iterative framework that you can use again and again for greater and greater improvement.
Ellen K. says: <OKAY>
I would recommend Top Performer as a very effective course for people that want to grow their skills in directing their own professional development. It helped me tremendously in focusing my efforts and making these efforts more sustainable. I have a much more concrete understanding of what career capital means and how to use that idea to select what kind of professional development projects to work on. I have always had side projects for professional development, but these were kind of random and hit or miss in terms of value rather than strategically chosen.
Brendan C. says: <GOOD>
If I can say the one single thing for me that this course has done for me that no other course has it is that it pushed me to take action.
The best way I could describe this course is with an analogy. Traditional education is like riding a bike with training wheels on. It’s good at what it does but it is a limited vehicle and if you want to continue to grow and go new places you are going to have to take the training wheels off. This course is like learning without training wheels. It is a generalized process that can apply to people across many disciplines and it can scale to whatever stage in your career you’re in. The ideal person for this course is for someone looking to take their development into their own hands and learn to be an independent learner.
Randy F. says: <OKAY>
The greatest benefit from the course is that it helped me to reorient my efforts, and prune out things I was doing that were not getting me anywhere. It also helped me to see which areas of building a career I need to improve upon. These are the skills described in the course. For example how to interview an expert, how to approach reviewing your career and how to assess if what you doing is effective. These are things that I was either ignoring, or doing badly, and the course has helped me to skill-up in these areas. I am going to repeat the course again, as I will benefit from from from further refining these skills.
Marvin C. says: <GOOD>
I was able to improve my CAD skills which is important for engineers. I am much more comfortable using CATIA now, despite there being so much more to learn.
Vincent W. says: <GOOD>
I would say you don’t want to go throughout your career guessing and wondering why someone else got hired or promoted instead of you. Sometimes it’s circumstance and sometimes it’s your own contribution. This course is the best for maximizing circumstances and contribution to making it ahead as fast as possible.
It’s not how you work (efficiency), it’s what you work on (effectiveness), in Tim Ferriss’ quotes, and this course is the best and only of its kind for the knowledge work we spend half of each week doing.
Martha W. says: <GREAT>
Several things went amazingly well. First one is expert interview – amazing result, definitely one habit that I should start doing much more. Second achievement is that this week I will be completing my machine learning course. This course was supposed to be 11 weeks long, but I am on track to finish it within 4 weeks. All thanks to bets and watertight planning.
I have started recommending this course to some of my closest friends already! It is the course that people should take if they are serious in developing themselves and continue growing. In other words, if the topic of how to be a better X keeps on popping up in your life, then you should take this course to settle it.
Chandra A. says: <GREAT>
The focus management and mastery sections of this course have had a profound impact already, and that’s just from implementing in small steps. It’s a little hard to quantify, but I’ve roughly doubled the amount of focused work I’m getting done outside my job, and I’m seeing on-the-job gains as well.
Scott and Cal have a deep, practical understanding of how and why deliberate practice works. It shows in their ability to make the process alive and accessible. This course provides the actionable framework that’s missing from all the helpful tips, techniques, and good advice we’ve all tried.
The lessons are about active mastery, not passive obedience to techniques. If you want magical, bullet-pointed productivity tools that somehow do the work for you, skip this. If you want to master the tools and start really owning how you work and the results you get, I highly recommend Top Performer.
Mario B. says: <GREAT>
I am changing careers and Top Performer came at the right time. The last weeks’ lesson where Cal said I needed the confidence to parlay my career capital, gave me an idea to pitch to my erstwhile employer. They’ve agreed to let me work from home! At almost the same pay!
If you are confused about what to do next, if you do not know how to go up in your career, if you need to learn how to think critically about your work (and personal) life… Join Top Performer!
Christopher J. says: <OKAY>
The biggest concrete change for me was the prioritization of planning projects. I’ve since created several Project Plan Documents, and the difficulty I have in doing so is reflective of how little planning I had been doing before. Basically, I didn’t look further than that day itself. This made me feel frazzled and as though I weren’t making any real progress, which makes sense because I wasn’t giving myself any way to measure progress. The Project Plan Document has given me a much greater sense of calm.
David W. says: <GOOD>
I began a dedicated effort to begin my PhD application. Writing about it really cemented my choices in logic & sound research as opposed to random searching. And then I uses some of the skills from the project planning stage in my own work as an engineer on major projects. The content of the course if applied correctly is invaluable, especially when considered over a lifetime of usage.
Kai Y. says: <GREAT>
I managed to successfully implement a writing schedule that required 3-4 hours of undistracted deep work. It helped me finish a short story that I probably would’ve abandoned half way, if not for the rule of forcing myself to finish a project despite the imperfections.
This is the stuff they never teach you in school, but could seriously be the backbone to your success (in career, life, etc)! I wish I had a course like this to structure my work and career-searching processes at earlier points in my life, like in high school, college, and the post-graduation years. If you’re someone who has frequently abandoned incomplete projects or chased dead end internships (or job opportunities), the principles taught in this course could turn that around and add structure to career floundering that many people go through.
Chad B. says: <OKAY>
I would certainly recommend this course to others (and I already have). I talk about how it provides a disciplined way of thinking through how to get better at whatever you want to get better at.
Torben F. says: <BAD (political stir isn’t a good thing)>
I managed to do some long-term planning and I actually followed though. Presented a good business plan for my boss and some colleagues. Caused a lot of (political) stir though. Deep work is to learn how to do hard things, that are valuable. If you want a kick-ass career, you need to understand this conceptually and be able to follow through with real world results. This course will teach you both.
Jin W. says: <OKAY>
I have learned a lot through the course. The encouragement of finding out key skills in my field by interviewing skilled people has been of tremendous importance. I have summarized key capabilities to become a great scientist in biology which I did not know before. This helps me pave the way for my training in future and will guide my research towards more fruitful direction.
Michael C. says: <OKAY>
I’m now practiced in reserving time each day for deep work. I think my efficiency has been boosted with that change. I’m now more mindful of developing skills that are relevant to my goals using the techniques from the course.
Suf A. says: <OKAY>
The course was very helpful to allow me to sort through the avalanche of ideas and select the most impactful skills in my career.
Ronald R. says: <GREAT>
The Top Performer program is an absolutely an amazing program and I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to take their career to the next level or become a top performer in any field of their choosing. What Scott and Cal have done is truly amazing. They’[Scott and Cal] have created a repeatable system for becoming excellent at anything that anyone can use to become successful. This is a no-fluff course that will give you huge results if you follow their specific instructions. I know I’m going to be referring back to this program again and again.
Logan Y. says: <GREAT>
If you’re considering this course, you get that our economy demands challenging, often hard-to-identify skills that enable valuable new contributions. Not only did the course give me tools for seeing and building those types of skills, it fundamentally changed how I think about building a meaningful career.
Diana F. says: <GREAT> (Actually she’s also one of my coaching students for ultralearning. Coincidence!)
I stuck to one thing as your course suggested. I am studying Excel in more depth – enrolled in more advanced classes, have been offered a position in a data analysis team, and I have also applied for a small scholarship. Due to improving these skills along the lines your course suggested I got a secondment within my department with a 25% increase in salary.
Deepti K. says: <GREAT> (Like that this reinforces the tough-love positioning we have)
This course is well-researched and has a good mix of general principles and concrete action steps, and it will earnestly badger you into doing things you dislike or find uncomfortable. Those are the things that make you better.
Scott W. says: <OKAY>
The expert interviews helped shape my understanding of what it takes to succeed at the next level. The tips on deliberate practice and setting up a project helped me scope and plan a project that has netted some early returns.
Michael S. says: <OKAY>
In college, you spent thousands of dollars per course, and learned a few things of questionable value. If you are serious about improving, this is well worth the admission fee. Bite the bullet, pay the $, and go through the course.
Garrett J. says: <OKAY>
Unlike other courses that focus on career development, which typically talk about the issue in vague terms, this course gets very concrete and provides a framework for picking a specific skill to notch up in one’s long-term process of developing a career.
Laurel S. says: <GREAT>
The course led me to choose a bigger, harder project, which may seem a bit counter-intuitive. I discovered that I could be bolder once I had a solid plan. As a result, I have a project that is nearing completion and has caught the attention of a number of my peers. The course will challenge you and stretch you, probably even frustrate you a bit, and that is precisely why it would be worth your time and effort! We live in an age of instant gratification and constant distraction. Too few of us take the harder road. Top Performer gave me a useful map for that journey.
Christopher S. says: <GOOD>
I’ve seen improvement in time-management, increased periods of deep focus and productivity which resulted in completing a third of major writing project in a remarkable amount of time.
Interviews were particularly insightful and am already looking forward to retaking the course as suggested and expanding the scope and nature of the questions asked.