Do it with style

Any athlete will tell you that the better your style, the less effort you make for the same result. "Less weight, more style" is a familiar comment from a trainer in a weights room.

Style is not flourishes and flair, it isn’t a gestures and mannerisms. It’s not tricks. Style is doing it smoothly, quickly, efficiently, neatly, with a minimum of fuss, bother and clattering about. It’s also about catching the informed eye, with an understated something special.

You have to practice when the other kids are watching the latest hit TV show or having a great lads or lassies night out; you have to want to be good, not to impress the girls or the boss, but to satisfy yourself. You have to give up fantasising and live in the horrible here-and-now of your actual skills.

The original Zephyr skateboard team surfing and skating every hour they could; Eric Clapton practicing the blues eight hours a day before he was twenty; Kernighan and Ritchie developing the C programming language and showing the world what the phrase "tight code" really meant; fashion designers from Armani to Zoran obsessing over cut, colour and fabric; and every world-class athlete practising every day for hours… face it, style is just geeky.

You have to have taste as well, or you can’t recognise someone else’s good style and learn (or steal) from it. Taste is all a bit tricky: who says my judgement is better than yours? It takes humility to develop taste and it takes knowledge to exercise informed discrimination.

Once you shoot for style, you’re putting your work up to be judged and yourself as a craftsman up for judgement as well. That’s a tough one – especially when there were a hundred kids at university better than you.

That understated something special is going to pass the hoi-polloi right by. Style is for the cognoscenti. It’s undemocratic and elitist. Get over it. The pay-off is that you do more with less effort. Your work shines. You get into heaven because you chose to use the talent and ability you were born with. You get to be a person with an identity because you identified with something enough to be good at it.