”I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
Bruce Lee
Good morning peeps, meditation done.
Quote for the day:
”I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
Bruce Lee
To become an expert at something you have to practice everyday and repeat that action over and over again, until it becomes instinctive and when the pressure is really on the hours and hours of practice will overcome any nerves you are experiencing.
Bruce Lee’s quote matches the much used concept that,
10,000 hours of practice make you an expert
The 10,000-hours concept can be traced back to a 1993 paper written by Anders Ericsson, a Professor at the University of Colorado, called ‘The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance’.
It highlighted the work of a group of psychologists in Berlin, who had studied the practice habits of violin students in childhood, adolescence and adulthood.
All had begun playing at roughly five years of age with similar practice times. However, at age eight, practice times began to diverge. By age 20, the elite performers had averaged more than 10,000 hours of practice each, while the less able performers had only done 4,000 hours of practice.
The psychologists didn’t see any naturally gifted performers emerge and this surprised them. If natural talent had played a role it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to expect gifted performers to emerge after, say, 5,000 hours.
Anders Ericsson concluded that,
“many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years”.
It is Malcolm Gladwell’s hugely popular book, ‘Outliers’, that is largely responsible for introducing “the 10,000-hour rule” to a mass audience — it’s the name of one of the chapters.
Ericsson then pointed out that 10,000 was an average, and that many of the best musicians in his study had accumulated “substantially fewer” hours of practice. He underlined, also, that the quality of the practice was important.
10, 000 hours is roughly 3 hours every day, for 10 consecutive years.
There are many arguments about how much natural talent and ability comes into becoming an expert, which I think is obviously a factor, but what I believe cannot be disputed is that if you put in 3 hours practice at something everyday you will become much better at it, than if you do not practice.
I have lived my life by the old adage,
Practice makes perfect
I practiced kicking a football and bowling a cricket ball for hours and hours everyday as a child, with my best friends the Price boys, David, John and Keith and we all played football and cricket to a very high level, until at 19 I gave up sport to become a dancer.
Again I practiced for hours and hours everyday, more than most of the other dancers, who had all started dancing at a much earlier age than me, by the time I stopped dancing after 10 years to go back to playing sport and coaching I had reached the top of my profession and travelled the world with some of the globes biggest stars.
I did 10 years of choreographing and sport production, working on all of the biggest sports events in cricket, football and rugby, travelling to exotic locations producing and choreographing the global conferences for adidas, Nike and Umbro, working with the world’s biggest sporting superstars.
I have been personal training well known high achievers for an average of 4 hours a day for the last 20 years and spent the last 9 years practicing and teaching yoga.
For the last 4 years I have written everyday for 2 − 3 hours, because I knew that if that’s what I wanted to do, then I had to practice writing every single day.
Finally since August I have been learning and practicing BARRE for 3 hours a day at BARREtoned and yesterday after teaching my second Free Community Class, one of the clients asked me how long I had been teaching BARRE for?
I answered,
“That was my second class.”
She exclaimed,
“OMG that’s amazing, I thought you had been teaching BARRE for years!”
That made me feel really good and made all the hours of unpaid practice at the studio I have been putting in worthwhile and reiterated what I already knew, that if you want to be successful in life, in whatever you want to do, you have to put the hours in everyday to see the rewards further down the line.
So what are you waiting for?
If there is something you want to achieve in life then you have to start doing it now, everyday.
Why not start today?
Now whilst eating breakfast I am practicing learning the names of the 18 people doing my Free Community Class at BARREtoned in Notting Hill this morning at 9:45 as I am not good at remembering peoples names yet, but I soon will be if I practice everyday, because remembering names is a skill, that has to be learnt, by practicing everyday, just like everything else in life.
If you want to take part in my last Free Community Class on Monday at 13:15 then Book Here
If you want to achieve the body and lifestyle you have always dreamed of then go to steveagyei.com or email me at steveagyei.com
Have a superp Saturday peeps and a wonderful weekend.
Breathe, Believe and Achieve
Be Happy, Healthy and Wise
Keep on Winning, Smiling and Living the Dream
Namaste
Steve Agyei
Founder of Beyond Lifestyle Secrets
Author of Celebrity Training Secrets
