How To Get Better At Anything In One Month
It’s easier than you think.
It’s hard to get great, but it’s easy to get better.
Because no matter what you want to improve about your life, work, or self, the path to improvement is the same.
Step 1: Choose One Thing
We all have plenty of things we want to get better at, but the first step to doing so is to focus on one.
Choose one specific thing you want to improve and focus solely on that for a month.
Give yourself permission to deal with all the other stuff you want to improve at a later date — your likelihood of success goes way up when you focus on one thing at a time.
Multitasking is not your friend.
Step 2: Clarify Your Motivation
Once you choose your one thing, decide exactly why you want to be better at it.
The more clearly you understand your why (with a nod to Simon Sinek), the easier it is to accomplish your goal.
Thinking through your motivation before you begin also helps ensure you choose the right thing to focus on.
For example, maybe you chose to get better at Twitter, but in thinking through your motivation realize your real goal is to get better at connecting with people and Twitter isn’t necessarily the best way for you to go about doing that.
The stronger your motivation, the greater your chance of success.
Step 3: Define “Better”
You can’t achieve a goal you haven’t clearly defined.
“Better” is a tricky word.
It can mean different things at different times. You need to define what it means in the context of your thing, so you can accurately measure whether you accomplish it.
Think through what metrics or tangible evidence you can attach to it.
For example, what does it mean to be a “better” blogger? Does it mean you post more frequently? That more people share your posts? That your posts inspire more debate?
There’s no right or wrong definition of what better means, but if you don’t clearly define it, it’s impossible to ever achieve it.
Step 4: Do Your Thing At Least Three Times A Week
No matter what your thing is, you will only get better at it if you do it on a regular basis.
The more you do it, the better you’ll get. But in almost all cases you have no real chance of getting better at anything in a month unless you commit to doing it at least three times a week.
You have to put in the work. Improvement doesn’t just happen.
Step 5: Measure Your Results
Since you defined metrics around what it means to be “better” at your thing, you can now measure your progress as you go.
It’s important to not only measure the results of doing your thing regularly, but also to analyze those results.
The key to getting better is found in what you learn from what you measure.
This varies widely depending on what your thing is, but your actions will result in a set of impacts you need to study.
Learn from how people react to what you do, how you react to it, and start to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Step 5: Develop A Hypothesis
As you measure the results of your activity and analyze them, use that knowledge to form a hypothesis about how you can improve your results.
This hypothesis can be more than one thing — it can be a series of observations that lead you to shift the way you do your thing.
What’s important is that you think through what you’ve learned from the results of what you’ve done and develop a theory of how you can improve it.
Step 6: Test Your Hypothesis
A hypothesis doesn’t do you any good unless you implement it and measure the results.
There’s as much chance your hypothesis of how to get better at your thing is wrong as there is that it’s right. But that’s fine.
You’re in a testing phase and being wrong can teach you valuable things that help get you closer to being right.
Don’t put too much pressure on your hypothesis to be right and don’t get discouraged if it’s wrong. Learn from it and use those findings to develop a new hypothesis, and test it again.
Each step — in success and failure — gets you closer to your goal of being better. Even if it may not seem like it in that moment.
Step 7: Recognize That Better Isn’t Great
As you go through the month — doing, measuring, testing, and repeating — you may feel you’re not making progress, but it’s important not to get discouraged.
Don’t confuse getting “better” with getting “great.”
Remember: it’s hard to get great, but it’s easy to get better.
You’re not going to get great at anything in a month — that’s not the way the world works. But you 100% can get better at anything in a month.
The way to get great is to keep getting better. And the way to get better is to do so one month at a time.
Subscribe to my newsletter to get 10 helpful ideas each week.
