How (And Why) to Practice For Business The Same Way You Practice Sports

“Practice makes perfect.”

You’ve probably heard this saying a thousand times growing up, but when was the last time you heard it as an adult?

We like to tell our children that practice makes perfect when they’re playing a sport or doing math homework.

Generally, we don’t think about our own work like that.

We should.

Even in the office or scientific arenas, practice is still essential.

It just doesn’t look quite the same as it did when we were younger.

Most of the literature we have on practice relates to sports or music. Which makes sense, because you can get very objective feedback.

If you practice enough, you’ll see the difference.

It’s not the same in an office setting. It’s not nearly as obvious how you go about practicing something. Unless you’re shooting paper balls into a trash can, there isn’t direct, objective feedback.

But there are still ways to practice.

10,000 Hours

The concept of practicing for 10,000 hours comes to us from a professor named Anders Ericsson, but it was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers: The Story of Success.

The idea is that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become world-class at something. Of course, this theory has been misused and misquoted since Ericsson studied it.

It is not necessarily the time spent that makes a difference, but also practicing in a certain way.

Ericsson recently came out with his own book called Peak: How To Master Almost Anything. In Peak, he argues this:

What matters when you’re practicing is not doing something better — it’s doing something different.

This is because your brain and your body can see the differences in output based on your input.

So, to improve, you need to change the input and continually evaluate the new output.

It’s like playing around with a recipe. You add ingredients, substitute, change the amounts to find what tastes best.

In The Office

How does this play out in the office world?

You need to turn what you’re doing into a method or formula.

Whether you’re studying scientific literature, preparing for a meeting, brainstorming, or creating a market forecast, all of these can be turned into a method.

For example, I have to stay updated on a large amount of scientific information. However, there isn’t much time between being a CEO, coaching teams, and having way too many hobbies and interests.

So, I focus on creating an accurate picture of how much I actually know.

Here’s how to do that:

1. Take an 11 x 17 piece of paper and a pencil, and find a quiet place.

2. Put a title on the top relating to the subject matter.

3. Data dump everything you know about the subject in text and pictures onto the piece of paper. Keep going until the page is full.

4. Compare the paper with an annotated bibliography. (I create one when first studying a subject).

Then, ask yourself “What did I miss? How weak is my understanding?”

It’s an instant diagnostic that determines how much you need to practice that subject. You can change the paper, location, time, approach or any number of things.

Concentrate on altering different pieces of the formula until you can find the best possible outcome.

Once you reduce things to a formula like above, you can follow Ericsson’s advice.

Practice being different, not better.

Some people get stuck doing the same thing over and over again because it works.

It may not work great, but it gets them by.

Instead, they should be changing parts of their formula and evaluating their output.

Here’s another example: I constantly change the way I give presentations. Sometimes, I use bullet points. Other times, I have a whole transcript.

Maybe I use a PowerPoint.

Maybe I don’t.

Sometimes, I try the presentation without any visuals at all. I always tweak my formula in different ways to see how it affects the outcome.

The trick is to reduce what you’re doing to a method, a formula.

That way, you can actually keep track of what you’re doing differently. You have a benchmark to check the output against.

Overcoming Resistance

We often resist formulating our work into equations because we don’t want to think of ourselves as an assembly line.

It goes against our human nature to think everything we do is rote procedure.

Nowadays, we tend to shun that Industrial era, assembly line thinking.

And in an office setting, this holds true. We’re not working in the same way that we would on an assembly line.

But there are advantages to thinking that way.

Thinking about your work activities in a linear progression enables you to vary parts of it and understand what impact it has on the output.

You can practice to improve your performance in an office setting. It’s not limited to a ball or an instrument.

You just have to create your own formula — and constantly change it.