Adopt This Approach From Sports and Surpass People in Business
Athletes streamline the learning process and knowledge workers should too.
Let’s face it. Getting good at new skills takes time.
But what if there were a way to shortcut the process? To get the highest return on skill investment for the least time commitment?
There is, and we can learn it from athletes.
It’s called doing drills.
Watch footage from an NFL practice, an Olympics training camp, or any other sporting arena.
Coaches put athletes through a series of very specific drills to build specific subskills.
Those subskills — when combined— produce excellence in that sport.
Why Drill Are So Powerful
Drills let you improve a complex skill by investing strategically in a simple subskill that gives you an outsized return.
And that’s not the only benefit.
Drills also simplify the learning process.
Because drills let you laser-focus on one subskill, your attention, memory, and brainpower don’t get spread thin trying to juggle multiple subskills at once.
In this article, you will learn how:
- Ben Franklin used drills to become world-class
- Three strategies to create drills in your life
Drills Can Make You World Famous
Ben Franklin was a successful writer, inventor, politician, diplomat, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.
His secret? He used drills to become a great writer and thinker.
For example, he did this drill to improve the structure of his writing:
- He found a well-written essay.
- Starting with the first paragraph, he wrote a one-line summary on an individual notecard. He created one notecard for each paragraph.
- When done summarizing, he shuffled the notecard pile and took a few day’s break to clear his memory.
- When he returned, he tried to rearrange the notecards back into the original essay’s logical order.
- He compared his notecard stack to the original essay to see what he missed
While you may not aspire to be world-renowned like Franklin, you can use the tactic of targeted drilling to improve your skills faster.
How To Do Drills
There are three key strategies to design drills:
Isolation — Design a drill that lets you focus exclusively on one subskill. For example:
- To improve public speaking, you could do targetted drills on: gesturing, talking fast and then slow, speech volume, and variety in tone. Your drill would only focus on that one subskill, ignoring all other subskills while you practice it.
Time Slice — Isolate a piece of the overall skill based on the time it occurs. For example:
- Music: practice the hardest section of the song
- Public speaking: practice openings; practice conclusions
- Cooking: focus on something early in the process like prepping food or something later like plating food
- Sports: practice specific items like kickoffs, face-offs, penalty shots
Copy an Expert — Use their finished product and try to recreate just one piece of it. When you can’t isolate a subskill using one of the previous methods, this is a great approach. For example:
- Art: Reproduce a small existing work, focusing on just one aspect. If you’re painting and working on coloring or shading, then you use pre-outlined versions of famous works, so you don’t need to worry about drawing, for instance.
- Speaking: In my mid-20s, I wanted to get good at public speaking. So, I practiced mimicking Tony Robbins, an amazing speaker. I would watch a video of him, and then I would say the same story trying to mimic whatever subskill I was drilling. So at one stage, I worked to mimic only how he switches from talking fast to talking slowly. At another stage, I practiced mimicking only his hand gestures.
- Writing: Ben Franklin reconstructed great articles as outlined above. You can try to reproduce any particular aspect of an expert’s writing.
Conclusion
Targetted drills create such a competitive advantage that all sports teams have adopted them. A hundred years ago, building athletic skill was far less regimented and precise.
In the knowledge-work economy, skill-building is where it was a hundred years ago in sports. Focused drills are not yet the norm.
This is actually a huge opportunity. By adopting drills into your professional development, you can have a significant competitive advantage.
Want To Improve Your Drills?
If you want to 5X your learning skills and eliminate procrastination, I created a free cheat sheet on Scott Young’s bestselling book, Ultralearning.
