How to Get More Awesome at the Things you do

Gifted. Talented.

You’ve no doubt heard those words before applied to others. But have you heard them applied to you? What about these: He was just born talented or she was a gifted little girl. Heard those? More importantly, do you believe the sentiment expressed in those statements that ability is genetic and therefore out of your control?

Hopefully, you’ve seen by now that with the right mindset and enough time, it is possible for any of us, no matter our age, culture or socio-economic background, to get much better at anything we want to get better at. That doesn’t mean we’ll become experts but we can certainly be well above average if we are willing to pursue excellence by following the principles of deliberate practice.

Let’s take a look then at what Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool recommend in their book Peak: How to Master Almost Anything for pursuing excellence at work, and in everyday life.

Excellence on the Job

What is the best way to improve a person’s performance who is already trained and on the job?

· It has to look and feel real. People need to be pushed out of their comfort zones in order for it to be called deliberate practice. There is no sense focusing on only what you’re good at. It needs to focus on skills (i.e., what you can do) and not just on knowledge (i.e., what you know).

· You also need to be able to identify top performers and then document what it is they do. That gives you a template by which to train lesser performers.

· Employees need to have a growth mindset, believing that abilities are improvable.

· Employees need to give up the myth that if you do something long enough, you’re bound to get better at it (i.e., experience is not the same as expertise).

· Employees need to understand that while effort is important to deliberate practice it is not the only ingredient.

· Employees shouldn’t be left on their own to figure out what excellence looks like and if they are becoming more excellent or not. A coach or mentor is invaluable in providing feedback and ideas on how to better practice.

· Employees find it difficult to make the time to do their job and to do training so learning should be built into and done on the job. This gets people into the habit of practice and into the habit of thinking more about practice. That — a practice-mindset — brings an employee at a company a little closer to the same model say a concert pianist or Olympic athlete would use to pursue excellence.

If you are an amateur golfer looking to apply the principles of deliberate practice, you don’t just read a few blog posts or watch a few videos with tips on how to be a better golfer. As Ericsson and Pool state in their book:

“…attending lectures, minicourses and the like offers little or no feedback and little or no chance to try something new, make mistakes, correct the mistakes and gradually develop a new skill”.

The bottom line is if you’re not improving, it isn’t likely that you lack the God-given talent but that instead you aren’t practicing in the right way.

Excellence in Everyday Life

Similar to finding excellence on the job, pursuing excellence at home or at school is a matter of doing the following:

Find a good teacher — This person should be available to work with you one-on-one as much as possible. It needs to be someone that understands the process of becoming an expert in the context that you are looking for. This helps establish accurate mental models of the actions you will need to be able to do. Otherwise, you are left to your own devices and the mental representations you create by yourself may or may not be accurate. Find a teacher you know has already guided others to the same level of expertise you are looking to get to. And don’t pick someone who is simply just an expert performer. Accomplished in the field doesn’t necessarily translate into good at teaching others how to become accomplished in the field. Ask prospective teachers about the practice methods and schedules they would assign to you. As you will often be practicing on your own, what a teacher asks you to practice and what a teacher asks you to focus on are paramount to forming good mental representations of what excellence in that context is and what it isn’t.

Focus — Finding a good teacher that can give you the right type of practice schedule will help you to be more engaged. You’ll need to do a lot of repetitions and that can become boring — even if you’re teacher has done a good job of making the training engaging. Therefore, focus is key. It represents your goal at the time. Anything else that isn’t your goal at that time is a distraction. When you practice you will become distracted. It’s human nature to do so. Quickly recognizing that you have become distracted and then refocusing are important abilities to have if you want to improve.

Thoughtful Repetition — Repetition done mindless is a waste of your time. The effort expended will not lead you to your targeted outcome. The purpose of repetition is not directly to make you better. The purpose of the repetition is to find out where you are weak and focus on improving that weakness by trying different methods until you find something that is successful.

Plateaus are Normal — Why is the so-called “winner’s circle”, or the best of the best in a context, so small? The answer is plateaus. At first, improvement in a new skill comes fast and frequent. Then it slows to almost an imperceptible crawl. It is at this point that the most people except their fate and settle into life at that ability level thinking no more improvement is possible for them. Instead, go directly towards that stagnation. Push well out of your comfort zone in that skill and see what breaks down first. Most likely then that is the part that needs your attention. Trying something different or new for practice is also often a good way to break out of a rut.

Maintain Motivation — Deliberate practice is not fun. There will be many other tempting and enjoyable things around you that will act as distractors. To maintain motivation you need to do a combination of 1) strengthen your reasons to keep going and 2) weaken your reasons to quit. Ericsson and Pool recommend setting aside one hour per day, cleared of all other obligations, where you can practice with full focus. That sort of well-structured routine is an important way to weaken your reason to quit. To strength your reasons to keep going, realize that you are very capable of becoming better at a certain thing than you currently are at it now. That’s intrinsic motivation. Another way to strengthen is to seek out the approval and admiration of others. This is extrinsic motivation. Even better, find a person or group of people who want to pursue the same kind and level of excellence that you do.

Deliberate practice is all about learning to do something that you can’t do. You push yourself out of your comfort zone. You engage in what seems like unending repetition. You look at where things are breaking down and figure out ways to fix those breakdowns. Our daily lives don’t naturally give us the opportunities to do this. To get better we first must believe that it is possible. Then we must put in the effort to construct the opportunities to practice deliberately.