To be the best at what you do takes an extraordinary commitment. You’ll need to practise – spend hours and hours focused on getting better. You will change the way your brain works by altering the very connections of the neurons, and indeed every cell in your body.
It’s a big deal.
And you’ll want to do it every day.
Not just 9am-5pm, Monday to Friday. Not even Monday to Saturday. But every day of the week.
Our good friends Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Romer found back in 1993 found that experts practised the same amount every day, including weekends.
So pick your area and start practising. Every day.
Some people say that you just have to work harder to get better. It seems to make sense, and appeals to the virtue of ‘hard work’.
But the truth is that it’s not that simple, is it?
There are some people who work really hard – who spend hours practising or playing – but who don’t get better. Maybe you were one of them.
Sometimes we can do things a lot and not get better at all. In fact, sometimes we get worse!
When I was playing tennis as a child, I would hit the ball and play tournaments and show up to expensive coaching sessions. And at my best I consistently got mediocre results.
The trouble was that I didn’t get feedback. I was practising but I wasn’t doing it the way I needed to if I wanted to actually get better. Instead, I rehearsed the skills I had over and over until I could play ‘well enough’. But I didn’t get better than that.
Nobody told me what I needed to do and I didn’t figure it out for myself. Maybe I could have but I didn’t.
As you read this, you have been walking for a long time. Yet how much better at walking are you today from last year?
Deliberate practice goes beyond just doing the same things over and over again, and instead is focused on actually getting better. It’s about finding ways to push yourself – to make your best even better – and it’s not always easy.
Sometimes you might need to invent ways to challenge yourself.
Because that is what the best of the best will do.
As I was rereading the Introduction of “The Handbook” this morning, it occurred to me how remarkable it is that there is actually a formal domain of expert performance at all.
Being an ‘expert’ is simultaneously honoured and stigmatized in much of the world. In some parts of the world excellence has even been systematically repressed. And yet, we still want to know “what it takes”.
Successful people spontaneously do things differently from those who stagnate. In particular, they have different practice histories. We consistently see that they engage in “deliberate practice” – they work to innovate the way they do what they do.
You can read more about what the lead editor of The Handbook has to say in an interview with Fast Company here.
Being excellent isn’t easy. But it is a lot more simple than you might believe.
Being the best demands a lot from you. You need to invest a lot of time, energy and effort in the domain, not just playing around, but focusing your mind on how to get better.
Day after day. Week after week. Month after month. Year after year.
But the people that get really good don’t like doing the deliberate practice any more than you do. And they don’t get better faster than you do. Nobody “likes” doing deliberate practice: To be successful, you just need to do it.
And the people who get really successful are the ones who will often do more practice than you do to get to the same standard.
Weird, eh?
So it’s really important to be able to master our state. To master our emotional, physical and mental condition – so that we can perform at our best when we need it.
The good news: That’s something we can train for.
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