Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield, authors of the forthcoming book The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well, with an op-ed in the times. According to them, the key to success is brutal self-assessment. What happens to organizations and people when they find obstacles in their [...]
Practice
In his book Mastery, Robert Greene talks about what separates amateurs and masters: By nature, we humans shrink from anything that seems possibly painful or overtly difficult. We bring this natural tendency to our practice of any skill. Once we grow adept at some aspect of this skill, generally one that comes more easily to [...]
No matter what skill you set out to learn, the pattern is always the same: See the whole thing. Break it down to its simplest elements. Put it back together. Repeat. — The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills This ties in perfectly with deliberate practice.
Developing soft skills is different than developing hard skills. It’s impossible to directly teach someone to improvise their way to a brilliant goal in hockey or soccer. Part of the problem relies on the variety of situations faced. Lionel Messi, an Argentine football star, can’t plan where everyone on the field will be and how [...]
Carol Dweck, Daniel Coyle, and Noel Tichy all point out that you need to stretch to learn new things. First, this passage from Carol Dweck … My colleagues and I have conducted interventions with adolescents in which they learn that their brains and intellect are malleable. They discover that when they stretch themselves to learn [...]
We all know that sports records keep getting broken, but we generally don’t appreciate just how dramatic the progress has been, or the reasons for it. For example, the Olympic records of a hundred years ago—representing the best performance of any human being on the planet—today in many cases equal ho-hum performance by high schoolers. [...]
After reading the post on deliberate practice, one reader pointed us to this process from The Talent Code. 1. Pick a target 2. Reach for it 3. Evaluate the gap between the target and the reach 4. Return to step one While this isn’t deliberate practice — where you deconstruct something into its constituent parts [...]
