Is there anyone around you who are amazingly good at something in your field that you want to be good at? You admired them so much that even if you tried "hard", things couldn't turn out to be the way you think. You blamed it to your talent and your gene. This book will change your misconception like "I am not good at it because I'm not gifted". It also tells you that if you practice it the right way, you can acquire any skill you want. The authors have studied those who stand out as experts in their field, such as athletes, musician, salespeople, an so on, for more than 30 years, delving into the nuts and bolts of what they do and how they do it, concluding that with the correct training, a ninety-year old can finish a Marathon race and someone can be qualifed for the PGA tournament even though he didn't have any experience in Golf before his thirties.
Potential is an expandable vessel, shaped by the various things we do throughout our lives. Learning isn't a way of reaching one's potential but rather a way of developing it.
1. Your practice must be purposeful. Without purpose, when you do someting repeatedly and reached a satisfatory skill level, you autopilot your performance and you stopped improving.
Generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of “acceptable” performance and automaticity, the additional years of “practice” don’t lead to improvement. The reason is that these automated abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate efforts to improve.
Here is the conversation that may happen to you:
TEACHER: Your practice sheet says that you practice an hour a day, but your playing test was only a C. Can you explain why?
STUDENT: I don’t know what happened! I could play the test last night!
TEACHER: How many times did you play it?
STUDENT: Ten or twenty.
TEACHER: How many times did you play it correctly?
STUDENT: Umm, I dunno . . . Once or twice . . .
TEACHER: Hmm . . . How did you practice it?
STUDENT: I dunno. I just played it.
Purposeful practice must be well-defined, specific and measurable. "Read this paragraph three times without any pronunciation error". Without such a goal, there was no way to judge whether the practice session had been effective.
Purposeful practice is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal.
2. You must be focused on your specific goal when you practice. You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention.
3. Purposeful practice also involves feedback. In this sense, it would be better if you have a tutor available who can tell you what you did is right or wrong.
4. Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone. If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve. If you feel uncomfortable, then it means that you are improving. But remember, do not push yourself so hard, otherwise you would get injured or feel too frustrated to keep going.
Getting out of your comfort zone means trying to do something that you couldn’t do before. Generally the solution is not “try harder” but rather “try differently.”
5. When you are getting your bottleneck, try different ways but not the difficult ways. Maybe it is not because you have reached your limits, but because you are lacking of movtivation which is the power to push you forward your goal.
The deliberate-practice mindset offers a very different view: anyone can improve, but it requires the right approach. If you are not improving, it’s not because you lack innate talent; it’s because you’re not practicing the right way. Once you understand this, improvement becomes a matter of figuring out what the “right way” is.
6. Take advantage of the plasticity of your brain.
7. The importance of mental presentation. As your goal is very specific, you mind forms clear pictures, preexisting patterns of information --- facts, image, rules, relationships, and so on. The more clear your presentations are, the more clear you know where to go and what to do.
A mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about. A simple example is a visual image.
Some of the principles in the book are hard to understand, because they are abstract. If you try to put it with some examples, you'll understand what the authors try to mention. All in all, it's a mind-blowing book for training and practice a skill. I share it with you here because I have benefited from it.