You are good enough to be where you are.
You’ve worked hard to get there. Put your blood, sweat and tears to learn the ropes. Run errands. Learn from mistakes. Climb the ladder.
Good enough should feel good, huh?
But you can’t help worrying about your future… You don’t want to be stuck at ‘good enough’ forever. You want to be better, faster, more effective. You’re frightened that the breathing-down-your-neck competition will take get to your dream goal before you. You want to be able to win more customers, solve more and more complex problems, ace those presentations without breaking a sweat.
You want to be a pro. An expert.
Practice doesn’t make perfect. Deliberate practice does
You’re smart. You know experts are not made in a day, and you are working on it. You’re perfecting your skills, attending trainings, don’t shy away from more responsibilities and even read about your stuff in your spare time.
You think you just need to practice more. Put in your 10,000 hours and it will take your performance to the next level, right?
Well, maybe.
Probably not.
The hard truth is, they have been lying to you: practice does not make perfect.
And while good old working on it and striving for excellence is still a safe bet when it comes to mastering a skill, the real masters are made differently.
The secret ingredients of becoming an expert at anything
What are those secret ingredients for becoming an expert at anything?
Evidence from scientific studies and experiments clearly point to what differentiates experts from those who are just good enough at something.
Here are five ways to help you lift your performance from good enough to expert level
1. Choose the right mindset.
Talent is overrated; worse – it’s out of fashion. Recent evidence from psychologists interested in achievement and success such as Carol Dweck ( ) and Robert Sternberg points out that the major factor in achieving expertise is not our ‘fixed abilities’. What really counts is the right mindset – Growth Mindset.
The grow mindset is a set of beliefs that talents and intelligence are malleable through learning and personal growth. Even if you don’t have ‘innate talents’ for something, you can still master the skill and achieve success, if you keep learning.
People with growth mindset expand their horizons and push themselves to get better and better through their desire to learn, get feedback, implement it and continue improving.
Growth mindset is a choice – says Carol Dweck, the key researcher in the matter. So choose the right mindset for success and grow– here’s how you can do it.
2. Shape up your motivation.
The journey to becoming an expert is likely to be long and painful. No doubt, it will be uphill and even may be winding. If you don’t want to give up half way through, make sure your motivation is up to the challenge.
– Steal motivation from successful people
Ever wondered how those super-multi-successful people motivate themselves to achieve their goals? What’s their secret? The drive from within.
Successful people are driven by intrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivation is the only motivation that can truly get you to the top, because it is about mastery, autonomy or a purpose. Where a love of money or fame, or praise wears off, the drive to climb the performance/learning curve keeps you going because it’s fun/feels great to overcome your own limitation, it’s fun to feel free, and it’s fulfilling to follow your passion, mission, your noble goal.
The ultimate intrinsic motivation can take form of ‘the rage to master’ – a term coined by Ellen Winner, a psychologist at Boston College, interested in child prodigy. ‘Rage to master’ is an obsession to conquer the craft and hone your skills. This is an extreme motivation, an internally driven unstoppable desire to get to the top.
No kidding. Capture this and shoot right to the top without even noticing you’ve done some hard work.
– Up the antes
A common reason people don’t achieve our goals is because they don’t really have a stake in the game. You’re much more likely to practice a skill to perfection if your livelihood, job security, or survival depends on it.
Building incentives into your goals can be very effective, so make sure your motivation to achieve mastery in whatever area you choose includes a high-level stake.
If your goal does not have an immediate consequence for not achieving it, create it. You can use one of the multiple apps that employs various psychological mechanisms to help your motivation
– StickK helps people create financial or accountability incentives to achieve their goals
– CoachMe is focused on providing individual coaching support
– You can just simply make a bet with a friend, or even better – give them the money BEFORE you embark on the journey and ask them to give it back to you only if you achieve the goal.
– Make your environment motivate you
If you still struggling with motivation on bad days (it can happen to anyone) – redesign your environment to force you to always choose the behaviours your want to practice.
‘Environmental tweaks beat self-control every time’ – write the Heath brothers in their great book on achieving change ‘Switch’ .
Use the path of least resistance and make your desired behaviour the default option. By tweaking environment to enable only the desired behaviour, or making the undesired action technically impossible, hospitals eliminated ‘human errors’ to (near) 0 in many areas.
– ‘Plant cues’ in your environment to remind yourself
want to lift your guitar playing skills – have your guitar handy wherever you think you may have time to practice it. How about having one instrument in your office, one in your living room, one in the kitchen (it takes forever to boil a kettle – why not use this time), and… you’ve guessed it – in the bathroom too.
3. Focus on what really matters
Research into expert development and high performance shows that beyond certain point (‘once a professional reached an acceptable skill level’) simply practicing more does not lead to further improvements. Practice that actually leads to improved performance is called deliberate practice.
– Practice deliberately
Expert performance specialist, such as K.A. Ericsson, concluded that it takes about 10,000hr of deliberate performance to achieve expert level, however newer studies argue that the relationship between deliberate practice and performance is not as strong as it was originally claimed 20 years ago, particularly when it comes to domain such as professional skills and education. Nevertheless, this is the best evidence that we have for now.
What distinguishes practice from deliberate practice is the fact that deliberate practice is designed exclusively to improve performance
How do you design a deliberate practice task?
– have a well defined goal for each task (e.g. focusing on one aspect of a skill only)
– make sure you are clear on your motivation for improvement (see p. 2)
– adjust the difficulty level to your prior knowledge – set it just outside your current comfort zone
– build-in feedback on performance; best if this is immediate feedback
– rinse and repeat the task with gradual refinements of performance.
– Master the secret of knowing what not to do
Do you feel overwhelmed by the prospect of having to find10,000 hours in your already busy schedule?
Don’t fret. The secret to keeping your sanity while practicing deliberately is to know what you need to focus on, as much as what you should not.
How will you know?
It’s the good, old Pareto Principle again.
If you’re not familiar yet with the Pareto Principle or 80/20 rule – this ‘rule of thumb’ says that roughly 80% of the effects come from roughly 20% of the causes, and has been proven correct in many areas, from economics, to business, to natural events. Use Pareto Principle to guide your skill selection process, but mind your current expertise level. You are already good enough, and very likely to have mastered the 20% of the skills that create the 80% of outcomes/outputs. This is why, for your deliberate practice sessions you need to choose skills or knowledge areas that are still outside your expertise.
4. Stand on the shoulders of giants
Shane Snow, the author of Smartcuts (book or video here) discovered that those who have managed to ‘hack the system’ and climb the success ladder faster than others smartly built off of the work of great thinkers before them. It really translates into two aspects of practice improvement:
– Train with the masters
You can obviously seek coaching and mentoring from other people who have achieved the mastery, but if for whatever reason this is not on the menu, here are a few more tips.
Learn from other by watching their performance, reading on it, analysing every more and re-playing masters’ games, case studies, etc.
– Use existing platforms
Platforms are tools, technology and all sorts of shortcuts that have been developed by those ‘giants’ before us. Obviously coaching and mentoring falls into that, but so do the calculator, your super-duper running shoes, mastermind groups and… my half-marathon training schedule or spaced-repetition algorithms.
Algorithms, guides, schedules are great shortcuts that experts have came up with. Some of those tools, such as training schedule, can be individualised, some not so. Look for stuff that has been proven to work, adapt it to your personal situation as much as possible and see how it works for you.
5. Create opportunities
You already know that it’s deliberate practice rather than just mere practice that counts in this game. But you need to create opportunities for further development.
– Schedule ‘deliberate practice sessions’ into your diary.
Ideally you want to practice as often as you can, even if it’s only a short session. Use whatever ‘dead time’ you have for that – commuting, walking your dog, or having your hair cut. ‘Redesign’ your current tasks to have opportunities for deliberate practice of new skills or knowledge base. Or simply dump whatever other activity you can. You may not need 10,000 hours, but you still need to find time for practice.
– Design your environment to optimise your learning and get frequent feedback on your performance – by either coming up with opportunities for feedback built-in (e.g. A/B testing, results-based feedback), or by asking others (colleagues, bosses, customers) for comments and advice.
Volunteer to work on projects that require the skills or knowledge abase you are working on. Hang out with people you can learn from, or who would force you to use your new skills. It’s just like wanting to expand your foreign professional vocabulary by reading trade magazines, watching trade-related programs and chatting to native-speaker professionals whenever you can, even if it’s only a LinkedIn or a FB group.
– Seek opportunities for learning from others.
I’ve talked about it above, but here you have it again: watch your masters, live and on the screen, ‘dismantle’ their performance step by step and copy it. If you are able to have face-to-face encounters, ask them for feedback.
– Engage in interactions with others seeking the same level of performance.
Even if you are not competitive, take part in competitions – you will not only get opportunities for deliberate practice, but also for feedback from those who are above your level of performance and from your peers.
This is particularly relevant if you are practicing a skill that requires some sort of collaboration or interaction, e.g. for musicians this will be playing in a band, when learning the art of negotiation – it’s your negotiating opponent and/or partner, in software development, it may be designers and your beloved marketing and sales department.
Being an expert is more than just having an extended body of knowledge or a mastery of a skill. It is also about having efficient processes, strategies and abilities to plan and solve problems that have not been yet presented – it is about having systems to adapt to new situations, learn and solve new problems.
‘Good enough’ is no longer good enough if you truly want to achieve your goals. Competition is getting fiercer and fiercer, new generations are fighting to take over your world. The only way is up-and-up – to the expert level.
Now, imagine yourself waving them all by-by. Picture yourself effortlessly and immediately solving software problems, winning negotiations, coming up with best-ever sales copy. Yes, you – working with ease and speed you never though you had.
You – the expert.
But experts are not made in a day, not even in those 10,000 hours. Just practicing more is not going to get you there. It takes deliberate and smart practice to skyrocket your performance to that level.
You know what to do now.
You have a roadmap how to get there. All you need to do is to follow it.
Decide where you want to start and take your first step.
Now.
Your triumphant top of the world awaits.
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