If there is one thing I wish I had known when I was a kid it would be how to get good at doing something. I always believed that you got good at something by a combination of talent and desire. Unfortunately that is wrong. I’m going to try to dispel that belief and show you how to excel at your chosen pastime.

The first step to becoming good at something is to really that you CAN become good at it. Our society believes deeply in the importance of talent, but the interesting thing about talent is that it doesn’t appear to actually exist. What I mean is that there are people who’s life work it is to look into talent, how it occurs etc. And guess what? They’ve never found it. There is always a practical explanation about why so and so was so good at music or sport or whatever. Now there is something I will call capacity. If you want to be a world class sprinter you pretty much have to be descended from a certain tribe in Kenya. If you want to play in the NBA it helps to be tall. If you want to be an astro-physicist you need a certain IQ. But the good news is that for 95% of the things we want to do even capacity isn’t a limiting factor.

What matters is intentional practice and lots of it. Simply put you learn how a skill is supposed to be performed and then you practice doing that skill until it becomes second nature. You have to spend your practice time doing what is hard for you to get rid of your weaknesses. Not too hard mind you or you will get discouraged and give up. The skill just needs to be hard enough to present a challenge. It is important to have some mechanism to tell you if you are performing the skill correctly or not. If you don’t have feedback then you won’t know that adjustments need to be made and will keep doing the skill incorrectly. This is why having a coach is so important.

The last point bears repeating. Practice doesn’t make perfect. It makes permanent. If you practice something incorrectly all you are doing is reinforcing your incorrect method and making the wrong way second nature. You need feedback when you practice!

The problem with intentional practice is that it isn’t much fun. That is why we don’t do it. It is much more fun to practice things we can already do. We don’t get frustrated, but we don’t grow either.

My issue is not some much knowing how to do things, but actually practicing them. I can tell you how to swing a tennis racket, workout, I know as much about cooking as most chefs, play guitar, sing, etc. But I can’t do any of these things. My problem is that I enjoy learning too much. It is so much easier than doing. There is always something new to be learn in whatever field I happen to be interested in at a given time and so I can save myself the bother of practicing. If you are like me my advice to you is turn off the tv, close your book, get off the internet and practice.

That brings me to my last point. Remember I said that what was needed was intentional practice and lots of it. When researchers went looking for talent what they found was that the two things separating exceptional performers from the rest of us was quality of practice time and quantity of practice. At the end of the day, it’s about how many hours you put in. We have to be consistent about practicing. Think of it like this. I want to get good at guitar so I practice three hours on Saturday. I feel really good about myself. That’s a lot of practice. But now I’m kind of burned out so I don’t touch the guitar for another week. Next week I decide to forgo the marathon session and practice an hour a day. Suddenly I’ve got 7 good hours under my belt. There’s no way I can make up that time with a few one off marathon practice sessions. Slow and steady wins the race.

Happy practicing!