A golf player, after taking a particularly difficult shot, received a round of applause from the onlooking crowd.
Everybody was cheering, clapping their hands and loudly commenting on this unbelievable stunt.
Everybody, except one old gentleman.
“Oh, man, that ain’t nothing but damn luck,” he accused the golf player in a mocking tone.
“Yeah, you’re right,” the golf player replied.
“But do you know what funny thing is?
The more I practice, the more luck I have.”
This great little anecdote teaches several lessons.
One, you weren’t born great.
And you're not going to get "lucky" just sitting on your couch in front of the TV binge-watching Breaking Bad.
Only when you throw your mind, heart and soul into something, you get something back.
Two, sure, there’s some luck involved in everything.
But Lady Luck needs to be in the company of Mr. Skill and Mr. Hard Work if you’re going to have any success.
Okay, but you might have missed the real lesson here.
Not all practice is born equal.
You may work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better.
What's missing?
In walks Anders Ericsson with his book Peak: Secrets From the New Science Of Expertise.
The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what he calls "deliberate practice.”
Let's get back to golf.
Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice.
That's just practice with rote, never-ending repetition, most probably followed by the frustration of not making much progress.
That's why you don't get better and eventually give up.
You see, just repeating a skill or task, even over a period of many years, doesn’t build expertise.
That’s because once you reach a reasonable level of competence and are able to do what you need to do, the skill becomes automatic.
At best, you’re maintaining your ability, but not improving it.
Hitting an eight-iron 200 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 4 meters of the pin 90 percent of the time, continually monitoring results and making appropriate adjustments and doing that for hours every day - that's deliberate practice.
It's more systematic, it requires focused attention, and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.
It’s about the compound effect.
It’s about the compound effect where even ridiculously small changes can produce huge effects over time.
It’s about practicing regularly, not sporadically.
Think consistency over intensity.
You can’t get into shape by going to the gym for 10 hours.
But if you work out every single day for 30 minutes you will get into shape.
"If I don't practice for a day, I know it. If I don't practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don't practice for three days, the world knows it.” -Vladimir Horowitz
More deliberate practice equals better performance, whereas tons of it equals great performance.
There’s just one problem: How do you practice business?
Presenting, negotiating, delivering speeches, reading reports, leading and evaluating people - these are skills and you can practice them all.
But, and this is a big but, instead of merely trying to get the task done, aim to get better at it.
This brings us to feedback.
And that’s the most important lesson here.
Getting constant feedback on results is of paramount importance in becoming an expert.
It allows you to understand how you're performing in relation to your expectations.
It’s a constant learning experience.
It can take you where you can’t take yourself.
Feedback is crucial, and getting it should be no problem in business.
Yet most people don't seek it, they just wait for it, hoping it won't come.
Without it, as Goldman Sachs leadership-development chief Steve Kerr says:
“It's as if you're bowling through a curtain that comes down to knee level. If you don't know how successful you are, two things happen. One, you don't get any better, and two, you stop caring.” If you aren't lucky enough to get that, seek it out.”
Find someone you trust and respect, someone who is skilled and actually has helped others walk down the path of greatness.
Whether it's one-on-one coaching with a teacher, mentor, or peer, or some form of self-assessment, you need a means of pinpointing your strengths and weaknesses.
This is the only way to identify and work through trouble spots and advance from “just ok” to true mastery of a skill.
Otherwise, you’re only guessing and experimenting with things.
For most of us, work is hard enough without pushing even harder.
Those extra steps are so difficult and painful they almost never get done.
That's the way it must be.
If great performance were easy, it wouldn't be rare.
As Tony Robbins recommends, model someone who is already getting the results you want.
If someone is successful not once, not twice, but consistently in anything, they’re not lucky.
Figure out how they do it.
Study them.
Do the same thing and save yourself decades of trial and error learning.
Success leaves clues.
Are you looking?
P.S. Like what you’re reading here? Well, you have three choices really.
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3. When you are ready to level up, hire me.
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