Every spectacular performance begins with hours of practice, before the light on stages is on. Those hours of drills are unseen to the audience’s eyes, with concentration, sweat and sometimes, tears.
Unseen hours are valuable time for us to hone our skills, challenge ourselves, be it learning a new thing or preparing to compete.
How to capture and utilise those unseen hours? There are 4 things to begin with:
Growth mindset: It comes from within ourselves, the desire for self-improvement, striving for a better version. If anytime you feel like you’re not growing, or learning anything new, it’s time to think of how to spend some extra hours to work on the areas that you need the most, or are excited about.
Areas of focus: It’s the art of deliberate practice. In a previous post, when I mentioned that David Beckham spent hours to practice his free kicks, that was how he mastered them for matches, ready to score goals. Spending time without knowing what to do is like shooting at unclear targets. If you want to learn more about data analysis, for example, you can drill down in Excel, SQL or Python and begin from there to learn the various techniques. If you wanna run for a longer distance, you’d start by stretching the current distance a little bit more over time. One thing to take note is something I called ‘the stagnant point” - this is where you don’t feel like making any further progress. You still practice, but you’re not improving. In this case, you either need to change the way you practice, or you’re ready to do it at the next level. Like a game, you should level up when you feel the challenge is not there anymore.
Consistency: Consistency beats motivation. I used to be excited about something for a day or two, then be much less for the third and fourth days. Motivation dies down. Consistency begins with a plan, a system and you just stick to it. A year ago, I worked on reducing my weight by doing exercises daily for 20 mins when I got up. And I did it for 2 months. There were some days off, but I was happy that the majority of the plan was completed. Don’t beat yourself if you fail to make it for certain days, knowing that you’ll come back and be ready to do even more. Little progress with consistency creates a huge impact. This is obvious, but not many people follow.
Feedback: Feedback is crucial to see where you are, what you do well and don’t. If you practice alone, try to use some benchmarks - the number of exercises, the running distance, the number of tests passed. If you do it with peers, great - peer feedback sharing will be valuable. Feedback leads to faster improvements.
Life is always full of challenges and learning at the same time. Put those unseen hours where they help add value to you the most.
🔥Links for this week
Are we having a moral panic over misinformation? This gives me a think about how to perceive “misinformation” more clearly.
Personal values: how to know who you really are. A collection of essays on value from Mark Manson.
The Munger operating system: How to live a life that really works. Some of the learning can be included in your system for feedback and improvements.