The Law of 10,000 Hours

A recent study on human performance by British Scientist revealed that it takes 10,000 hours of practice for a person to become an ace in any field. The study was done at Berlin's Academy of Music by observing violinists who started as young as five years old. They started practicing between 2 or 3 hours a week and later increased the time they spent as time went by.

The discovery also showed that the practice must be focused, systematic, and done with the proper techniques. This actually makes perfect sense because in the golfing world there is a maxim that goes "practice makes permanent" as opposed the the one we are more familiar with, "practice makes perfect". It will actually be counter productive to practice the wrong thing and make it perfect because once the skill becomes automatic, it will be almost impossible to reverse.

Neurologist Daniel Levitin explained in a BBC science magazine Focus, "It seems it takes the brain this long to assimilate all it needs to know to achieve true mastery”. Top performers, according to this study, performed brilliantly after they have completed their 10,000 hours compared to those who have only touched 8000 hours.

Actually, humans are designed to achieve mastery through practice. If you look at all the natural skill you had to acquire like walking, talking and even eating, all takes practice for you to reach mastery. It is also interesting to note that once mastery is reached it is difficult to reverse. As an example, try to purposely take a fall. I mean really fall hard like you did when you learnt to walk. Or if you are more adventurous, try to take a fall riding a bicycle on purpose in the same manner. In my attempts, I experienced a sort of self-correcting autopilot mechanism kicking in to prevent me from falling no matter how hard I tried.

The insight form this study actually enables you to actually predict what you will be in the future. Just by look at what you are doing now, multiply that by 10,000 hours and you will know what you will be good at the end of the 10,000 hours. If you engage yourselves in activities that are going to impact you positively, 10,000 hours from today, you can can be assured of the result. In addition, this is talking about mastery level and performing brilliantly.

On the flipside, if you do nothing to improve your lives, and keep on doing that, you will also be brilliantly average !

I like it when Gary Player, one of the best golfers in this century, replied when people said he is always lucky to be able to get out of the bunker all the time, “the harder I work the luckier I get”. So you see that mediocre performers look at success as luck while top performers view success as nothing but sheer hard work.

So the next time you look as someone doing something well and it looks so easy, the question to ask is not how does he get to be so lucky to that so well while you cannot. Rather ask and imagine the commitment and pain that he has to go through to gain that level of mastery.

So, today, decide on what you want to master and perform brilliantly. Find a good coach and go at it for 10,000 hours and, as Zig Ziglar, one of the worlds best salesman and performance in the world would say it “see you at the top”.

Thinking Patterns of Successful People Vs Failures

The Thinking Patterns of Successful People Vs. the Failures

Do you know that most of the time the only difference between successful people and failures is in how they think ? In my line of work as a training consultant, I find this to be true all the time. One of the most obvious difference in thinking between successful people and failures is successful people do not make or take excuses in their thinking. They focus their thinking in doing and finding ways to implement worthwhile ideas. They focus more on how to make things work rather than finding blames on why things fail. Failures on the other hand will focus on their inabilities and focus their attention on the different excuses they can find to justify why an idea cannot be implemented. Result is the dependent on attention. What we focus on gets expanded. As such when we focus on excuses and failures in our lives, that will be the outcome of our lives.

In contrast, the mindset of successful people is always saying to themselves that the solution to a problem is not there yet because they have not tried enough. Failures always think they have tried too much. In fact some failures even has rules about how many times they should try something. After that their brains will go into a massive block and then it will issue the instructions give up. When this happens repeatedly, it will become an autopilot reaction. Imagine some people master the art of trying and never giving up while some refine the skill of making excuses and even turn it into an art form !

On the other hand, successful people always challenge themselves to try new methods all the time. When faced with an undesired outcome, they will find different ways of doing things. In fact, even if they cannot get the result, they take the attitude that the solution is there, only they are not seeing it. Other people might come along and see the solution and they will respect that and go along to solve the problem. Failures on the other hand takes a mysteriously different approach. In that situation many of them becomes too proud to even acknowledge, let alone accept the solution.

Think of how many solutions to problems has gone by in many big corporations simply because management do not want to accept solutions from their subordinates. In my experience as a training consultant, I have seen many situations where good solutions gets ignored because management do not want to recognize the staff (ironicaly, these are people they hire and keep on paying every month !). To top that, in some situations, they even blame their staff of not being creative !

So, the next time we try to do something new or solve a new problem, always ask ourselves weather we are using the thinking patterns of the successful or otherwise . Once we detect a flaw in our thinking, immediately break that pattern and start to think in the opposite direction. When this happens you will start to see new options and different routes to interesting possibilities. Just because we cannot solve the problem does not mean there are no solutions. In fact, if we only look around us, things that are commonplace like the radio, television, airplanes, electricity to name but a few are all products that comes into reality because some one thought that they are possible and keep on trying to find solutions when others gave up. They were all impossibilities to those who gave up on those ideas.