TIP #23 VISUALIZE THE WIRES OF YOUR BRAIN FORMING NEW CONNECTIONS
Mistakes aren’t really mistakes, then—they’re the information you use to build the right links. The more you pay attention to mistakes and fix them, the more of the right connections you’ll be building inside your brain.
TIP #24 VISUALIZE THE WIRES OF YOUR BRAIN GETTING FASTER
Every time you practice deeply—the wires of your brain get faster. Over time, signal speeds increase to 200 mph from 2 mph. When you practice, it’s useful and motivating to visualize the pathways of your brain being transformed from simple copper wires to high-speed broadband, because that’s what’s really happening.
TIP #25 SHRINK THE SPACE
A good example is used by FC Barcelona, widely considered the world’s best soccer team. The method is simple: one room slightly bigger than a bathroom, two players, and one ball—whoever can keep the ball from the other player longest wins.
Ask yourself: What’s the minimum space needed to make these reaches and reps? Where is extra space hindering fast and easy communication?
SLOW IT DOWN (EVEN SLOWER THAN YOU THINK)
When we learn how to do something new, our immediate urge is to do it again, faster.
Super-slow practice works like a magnifying glass: It lets us sense our errors more clearly, and thus fix them.
Ben Hogan, considered to have perhaps the most technically sound golf swing in the history of the game, routinely practiced so slowly that when he finally contacted the ball, it moved about an inch. As the saying goes, “It’s not how fast you can do it. It’s how slowly you can do it correctly.”
TIP #27 CLOSE YOUR EYES
Closing your eyes is a swift way to nudge you to the edges of your ability, to get you into your sweet spot. It sweeps away distraction and engages your other senses to provide new feedback. It helps you engrave the blueprint of a task on your brain by making even a familiar skill seem strange and fresh.
TIP #28 MIME IT
Removing everything except the essential action lets you focus on what matters most: making the right reach.
TIP #29 WHEN YOU GET IT RIGHT, MARK THE SPOT
One of the most fulfilling moments of a practice session is when you have your first perfect rep. When this happens, freeze. Rewind the mental tape and play the move again in your mind. Memorize the feeling, the rhythm, the physical and mental sensations.
This is not the finish—it’s the new starting line for perfecting the skill until it becomes automatic.
“Practice begins when you get it right.”
TIP #30 TAKE A NAP
Albert Einstein was good at physics, and he was really good at his daily post-lunch twenty-minute snooze.
Other famous nappers include Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon Bonaparte, Winston Churchill, Thomas Edison, Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, and John D. Rockefeller.
Napping is good for the learning brain, because it helps strengthen the connections formed during practice and prepare the brain for the next session. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that napping for ninety minutes improved memory scores by 10 percent, while skipping a nap made them decline by 10 percent. “You need sleep before learning, to prepare your brain, like a dry sponge, to absorb new information,”
TIP #31 TO LEARN A NEW MOVE, EXAGGERATE IT
Go too far so you can feel the outer edges of the move, and then work on building the skill with precision.
TIP #32 MAKE POSITIVE REACHES
You can either focus your attention on the target (what you want to do) or you can focus on the possible mistake (what you want to avoid). This tip is simple: Always focus on the positive move, not the negative one.
For example, a golfer lining up a putt should tell herself, “Center the stroke,” not “Don’t pull this putt to the left.”
TIP #33 TO LEARN FROM A BOOK, CLOSE THE BOOK
Learning is reaching. Passively reading a book—a relatively effortless process, letting the words wash over you like a warm bath—doesn’t put you in the sweet spot.
On the other hand, closing the book and writing a summary forces you to figure out the key points (one set of reaches), process and organize those ideas so they make sense (more reaches), and write them on the page (still more reaches, along with repetition). The equation is always the same: More reaching equals more learning.
TIP #34 USE THE SANDWICH TECHNIQUE
What’s the best way to make sure you don’t repeat mistakes?
- Make the correct move. 2. Make the incorrect move. 3. Make the correct move again. The goal is to reinforce the correct move and to put a spotlight on the mistake, preventing it from slipping past undetected and becoming wired into your circuitry.
TIP #35 USE THE 3 × 10 TECHNIQUE
To learn something most effectively, practice it three times, with ten-minute breaks between each rep.
TIP #36 INVENT DAILY TESTS
“The important thing, the only thing, is to help the student push themselves.
To invent a good test, ask yourself: What’s one key element of this skill? How can I isolate my accuracy or reliability, and measure it? How can I make it fun, quick, and repeatable, so I can track my progress?
TIP #37 TO CHOOSE THE BEST PRACTICE METHOD, USE THE R.E.P.S. GAUGE
ELEMENT 1: REACHING AND REPEATING. Does the practice have you operating on the edge of your ability, reaching and repeating?
ELEMENT 2: ENGAGEMENT. Is the practice immersive? Does it command your attention? Does it use emotion to propel you toward a goal?
ELEMENT 3: PURPOSEFULNESS. Does the task directly connect to the skill you want to build?
ELEMENT 4: STRONG, SPEEDY FEEDBACK. Does the learner receive a stream of accurate information about his performance—where he succeeded and where he made mistakes?
TIP #38 STOP BEFORE YOU’RE EXHAUSTED
But when it comes to learning, the science is clear: Exhaustion is the enemy. Fatigue slows brains. It triggers errors, lessens concentration, and leads to shortcuts that create bad habits. It’s no coincidence that most talent hotbeds put a premium on practicing when people are fresh, usually in the morning, if possible. When exhaustion creeps in, it’s time to quit.
TIP #39 PRACTICE IMMEDIATELY AFTER PERFORMANCE
As the golfer Jack Nicklaus said, “I always achieve my most productive practice after an actual round. Then, the mistakes are fresh in my mind and I can go to the practice tee and work specifically on those mistakes.”
TIP #40 JUST BEFORE SLEEP, WATCH A MENTAL MOVIE
Just before falling asleep, they play a movie of their idealized performance in their heads. A wide body of research supports this idea, linking visualization to improved performance, motivation, mental toughness, and confidence.
TIP #41 END ON A POSITIVE NOTE
A practice session should end like a good meal—with a small, sweet reward. It could be playing a favorite game or it could be more literal. (Chocolate works quite well.)
TIP #42 SIX WAYS TO BE A BETTER TEACHER OR COACH
- Use the First Few Seconds to Connect on an Emotional Level
Before you can teach, you have to show that you care.
- Avoid Giving Long Speeches—Instead, Deliver Vivid Chunks of Information
- Be Allergic to Mushy Language
“Move your hands higher” is vague. “Move your hands next to your ear” is concrete.
Communicate with precise nouns and numbers—things you can see and touch and measure—and avoid adjectives and adverbs, which don’t tell you precisely what to do.
- Make a Scorecard for Learning
Pick a metric that measures the skill you want to develop, and start keeping track of it.
I’ve encountered a number of top soccer, basketball, and hockey coaches who track the number of smart passes their team makes during a game, and who use this number—not the score—as the most accurate measure of their team’s success.
- Maximize “Reachfulness”
In a flipped classroom, students do the reverse. They listen to lectures at home, online, and spend class time actively struggling with the work: doing problems, wrestling with concepts—in essence, reaching—while the teacher walks around, coach-style, and helps individuals one at a time.
Ask yourself: What kind of space will create the most reachful environment? How can you replace moments of passivity with moments of active learning?
- Aim to Create Independent Learners
TIP #43 EMBRACE REPETITION
Repetition is the single most powerful lever we have to improve our skills, because it uses the built-in mechanism for making the wires of our brains faster and more accurate
As the martial artist and actor Bruce Lee said, “I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick ten thousand times.”
TIP #44 HAVE A BLUE-COLLAR MIND-SET
As the artist Chuck Close says, “Inspiration is for amateurs.”
TIP #45 FOR EVERY HOUR OF COMPETITION, SPEND FIVE HOURS PRACTICING
Games are fun. Tournaments are exciting. Contests are thrilling. They also slow skill development, for four reasons: 1. The presence of other people diminishes an appetite for risks, nudging you away from the sweet spot. 2. Games reduce the number of quality reps. 3. The pressure of games distorts priorities, encouraging shortcuts in technique. 4. Games encourage players, coaches, and parents to judge success by the scoreboard rather than by how much was learned.
TIP #46 DON’T WASTE TIME TRYING TO BREAK BAD HABITS—INSTEAD, BUILD NEW ONES
The blame lies with our brains. While they are really good at building circuits, they are awful at unbuilding them.
The solution is to ignore the bad habit and put your energy toward building a new habit that will override the old one.
TIP #47 TO LEARN IT MORE DEEPLY, TEACH IT
This works because when you communicate a skill to someone, you come to understand it more deeply yourself.
The saying “Those who can’t do, teach” should be rewritten as “Doers who teach do better.”
TIP #48 GIVE A NEW SKILL A MINIMUM OF EIGHT WEEKS
Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can be proficient in any skill in eight weeks. Rather, it underlines two more basic points: 1) Constructing and honing neural circuitry takes time, no matter who you are; and 2) Resilience and grit are vital tools, particularly in the early phases of learning. Don’t make judgments too early. Keep at it, even if you don’t feel immediate improvement. Give your talent (that is, your brain) the time it needs to grow.
TIP #49 WHEN YOU GET STUCK, MAKE A SHIFT
A plateau happens when your brain achieves a level of automaticity; in other words, when you can perform a skill on autopilot, without conscious thought.
When it comes to developing talent, however, autopilot is the enemy, because it creates plateaus.
the best way past a plateau is to jostle yourself beyond it; to change your practice method so you disrupt your autopilot and rebuild a faster, better circuit.
One way to do this is to speed things up—to force yourself to do the task faster than you normally would. Or you can slow things down—going so slowly that you highlight previously undetected mistakes. Or you can do the task in reverse order, turn it inside out or upside down.
TIP #50 CULTIVATE YOUR GRIT
Grit is that mix of passion, perseverance, and self-discipline that keeps us moving forward in spite of obstacles.
Grit isn’t inborn. It’s developed, like a muscle, and that development starts with awareness.
TIP #51 KEEP YOUR BIG GOALS SECRET
Telling others about your big goals makes them less likely to happen, because it creates an unconscious payoff—tricking our brains into thinking we’ve already accomplished the goal. Keeping our big goals to ourselves is one of the smartest goals we can set.
TIP #52 “THINK LIKE A GARDENER, WORK LIKE A CARPENTER”
Think patiently, without judgment. Work steadily, strategically, knowing that each piece connects to a larger whole.
Deep practice (n), also called deliberate practice: The form of learning marked by 1) the willingness to operate on the edge of your ability, aiming for targets that are just out of reach, and 2) the embrace of attentive repetition.
Sweet spot (n): The zone on the edge of current ability where learning happens fastest. Marked by a frequency of mistakes, and also by the recognition of those mistakes
Myelin is an insulator (you might recall the term “myelin sheath” from biology class). This refers to its function of wrapping the wires of our brain in exactly the same way that electrical tape wraps around an electrical wire: It makes the signal move faster and prevents it from leaking out.
Except the early scientists were wrong. It turns out that myelin does react—it grows in response to electrical activity, i.e., practice.
Every time you perform a rep, your brain adds another layer of myelin to those particular wires. The more you practice, the more layers of myelin you earn, the more quickly and accurately the signal travels, and the more skill you acquire.
Action is vital. Myelin doesn’t grow when you think about practicing. It grows when you actually practice—when you send electricity through your wires. • Myelin wraps—it doesn’t unwrap. Like a highway paving machine, myelination happens in one direction. Once a skill circuit is insulated, you can’t uninsulate it (except through age or disease). This is why habits are tough to break (see Tip #46). • You can add myelin throughout life. It arrives in a series of waves throughout childhood, creating critical learning periods. The net amount of myelin peaks around age fifty, but the myelin machinery keeps functioning into old age, which is why we can keep learning new things no matter what our age.
Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect.