How To Get Really Good at Anything

“Good, better, best, never let it rest, ’til your good is better and your better is your best.”

1) Practise every day. There’s no such thing as overnight success, it is earned in the hours you commit to practise. The best practise every day, the good practise most days, the average practise when they remember and the rest don’t bother.

2) Practise the things you least enjoy most. They are likely to be those things that you find difficult and therefore You generally avoid practising them as much as the parts enjoy.

3) Get expert tuition. The expert will help you focus on those areas that will help you progress. Without expert tuition it may take you a lot longer than it normally would, and it’s going to take you 10,000 hours anyway. Find a tutor, teacher, coach or mentor, someone with expertise, someone who can show you precisely what to practice so you don’t waste your time.

4) Obsess on the basics. Exceptional people aren’t exceptional because they’re good at the advanced stuff, they’re exceptional because they’re good at the basic stuff. Without exceptional foundation skills you cannot be exceptional.

5) Measure your progress – Somewhere down the line you will hit a brick wall and feel like you have cannot advance, if you measure yourself regularly you will know that you’ve progressed, if you do not you are likely to give in when you hit the wall because you will not see the progress you’ve made.

6) Don’t quit -seriously – the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful is that the unsuccessful always give up.

7) Find an excuse to practice and not an excuse to skip to practice. The exceptional have a great attitude, they know that practice leads to results.

8) Don’t stop practising just because you got a little bit good, a little bit good isn’t exceptional but it feels so good. At 800 hours practise you are better than the beginner, but you are miles away from exceptional. Even at 3000 hours of practice you are still really only average. Don’t let this demotivate you, you are 3000 hours in! You are 3000 hours more than someone who couldn’t get off their arse. You are still 7000 hours away from exceptional. But getting a little bit good can easily lull you into a false sense of ability, you may even start to impress others with your skills, The layperson with no experience at all maybe truly amazed by your skills, is this what you want? Do you really want to swap exceptional for easy gratification? The exceptional understand that delayed gratification is the only way to truly advance to exceptional, those who want instant gratification should apply to a reality television show.

9) Don’t mistake pain for not being good at something – guitarists fingers bleed, ice skaters fall, boxers get hit, actors and writers get rejected, brilliant scientist are overlooked. Pain is a sign that you’re putting yourself out there. Only those who don’t put themselves out there feel no pain. Befriend pain, it’s going to be with you on your journey to exceptional and it’s going to be with you when you get there. No one ever got exceptional without pain, without failure, without rejection – it’s part of the process, if you can’t learn to love, at least learn to put up with it.

10) If you’re going to give in, give in now, the exceptional know that giving in later, will be a bigger waste of time and money and effort. If giving in is an option, you will give in. Everything is easier than becoming exceptional.

People put off achieving their dreams because they fear that only the exceptional can be exceptional. It isn’t true.