Pick a Target and Go to Work

Are you using your free time to improve yourself?  Are you efficient with that time?  If you want to train smarter, here’s some wisdom from scientist Anders Ericsson, author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise.  He believes it does not take 10,000 hours to develop a special skill. But it does take hard work. And you can make the most of that work by practicing smart, deliberately and purposefully.  Isolate one area that needs improvement and go to work.  Five recommended steps: 
1. Accept where you’re at with an honest assessment. 
2. Challenge yourself with deliberate practice on one particular point of improvement. 
3. Get a coach who can help you see what you’re doing both right and wrong. “Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it,” Ericsson says. 
4. Become a teacher.  Analyze others and help them systematically improve.  “The best way,” says Ericsson, “to get past any barrier is to come at it from a different direction.”
5. Get out there and start.

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