Jeff Haden
Here is an excerpt from an article written by Jeff Haden for BNET (March 21, 2011) The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.
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The intersection of talent and effort is a funny place.
Think about a skill you’ve tried to acquire, whether business, sports, or personal.
At first you improve at a rapid rate. Then your improvements slow down. Eventually, no matter how much effort you put in, you just don’t seem to get better.
Then you do one of two things:
(1) You decide channeling your inner Mozart is impossible so you quit, or (2) You decide maybe you haven’t really worked hard enough, so you keep digging.
Most of the time we stop trying to improve because we assume our talent has taken us as far as we can go. We decide we’ll never be the Mozart of our field.
If we keep digging, we still don’t tend to improve, mainly because doing more of what got us to the level we have reached rarely results in further improvement. Think of that as my Modified Einsteinian Definition of Insanity: Doing (more and more) of the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
At some point the problem isn’t effort; the problem is how we apply that effort.
Why? Say you’re trying to improve a physical skill. Over time your skills become automatic. Automatic is a good thing, because it means you’ve internalized a skill, but automatic is also a bad thing because anything automatic is hard to adjust. The key to improvement is to find ways to adapt or modify what you already do well so you can do that even better.
We learn best from making mistakes. To improve, find ways to make mistakes:
1. Slow down. Forcing yourself to go slower breaks habits as well, and is a perfect way to uncover adaptations that weren’t apparent at normal speed.
2. Speed up. Go much faster than normal. Sure, you’ll screw up, but in the process you’ll break up old habits, adapt to new conditions, and find improvements.
3. Break a complex task into component parts. Almost every task includes discreet steps. Pick one, deconstruct it, master it… then put the whole task back together. Then choose another component part.
4. Measure differently. Pick a different measurement than you normally use to analyze performance. Measure speed instead of accuracy, for example, or use video or audio. (A friend taped four initial meetings with prospective customers and identified several bad habits he was unaware of. Watching yourself isn’t particularly fun, but it’s darned objective.)
The cliche “perfect practice makes perfect” is accurate because each time we practice perfectly we perform a task as well as we possibly can. When we try to do our best, every mistake is obvious — and then we can learn from those mistakes, adapting and modifying our techniques so we constantly, even if only incrementally, improve.
That’s where talent and effort intersect. Skill, like talent, isn’t an end result. Skill is a process.
Take Mozart. Everyone knows the musical prodigy Mozart, composing and performing by the age of six. Less well known is the Mozart who put in thousands and thousands of hours of focused practice starting at age three. His genius lay not just in talent but also in effort. Talent took him far; hard work and focused practice took him a lot farther.
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Want to know more about how to develop your own skills? Check out Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, or Matthew Syed’s Bounce.
Read a little, then practice a lot.
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To read the complete article, please click here.
Haden learned much of what he knows about management as he worked his way up the printing business from forklift driver to manager of a 250-employee book plant. Everything else he knows, he has picked up from ghostwriting books for some of the smartest CEOs he knows in business. He has written more than 30 non-fiction books, including four Business and Investing titles that reached #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list. He’d tell you which ones, but then he’d have to kill you.
Visit his website at: www.blackbirdinc.com.