How to Master Almost Anything - A Proven Step by Step Plan for Mastery in Any Discipline

This video is part of a large public self development experiment that I'm doing on myself to improve reading retention and video presentation. Click here to learn more:- youtube.com/watch?v=Cj5VaqBLW8w

This book is one of my favorite books because it's a really deep look into what makes high performance. Anders Ericsson is the expert on experts - he's dedicated decades of his life to researching how people become amazing at stuff. The bottom line is that we have a lot more control over our performance than we think.

In all his years of research and study, he's never found a single high performer who hasn't spent hours and hours practicing on their craft - there simply hasn't been a single instance of a so-called prodegy, or a natural. But it's not just any old practice that creates exceptional performance. There are actually three different types of practice, and they're not all equal.

Naive practice is akin to doing the same thing over and over again and hoping that you'll get better once you put in the hours. This is like playing the same song on the piano repetitively or jogging at the same speed that you always jog when you exercise. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. In fact, it's worse than that - studies in some areas (one example is doctors) actually show that if you do things "automatically" on a repetitive basis, then you can actually perform worse over time.

Purposeful practice is a step up. This is where you break down what you're trying to get better at into small skills and create specific goals to practice them. You focus hard - this isn't automatic and it requires concentration. You won't enjoy it and you'll be mentally exhausted after a few hours. Even top musicians can only do this for a maximum of four hours per day. Finally you keep trying to do things that you can't already do. You're trying to work just beyond the boundary of your current limits. This kind of practice works really well... but it can be optimised even further.

The gold standard of practice is deliberate practice. This is purposeful practice but with the addition of an expert coach. The coach should give immediate feedback on the student's efforts. Deliberate practice is the fastest and most efficient method we currently know to get better at anything. It's what we should strive for.

If you do deliberate practice for long enough, you develop mental representations which allow you to retain and process a huge amount of information automatically and do things that other untrained humans can't. These mental representations are extremely powerful - they trump everything - even intelligence. They're so powerful that to untrained individuals, the abilities seem almost superhuman.

My conclusion from reading this book is that we all have a gift. The gift is that we get to decide what we want to be good at, apply deliberate practice, and get good at it. A lot of the principles I've read about in this book I'm applying in my life right now...That's why I'm doing this whole self development video experiment. Amazing book - read it!

Get the book here:- amzn.to/2mjFazH

Deliberate purpose feedback for myself:-

- The recording process for this was quite inefficient. There were far too many cuts and, once again, I noticed that I didn't really have a clear enough picture of what I wanted to say, but I only realised this while the camera was rolling and I wasn't able to communicate my ideas clearly. This is the highest point of leverage for me now - I must get better at being absolutely clear on the message that I'm trying to convey.

- Some cuts are pretty dodgy. For instance the point where it goes from day to night and back to day again :/

- At points the video is monotonous and boring - I still need to work on improving my energy and oscillating between periods of low and high energy.

Resources:-
My book list:- docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xgJLJlgtrl2sIcN…
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