Grit

The little book of talent

  1. Stare at who you want to become
    1. Bookmark a few YouTube videos, and watch them before you practice, or at night before you go to bed.
  2. Spend 15 minutes a day engraving the skill on your brain
    1. The key to effective engraving is to create an intense connection: to watch and listen so closely that you can imagine the feeling of performing the skill.
  3. Steal without apology
  4. Buy a notebook
    1. What matters is that you write stuff down and reflect on it. Results from today. Ideas for tomorrow. Goals for next week. A notebook works like a map: It creates clarity.
  5. Be willing to be stupid
    1. But being willing to be stupid—in other words, being willing to risk the emotional pain of making mistakes—is absolutely essential, because reaching, failing, and reaching again is the way your brain grows and forms new connections
  6. Choose spartan over luxurious
    1. Which is a shame, because luxury is a motivational narcotic: It signals our unconscious minds to give less effort. It whispers, Relax, you’ve made it.
    2. Simple, humble spaces help focus attention on the deep-practice task at hand: reaching and repeating and struggling.
  7. Before you start, figure out if it’s a hard skill or a soft skill
  8. To build hard skill, work like a careful carpenter
    1. When you learn hard skills, be precise and measured. Go slowly. Make one simple move at a time, repeating and perfecting it before you move on. Pay attention to errors, and fix them, particularly at the start
  9. To build soft skill, play like a skateboarder
    1. In other words, to build soft skills you should behave less like a careful carpenter and more like a skateboarder in a skateboard park: aggressive, curious, and experimental, always seeking new ways to challenge yourself
  10. Honor the hard skills
  11. Don’t fall for the prodigy myth
    1. If you have early success, do your best to ignore the praise and keep pushing yourself to the edges of your ability, where improvement happens. If you don’t have early success, don’t quit.
  12. Five ways to pick a high quality coach
  13. Find the sweet spot
    1. There is a place, right on the edge of your ability, where you learn best and fastest.
    2. Albert Einstein said, “One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.” The key word is “barely.” Ask yourself: If you tried your absolute hardest, what could you almost do? Mark the boundary of your current ability, and aim a little beyond it. That’s your spot.
  14. Take off your watch
  15. Break every move down into chunks
    1. To begin chunking, first engrave the blueprint of the skill on your mind (see Tip #2). Then ask yourself: 1) What is the smallest single element of this skill that I can master? 2) What other chunks link to that chunk?
    2. No matter what skill you set out to learn, the pattern is always the same: See the whole thing. Break it down to its simplest elements. Put it back together. Repeat.
  16. Each day, try to build one perfect chunk
    1. a daily SAP: smallest achievable perfection
    2. In this technique, you pick a single chunk that you can perfect—not just improve, not just “work on,” but get 100 percent consistently correct.
    3. You are built to improve little by little, connection by connection, rep by rep.
    4. As Wooden also said, “Don’t look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.”
  17. Embrace Struggle
  18. Choose five minutes a day over 1 hour a week
  19. Don’t do drill, instead, play small, addictive games
  20. Practice alone
  21. Think in image
  22. Pay attention immediate after your mistake
  23. Visualize the wires in your brain forming new connections
  24. Visualize the wires in your brain getting faster
  25. Shrink the space
  26. Slow it down
    1. It’s not how fast you can do it. It’s how slowly you can do it correctly.
  27. Close your eyes
    1. 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.
  28. Mime it
  29. When you get it right, mark the spot
  30. take a nap
  31. To learn a new move, exaggerate it.
  32. Make positive reaches
    1. : Always focus on the positive move, not the negative one
  33. To learn from a book, close the book
  34. Use the sandwich technique
    1. make the correct move
    2. make the incorrect move
    3. make the correct move again
  35. Use the 3×10 technique
  36. Invent daily tests
    1. 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?
  37. To choose the best practice method, use the R.E.P.S guage
    1. The biggest problem in choosing a practice strategy is not that there are too few options, but that there are too many
    2. R: Reaching and Repeating
    3. E: Engagement
    4. P: Purposefulness
    5. S: Strong, Speedy Feedback.
  38. Stop before you are exhausted
  39. Practice immediate after performance
  40. Just before sleep, watch mental movie
  41. End on a positive note
  42. Six ways to be a better coach
  43. Embrace repetition
  44. Have a blue-collar mindset
    1. They get up in the morning and go to work every day, whether they feel like it or not
    2. As the artist Chuck Close says, “Inspiration is for amateurs.”
  45. For every hour of competition, spend five hours practicing.
  46. Don’t spend time trying to break bad habits, instead, build new ones
  47. To learn it more deeply, teach it.
  48. Give a new skills minimum eight weeks
  49. When you get stuck, make a shift
  50. Cultivate your grit.

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