Grow
Just doing a behavior doesn’t necessarily make you better at it. For example my cooking doesn’t get any better even though I do it all the time. To grow in your skills, you have to deliberately focus on the growth.
We found the book Peak very motivating when it comes to deliberate practice. It makes a pretty convincing case that deliberate practice trumps innate talent and intelligence in almost any field. This is the summary:
Have a clear goal, ideally measurable
Try to have them on a very granular level, eg. not “Get better at tennis? But “improve backspin on my forehand”
Learn from experts in the filed
Becoming better at a skill entails learning better mental representations tied to performing it
Experts in the field will have acquired those already and can help you get there faster
Identifying an expert can be hard. Try to not base it on their reputation but on verifiable performance
A good teacher is both expert at what they do and has successfully taught others their ways
Different teachers are good at different things, you might have to switch once you plateau
If you can’t find a teacher, the next three bullets become even more important.
Move outside of your comfort zone
Just “doing the thing” won’t help you grow. You need to focus on improving at that requires being out of your comfort zone
Focus on action, not knowledge. For example you can be great at the theory behind chess, the grammar of a language, or music theory for violin, but without practicing the actual skill you won’t grow.
Have clear feedback on your skill
Ideally this is from an expert or teacher but often you can get your own feedback by eg recording yourself, using AI, trying to reproduce expert behavior and spot differences, etc
Try to focus on short-delay frequent feedback
Schedule dedicated time where this skill has your full attention
You can learn almost anything if you put in the time. Practice time trumps innate ability and IQ in almost all skills
While IQ helps a bit with faster initial learning and on the fly thinking, after little time of practice the acquired mental representations trump this and at expert-level performance in most field, IQ or other innate talents don’t predict success, practice does
It’s not going to be fun, so use the behavior checklist to build a habit to consistently put in the work
Even though it’s not fun, practice usually become less painful the more of a habit you make of it
If done right this can be exhausting, so make sure you get enough sleep and in general take good care of your body and mind
To improve my violin skills, I want to play scales fluently (goal) by practicing daily for 30min (attention) while recording myself (feedback) on scales I don’t yet know (comfort zone) with bi-weekly guidance from a teacher (expert)
Christoph