We often celebrate gifted kids in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But you don’t have to be a wunderkind to achieve success.
As an organizational psychologist, I’ve spent much of my career studying the forces that fuel our progress. I’ve found that the learning process isn’t finished when we acquire knowledge. It’s complete when we consistently apply that knowledge.
Here are 11 little life changes that highly successful people practice every day:
1. They seek discomfort.
Instead of just striving to learn, aim to feel uncomfortable. Pursuing discomfort sets you on a faster path to growth. If you want to get it right, it has to feel wrong first.
2. They set a mistake budget.
To encourage trial and error, set a goal for the minimum number of mistakes you want to make per day or per week. When you expect to stumble, you ruminate about it less — and improve more.
3. They ask for advice, not feedback.
Feedback is backward-looking — it leads people to criticize you or cheer for you. Advice is forward-looking — it leads people to coach you.
You can get your critics and cheerleaders to act more like coaches by asking a simple question: “What’s one thing I can do better next time?”
4. They figure out which sources to trust.
Decide what information is worth absorbing — and which should be filtered out. Listen to the coaches who have relevant expertise (credibility), know you well (familiarity), and want what’s best for you (care).
5. They strive for excellence, not perfection.
6. They are their own last judge.
It’s better to disappoint others than to disappoint yourself. Before you release something into the world, assess whether it represents you well. If this was the only work people saw of yours, would you be proud of it?
7. They turn the daily grind into a source of daily joy.
To maintain harmonious passion, design practice around deliberate play. Set up fun skill-building challenges — like Steph Curry trying to score 21 points in a minute,…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply