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Volume 11, Issue 25: Deliberate practice

I was thinking about the piece I wrote last month on excellence (Excellence is Mundane) from Mark Batterson's "Win the Day" book. I thought about what makes renown athletes like Michael Phelps not slack in their training disciplines after attaining world champion status and breaking world records.

It is said that it takes only ten thousand hours to achieve expertise in anything, if you practice the right thing the right way. Earlier on in Mark's book he describes deliberate practice from Enders Ericsson's point of view. One piece of advice that Enders offers when it comes to deliberate practice is that: "There's no point at which performance maxes out and additional practice does not lead to further improvement."

In other words, Mark elaborates, "You never age out. Don't stop at ten thousand hours! Keep practicing till the day you die! That's what winning the day is all about." For me this means you never get to a point where you don't need to sharpen your skill anymore. Practicing and improving is what you do day in, day out. It's who you are. It's what your life is about. It's the story of your life.

Intrinsic motivation keeps high performers going. It is what sustains their deliberate practice. It matters not what level of performance they attain, they keep practicing and improving. How about that? These are the kind of things that inspire me. You don't arrive at peak performance or achievement. You keep going, you keep doing and improving at what you do until you can't do it anymore.

So, I was asking myself what I need to activate deliberate practice on, as well as what I have already activated deliberate practice on. What have you activated deliberate practice on? What do you need to activate deliberate practice on?

 

For His Glory,

Lillian Chebosi