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Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
There’s a good chance most of the problems in your life and work come down to insufficient slack. Here’s how slack works and why you need more of it. Imagine if you, as a budding productivity enthusiast, one day gained access to a time …
Everything You Need to Know to Improve Your Performance at Anything—For Beginners and Experts Deliberate practice is the best technique for achieving expert performance in every field—including writing, teaching, sports, programming, music, …
“Feedback is an effective tool for promoting efficient behavior: it enhances individuals’ awareness of choice consequences in complex settings.” —“Feedback and Efficient Behavior,” Sandro Casal, Nives DellaValle, Luigi Mittone, and Ivan …
Not every time you lose, are you beaten. And not every time you win, did you win. There is a difference between losing and being beaten, and it comes down to you. From Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less Larry Gelwix coached the …
Steve Pavlina’s book, Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth, offers an interesting look at self-improvement. “Perception is the most basic aspect of truth,” Pavlina writes, …
I thought this excerpt from The Plateau Effect: Getting from Stuck to Success was worth thinking about. If you try to improve your listening skills, you’ll notice a lot of discussion about “listening with intent.” That phrase means …
What can we learn from the working habits of famous writers, artists, and composers? And how did they find time each day to do their work? After reading Mason Currey’s fantastic book, Daily Rituals, the answer is lots. But if …
Have you ever found yourself trying really hard on something you care about? Maybe you’re learning how to play the piano. But the more effort you put in, the less you seem to get out of it. You’ve plateaued, according to Bob …
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to my habits recently and how they affect me. One thing I’ve placed an increasingly watchful eye on is email. Email seems pervasive in our lives. We check email on the bus, we check it in the bath. We check …
We know one of the biggest things you can do to improve your working habits is switch creative work first and reactive work, like replying to emails, later in the day. That’s easy to say, but hard to do. How do can we go about this? …
I know it sounds strange but I love learning about how people go about creating things. So you can imagine my delight when I came across Mason Currey’s new book Daily Rituals, which describes how 161 inspiring minds maneuver the …
A brilliant passage from Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood on talent. There just happen to be people like that. They’re blessed with this marvelous talent, but they can’t make the effort to systematize it. They end up squandering it in …
You do want to sleep better, don’t you? Me too. After last weeks post, “If this is sleep research’s golden age, then why are we all so tired?” I picked up a copy of Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep to learn more …
Deliberate practice is a method for improving your performance at anything, based on constant feedback and working at the edge of your abilities. Elite people in every field use it to build up their expertise. Let’s take a look at exactly …
From The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business Chunking — The Root of Habits The process—in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine—is known as ‘chunking,’ and it’s at …
Getting better at something you’re decent at, isn’t as easy as it sounds. Consider driving. A skill you likely learned as a teenager. Within a few hundred hours under the wheel, you went from a petrified know nothing to a …