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Performance

Efficiency is the Enemy

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 …

Read moreEfficiency is the Enemy

The Ultimate Deliberate Practice Guide: How to Be the Best

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, …

Read moreThe Ultimate Deliberate Practice Guide: How to Be the Best

What Information Do You Need in Order to Change?

“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 …

Read moreWhat Information Do You Need in Order to Change?

The Difference Between Losing and Being Beaten

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 …

Read moreThe Difference Between Losing and Being Beaten

66 Personal Development Habits For Smart People

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, …

Read more66 Personal Development Habits For Smart People

Peak Listening — A Simple Trick You Can Apply Today

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 …

Read morePeak Listening — A Simple Trick You Can Apply Today

Daily Routines of Famous Creatives: Artists, Writers, Composers

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 …

Read moreDaily Routines of Famous Creatives: Artists, Writers, Composers

The 8 Causes of Plateaus

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 …

Read moreThe 8 Causes of Plateaus

The Tyranny of Email — 10 Tips to Save You

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 …

Read moreThe Tyranny of Email — 10 Tips to Save You

The Building Blocks of A Great Daily Routine

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? …

Read moreThe Building Blocks of A Great Daily Routine

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

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 …

Read moreDaily Rituals: How Artists Work

“That’s as far as they go. They can’t take it any further. And why not? Because they won’t put in the effort”

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 …

Read more“That’s as far as they go. They can’t take it any further. And why not? Because they won’t put in the effort”

How You Can Sleep Better

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 …

Read moreHow You Can Sleep Better

What is Deliberate Practice?

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 …

Read moreWhat is Deliberate Practice?

The Science Of Habit Formation And Change

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 …

Read moreThe Science Of Habit Formation And Change

Top Athletes And Singers Have Coaches. Should You?

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 …

Read moreTop Athletes And Singers Have Coaches. Should You?

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