Warren Buffett & Trump's best-selling book award.
Title: Genius Comes from Deliberate Practice: Effective Learning Methods for Success
Celebrity & Media Recommendations:
Donald Trump (President of the United States): "A great book from start to finish!"
Time Magazine: "Fuel your life force!"
01 Think before you read
Is talent a key factor in success?
What kind of practice is "deliberate"?
How can we follow through with deliberate practice?
02 Golden sentences in the book
Great achievements do not belong only to those whom God favors, but to anyone, including you.
20,000 falls, resulting in perfect performance.
Mozart became Mozart through a shocking amount of hard work.
Great achievements come from exercises that are carefully designed to improve a particular skill.
When practice reaches an extraordinary level, extraordinary achievements are created.
Knowledge is your friend, not your enemy, and the more the better.
03 Essence Notes
Genius Comes from Deliberate Practice: Effective Learning Methods for Success is a book that explores how to achieve extraordinary results. As soon as the book came out in the United States, it was highly praised by Time magazine and other media, and some American readers read the book aloud to their loved ones, telling them: "Great achievements do not only belong to those who are favored by God, but can be obtained by anyone, including you."
The book was written by Jeff Colvin, a veteran editor of Fortune magazine and a well-known journalist, who is not only a frequent speaker on cutting-edge issues in the United States, but also a radio presenter with a weekly audience of 7 million people. In Colvin's view, there is no genius in this world, and any world-class achievement requires painstaking effort, dedication, and deliberate practice to break the mold.
We can grasp Colvin's effective learning method from the following four aspects:
First, is the secret to success that we have always believed in reliable?
We have a lot of deep-rooted ideas about the trick to success.
One of the stereotypes is that years of hard work leads to a wealth of experience, and that experience naturally leads to success. The other is that innate talent leads to success.
The author of this book, however, argues that neither experience nor talent is the key to success.
He began by pointing out that those around us with a wealth of experience are far from being at the level of excellence. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary that many people who have achieved small things have become worse with experience. Through this, Colvin tells us that just taking time doesn't do much to help a person become a top-notch person.
Second, Colvin used Mozart as an example to discuss the issue of talent. Mozart is often thought of as a natural musical prodigy who composed music at the age of 5 and gave solo recitals at the age of 8, but Colvin points out that this is not accurate. Mozart's early musical works, which are said to be good stories, were actually copied and imitated by others under the guidance of his father, and they were not world-class masterpieces, and by the time Mozart wrote his first masterpiece at the age of 21, he had actually undergone 18 years of extremely difficult professional training.
Second, why is deliberate practice not ordinary practice, not the so-called "practice makes perfect"?
Deliberate practice is not a general exercise, it is not a simple repetition, it is designed to improve performance, it can be repeated many times, and the feedback on the effect in deliberate practice is deliberately and continuously.
The first element of deliberate practice is to form positive feedback.
We usually have a lot of misconceptions about practice, such as understanding practice as simple repetition, although repetition is the basis of deliberate practice, but constant simple repetition and general practice that does not step out of the comfort zone cannot bring real progress, and sometimes it reinforces the wrong habits. In deliberate practice, does the practice achieve the goal and effect? If it is achieved, how can it be further consolidated and improved? If not, how can it be corrected and improved? These problems are carefully designed, and there will be timely and effective feedback, only with such positive feedback, deliberate practice can become deliberate practice, and only in this way can we continuously improve our skill level through deliberate practice.
Another element of deliberate practice is to avoid automaticity.
In particular, Colvin argues that deliberate practice should avoid automaticity, because deliberate practice is the exact opposite of what is commonly understood as "practice makes perfect." The so-called automaticity refers to the almost instinctive automatic reaction of people after long-term practice, and someone's unthinking reaction makes him look very much like an expert at first glance, but the harsh fact is that the result of automaticity is not necessarily the correct response, and there is no guarantee that it will reach the level of an expert.
Third, in practice, how exactly does deliberate practice work?
First, let's look at the three modes of deliberate practice.
Direct practice consists of three modes: musical, chess, and sports.
Music mode: In traditional classical music performance, the musician knows what he is going to play, because the music has been written, the greatness of the musician lies in their ability to perform, in other words, the practitioner knows what he wants to express, and the challenge is how to express it accurately and perfectly.
Chess mode: Choose a specific solution to solve the problem you are facing, and then compare it with the master's plan to find your own gap. The chess model gets its name from chess, and it is this method that chess players practice. Case study teaching in business schools is a practical application of this model in business.
Sports mode: It is different from the music mode because the situation is different every time and the action is different every time. Colvin suggested that people can find a friend to pretend to be an evenly matched opponent to practice making sales calls or negotiating with them, and use unpredictable opponents and changing situations to push them to react quickly.
Second, how can we apply deliberate practice at work through self-regulation?
1. We need to set goals before work: not only focus on the results, but also focus on the process of achieving the results, so as to make the most detailed and technically oriented plans.
2. In addition, we need to observe ourselves at work, monitor what is happening in our brains from a bystander-like perspective, and observe how things are going;
3. After work, we should check the feedback in time, strictly self-evaluate, and find out the reasons for our mistakes.
Thirdly, we need to use deliberate practice to build mental models to deepen our knowledge accumulation.
The goal of our learning is not to gather a lot of information, but to deepen our knowledge and build our own mental model, which is a picture of how the brain works. Mental models can be used to place growing industry knowledge, distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information, and predict what will happen further. For example, when prominent business people get their hands on the financial statements of potential investors, they can find out what is the key information related to revenue, profit, and investment value from the complex financial data, and what is just unimportant information or even just interference.
Fourth, although deliberate practice is good, it is so hard, how can we persevere?
First, Colvin suggested that we should pay attention to the generation of "flow" in our deliberate practice.
In the process of deliberate practice, we step out of the comfort zone that makes us feel comfortable and lazy, and enter the learning zone that is both constantly challenging and constantly responding. Colvin pointed out that when the challenge is not too difficult or too easy, and it is just a match for personal ability, it is easier to have flow, and this state of euphoria can motivate us to continue to practice deliberately for many years.
Second, Colvin proposed that the "multiplier effect" could be exploited.
The multiplier effect refers to the fact that a small advantage in certain areas can trigger a series of events, a slightly better than the ordinary person's innate endowment, acquired environment, promote a slight increase in ability, and each increase in ability will bring a better environment, and then, a better environment will further improve ability. The multiplier effect not only leads to an increase in skills, but also increases people's motivation to keep improving their skills.
