More on how to find your sweet spot for learning here.Īsking someone "How long are you going to be doing this?" was the best predictor of how skilled that person would end up being. You want to constantly be toggling, adjusting the environment so that you're succeeding 60 to 80 percent of the time. You don't want to be succeeding 95 percent of the time. You don't want to be succeeding 40 percent of the time. When it's too easy… well, we quit then too.Īlways be upping the challenge to stay in that 60 to 80 percent zone. You want to be successful 60 to 80 percent of the time when training. More on how to shift from reading to doing here. If you want to, say, memorize a passage, it's better to spend 30 percent of your time reading it, and the other 70 percent of your time testing yourself on that knowledge. This is one of the reasons that, for a lot of skills, it's much better to spend about two thirds of your time testing yourself on it rather than absorbing it. Our brains evolved to learn by doing things, not by hearing about them. The closer your practice is to the real thing, the faster you learn. The other two-thirds of your time you want to be doing the activity. Spend only one third of your time studying. More on the best way for you to practice here. You want to practice where you are on the edge of your ability, reaching over and over again, making mistakes, failing, realizing those mistakes and reaching again. It's better to spend a very, very high quality ten minutes, or even ten seconds, than it is to spend a mediocre hour. The more time you spend there, the faster you learn. When you're struggling, that's when you're getting smarter. We learn when we're in our discomfort zone.
You want to be stretched to the edge of your ability.
So how can you and I do that? Here are seven steps experts use: Hours are vital but you can get to mastery faster - much faster - by practicing the right way. Dan knows that the " 10,000 hour rule" is nice, but you need to align your effort with the way your brain was designed to learn.