10 Tips for Improving Your Skills

In Daniel Coyle’s book, The Little Book of Talent, he discusses 52 tips to help improve your skills based on research, interviews and experiences that included:

• A top 20 women’s tennis club from Moscow
• A music camp where students accomplish one year’s worth of progress in 7 weeks
• An inner-city school that ranked last in math to the top 96 percentile in 4 years
• A vocal school that produces and develops top pop music talent
• A ski academy that has produced 50 Olympic skiers over the past 40 years
• Working with various other laboratories, educators, and research centers

The book goes on to state:

1.      We all possess talents

2.      We are unsure how to develop those talents to their full potential

Below are the top 10 I felt made the most sense.

Getting Started – The Blueprint for the Skills You Want to Build

#5 Be willing to look stupid

Your willingness to risk the emotional pain of making mistakes. Reaching, failing, and reaching again is the way the brain grows and forms new connections. Mistakes are not mistakes, rather guideposts to make you better.

#7 Distinguish between hard and soft skills

Hard: high precision, usually one path to an ideal result, requiring repeatable abilities in specialized pursuits. They are reliable, exact, and are performed the same every time as they are built from fundamentals.

Soft: highly flexible, with many paths to get the same result. Being agile and interactive, while recognizing patterns in a situation as they unfold. Reading, recognizing, reacting. Putting yourself in challenging, and ever-changing environments.

#11 Do not fall for the prodigy myth

Research shows that prodigies do not exist. Rather, talent is built on constructing skills day by day and early success is often a week predictor of long-term success.

Improving Skills – How to Make Progress Over Time

#13 Finding your sweet spot

The sweet spot is where the is frustration and difficulty lies, and where you have alertness to errors. It is harder than the comfort zone where everything comes without exerting much energy and easier than the survival zone where you’re guessing the entire time because you’re confused and overwhelmed.

#14 Take off your watch

Deep practice should be measured in high quality reps, not by time elapsed. Instead of saying, I will practice for 20 minutes, say I’m going to do X, Y number of times.

#18 Embrace struggle

Most of us avoid struggle because it feels like failure, but it is a biological necessity for improvement. Consider it: “Desirable Difficulty”. 

Sustaining Progress – Overcoming Plateaus and Building Habits for the Long Term

#43 Embrace repetition

Repetition is the single most powerful lever we have to improve our skills.

#47 To learn more deeply, teach it

When you communicate a skill to someone, you understand it more deeply yourself. Doers who teach, do better.

#50 Cultivate your grit

Grit is the mix of passion, perseverance, and self-discipline that keeps us moving forward despite obstacles. Grit is not born, it is developed.

#52 Think like a gardener, work like a carpenter

Understand talent grows slowly, build it with daily deep practice. Each piece that you work on, connects to a large whole.

References for this article: The Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle, also NYT Best Selling Author of: The Talent Code