Train

Training for something is the most underrated practice there is.  But it’s not just any training, it’s training towards a goal.  If Lebron James just randomly threw basketballs towards the net, he wouldn’t get any better.  But if he practiced with focus, and that focus allowed him to get the feedback he needs to correct what he’s doing wrong, he will get better.

The problem with training by yourself is everyone plateaus.  You train a certain way, get to a point, and then you stop improving.  There’s an S curve that illustrates this well.  At first you don’t make much progress, so there’s not much gain.  Then, with the proper training and feedback, you start to accelerate your learning.  That learning and ability grows quickly, but eventually levels off again, and you get diminishing returns.  It’s at this point that you have to do something differently.  You need to train in a different way, get feedback from someone else, in order to get to the next level.

A great example of this is Tiger Woods.  He was one of the greatest golfers ever with his natural swing, but he plateaued.  He was winning, but driven as he was, he wasn’t winning enough, or as often as he’d like.  So he got a new coach, and they completely redid his swing.  During the time when he was mastering this new approach, he fell off the rankings.  He didn’t do well, but he stuck with it.  Once he mastered this new swing, he was able to reach a whole new level, and he won tournament after tournament, championship after championship.

Another way to think about it is the progression from apprentice, to journeyman, and finally master.  You start as an apprentice, where you train the basic executional elements of whatever skill you are trying to learn.  Once you have great proficiency in the basics, you move on to learning all of the finer things, the details.  This part of the training is becoming a journeyman.  You are on your way.  Then, once you have learned the basics, and the fine details, you have the potential to be a master.  But not everyone will reach mastery.  It all depends on how you train, what feedback you get, and the master you are learning from, but with dedicated work, finally you become a master.  You know the rules and techniques so well, you can mold them and adjust them, and make them your own.

What some masters don’t realize is there are levels above that even.  Think about the great painters of the world.  They are all masters, but they have some of their own flair mixed in.  What they realize is to get to the next level, you have to do something where you are an apprentice again.  Leonardo Da Vinci was a masterful painter, but to get to the next level, he became a student of the body, even going so far as to perform autopsy’s in the local hospitals.  This allowed him to bring to life the illustrations and paintings he created.  Now you don’t have to go that far, but the only way that new information was relevant to Leonardo was it built on the basis of knowledge he had before.  He could only move to the next level after having mastered the level before it.  That is how you use training to get where you want to go.

Training is important in other professions as well, not just artistry, or sport, or business.  It’s use is probably best shown in the military.  There’s a myth that I want to dispel about ‘rising to the occasion’ or some one-off unbelievable performance.  Those situations are extremely rare, and highly publicized as a result.  The reality for the other 99.9% of the world is in situations of extreme stress, people don’t rise to the occasion, they fall back to their highest level of training.  That is why there are so many drills that simulate battle and combat situations.  So people in those situations don’t fall back onto their natural instinct of fight, flight, or freeze, they execute on their training.  They get the job done.  They take the hill, move forward, face dangers, and otherwise perform in situations that would make an untrained person literally crap their pants.  This also applies in business, but without the life threatening danger.  When you’re in a presentation and some key decision maker is there, and they ask a tough question, were you prepared for it?  Or did you panic?  Did you train for it?  Or not?

So how do you train well?  The key to training well is the discipline to put in the reps even when you don’t want to, or you think you’ve done enough.  Have you really, or have you just plateaued?  Is there more you can learn, a different field you can combine, or somewhere else they are doing things differently?  Where can you be an apprentice again, that will take your mastery to the next level?  You need to do the homework, do what’s required, to get the outcome you want.

Focused practice, with corrective feedback, combined with discipline, will make you great at whatever you’re training for.  It’s as simple as that.