1. Goals & Systems
1.1. Systems are scalable and repeatable. While setting goals is important, if you aren't creating a process to continuously achieve them, you will fail more often.
1.2. What do I mean by system? Think of it as your plan of action, the route you're going to follow, a set of steps you take daily. It's the "how" of reaching your goal and obtaining the results that you want.
2. Achieving Your Goals: Advice from the Ancients (Colossus of Rhodes 108 ft tall, made of bronze, Sun God Helios @ 280 BCE)
2.1. “If a thing is humanly possible, consider it within your reach” –Marcus Aurelius In early April around 4,000 years ago, the Babylonians held civilization’s first-recorded New Year celebration. To the ancient Babylonians, New Year’s resolutions and traditions were extrinsically motivated. During the 12-day new year festival, new kings were crowned, or loyalty was sworn to existing monarchs. Crops were sown and promises to the gods were made to repay debts and return borrowed items. In more recent times, New Year’s resolutions have become more intrinsically motivated. This year, tens of millions of people will make promises of self-improvement or the achievement of particular goals. Known as Telos (end, purpose, or goal) in ancient Greek, the ancients well understood the importance of goal-setting and achievement. According to the Greeks, Telos involved self-reflection, wherein one would ponder on their misgivings, and put in place a plan to improve their behavior or outlook on life. Some goals were fairly easy to achieve, such as being kinder to one’s friends, whereas some goals could take a lifetime to achieve, such as finding one’s purpose in life.
2.2. Meditations
2.2.1. The Meditations (or Things to One’s Self) of Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD) gives you a prescribed way in which you can actually reduce genuine suffering in your life because Rome’s great “philosopher king” lays out a very compelling, very practical way in which you can stop yourself being totally overwhelmed by difficult events.
3. Dr. .Anders Ericsson (April 5, 2016)
3.1. What is Deliberate Practice
3.1.1. Purposeful Practice (core of Ericsson’s deliberate practice) Exactly what it says on tin – this is practicing with a purpose. The mission is to improve, and you are practicing for that sole reason. Every time you practice, you are asking the question: “How can I do this better?” A specific component of the skill is isolated (a component that one is poor at/can’t do) and then targeted for improvement via training activities. There are four principles of purposeful practice: 1. You need to establish a (reachable) specific goal. Vague overall performance targets like ‘succeed’ or ‘get better’ won’t cut it. 2. You must be maximally focused on improvement during practice. It must be intense, uninterrupted and repetitive (‘drilling’). Not particularly pleasant, but highly rewarding. 3. You must receive immediate feedback on your performance. Without it, you can’t figure out what you need to modify or how close you are to achieving your specific goal. 4. You must get out of your comfort zone, constantly attempting things that are just out of reach. Take chest drain insertion for example. You isolate one part of the procedure that you know needs improvement – e.g. surgical hand-ties (to suture the chest drain to the skin): Goal: Be fast and efficient at single-handed surgical hand-ties by the end of the training session. Focus: Watch a training video explaining how best to perform the tie a few times; then practice tying knots round a kitchen utensil using the taught technique multiple times. Feedback: Compare your performance to that on the training video, or ideally get personalised feedback from a supervisor. Exit comfort zone: Experiment by performing the technique under time pressure or give yourself less suture thread to work with. A hallmark of purposeful practice is that performance level during training tasks is not initially at the desired level – there is a gap. By the end of a phase of training, there needs to be something measurable that you’ve improved. Embracing these principles in training squeezes the trigger of the greatest weapon in the arsenal of the human brain – adaptability. Every training session should be viewed as a challenge to refine and improve. Deliberate Practice “The most effective (improvement) method of all: deliberate practice. It is the gold standard, the ideal to which anyone learning a skill should aspire.” – Anders Ericsson Deliberate practice encompasses the principles of purposeful practice, with a couple of additional elements: 1. The field must be well established, and elite performers easily identified. 2. A coach or teacher guides training. A good coach provides constant individualised feedback and designs training activities that target specific areas. They hold the ‘roadmap’ that guides the student through an evolving training regime that hones skills in a specific order. Certain skills can only be taught and practiced once others have been mastered. This calculated and heavily supervised approach to training always leads to elite performance when the student is motivated. It is tried and tested. A useful analogy is to think of purposeful practice as trekking through the desert to a specific destination that is out of sight. You know the general direction you need to go, but in order to reach the destination you must walk in a completely straight line – notoriously difficult in the desert. A good strategy would be to use landmarks up ahead such as trees and sand dunes to aim at, so as to avoid walking round in circles. You are progressing with a purpose, but there is minimal guidance. In this context, deliberate practice can be thought of as that same journey, but instead there is a path marking the route you need to walk, with signposting along the way, and even a camel guide to get you back on track if you veer off the route.