The Procedure: Deliberate practice

The Procedure: Deliberate practice

Deliberate practice is a unique, which differs from mere experience and sharpening and refining skills without thinking. Deliberate practice is no very pleasant. It is not repetition or execution of the skills already acquired, but repetition designed, strategic, to reach beyond the current level, which is necessarily associated with frequent failures. People, who desire something, should concentrate on improving specific aspects through practicing activities designed to change and refine mechanisms for solving problems and future refinement of feedback. It is a practice that perseveres.

Deliberate practice requires a mental concentration of never being satisfied with the current skills. It requires constant sacrifice, a pathological work without rest and a passion for reaching steadily and persistently goals, just beyond our means and capabilities. Disappointment and failure are desired along with a constant resolve to improve and try again, again and again and again. This requires a huge change in life, the use of time and a daily commitment to be better. It is like being stuck to the process to be always better. It requires concentration and focus on improving performance. When an individual pushes himself deliberately pushed beyond his comfort zone and is encouraged to sustain exhausting physical activities, it induces a state of abnormal cells in the physiological system. The brain also physically adapts to intellectual stress as needed. Becoming someone important requires the right combination of mental resources, strategy, persistence and time. These tools are all part of the normal functioning of the human being. The physiology of this process demands extraordinary amounts of dedication and time; not just hours and hours of dedication, but thousands of hours over the course of our lives. The best gift we have today is this new dynamic. We must know our limits, and we must push beyond. Finding our true limit in one area, will take years and thousands of hours of chasing vehemently. Mozart once said, “People are mistaken to think that my art has been very easy for me. Nobody has given so much time and thought to a composition as me”. At an early age, Mozart’s work was not truly amazing, just imitations of other composers. His first seven piano concerts, written between 11 and 16 years of age, contain nothing original. It was not until 10 later that Mozart incorporated many styles and motifs and developed his own style. Critics consider the Symphony No. 29, written a decade after the first, as his first work of real stature. The piano concert No. 9 “Jeunehomme” is widely considered as his first great piano concert, written when he was 21, and it was his composition number 271. He wrote his first opera “Idomenero”, three years later.

The Most notable fact about his adolescence is not the quality of his work, but his consistency, obsessive, persistence and arduous work, to perform many compositions. Looking at Mozart´s chronological work, there is a clear path of originality and importance, culminating in his final three symphonies, written at the age of 32, and considered his greatest works. We must know our own limits and learn to push ourselves. Finding our true natural limit in an area takes many years and many thousands of hours of hard work. Avoid areas of comfort and expertise because they break creativity and divert motivation. Reality tells us that people who reach high goals develop different skills at different ages; in fact, researchers have found that prodigy children and adults who achieve high impact goals are often not the same person. A long list suggests that many adults, who accomplished great things, did not show profound abilities when they were children (e.g. Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Bach, Newton, Da Vinci, and Einstein). All individuals have different biology, but none has a predestined fate. Each individual builds himself according to his abilities. Many tell us that to

discover our own potential; it is necessary to add: sweat, tears, love, sacrifice, perseverance and a lot of time. Some studies have shown that it is necessary to include thinking, nutrition, mentoring, culture, time, focus and motivation to influence and develop skills. All these processes are imperceptible and slow, impossible to see from the outside, for they happen inside human beings.

In many cases, when a brain damage occurs, this damage does not create a skill, but a development opportunity. It is as if the brain were flexible – plastic – and had the ability to recruit other areas to use. Even an ordinary brain is capable of powerful things, when provoked and pushed beyond its limits. According to Neuroscience and Music Psychologists, music activates neurons in many brain regions simultaneously and each listener with pragmatic senses inspires the formation of multiple memory channels, which in turn, informs future coding melodic memories. In general, people who have achieved outstanding goals have an original guidance, high appetite for accomplishment and an incredible desire for success. Why does a genius have that obsessive need?. Intense ambition involves a complex dynamic in people of different ages and circumstances. Sometimes extreme adversity, sometimes for revenge or just a way to prove himself to be loved or fear of his father or family. For example, in the case of Michael Jordan, he hated losing and his constant work on his weaknesses allowed him to have the desire to be the best. A common characteristic of successful adults is that at some point in their lives, they realize that the process of improving is within their own control.

A successful one realizes that he controls his skills. People who believe in the incremental theory of intelligence, believe that intelligence is malleable and can be enhanced with some effort. These people are much more successful and intellectually ambitious. Potential exists when a person develops a high desire to achieve goals and believes talent is a function of acquiring skills rather than just having innate abilities. Achieving goals depends entirely on long-term attitude, resources and a good process. Usually someone successful in sports has a set of contributions in several aspects and variables: climate, media, demographics, training, spirituality, education, economy and folklore. In short, athletic success is systemic and not generic. Training attitudes and delayed gratification are two vital components in people who achieve outstanding goals in sports. In addition, individuals who achieve high impact objectives, have particular patterns of cultural strengths, a high achievement orientation, inclination to seek new challenges, to be competitive and with a strong desire to win and high elaboration of need as a virtue. Over time, they build a strong culture of success, bringing more and more success, with benchmarking and Goals-Objectives and an increasingly higher level of expectations. The simplest way to inspire a better and the best performance is being surrounded by the most ferocious possible competitors and an extreme culture of excellence. The best way of helping people to achieve their goals is pushing them to extreme limits, far beyond their competitors do.

New equation of success

Today success is seen as a function of many variables.

Success = Genes A + Genes B (Variable) +Training (X) + Y (Attitude)+Z (desire

to win) + C (Coaching) +D (Desire) + Cult (Culture) +A (Food)+L (Language) +

Custom + S (Spirituality) + E (Climate) + H (Environment) + disease rate

(Health)+ Hab (Habits) + Time + Tech (Application of Technology)+

Knowledge (External and Internal) + Belief in yourself + Emotional Intelligence + Reason (intrinsic and extrinsic motivations) Science has shown inequivocally that a person’s mind has the power to influence and impressively affect long-term the dynamics of performance and achievement. Many psychologists emphasize that not only biology sets the ultimate limits of performance, but definitely, the min determines how far one reaches. It is vital, according to this understanding, to work in a dynamic environment, with good motivational psychological development to achieve high goals. In the last centuries, a progressive improvement in athletic performance has been showed. This is due to advances made in technology, aerodynamics, strength training, and new methods of training, competitiveness and desire.

New people who have accomplished outstanding goals are not super humans, with gifted genes, or super-weird. They are part of a culture of extremes, ambitious to get more and risk more, of a profound desire of doing things better. Nevertheless, most of us do not want anything from that culture of extremes and we prefer to stay in the middle of something, almost mediocre.

In a world obsessed with discovering internal skills, the evidence provides a completely different approach: far from a fixed notion that human beings have assets, skills, talents and fixed contributions, there is a new concept of development of these assets, skills and human talents. The new science helps us to understand how a common and normal human being can grow and do good things, great and extraordinary. This exposes a fallacy of the old idea that only those endowed with unique gifts can be geniuses and achieve high goals.

To think that talent is innate only makes the world more manageable, more comfortable and releases people from expectations, and free them of comparisons. If someone is innately talented in a particular area or subject,why I am going to strive to improve in that area?. Thus I should be jealous of your genetic luck while I avoid feeling frustrated if I try. This idea leads to apathy, mental comfort, and procrastination, releasing people from effort

and depriving them of rewards. A new development of paradigm requires not only a new intellectual adjustment, but also moral psychological and spiritual. This begins by expanding how we consider our real assets, responsibilities and

boundaries, which are not only biological, but also economic, cultural, nutritional, environmental and family education.Considering what we inherit as opposed to what we decide requires a radical revision. Although genes do not change by themselves from generation to generation, the instructions given to them may change. This means that I may impact the genetic legacy.

Even in free nations, people are determined by habits, media messages, patterns, agendas, expectations, social and natural infrastructure, involving us in things that are not ours. Many of these elements have passed from generation to generation with little change and difficult to change. None of the foregoing suggests that we have or must have an absolute control of our lives and abilities. Now, our task is to replace the simplistic notion of those talents given and the misconception that only talents are responsible for large and vast new ways of influence, many of which are out of our control, but with some hope of being able to influence and increase our understanding. The simplest lesson learned from the ultra-achievers of goals, is not how things have been easy for them, but how hard and how resilient they have been. It is a matter of wishing things, wanting to do so many things and never giving up. It is necessary to be ready to sacrifice time, money, sleep and sometimes even friends and reputation. You have to adopt a lifestyle for such an ambition, not for weeks or months but for years. You look forward to something to be willing to fail and make mistakes, so that these faults and errors give you new ways of doing things and learn from them. People who achieve extraordinary goals require an uncommon level of personal motivation and great faith.

The sources of motivation are often mysterious. Emotions and psychology mold this deep motivation which comes from many possible parts. A person can be happily inspired, spiritually devout or deeply resentful. Motivation may be selfish or vengeful, or need to prove something, good or bad, and all of this can be conscious or unconscious. Inspiration may come in many ways, through family rivalry, a desire to impress some family member, an insatiable hunger to be loved or hatred of failure. All great thinkers and inventors are nonconformist. They always want something; they wish they could have had more education, have worked harder, and all of these people have a high level of self-criticism.

Nietzsche: “All great artists and thinkers are great workers, tireless in invention and transforming, order, eliminators and trouble makers. Those with high ambitions must tirelessly turn failures into opportunities, like judo, where the practitioner turns the opponent’s attack and energy in favor of the attacked, Unless there is a focused motivation, there may be feelings of guilt and regret that dangerously distract from the real assignment; this must necessarily focus of improvement. The most common type of fault is the biological one, which is highly decisive. Perhaps, the biggest obstacle to our success is to believe that there are inferior genes. Sometimes possible targets or goals are far, many years away from certain and often-difficult to envision. The practical distance between current skills and desired skills are so huge, that goals seen unattainable. Many people give in to this feeling of discouragement instead of taking distance as an inspiration and encouragement. Greatness is not just going beyond mediocrity, it is transcending it. Greatness begins with one-step further, and another step, and hundreds of small and large steps until the distance cannot be measured. The only way to reach greatness is to go far, hard, persistently pushing everything, from the points of logic and reason. That is why people, who achieve high goals, at any age, are dreamers. Their heads are tied to clouds imagining the unimaginable. They ignore the small turnouts and everything that seem obstacles. Hundreds of extraordinary successful people recognize that there is no age for impossible. Being in the game is difficult and for those who keep on, that is a process of improvement, especially over time which has no substitute, thus time is crucial for excellence.

Self-control

In our culture, we are constantly conditioned to gratify our impulses immediately: shop, eat, drink, watch, and click now. Successful people who achieve high goals, overcome those impulses. The small accomplishments along the way provide much more satisfaction to keep on. A lesson to learn is that things come out of nowhere and evolve from nothing. The smallest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest and the most promising seed in a bad situation may turn into anything.

The true way to success remains not in the molecular composition of a person, but in the development of a more productive and outstanding identification of external resources. Find a mentor, a great teacher who will inspire, advise, criticize and have extreme faith in you, who tells you the different person you must be– and different skills – that you must have in life.

Parents’ work

Each child is unique in his genetics and conceived entity in his distinctive environment, which immediately affects his unique interaction and behavior

However, our brain and body are designed to be flexible and plastic and to face challenges and adaptation. Recent studies conclude that brain development is not a passive process or a genetic blueprint for inflexible environment, but an active process that depends on cellular molecular process and probabilistic organizational levels genetic and no genetic, because of the bidirectional relationship among genes, brain and behavior. Babies are special beings, and what makes them special is that they are not intelligent at birth, but they are designed to change their minds when facing new data and information, Intelligence is not fixed but waiting to be developed. Athletic progress is not preordered but waiting to be trained. Musical ability is dormant in all of us,

waiting to be awakened. The creative potential is built into our brain architecture and all these functions of influence and processes, far from being completely controllable. The job of a father is to get involved in this work and process, which should begin before the baby’s birth. We know that genes play a role and its expression is determined each time by the quality of life of our children. We know that we must help our children to decide their own destiny. Then our job as parents is to find the best one possible and unique that gets the best of the individual. It is important to know that the most relevant influences on children’s character are not their parents by their playmates. On the average, parents and peers are to be complementary in their roles: parents are more important in relation to their education, discipline, responsibilities, order,

charity education and ways of interacting with authority figures. On the other hand, peers are important in cooperative learning, to find popularity

and styles of interaction among peers of the same age. Parents are not everything for children and they do not have complete control over them, therefore sometimes when things get bad, parents do not help much, but the mentoring of parents matter much, since they seriously impact on the goals, strategies and personal philosophy of children.

Here we will see four key points for excellence:

a) Beliefs – thought:

– Extraordinary repetition, parental persistence and continuous

strengthening, so a child may strengthen his/her technical

expertise.

– Suzuki method (Mother tongue method).

– Constant parents’ involvement in children’s activities like, practicing

(for example; playing a musical instrument), constant memory and a

lot of patience.

– Remember: talent is not inherent and this must be educated and

trained. With special training and a lot of persistence, anyone can

achieve great goals and success.

– Instead of thinking about given talents and gifts, parents should

think deeply about the extraordinary potential of their children.

b) Support creativity. Do not kill or break creativity:

– Parents have to find what children like. They also should assign goals

and high expectations, without becoming anxious to see that a child

fails to achieve high goals. Parents must have patience.

– An early exposure to resources is an excellent thing and gives high

expectation, goals, demonstrate persistence and resilience when

they have to face challenges.

– Parents should not use affection as an achievement award; but on

the contrary use penalties when a child fails or makes mistakes.

Parents need to show trust and faith towards child skills that helps

to seek self-satisfaction.

c) Persistence and tranquility:

– Einstein said: “It is not that I’m so smart. But I stay with the

questions much longer.”

– In the end, persistence is the difference between mediocrity and

success.

– The key is intermittent reinforcement.

– A person who grows up getting too frequent rewards will not be

persistent, because that person will stand still when a prize

disappears (Kaizen Principle).

– There should be an emphasis on avoiding instant gratification,

because it generates bad habits.

– The ability to delay gratification opens new possibilities to look for

improvement.

– Those with early skills of self-discipline and delay in seeking

gratification have achieved high academic success.

– It is possible that gratification modes can be altered and saved by

parents and teachers; thus delaying gratification must be a skill and

like all skills must be learned and improved.

– If children learn self-regulatory strategies to reduce frustration in

situations, they impose self-delay of gratification. This will help to

be tied to those desired goals.

– Act as you would have your child behave now and in the future. Do

not eat, buy or grab all you want.

– Do not respond immediately to all that your children want. Let

them learn how to deal with frustration with what they want.

– Any philosophy, religion and practical exercises that reinforce these

principles will help both parents and children.

d) Willingness to accept failures and make mistakes (Da Vinci):

– In the world of success and achievement, weaknesses are

opportunities. Before failure, we must be open, flexible and

understand that these widen doors.

– The only true fault is quitting.

– Some biologists and scholars of human performance tell us that the

human being develops as a response to problems and failures.

– Parents should not make things easy to children; on the contrary,

they must submit, monitor and modulate challenges.

– Great success stories appear when parents and children learn to

fight against wind and tide; achieve and gain satisfaction struggling

against the tide.

– Have a philosophy of persistence.

We have to have persistence: recognize that we can make mistakes and do not always have the correct answer; that we can always find better solutions. We can be more effective and teach our children to move towards the right.