How to Become Truly Great At What You Do
I love Malcolm Gladwell's books, even though I disagree with almost every conclusion his books offer. The one I have the biggest bone to pick is the 10,000-hour rule. It's brilliant because it's sticky (another Gladwell term!), and our minds tend to believe what is most easy to accept.
The 10,000 rule claims it takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery of complex skills. Yet we all know people who put in an intense 10,000+ hours of such practice who remain mediocre. Plus, different complex skills require various commitments to master, and different personalities are more likely to be good at specific skills than others.
Suppose you want to move beyond sound bite and bumper sticker advice on expertise and get at the heart of it. In that case, I'll give you three key areas you need to focus on if you want to be what Gladwell calls an Outlier or what I heard David Goggins refer to as "being uncommon among uncommon men."
I've used this approach to set records in business and become regarded as the best webinar pitch presenter.
Monomania + Timely Reality Checking
If you want to be good at one thing, you must give up on many other things. When I wrestled, that's all I did. Any other sport I played, I did for leisure, and there wasn't much leisure time.
But putting in the time isn't enough. Are you using the time wisely? After wrestling matches, my dad and I would review what I did right and wrong, what we learned, and where we should focus next.
When my dad wasn't in my corner - I still wrestled, but I didn't get better. Sometimes I got worse because I started developing poor technique, and it's harder to fix poor technique than to start from scratch.
You have to put in your reps. I've spent thousands of hours on sales calls, poking and prodding prospects to find who is a proper fit and who isn't, and then, if they are a proper fit, figuring out why they wouldn't buy when buying was the better option.
Different activities require different cadences. We could post-mortem every wrestling match because they were 6 minutes long, and there would be an hour or two before the next one. If you're in a high-intensity work environment, you might only be able to post-mortem at the end of the work day.
But post-mortem, you must.
What did you learn?
Where did you excel?
Where did you fall short?
What adjustments should you consider?
If you have to do it alone, so be it. Ideally, though, you have a third-party expert eyes on you from time to time.
You don't work smart instead of hard. You work smart and hard.
Influence Outcomes
You can't be the top coin-flip predictor in the world, no matter how many reps you put in and how many post-mortems you perform.
You have to be in conditions where your skillset can influence the outcome considerably. Sounds obvious in theory, but in practice, it's much trickier. Sometimes in sales, it is the leads - they suck, and you nor I could close. Sometimes it's the product - it's a great product, but it's not the right time in the market.
The key is to isolate the variables that have randomness to them and attempt to minimize them so you can focus on those variables you have the most influence over.
We hold the record for the biggest promotion as an affiliate doing an internet marketing product launch. Other affiliates exerted little influence over the variables - they used the existing sales materials, promotion schemes, and angles.
We didn't. We wrote 100% of our sales copy and even made our money-back guarantee on top of the vendor's money-back guarantee. Instead of playing within the rules, we made our own.
Seek what you can change, then find the most dramatic way to change it in your favor positively.
Living at the Edge
Practice is everything. We might wrestle 30 minutes a week in actual matches, but we practiced 12-15 hours for those 30 minutes. One week I remember practicing for several hours just on how to hold an opponent's wrist for one particular situation.
Keith Cunningham, the author of The Road Less Stupid, tells the story of stumbling onto Tiger Woods one day at a golf course. He watched as Tiger was surrounded by several coaches, who would watch him hit a ball off the tee, and then analyze it from each coach's perspective. There was a coach that studied his eyes, another his hips, another his wrists. Tiger was hitting less than one ball per minute.
Practicing like this is draining. Many folks can't hack it because you're constantly working on the things you're weak at. It can undermine your confidence if you let it, and it never feels pleasant. If you're putting in 20 hours a week of practicing, about 4-5 hours of it should be what they call deliberate practice - where you constantly assault the limits of your current capabilities to grow.
I've poured over transcripts of my webinars, isolating areas of improvement and then spending hours rehearsing alternative material. I learned how to speak in rhythms to get an extra edge skill that separates me from other great webinar presenters.
Where can you put an intense, deliberate focus to set yourself apart even from the excellent? And when you do that, can you find another area and do it again? And again?
If so, you might have what it takes to be truly great at what you do.