Quotes About Development

this thirty-day experiment

The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,

Mike Jackson leveraged the craftsman mindset to do whatever he did really well, thus ensuring that he came away from each experience with as much career capital as possible. He never had elaborate plans for his career. Instead, after each working experience, he would stick his head up to see who was interested in his newly expanded store of capital, and then jump at whatever opportunity seemed most promising.

method for building skills by ruthlessly stretching yourself beyond where you're comfortable.

serious study, defining it formally as an "activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual's performance.

According to Johnson's theory, Sarah would have been better served by first mastering a promising niche—a task that may take years—and only then turning her attention to seeking a mission.

Finding useful new technologies is just the first step to improving your life. The real benefits come once you start experimenting with how best to use them.

The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that's the hardest phase,

You need to get good in order to get good things in your working life.

My suggestion is that you try to learn and apply one new skill every week, over a period of six weeks. Start with easy projects like those suggested above, but as soon as you feel the challenge wane, ramp up the complication of the skills and steps involved.

differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.

The difference in our abilities by the age of eighteen had less to do with the number of hours we practiced—though he probably racked up more total practice hours than I did, we weren't all that far apart—and more to do with what we did with those hours.

if you just show up and work hard, you'll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better. This

the difficulty of focus and the hours of practice necessary to strengthen your "mental muscle.

Control that's acquired without career capital is not sustainable.

You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we've painstakingly adapted over millennia.

The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that's the hardest phase," he says.

The First Control Trap In which I introduce the first control trap, which warns that it's dangerous to pursue more control in your working life before you have career capital to offer in exchange. Jane's

On reflection, this makes sense. If you have many years' experience, then you've had time to get better at what you do and develop a feeling of efficacy. It also gives you time to develop strong relationships with your coworkers and to see many examples of your work benefiting others.

introduced the term career capital to describe these rare and valuable skills, and noted that the tricky part is figuring out how to acquire this capital. By definition, if it's rare and valuable, it's not easy to get.

if you're not careful to keep pushing forward, your improvement can taper off to what the performance scientist Anders Ericsson called an "acceptable level," where you then remain stuck.

focused on difficult activities, carefully chosen to stretch your abilities where they most need stretching and that provide immediate feedback.

In the final accounting, the journalistic philosophy of deep work scheduling remains difficult to pull off. But if you're confident in the value of what you're trying to produce, and practiced in the skill of going deep (a skill we will continue to develop in the strategies that follow), it can be a surprisingly robust way to squeeze out large amounts of depth from an otherwise demanding schedule.

Most individuals who start as active professionals… change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work… is a poor predictor of attained performance." Put another way, if you just show up and work hard, you'll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.