SOURCE :TIME
Hours are vital but you can get to mastery faster — muchfaster — by practicing the right way.
1) Be Uncomfortable
You learn best when you’re reaching. “Flow” is great. But flow is notthe best way to learn.
You want to be stretched to the edge of your ability. It needs to be hard. That’s how your brain grows.
Here’s Dan:
We learn when we’re in our discomfort zone. When you’re struggling, that’s when you’re getting smarter. The more time you spend there, the faster you learn. It’s better to spend a very, very high quality ten minutes, or even ten seconds, than it is to spend a mediocre hour. You want to practice where you are on the edge of your ability, reaching over and over again, making mistakes, failing, realizing those mistakes and reaching again.
What type of practice produces peak performance?
It’s “Deep Practice” (or Deliberate Practice) and I tend to focus on four parts:
1) Make your practice as similar to the real life scenario as possible.
Via The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How:
“One real encounter, even for a few seconds, is far more useful than several hundred observations.” Bjork cites an by psychologist Henry Roediger at Washington University of St. Louis, where students were divided into two groups to study a natural history text. Group A studied the paper for four sessions. Group B studied only once but was tested three times. A week later both groups were tested, and Group B scored 50 percent higher than Group A. They’d studied one-fourth as much yet learned far more.
Via Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To:
Practicing under the types of pressures you will face on the big testing day is one of the best ways to combat choking…
And:
During the initial shooting practice, all of the officers missed more shots when firing at a live opponent compared with firing at the stationary cardboard targets. Not so surprising. This was true after training as well, but only for those officers whose practice had been limited to the cardboard cutouts. For those officers who practiced shooting at an opponent, after training they were just as good shots when aiming at the live individuals as they were when aiming at the stationary cutouts. The opportunity to “practice under the gun” of an opponent, so to speak, really helped to hone the police officers’ shots for more real-life stressful shooting situations.
2) Don’t be passive. Testing yourself is far better than reviewing.
Via Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success:
Good decision making is about compressing the informational load by decoding the meaning of patterns derived from experience. This cannot be taught in a classroom; it is not something you are born with; it must be lived and learned.
Testing yourself is the best way to learn — even if you fail the tests.
3) Practice is not just repetition. Be ruthlessly critical and keep trying to improve on the constituent elements of the skill.
Via Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else:
Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.
Via The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How:
“Our predictions were extremely accurate,” Zimmerman said. “This showed that experts practice differently and far more strategically. When they fail, they don’t blame it on luck or themselves. They have a strategy they can fix.”
Via Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success:
When most people practice, they focus on the things they can do effortlessly,” Ericsson has said. “Expert practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.”
A negative attitude, not a positive attitude, makes you more likely to learn from your mistakes. In fact, the shift to focusing on negative feedback is one of the marks of an expert mindset.
Ruthlessly critical in practice, blindly optimistic on game day. It’s irrational, but it works.
4) Practice a lot: 10,000 hours worth.
Via Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else:
One factor, and only one factor, predicted how musically accomplished the students were, and that was how much they practiced.
And when the big day comes, make sure you know the methods to resist choking under pressure.
2) Stop Reading. Start Doing.
Keep the “Rule of Two-Thirds” in mind. Spend only one third of your time studying.
The other two-thirds of your time you want to be doing the activity. Practicing. Testing yourself.
Get your nose out of that book. Avoid the classroom. Whatever it is you want to be the best at, be doing it.
The closer your practice is to the real thing, the faster you learn.
Here’s Dan:
Our brains evolved to learn by doing things, not by hearing about them. This is one of the reasons that, for a lot of skills, it’s much better to spend about two thirds of your time testing yourself on it rather than absorbing it. There’s a rule of two thirds. If you want to, say, memorize a passage, it’s better to spend 30 percent of your time reading it, and the other 70 percent of your time testing yourself on that knowledge.
What’s the best way to learn from a book?
Don’t keep reading it over and over. Read it and write a one page summary.
Via Daniel Coyle’s excellent book The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills:
Research shows that people who (wrote a summary) remember 50 percent more material over the long term than people who follow (repeatedly read). This is because of one of deep practice’s most fundamental rules: Learning is reaching. Passively reading a book— a relatively effortless process, letting the words wash over you like a warm bath— doesn’t put you in the sweet spot. Less reaching equals less learning.
On the other hand, closing the book and writing a summary forces you to figure out the key points (one set of reaches), process and organize those ideas so they make sense (more reaches), and write them on the page (still more reaches, along with repetition). The equation is always the same: More reaching equals more learning.
3) The Sweet Spot
You want to be successful 60-80% of the time when training. That’s the sweet spot for improvement.
When learning is too hard, we quit. When it’s too easy… well, we quit then too.
Always be upping the challenge to stay in that 60-80% zone.
Here’s Dan:
You don’t want to be succeeding 40 percent of the time. That’s flailing around. You don’t want to be succeeding 95 percent of the time. That’s too easy. You want to constantly be toggling, adjusting the environment so that you’re succeeding 60 to 80 percent of the time.
What’s the sweet spot for optimal improvement?
While practicing, you want to be succeeding on 50-80% of attempts.
Fewer than that and you’re going to be confused and feel like it’s all luck.
More success than that and you’re not pushing yourself.
Via Daniel Coyle’s excellent book The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills:
Comfort Zone
Sensations: Ease, effortlessness. You’re working, but not reaching or struggling.
Percentage of Successful Attempts: 80 percent and above.
Sweet Spot
Sensations: Frustration, difficulty, alertness to errors. You’re fully engaged in an intense struggle— as if you’re stretching with all your might for a nearly unreachable goal, brushing it with your fingertips, then reaching again.
Percentage of Successful Attempts: 50– 80 percent.
Survival Zone
Sensations: Confusion, desperation. You’re overmatched: scrambling, thrashing, and guessing. You guess right sometimes, but it’s mostly luck.
Percentage of Successful Attempts: Below 50 percent.
4) Commit To The Long Term
Asking someone ”How long are you going to be doing this?” was the best predictor of how skilled that person would end up being.
Merely committing to the long haul had huge effects.
Here’s Dan:
The question that ended up being the most predictive of skill was “How long are you going to be doing this?” Commitment was the difference maker. The people who combined commitment with a little bit of practice, their skills went off the charts.
http://thetalentcode.com/2013/11/01/meet-resilient-mouse-your-new-superhero/
Commit to the long haul. Don’t give up. Even works for mice:
5) Find A Role Model
Watching the best people work is one of the most powerful things you can do.
It’s motivating, inspiring and it’s how you were built to learn. Study the best to be the best.
Here’s Dan:
When we stare at someone we want to become and we have a really clear idea of where we want to be, it unlocks a tremendous amount of energy. We’re social creatures, and when we get the idea that we want to join some enchanted circle up above us, that is what really lights up motivation. “Look, they did it. I can do it.” It sounds very basic, but spending time staring at the best can be one of the most powerful things you do.
8 Steps To Getting The Perfect Mentor For You
mentor
Mentors, mentors, mentors. Everyone’s always talking about them but no one really seems to know how to get a good one.
Thanks to the internet we have more information than ever — but not any more wisdom.
Contacting mentors is one of the things I think you should do every week.
Whenever I say that, the response is the same: How?
Here’s what research and experts have to say about picking, contacting and maintaining a relationship with the right mentor, A-to-Z. Strap in.
Mentors Matter
I’ve posted about what the most successful people in the world all have in common. One of those things is mentors.
For his book Creativity, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi interviewed over 91 of the most creative people in the world (including 14 Nobel prize winners.)
What did they have in common? By the time they were college age, almost every one of those earthshakers had an important mentor:
In our study we found that a few individuals were taken in hand by competent adult practitioners very early in life, many were recognized during high school, and most of the remaining had an important mentor by the time they were of college age. Again, recognition by a mentor is not strictly necessary, but it must definitely contribute to the realization of creative potential.
10,000 hours of deliberate practice makes you an expert but what makes you dedicate 10,000 hours to something in the first place?
As Adam Grant of Wharton explains, the answer is great mentors.
Why would somebody invest deliberate practice in something? It turns out that actually most of these world-class performers had a first coach, or a first teacher, who made the activity fun.
Not worried about accepting a prize in Stockholm or being a chess grandmaster?
Okay, brass tacks here: Research shows mentors mean promotions and career satisfaction.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
…past research has also found that people with mentors get more promotions and experience greater job and career satisfaction than those without mentors.
What Do Mentors Really Do?
Mentors generally offer three things.
1) They give career guidance.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
First, they offer career guidance-for example, by making suggestions on assignments a protege might take, or suggestions on what career path might be most advantageous.
2) It’s not all about work. Mentors provide much needed emotional support when times get tough.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
Second, mentors can provide emotional support around issues such as the inherent conflict between work and family, or can recommend methods for coping with a difficult boss or with work stress.
3) Mentors also often act like a role model, giving you something to emulate and aspire to.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
Third, a mentor may provide support to proteges by serving as an effective role model who demonstrates appropriate behaviors for different situations.
Some people might say, “I don’t need to worry about all this. My company has a mentorship program.”
Yeah, too bad that program sucks.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
Unfortunately, recent research has revealed that those in formal mentoring programs often fail to deliver on their rosy promises, and the participants may be left helpless and disillusioned. Possible reasons for this include a shoddy formal mentoring program structure, a matchmaking system that mimics blind dates from hell, or simply inadequate resources or rewards to support these programs.
And what about your greater career? If you’re a star do you think your company is going to tell you when it’s time to move on to greener pastures?
You need objectivity and you need someone who can give you advice that’s valuable over the long haul.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
Mentors external to an organization provide a different perspective on the protege’s career and profession, as well as on the situations they witness in their organization. Being too entrenched in one organization can lead to less innovative decision making, possibly embracing only a particular style of management, and finally an inability to imagine a career outside of that organization.
So you need to get your own mentor. Here’s how.
How To Pick A Mentor
I’ve done an entire post on selecting the best mentor for you. You can read thathere.
The quick and dirty version comes courtesy of Dan Coyle’s masterpiece The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills:
Avoid Someone Who Reminds You of a Courteous Waiter
Seek Someone Who Scares You a Little
Seek Someone Who Gives Short, Clear Directions
Seek Someone Who Loves Teaching Fundamentals
Other Things Being Equal, Pick the Older Person
The research also shows it’s good to look for someone who has a resume that shows grit.
And, believe it or not, happier mentors are better mentors.
Know yourself and what you need. If you don’t have these answers, a mentor can’t help you much.
Aspirational figures must “fit” with your career goals.
Role models who aren’t relevant or whose achievements are unattainable can make you 22% less satisfied with your career.
Via The 100 Simple Secrets of Successful People:
People who actively target someone to serve as a role model draw positive feelings from that person only if the role model’s achievements are both relevant and attainable. People who choose role models who do not fit that description wind up 22 percent less satisfied with their careers than people who do not have a role model at all. – Lockwood and Kunda 2000
Though I’m using mentor in the singular, I encourage you to be polygamous here — you need multiple mentors to cover the various areas of life.
More on how to select the perfect mentor here.
How To Contact A Potential Mentor
A referral from a mutual friend or contact is gold. But not everyone will be able to get that.
So what do you say in that first email?
You still want to leverage the power of some kind of similarity to build a connection.
Wharton Professor Adam Grant notes that he’s much more likely to reply when people highlight uncommon commonalities in their emails to him.
What’s that mean? Ways you two are similar that aren’t obvious. And this has scientific underpinnings:
As the psychologist Robert Cialdini sums up the evidence from Influence, “Similarity literally draws people together.” In Give and Take, I elaborate on this principle to point out that similarities matter most when they’re rare. We bond when we share uncommon commonalities, which allow us to feel that we fit in and stand out at the same time.
So you establish some kind of common ground. The next thing to keep in mind is equally important:
Wasting a mentor’s (or potential mentor’s) time in any form is a mortal sin.
Not only is it annoying, it shows you lack basic skills. It screams to a mentor, “This person isn’t ready for your help.”
Writing a multi-page email to a very busy person doesn’t show you’re serious — it shows you’re insane.
So respect their time and start small. Asking good questions is a great way to build a relationship.
But the key word here is “good” questions.
NEVER ASK A MENTOR A QUESTION GOOGLE CAN EASILY ANSWER FOR YOU.
Carve this in stone. Scrawl it in blood above your desk. Get a tattoo.
Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, highlights this tip succinctly: Do your homework.
It’s amazing how many would-be mentees or beneficiaries ask busier people for answers Google could provide in 20 seconds. That puts you on the banned list. Explicitly state what you’ve done to get answers or help yourself.
There is an old expression: “When the student is ready, the master appears.”
If you’re doing everything you can to advance your career, getting a mentor won’t be too hard. Why?
Because if you’re doing awesome work, people more successful than you will notice and want to help you.
If they don’t, you’re doing something wrong.
What, personally, makes me want to go the extra mile for someone?
When they demonstrate they have explored every conceivable avenue and they can go no further without me.
Seeing someone has done everything in their power shows they’re smart, they didn’t waste my time, and they’re resourceful.
Most mentors see themselves that way, so guess what? The two of you now have something very important in common.
Finally, don’t mention the M word — mentor. You wouldn’t ask for marriage on the first date, would you?
My friend Ryan Holiday, author of Trust Me I’m Lying, says you should never flat out ask “Will you be my mentor?“:
Don’t ask anyone to be your mentor, don’t talk about mentorships, just leave the word alone. No one goes out and straight up asks someone they’re attracted to be their boyfriend of girlfriend–that’s a label that’s eventually applied to something that develops over time. A mentorship is the same way, it’s a dance, not a contractual agreement… If you email a total stranger to ask them to commit to give you hours of their time over a period of years and demand that this gift is to be called a “mentorship,” you’re going to be disappointed.
The Email
What does an intro email look like?
My friend Ramit Sethi, NYT bestselling author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich, has some templates you can use.
Here’s a quick breakdown of some of my thoughts meshed with his insights.
Subject line: I like to use the name of a mutual friend or contact that referred me. Otherwise, use something you share in common (alumni of the same school, etc.) or something attention getting.
First thing: introduce yourself and clarify the connection you mentioned in your subject line.
Politely flatter. It’s appropriate — if they weren’t awesome why would you want their help? It shows you took the time to learn about them. Highlight uncommon commonalities.
Be clear, but polite, about what you want. Short but not blunt. Do not waste their time.
Show you’ve done your homework. Can your questions be Googled? If so, to the ninth circle of Hell with you.
The easier you make it for them to give a yes, the more likely you are to get a yes. You’ll schedule around them. You’ll drive to them. You’ll bring coffee.
Proofread, edit, and make sure it’s brief. Take the time. A hastily sent grammatical abomination from your iPhone is a terrible idea. And if the length of your email elicits a gasp, a sigh or a comparison to the Game of Thrones books, you’re not done editing.
How To Handle The First Meeting
So they agreed to talk to you or meet with you. Great. I’m not going to tell you to be on time, be polite, and brush your teeth.
If you require that kind of advice you don’t need this article, you need preschool.
Some tips culled from Ramit, Ryan and my own experience:
Ask good questions. Good questions show you are smart and have done your homework, and make the mentor feel that they offer unique value.
Other than asking good questions, shut up. Ryan says ”The point of an accomplishment mentor is not for you to give them your opinion.”
Don’t ask for a job. This makes people feel awkward and undoes all the good work you’ve done so far.
Be likable. Here’s more on making people like you, using Dale Carnegie’s classic advice and making good conversation.
Again, never waste their time. Keep it short, hit your marks, create an impression you can build on and make an exit.
Do those and you’ll be in good shape. Of course, right after this is where most people totally drop the ball.
How To Maintain A Mentor Relationship
Many people send a great email, have a great meeting… and then they vanish off the face of the Earth and let the connection go cold.
From Ryan:
Stay in the picture. You are easily forgotten by busy people, remember that. The key then is to find ways to stay relevant and fresh. Drop emails and questions at an interval that straddles the fine line between bothersome and buzzworthy. It’s easier to keep something alive than it is to revive the deceased…but it’s on you to keep the blood flowing, not the mentor.
And the inevitable question people ask me: What do I say when I touch base with them?
After that first meeting, did you actually take any of their advice? (If not, stop reading now and just go watch cartoons, okay?)
The best answer, in my opinion, is simple:
I used your advice by doing _____. Here’s how wonderfully it turned out _____. Thank you so much!
Do what they said, get results, and let them know they made a difference. This is what mentors want.
If they engage you can follow up with:
I (did my homework) and figured (really impressive next steps) would be _____ but I’d love your insight. Do you think (well-thought-out-strategy #1) or (well-thought-out-strategy #2) is better?
You want these interactions to be conversational back and forths, not one-offs you need to regularly hit with a conversation defibrillator to keep the relationship alive.
And try to reconnect with them in person or on the phone at least annually.
Now Do It
I don’t know where I’d be without the mentors who helped shape me.
So no more “I don’t know how to do that” excuses. You have the pieces to the puzzle now.
You cannot — and should not — go it alone. You have much to learn from those who came before you.
Go back to the top of this post, follow the steps and get started.
As Eleanor Roosevelt once said:
Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.
6) Naps Are Steroids For Your Brain
Napping isn’t for the lazy. It’s one of the habits of the most successful people in any field.
Sleep is essential to learning. Naps are a tool that will make you the best.
Here’s Dan:
Napping is a high performance activity. If you looked into the habits of highly successful people you would see a lot of naps, a lot of recovery. It’s sort of our brains’ janitorial service. It helps us clean out the stuff we don’t want. It also helps us work on ideas while we’re asleep. Top performers use sleep as a tool.
4 Things Astronauts Can Teach You About A Good Night’s Sleep
Who knows about sleep? Astronauts.
They have to. Their bodies are cut off from many of the normal external cues that remind us what time it is.
But actually, it’s even worse than that.
In orbit they can experience a dozen sunrises and sunsets a day which makes their circadian rhythm go completely haywire.
When you’re in a tin can floating through the cold darkness of outer space, being off your game due to lousy sleep can have very bad results.
When sleep deprivation has you so messed up you don’t notice you’re taking photos of the walls instead of Earth, yeah, that could present a problem.
Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:
…cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev reported in his diary that he had a tendency to make mistakes on days following an unusually late bedtime; on one occasion he took fifty Earth-observation photographs through a closed porthole before realizing his error.
So NASA started doing some serious research.
3 Big Insights On Sleep
They quickly realized a few things:
1) You’re a slave to external cues
Without light, darkness and other contextual signals, your ability to regulate sleep times can be a mess.
Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:
Lacking the normal circadian cues of daylight and darkness, individuals, when permitted, tend to become desynchronized; that is, they retire to bed at a later hour and remain awake longer each night.
2) Your body doesn’t naturally stay on a 24hr cycle
Without something to rein it in, you’ll work off a 25.4 hour day. This drift compounds and eventually your sleep cycle can totally spin out of control.
Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:
If the individual is isolated without access to any time cues, however, the sleep/wake cycle and body temperature rhythms drift toward later times each day and are expressed in free-running periods of 25.4 hours; at this rate an individual’s sleep/wake cycle could drift nearly 10 hours per week in the absence of diurnal cues… In extreme cases, an individual can cycle completely around the clock.
3) You’re not very good at judging sleep quality
You may think sleeping with the lights on doesn’t affect you, but it does. And you won’t necessarily notice your reduced performance the next day, either.
Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:
…it is a folklore belief that all people adapt to regular sounds and are not affected by noises perceived during their sleep. In fact, the sleep of most people is disturbed by even the most regular sounds; for some individuals, the quality of sleep can be reduced without conscious recognition or complete awakening.
This info is more valuable than you think. Why?
We’re All Astronauts Now
As John Durant points out in his fascinating new book, The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health, due to modern technology, we’re allliving more like astronauts now.
Via The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health:
Today our bodies have become thoroughly confused by the artificial signals of modern life. Light is no longer a cyclical function of the sun, but of always-on indoor lights, TV screens, and computer monitors. Temperature no longer follows a dynamic cycle of cooling at night and warming during the day but sits at a static level set by the thermostat. Human chatter and social interaction used to follow a natural ebb and flow, but now we are more likely to live and sleep in isolation from real people, even while we have 24/7 access to artificial people (faces on TV, voices on the radio). Then, after utterly confusing our circadian rhythm, we try to take back control with stimulants (caffeine, nicotine) and depressants (alcohol, sleeping pills). Is it any wonder that a third of Americans are chronically sleep-deprived?
Maybe you think this doesn’t affect you — or at least not much.
You’re wrong. Remember #3 above.
Research done on non-astronauts has shown the same thing. After 2 weeks of 6 hours of sleep a night, you’re legally drunk:
…by the end of two weeks, the six-hour sleepers were as impaired as those who, in another Dinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straight — the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk.
But what did the chronically sleep deprived say when asked how they felt? “It’s not affecting me.”
Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are.
So if you are having reduced performance due to sleep issues, you may not be aware. This is a problem.
So what answers did NASA come up with?
What You Need To Do
In the past I’ve rounded up sleep research and documented my own sleep-hacking experiments. Let’s add some astronaut knowledge.
Given you probably don’t have to deal with the thruster jets of Skylab waking you up or the sounds of the hull of your ship expanding and contracting, I’ve edited the recommendations down to four points:
Maintain a consistent schedule, even on weekends. Keep in mind the “free-running” problem. Your body will push later if given the chance.
Take an hour to wind down before bed. Yes, you’re busy. But your time is not more precious than an astronaut’s. So take the time to wind down.
If you don’t have strong day/night cues, add them. Get sunlight in the morning. Dim the lights at night. Turn electronics off as bedtime approaches or use an application like f.lux.
Keep your bedroom dark, cool and free from noise. Even if you think “the light doesn’t bother you” or “the noise isn’t that bad” it can still reduce sleep quality.
Durant offers another solid piece of advice I follow myself: forget the alarm clock in the morning; set an alarm to remind you to go to bed at night.
Via The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health:
A useful technique is setting an alarm clock—not to wake up, but to get ready for bed. Set an alarm for an hour before bedtime. When it goes off, finish up any work on the computer, turn off the TV, turn off any unnecessary lights, and start to wind down for the day.
This prevents you from cheating yourself on sleep and allows you to wake up naturally.
(Even if “naturally” happens to be on the surface of the moon.)
7) Keep a Notebook
Eminem keeps a journal. Peyton Manning keeps a journal.
Top performers track their progress, set goals, reflect and learn from their mistakes.
Here’s Dan:
Most people who are taking an ownership role in their talent development use this magical tool called a notebook. Keep a performance journal. If you want to get better, you need a map, and that journal is that map. You can write down what you did today, what you tried to do, where you made mistakes. It’s a place to reflect. It’s a place to capture information. It’s a place to be able to track your progress. It’s one of the most underused yet powerful tools that I could imagine anybody using.
Strokes of genius: Here’s how the most creative people get their ideas
Where do strokes of genius come from?
Keith Sawyer tells an interesting story about breakthrough ideas in his book, Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity.
Researcher Vera John-Steiner wanted to know “What nourishes sustained productivity in the lives of creative individuals?“
She interviewed over 70 living creative geniuses and analyzed the notebooks of 50 dead ones (including Tolstoy, Einstein, etc.) to look at their work habits.
She assumed this was going to end up as a review of Eureka! moments in the greatest creative minds.
She even planned to title her book “The Leap” because it would be about those giant flashes of inspiration that led to breakthrough ideas.
But she was completely wrong.
Eureka! moments turned out to be a myth.
There was no inspiration moment where a fully formed answer arrived.
Strokes of genius happened over time.
A great idea comes into the world by drips and drabs, false starts, and rough sketches.
Via Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity:
Creativity started with the notebooks’ sketches and jottings, and only later resulted in a pure, powerful idea. The one characteristic that all of these creatives shared— whether they were painters, actors, or scientists— was how often they put their early thoughts and inklings out into the world, in sketches, dashed-off phrases and observations, bits of dialogue, and quick prototypes. Instead of arriving in one giant leap, great creations emerged by zigs and zags as their creators engaged over and over again with these externalized images.
She heard it over and over again in the interviews and read it in different forms in every notebook.
Via Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity:
Albert Einstein always said he thought in pictures: “Words do not play any role in my thought; instead, I think in signs and images which I can copy and combine.”
English writer Jessica Mitford engaged in a constant dialogue with her unfolding drafts: “The first thing to do is read over what you have done the day before and rewrite it. And then that gives you a lead into the next thing to do.”
The painter Ben Shahn described creativity as “the long artistic tug-of-war between idea and image.”
Poet May Sarton wrote, “The poem teaches us something while we make it; there is nothing dull about revision.”
It was never a clean, linear process.
Via Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity:
Successful creators engage in an ongoing dialogue with their work. They put what’s in their head on paper long before it’s fully formed, and they watch and listen to what they’ve recorded, zigging and zagging until the right idea emerges.
What can we take away from this?
Stop expecting inspiration to deliver a finished product.
Write all your ideas down as early as possible. (It’s no surprise so many of the geniuses kept notebooks.)
Stop discarding half-baked ideas. Those crappy ideas are the good ideas — they just need work.
Don’t think your first idea is the right one. And don’t think it’s perfect as-is.
Give it time. Deadlines don’t make you more creative.
Wrestle with your ideas. Dissect, combine, add, subtract, turn them upside down and shake them. Get ideas colliding.
f You Only Remember Two Words From This…
Dan says the two key words are “Reach” and “Stare.”
Reach: Always push yourself to the edge of your ability.
Stare: Look at those better than you and emulate them.
Here’s Dan:
I would say, “Reach. Get out on the edge of your ability. Get into your discomfort zone and reach past that.” And I would say, “Stare. Find somebody you want to be in two years, three years, five years, and stare at that person. See what they’re doing. See exactly what they’re doing, and steal that. Steal from them.”
Sum Up
Sadly, you weren’t born an expert.
But you can become one with practice and time. Start now. You’ll be amazed at what you can achieve:SOURCE :TIME
Hours are vital but you can get to mastery faster — muchfaster — by practicing the right way.
1) Be Uncomfortable
You learn best when you’re reaching. “Flow” is great. But flow is notthe best way to learn.
You want to be stretched to the edge of your ability. It needs to be hard. That’s how your brain grows.
Here’s Dan:
We learn when we’re in our discomfort zone. When you’re struggling, that’s when you’re getting smarter. The more time you spend there, the faster you learn. It’s better to spend a very, very high quality ten minutes, or even ten seconds, than it is to spend a mediocre hour. You want to practice where you are on the edge of your ability, reaching over and over again, making mistakes, failing, realizing those mistakes and reaching again.
What type of practice produces peak performance?
It’s “Deep Practice” (or Deliberate Practice) and I tend to focus on four parts:
1) Make your practice as similar to the real life scenario as possible.
Via The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How:
“One real encounter, even for a few seconds, is far more useful than several hundred observations.” Bjork cites an by psychologist Henry Roediger at Washington University of St. Louis, where students were divided into two groups to study a natural history text. Group A studied the paper for four sessions. Group B studied only once but was tested three times. A week later both groups were tested, and Group B scored 50 percent higher than Group A. They’d studied one-fourth as much yet learned far more.
Via Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To:
Practicing under the types of pressures you will face on the big testing day is one of the best ways to combat choking…
And:
During the initial shooting practice, all of the officers missed more shots when firing at a live opponent compared with firing at the stationary cardboard targets. Not so surprising. This was true after training as well, but only for those officers whose practice had been limited to the cardboard cutouts. For those officers who practiced shooting at an opponent, after training they were just as good shots when aiming at the live individuals as they were when aiming at the stationary cutouts. The opportunity to “practice under the gun” of an opponent, so to speak, really helped to hone the police officers’ shots for more real-life stressful shooting situations.
2) Don’t be passive. Testing yourself is far better than reviewing.
Via Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success:
Good decision making is about compressing the informational load by decoding the meaning of patterns derived from experience. This cannot be taught in a classroom; it is not something you are born with; it must be lived and learned.
Testing yourself is the best way to learn — even if you fail the tests.
3) Practice is not just repetition. Be ruthlessly critical and keep trying to improve on the constituent elements of the skill.
Via Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else:
Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.
Via The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How:
“Our predictions were extremely accurate,” Zimmerman said. “This showed that experts practice differently and far more strategically. When they fail, they don’t blame it on luck or themselves. They have a strategy they can fix.”
Via Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success:
When most people practice, they focus on the things they can do effortlessly,” Ericsson has said. “Expert practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.”
A negative attitude, not a positive attitude, makes you more likely to learn from your mistakes. In fact, the shift to focusing on negative feedback is one of the marks of an expert mindset.
Ruthlessly critical in practice, blindly optimistic on game day. It’s irrational, but it works.
4) Practice a lot: 10,000 hours worth.
Via Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else:
One factor, and only one factor, predicted how musically accomplished the students were, and that was how much they practiced.
And when the big day comes, make sure you know the methods to resist choking under pressure.
2) Stop Reading. Start Doing.
Keep the “Rule of Two-Thirds” in mind. Spend only one third of your time studying.
The other two-thirds of your time you want to be doing the activity. Practicing. Testing yourself.
Get your nose out of that book. Avoid the classroom. Whatever it is you want to be the best at, be doing it.
The closer your practice is to the real thing, the faster you learn.
Here’s Dan:
Our brains evolved to learn by doing things, not by hearing about them. This is one of the reasons that, for a lot of skills, it’s much better to spend about two thirds of your time testing yourself on it rather than absorbing it. There’s a rule of two thirds. If you want to, say, memorize a passage, it’s better to spend 30 percent of your time reading it, and the other 70 percent of your time testing yourself on that knowledge.
What’s the best way to learn from a book?
Don’t keep reading it over and over. Read it and write a one page summary.
Via Daniel Coyle’s excellent book The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills:
Research shows that people who (wrote a summary) remember 50 percent more material over the long term than people who follow (repeatedly read). This is because of one of deep practice’s most fundamental rules: Learning is reaching. Passively reading a book— a relatively effortless process, letting the words wash over you like a warm bath— doesn’t put you in the sweet spot. Less reaching equals less learning.
On the other hand, closing the book and writing a summary forces you to figure out the key points (one set of reaches), process and organize those ideas so they make sense (more reaches), and write them on the page (still more reaches, along with repetition). The equation is always the same: More reaching equals more learning.
3) The Sweet Spot
You want to be successful 60-80% of the time when training. That’s the sweet spot for improvement.
When learning is too hard, we quit. When it’s too easy… well, we quit then too.
Always be upping the challenge to stay in that 60-80% zone.
Here’s Dan:
You don’t want to be succeeding 40 percent of the time. That’s flailing around. You don’t want to be succeeding 95 percent of the time. That’s too easy. You want to constantly be toggling, adjusting the environment so that you’re succeeding 60 to 80 percent of the time.
What’s the sweet spot for optimal improvement?
While practicing, you want to be succeeding on 50-80% of attempts.
Fewer than that and you’re going to be confused and feel like it’s all luck.
More success than that and you’re not pushing yourself.
Via Daniel Coyle’s excellent book The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills:
Comfort Zone
Sensations: Ease, effortlessness. You’re working, but not reaching or struggling.
Percentage of Successful Attempts: 80 percent and above.
Sweet Spot
Sensations: Frustration, difficulty, alertness to errors. You’re fully engaged in an intense struggle— as if you’re stretching with all your might for a nearly unreachable goal, brushing it with your fingertips, then reaching again.
Percentage of Successful Attempts: 50– 80 percent.
Survival Zone
Sensations: Confusion, desperation. You’re overmatched: scrambling, thrashing, and guessing. You guess right sometimes, but it’s mostly luck.
Percentage of Successful Attempts: Below 50 percent.
4) Commit To The Long Term
Asking someone ”How long are you going to be doing this?” was the best predictor of how skilled that person would end up being.
Merely committing to the long haul had huge effects.
Here’s Dan:
The question that ended up being the most predictive of skill was “How long are you going to be doing this?” Commitment was the difference maker. The people who combined commitment with a little bit of practice, their skills went off the charts.
http://thetalentcode.com/2013/11/01/meet-resilient-mouse-your-new-superhero/
Commit to the long haul. Don’t give up. Even works for mice:
5) Find A Role Model
Watching the best people work is one of the most powerful things you can do.
It’s motivating, inspiring and it’s how you were built to learn. Study the best to be the best.
Here’s Dan:
When we stare at someone we want to become and we have a really clear idea of where we want to be, it unlocks a tremendous amount of energy. We’re social creatures, and when we get the idea that we want to join some enchanted circle up above us, that is what really lights up motivation. “Look, they did it. I can do it.” It sounds very basic, but spending time staring at the best can be one of the most powerful things you do.
8 Steps To Getting The Perfect Mentor For You
mentor
Mentors, mentors, mentors. Everyone’s always talking about them but no one really seems to know how to get a good one.
Thanks to the internet we have more information than ever — but not any more wisdom.
Contacting mentors is one of the things I think you should do every week.
Whenever I say that, the response is the same: How?
Here’s what research and experts have to say about picking, contacting and maintaining a relationship with the right mentor, A-to-Z. Strap in.
Mentors Matter
I’ve posted about what the most successful people in the world all have in common. One of those things is mentors.
For his book Creativity, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi interviewed over 91 of the most creative people in the world (including 14 Nobel prize winners.)
What did they have in common? By the time they were college age, almost every one of those earthshakers had an important mentor:
In our study we found that a few individuals were taken in hand by competent adult practitioners very early in life, many were recognized during high school, and most of the remaining had an important mentor by the time they were of college age. Again, recognition by a mentor is not strictly necessary, but it must definitely contribute to the realization of creative potential.
10,000 hours of deliberate practice makes you an expert but what makes you dedicate 10,000 hours to something in the first place?
As Adam Grant of Wharton explains, the answer is great mentors.
Why would somebody invest deliberate practice in something? It turns out that actually most of these world-class performers had a first coach, or a first teacher, who made the activity fun.
Not worried about accepting a prize in Stockholm or being a chess grandmaster?
Okay, brass tacks here: Research shows mentors mean promotions and career satisfaction.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
…past research has also found that people with mentors get more promotions and experience greater job and career satisfaction than those without mentors.
What Do Mentors Really Do?
Mentors generally offer three things.
1) They give career guidance.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
First, they offer career guidance-for example, by making suggestions on assignments a protege might take, or suggestions on what career path might be most advantageous.
2) It’s not all about work. Mentors provide much needed emotional support when times get tough.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
Second, mentors can provide emotional support around issues such as the inherent conflict between work and family, or can recommend methods for coping with a difficult boss or with work stress.
3) Mentors also often act like a role model, giving you something to emulate and aspire to.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
Third, a mentor may provide support to proteges by serving as an effective role model who demonstrates appropriate behaviors for different situations.
Some people might say, “I don’t need to worry about all this. My company has a mentorship program.”
Yeah, too bad that program sucks.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
Unfortunately, recent research has revealed that those in formal mentoring programs often fail to deliver on their rosy promises, and the participants may be left helpless and disillusioned. Possible reasons for this include a shoddy formal mentoring program structure, a matchmaking system that mimics blind dates from hell, or simply inadequate resources or rewards to support these programs.
And what about your greater career? If you’re a star do you think your company is going to tell you when it’s time to move on to greener pastures?
You need objectivity and you need someone who can give you advice that’s valuable over the long haul.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
Mentors external to an organization provide a different perspective on the protege’s career and profession, as well as on the situations they witness in their organization. Being too entrenched in one organization can lead to less innovative decision making, possibly embracing only a particular style of management, and finally an inability to imagine a career outside of that organization.
So you need to get your own mentor. Here’s how.
How To Pick A Mentor
I’ve done an entire post on selecting the best mentor for you. You can read thathere.
The quick and dirty version comes courtesy of Dan Coyle’s masterpiece The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills:
Avoid Someone Who Reminds You of a Courteous Waiter
Seek Someone Who Scares You a Little
Seek Someone Who Gives Short, Clear Directions
Seek Someone Who Loves Teaching Fundamentals
Other Things Being Equal, Pick the Older Person
The research also shows it’s good to look for someone who has a resume that shows grit.
And, believe it or not, happier mentors are better mentors.
Know yourself and what you need. If you don’t have these answers, a mentor can’t help you much.
Aspirational figures must “fit” with your career goals.
Role models who aren’t relevant or whose achievements are unattainable can make you 22% less satisfied with your career.
Via The 100 Simple Secrets of Successful People:
People who actively target someone to serve as a role model draw positive feelings from that person only if the role model’s achievements are both relevant and attainable. People who choose role models who do not fit that description wind up 22 percent less satisfied with their careers than people who do not have a role model at all. – Lockwood and Kunda 2000
Though I’m using mentor in the singular, I encourage you to be polygamous here — you need multiple mentors to cover the various areas of life.
More on how to select the perfect mentor here.
How To Contact A Potential Mentor
A referral from a mutual friend or contact is gold. But not everyone will be able to get that.
So what do you say in that first email?
You still want to leverage the power of some kind of similarity to build a connection.
Wharton Professor Adam Grant notes that he’s much more likely to reply when people highlight uncommon commonalities in their emails to him.
What’s that mean? Ways you two are similar that aren’t obvious. And this has scientific underpinnings:
As the psychologist Robert Cialdini sums up the evidence from Influence, “Similarity literally draws people together.” In Give and Take, I elaborate on this principle to point out that similarities matter most when they’re rare. We bond when we share uncommon commonalities, which allow us to feel that we fit in and stand out at the same time.
So you establish some kind of common ground. The next thing to keep in mind is equally important:
Wasting a mentor’s (or potential mentor’s) time in any form is a mortal sin.
Not only is it annoying, it shows you lack basic skills. It screams to a mentor, “This person isn’t ready for your help.”
Writing a multi-page email to a very busy person doesn’t show you’re serious — it shows you’re insane.
So respect their time and start small. Asking good questions is a great way to build a relationship.
But the key word here is “good” questions.
NEVER ASK A MENTOR A QUESTION GOOGLE CAN EASILY ANSWER FOR YOU.
Carve this in stone. Scrawl it in blood above your desk. Get a tattoo.
Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, highlights this tip succinctly: Do your homework.
It’s amazing how many would-be mentees or beneficiaries ask busier people for answers Google could provide in 20 seconds. That puts you on the banned list. Explicitly state what you’ve done to get answers or help yourself.
There is an old expression: “When the student is ready, the master appears.”
If you’re doing everything you can to advance your career, getting a mentor won’t be too hard. Why?
Because if you’re doing awesome work, people more successful than you will notice and want to help you.
If they don’t, you’re doing something wrong.
What, personally, makes me want to go the extra mile for someone?
When they demonstrate they have explored every conceivable avenue and they can go no further without me.
Seeing someone has done everything in their power shows they’re smart, they didn’t waste my time, and they’re resourceful.
Most mentors see themselves that way, so guess what? The two of you now have something very important in common.
Finally, don’t mention the M word — mentor. You wouldn’t ask for marriage on the first date, would you?
My friend Ryan Holiday, author of Trust Me I’m Lying, says you should never flat out ask “Will you be my mentor?“:
Don’t ask anyone to be your mentor, don’t talk about mentorships, just leave the word alone. No one goes out and straight up asks someone they’re attracted to be their boyfriend of girlfriend–that’s a label that’s eventually applied to something that develops over time. A mentorship is the same way, it’s a dance, not a contractual agreement… If you email a total stranger to ask them to commit to give you hours of their time over a period of years and demand that this gift is to be called a “mentorship,” you’re going to be disappointed.
The Email
What does an intro email look like?
My friend Ramit Sethi, NYT bestselling author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich, has some templates you can use.
Here’s a quick breakdown of some of my thoughts meshed with his insights.
Subject line: I like to use the name of a mutual friend or contact that referred me. Otherwise, use something you share in common (alumni of the same school, etc.) or something attention getting.
First thing: introduce yourself and clarify the connection you mentioned in your subject line.
Politely flatter. It’s appropriate — if they weren’t awesome why would you want their help? It shows you took the time to learn about them. Highlight uncommon commonalities.
Be clear, but polite, about what you want. Short but not blunt. Do not waste their time.
Show you’ve done your homework. Can your questions be Googled? If so, to the ninth circle of Hell with you.
The easier you make it for them to give a yes, the more likely you are to get a yes. You’ll schedule around them. You’ll drive to them. You’ll bring coffee.
Proofread, edit, and make sure it’s brief. Take the time. A hastily sent grammatical abomination from your iPhone is a terrible idea. And if the length of your email elicits a gasp, a sigh or a comparison to the Game of Thrones books, you’re not done editing.
How To Handle The First Meeting
So they agreed to talk to you or meet with you. Great. I’m not going to tell you to be on time, be polite, and brush your teeth.
If you require that kind of advice you don’t need this article, you need preschool.
Some tips culled from Ramit, Ryan and my own experience:
Ask good questions. Good questions show you are smart and have done your homework, and make the mentor feel that they offer unique value.
Other than asking good questions, shut up. Ryan says ”The point of an accomplishment mentor is not for you to give them your opinion.”
Don’t ask for a job. This makes people feel awkward and undoes all the good work you’ve done so far.
Be likable. Here’s more on making people like you, using Dale Carnegie’s classic advice and making good conversation.
Again, never waste their time. Keep it short, hit your marks, create an impression you can build on and make an exit.
Do those and you’ll be in good shape. Of course, right after this is where most people totally drop the ball.
How To Maintain A Mentor Relationship
Many people send a great email, have a great meeting… and then they vanish off the face of the Earth and let the connection go cold.
From Ryan:
Stay in the picture. You are easily forgotten by busy people, remember that. The key then is to find ways to stay relevant and fresh. Drop emails and questions at an interval that straddles the fine line between bothersome and buzzworthy. It’s easier to keep something alive than it is to revive the deceased…but it’s on you to keep the blood flowing, not the mentor.
And the inevitable question people ask me: What do I say when I touch base with them?
After that first meeting, did you actually take any of their advice? (If not, stop reading now and just go watch cartoons, okay?)
The best answer, in my opinion, is simple:
I used your advice by doing _____. Here’s how wonderfully it turned out _____. Thank you so much!
Do what they said, get results, and let them know they made a difference. This is what mentors want.
If they engage you can follow up with:
I (did my homework) and figured (really impressive next steps) would be _____ but I’d love your insight. Do you think (well-thought-out-strategy #1) or (well-thought-out-strategy #2) is better?
You want these interactions to be conversational back and forths, not one-offs you need to regularly hit with a conversation defibrillator to keep the relationship alive.
And try to reconnect with them in person or on the phone at least annually.
Now Do It
I don’t know where I’d be without the mentors who helped shape me.
So no more “I don’t know how to do that” excuses. You have the pieces to the puzzle now.
You cannot — and should not — go it alone. You have much to learn from those who came before you.
Go back to the top of this post, follow the steps and get started.
As Eleanor Roosevelt once said:
Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.
6) Naps Are Steroids For Your Brain
Napping isn’t for the lazy. It’s one of the habits of the most successful people in any field.
Sleep is essential to learning. Naps are a tool that will make you the best.
Here’s Dan:
Napping is a high performance activity. If you looked into the habits of highly successful people you would see a lot of naps, a lot of recovery. It’s sort of our brains’ janitorial service. It helps us clean out the stuff we don’t want. It also helps us work on ideas while we’re asleep. Top performers use sleep as a tool.
4 Things Astronauts Can Teach You About A Good Night’s Sleep
Who knows about sleep? Astronauts.
They have to. Their bodies are cut off from many of the normal external cues that remind us what time it is.
But actually, it’s even worse than that.
In orbit they can experience a dozen sunrises and sunsets a day which makes their circadian rhythm go completely haywire.
When you’re in a tin can floating through the cold darkness of outer space, being off your game due to lousy sleep can have very bad results.
When sleep deprivation has you so messed up you don’t notice you’re taking photos of the walls instead of Earth, yeah, that could present a problem.
Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:
…cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev reported in his diary that he had a tendency to make mistakes on days following an unusually late bedtime; on one occasion he took fifty Earth-observation photographs through a closed porthole before realizing his error.
So NASA started doing some serious research.
3 Big Insights On Sleep
They quickly realized a few things:
1) You’re a slave to external cues
Without light, darkness and other contextual signals, your ability to regulate sleep times can be a mess.
Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:
Lacking the normal circadian cues of daylight and darkness, individuals, when permitted, tend to become desynchronized; that is, they retire to bed at a later hour and remain awake longer each night.
2) Your body doesn’t naturally stay on a 24hr cycle
Without something to rein it in, you’ll work off a 25.4 hour day. This drift compounds and eventually your sleep cycle can totally spin out of control.
Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:
If the individual is isolated without access to any time cues, however, the sleep/wake cycle and body temperature rhythms drift toward later times each day and are expressed in free-running periods of 25.4 hours; at this rate an individual’s sleep/wake cycle could drift nearly 10 hours per week in the absence of diurnal cues… In extreme cases, an individual can cycle completely around the clock.
3) You’re not very good at judging sleep quality
You may think sleeping with the lights on doesn’t affect you, but it does. And you won’t necessarily notice your reduced performance the next day, either.
Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:
…it is a folklore belief that all people adapt to regular sounds and are not affected by noises perceived during their sleep. In fact, the sleep of most people is disturbed by even the most regular sounds; for some individuals, the quality of sleep can be reduced without conscious recognition or complete awakening.
This info is more valuable than you think. Why?
We’re All Astronauts Now
As John Durant points out in his fascinating new book, The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health, due to modern technology, we’re allliving more like astronauts now.
Via The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health:
Today our bodies have become thoroughly confused by the artificial signals of modern life. Light is no longer a cyclical function of the sun, but of always-on indoor lights, TV screens, and computer monitors. Temperature no longer follows a dynamic cycle of cooling at night and warming during the day but sits at a static level set by the thermostat. Human chatter and social interaction used to follow a natural ebb and flow, but now we are more likely to live and sleep in isolation from real people, even while we have 24/7 access to artificial people (faces on TV, voices on the radio). Then, after utterly confusing our circadian rhythm, we try to take back control with stimulants (caffeine, nicotine) and depressants (alcohol, sleeping pills). Is it any wonder that a third of Americans are chronically sleep-deprived?
Maybe you think this doesn’t affect you — or at least not much.
You’re wrong. Remember #3 above.
Research done on non-astronauts has shown the same thing. After 2 weeks of 6 hours of sleep a night, you’re legally drunk:
…by the end of two weeks, the six-hour sleepers were as impaired as those who, in another Dinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straight — the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk.
But what did the chronically sleep deprived say when asked how they felt? “It’s not affecting me.”
Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are.
So if you are having reduced performance due to sleep issues, you may not be aware. This is a problem.
So what answers did NASA come up with?
What You Need To Do
In the past I’ve rounded up sleep research and documented my own sleep-hacking experiments. Let’s add some astronaut knowledge.
Given you probably don’t have to deal with the thruster jets of Skylab waking you up or the sounds of the hull of your ship expanding and contracting, I’ve edited the recommendations down to four points:
Maintain a consistent schedule, even on weekends. Keep in mind the “free-running” problem. Your body will push later if given the chance.
Take an hour to wind down before bed. Yes, you’re busy. But your time is not more precious than an astronaut’s. So take the time to wind down.
If you don’t have strong day/night cues, add them. Get sunlight in the morning. Dim the lights at night. Turn electronics off as bedtime approaches or use an application like f.lux.
Keep your bedroom dark, cool and free from noise. Even if you think “the light doesn’t bother you” or “the noise isn’t that bad” it can still reduce sleep quality.
Durant offers another solid piece of advice I follow myself: forget the alarm clock in the morning; set an alarm to remind you to go to bed at night.
Via The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health:
A useful technique is setting an alarm clock—not to wake up, but to get ready for bed. Set an alarm for an hour before bedtime. When it goes off, finish up any work on the computer, turn off the TV, turn off any unnecessary lights, and start to wind down for the day.
This prevents you from cheating yourself on sleep and allows you to wake up naturally.
(Even if “naturally” happens to be on the surface of the moon.)
7) Keep a Notebook
Eminem keeps a journal. Peyton Manning keeps a journal.
Top performers track their progress, set goals, reflect and learn from their mistakes.
Here’s Dan:
Most people who are taking an ownership role in their talent development use this magical tool called a notebook. Keep a performance journal. If you want to get better, you need a map, and that journal is that map. You can write down what you did today, what you tried to do, where you made mistakes. It’s a place to reflect. It’s a place to capture information. It’s a place to be able to track your progress. It’s one of the most underused yet powerful tools that I could imagine anybody using.
Strokes of genius: Here’s how the most creative people get their ideas
Where do strokes of genius come from?
Keith Sawyer tells an interesting story about breakthrough ideas in his book, Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity.
Researcher Vera John-Steiner wanted to know “What nourishes sustained productivity in the lives of creative individuals?“
She interviewed over 70 living creative geniuses and analyzed the notebooks of 50 dead ones (including Tolstoy, Einstein, etc.) to look at their work habits.
She assumed this was going to end up as a review of Eureka! moments in the greatest creative minds.
She even planned to title her book “The Leap” because it would be about those giant flashes of inspiration that led to breakthrough ideas.
But she was completely wrong.
Eureka! moments turned out to be a myth.
There was no inspiration moment where a fully formed answer arrived.
Strokes of genius happened over time.
A great idea comes into the world by drips and drabs, false starts, and rough sketches.
Via Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity:
Creativity started with the notebooks’ sketches and jottings, and only later resulted in a pure, powerful idea. The one characteristic that all of these creatives shared— whether they were painters, actors, or scientists— was how often they put their early thoughts and inklings out into the world, in sketches, dashed-off phrases and observations, bits of dialogue, and quick prototypes. Instead of arriving in one giant leap, great creations emerged by zigs and zags as their creators engaged over and over again with these externalized images.
She heard it over and over again in the interviews and read it in different forms in every notebook.
Via Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity:
Albert Einstein always said he thought in pictures: “Words do not play any role in my thought; instead, I think in signs and images which I can copy and combine.”
English writer Jessica Mitford engaged in a constant dialogue with her unfolding drafts: “The first thing to do is read over what you have done the day before and rewrite it. And then that gives you a lead into the next thing to do.”
The painter Ben Shahn described creativity as “the long artistic tug-of-war between idea and image.”
Poet May Sarton wrote, “The poem teaches us something while we make it; there is nothing dull about revision.”
It was never a clean, linear process.
Via Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity:
Successful creators engage in an ongoing dialogue with their work. They put what’s in their head on paper long before it’s fully formed, and they watch and listen to what they’ve recorded, zigging and zagging until the right idea emerges.
What can we take away from this?
Stop expecting inspiration to deliver a finished product.
Write all your ideas down as early as possible. (It’s no surprise so many of the geniuses kept notebooks.)
Stop discarding half-baked ideas. Those crappy ideas are the good ideas — they just need work.
Don’t think your first idea is the right one. And don’t think it’s perfect as-is.
Give it time. Deadlines don’t make you more creative.
Wrestle with your ideas. Dissect, combine, add, subtract, turn them upside down and shake them. Get ideas colliding.
f You Only Remember Two Words From This…
Dan says the two key words are “Reach” and “Stare.”
Reach: Always push yourself to the edge of your ability.
Stare: Look at those better than you and emulate them.
Here’s Dan:
I would say, “Reach. Get out on the edge of your ability. Get into your discomfort zone and reach past that.” And I would say, “Stare. Find somebody you want to be in two years, three years, five years, and stare at that person. See what they’re doing. See exactly what they’re doing, and steal that. Steal from them.”
Sum Up
Sadly, you weren’t born an expert.
But you can become one with practice and time. Start now. You’ll be amazed at what you can achieve:
Hours are vital but you can get to mastery faster — muchfaster — by practicing the right way.
1) Be Uncomfortable
You learn best when you’re reaching. “Flow” is great. But flow is notthe best way to learn.
You want to be stretched to the edge of your ability. It needs to be hard. That’s how your brain grows.
Here’s Dan:
We learn when we’re in our discomfort zone. When you’re struggling, that’s when you’re getting smarter. The more time you spend there, the faster you learn. It’s better to spend a very, very high quality ten minutes, or even ten seconds, than it is to spend a mediocre hour. You want to practice where you are on the edge of your ability, reaching over and over again, making mistakes, failing, realizing those mistakes and reaching again.
What type of practice produces peak performance?
It’s “Deep Practice” (or Deliberate Practice) and I tend to focus on four parts:
1) Make your practice as similar to the real life scenario as possible.
Via The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How:
“One real encounter, even for a few seconds, is far more useful than several hundred observations.” Bjork cites an by psychologist Henry Roediger at Washington University of St. Louis, where students were divided into two groups to study a natural history text. Group A studied the paper for four sessions. Group B studied only once but was tested three times. A week later both groups were tested, and Group B scored 50 percent higher than Group A. They’d studied one-fourth as much yet learned far more.
Via Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To:
Practicing under the types of pressures you will face on the big testing day is one of the best ways to combat choking…
And:
During the initial shooting practice, all of the officers missed more shots when firing at a live opponent compared with firing at the stationary cardboard targets. Not so surprising. This was true after training as well, but only for those officers whose practice had been limited to the cardboard cutouts. For those officers who practiced shooting at an opponent, after training they were just as good shots when aiming at the live individuals as they were when aiming at the stationary cutouts. The opportunity to “practice under the gun” of an opponent, so to speak, really helped to hone the police officers’ shots for more real-life stressful shooting situations.
2) Don’t be passive. Testing yourself is far better than reviewing.
Via Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success:
Good decision making is about compressing the informational load by decoding the meaning of patterns derived from experience. This cannot be taught in a classroom; it is not something you are born with; it must be lived and learned.
Testing yourself is the best way to learn — even if you fail the tests.
3) Practice is not just repetition. Be ruthlessly critical and keep trying to improve on the constituent elements of the skill.
Via Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else:
Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.
Via The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How:
“Our predictions were extremely accurate,” Zimmerman said. “This showed that experts practice differently and far more strategically. When they fail, they don’t blame it on luck or themselves. They have a strategy they can fix.”
Via Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success:
When most people practice, they focus on the things they can do effortlessly,” Ericsson has said. “Expert practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.”
A negative attitude, not a positive attitude, makes you more likely to learn from your mistakes. In fact, the shift to focusing on negative feedback is one of the marks of an expert mindset.
Ruthlessly critical in practice, blindly optimistic on game day. It’s irrational, but it works.
4) Practice a lot: 10,000 hours worth.
Via Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else:
One factor, and only one factor, predicted how musically accomplished the students were, and that was how much they practiced.
And when the big day comes, make sure you know the methods to resist choking under pressure.
2) Stop Reading. Start Doing.
Keep the “Rule of Two-Thirds” in mind. Spend only one third of your time studying.
The other two-thirds of your time you want to be doing the activity. Practicing. Testing yourself.
Get your nose out of that book. Avoid the classroom. Whatever it is you want to be the best at, be doing it.
The closer your practice is to the real thing, the faster you learn.
Here’s Dan:
Our brains evolved to learn by doing things, not by hearing about them. This is one of the reasons that, for a lot of skills, it’s much better to spend about two thirds of your time testing yourself on it rather than absorbing it. There’s a rule of two thirds. If you want to, say, memorize a passage, it’s better to spend 30 percent of your time reading it, and the other 70 percent of your time testing yourself on that knowledge.
What’s the best way to learn from a book?
Don’t keep reading it over and over. Read it and write a one page summary.
Via Daniel Coyle’s excellent book The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills:
Research shows that people who (wrote a summary) remember 50 percent more material over the long term than people who follow (repeatedly read). This is because of one of deep practice’s most fundamental rules: Learning is reaching. Passively reading a book— a relatively effortless process, letting the words wash over you like a warm bath— doesn’t put you in the sweet spot. Less reaching equals less learning.
On the other hand, closing the book and writing a summary forces you to figure out the key points (one set of reaches), process and organize those ideas so they make sense (more reaches), and write them on the page (still more reaches, along with repetition). The equation is always the same: More reaching equals more learning.
3) The Sweet Spot
You want to be successful 60-80% of the time when training. That’s the sweet spot for improvement.
When learning is too hard, we quit. When it’s too easy… well, we quit then too.
Always be upping the challenge to stay in that 60-80% zone.
Here’s Dan:
You don’t want to be succeeding 40 percent of the time. That’s flailing around. You don’t want to be succeeding 95 percent of the time. That’s too easy. You want to constantly be toggling, adjusting the environment so that you’re succeeding 60 to 80 percent of the time.
What’s the sweet spot for optimal improvement?
While practicing, you want to be succeeding on 50-80% of attempts.
Fewer than that and you’re going to be confused and feel like it’s all luck.
More success than that and you’re not pushing yourself.
Via Daniel Coyle’s excellent book The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills:
Comfort Zone
Sensations: Ease, effortlessness. You’re working, but not reaching or struggling.
Percentage of Successful Attempts: 80 percent and above.
Sweet Spot
Sensations: Frustration, difficulty, alertness to errors. You’re fully engaged in an intense struggle— as if you’re stretching with all your might for a nearly unreachable goal, brushing it with your fingertips, then reaching again.
Percentage of Successful Attempts: 50– 80 percent.
Survival Zone
Sensations: Confusion, desperation. You’re overmatched: scrambling, thrashing, and guessing. You guess right sometimes, but it’s mostly luck.
Percentage of Successful Attempts: Below 50 percent.
4) Commit To The Long Term
Asking someone ”How long are you going to be doing this?” was the best predictor of how skilled that person would end up being.
Merely committing to the long haul had huge effects.
Here’s Dan:
The question that ended up being the most predictive of skill was “How long are you going to be doing this?” Commitment was the difference maker. The people who combined commitment with a little bit of practice, their skills went off the charts.
http://thetalentcode.com/2013/11/01/meet-resilient-mouse-your-new-superhero/
Commit to the long haul. Don’t give up. Even works for mice:
5) Find A Role Model
Watching the best people work is one of the most powerful things you can do.
It’s motivating, inspiring and it’s how you were built to learn. Study the best to be the best.
Here’s Dan:
When we stare at someone we want to become and we have a really clear idea of where we want to be, it unlocks a tremendous amount of energy. We’re social creatures, and when we get the idea that we want to join some enchanted circle up above us, that is what really lights up motivation. “Look, they did it. I can do it.” It sounds very basic, but spending time staring at the best can be one of the most powerful things you do.
8 Steps To Getting The Perfect Mentor For You
mentor
Mentors, mentors, mentors. Everyone’s always talking about them but no one really seems to know how to get a good one.
Thanks to the internet we have more information than ever — but not any more wisdom.
Contacting mentors is one of the things I think you should do every week.
Whenever I say that, the response is the same: How?
Here’s what research and experts have to say about picking, contacting and maintaining a relationship with the right mentor, A-to-Z. Strap in.
Mentors Matter
I’ve posted about what the most successful people in the world all have in common. One of those things is mentors.
For his book Creativity, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi interviewed over 91 of the most creative people in the world (including 14 Nobel prize winners.)
What did they have in common? By the time they were college age, almost every one of those earthshakers had an important mentor:
In our study we found that a few individuals were taken in hand by competent adult practitioners very early in life, many were recognized during high school, and most of the remaining had an important mentor by the time they were of college age. Again, recognition by a mentor is not strictly necessary, but it must definitely contribute to the realization of creative potential.
10,000 hours of deliberate practice makes you an expert but what makes you dedicate 10,000 hours to something in the first place?
As Adam Grant of Wharton explains, the answer is great mentors.
Why would somebody invest deliberate practice in something? It turns out that actually most of these world-class performers had a first coach, or a first teacher, who made the activity fun.
Not worried about accepting a prize in Stockholm or being a chess grandmaster?
Okay, brass tacks here: Research shows mentors mean promotions and career satisfaction.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
…past research has also found that people with mentors get more promotions and experience greater job and career satisfaction than those without mentors.
What Do Mentors Really Do?
Mentors generally offer three things.
1) They give career guidance.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
First, they offer career guidance-for example, by making suggestions on assignments a protege might take, or suggestions on what career path might be most advantageous.
2) It’s not all about work. Mentors provide much needed emotional support when times get tough.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
Second, mentors can provide emotional support around issues such as the inherent conflict between work and family, or can recommend methods for coping with a difficult boss or with work stress.
3) Mentors also often act like a role model, giving you something to emulate and aspire to.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
Third, a mentor may provide support to proteges by serving as an effective role model who demonstrates appropriate behaviors for different situations.
Some people might say, “I don’t need to worry about all this. My company has a mentorship program.”
Yeah, too bad that program sucks.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
Unfortunately, recent research has revealed that those in formal mentoring programs often fail to deliver on their rosy promises, and the participants may be left helpless and disillusioned. Possible reasons for this include a shoddy formal mentoring program structure, a matchmaking system that mimics blind dates from hell, or simply inadequate resources or rewards to support these programs.
And what about your greater career? If you’re a star do you think your company is going to tell you when it’s time to move on to greener pastures?
You need objectivity and you need someone who can give you advice that’s valuable over the long haul.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
Mentors external to an organization provide a different perspective on the protege’s career and profession, as well as on the situations they witness in their organization. Being too entrenched in one organization can lead to less innovative decision making, possibly embracing only a particular style of management, and finally an inability to imagine a career outside of that organization.
So you need to get your own mentor. Here’s how.
How To Pick A Mentor
I’ve done an entire post on selecting the best mentor for you. You can read thathere.
The quick and dirty version comes courtesy of Dan Coyle’s masterpiece The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills:
Avoid Someone Who Reminds You of a Courteous Waiter
Seek Someone Who Scares You a Little
Seek Someone Who Gives Short, Clear Directions
Seek Someone Who Loves Teaching Fundamentals
Other Things Being Equal, Pick the Older Person
The research also shows it’s good to look for someone who has a resume that shows grit.
And, believe it or not, happier mentors are better mentors.
Know yourself and what you need. If you don’t have these answers, a mentor can’t help you much.
Aspirational figures must “fit” with your career goals.
Role models who aren’t relevant or whose achievements are unattainable can make you 22% less satisfied with your career.
Via The 100 Simple Secrets of Successful People:
People who actively target someone to serve as a role model draw positive feelings from that person only if the role model’s achievements are both relevant and attainable. People who choose role models who do not fit that description wind up 22 percent less satisfied with their careers than people who do not have a role model at all. – Lockwood and Kunda 2000
Though I’m using mentor in the singular, I encourage you to be polygamous here — you need multiple mentors to cover the various areas of life.
More on how to select the perfect mentor here.
How To Contact A Potential Mentor
A referral from a mutual friend or contact is gold. But not everyone will be able to get that.
So what do you say in that first email?
You still want to leverage the power of some kind of similarity to build a connection.
Wharton Professor Adam Grant notes that he’s much more likely to reply when people highlight uncommon commonalities in their emails to him.
What’s that mean? Ways you two are similar that aren’t obvious. And this has scientific underpinnings:
As the psychologist Robert Cialdini sums up the evidence from Influence, “Similarity literally draws people together.” In Give and Take, I elaborate on this principle to point out that similarities matter most when they’re rare. We bond when we share uncommon commonalities, which allow us to feel that we fit in and stand out at the same time.
So you establish some kind of common ground. The next thing to keep in mind is equally important:
Wasting a mentor’s (or potential mentor’s) time in any form is a mortal sin.
Not only is it annoying, it shows you lack basic skills. It screams to a mentor, “This person isn’t ready for your help.”
Writing a multi-page email to a very busy person doesn’t show you’re serious — it shows you’re insane.
So respect their time and start small. Asking good questions is a great way to build a relationship.
But the key word here is “good” questions.
NEVER ASK A MENTOR A QUESTION GOOGLE CAN EASILY ANSWER FOR YOU.
Carve this in stone. Scrawl it in blood above your desk. Get a tattoo.
Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, highlights this tip succinctly: Do your homework.
It’s amazing how many would-be mentees or beneficiaries ask busier people for answers Google could provide in 20 seconds. That puts you on the banned list. Explicitly state what you’ve done to get answers or help yourself.
There is an old expression: “When the student is ready, the master appears.”
If you’re doing everything you can to advance your career, getting a mentor won’t be too hard. Why?
Because if you’re doing awesome work, people more successful than you will notice and want to help you.
If they don’t, you’re doing something wrong.
What, personally, makes me want to go the extra mile for someone?
When they demonstrate they have explored every conceivable avenue and they can go no further without me.
Seeing someone has done everything in their power shows they’re smart, they didn’t waste my time, and they’re resourceful.
Most mentors see themselves that way, so guess what? The two of you now have something very important in common.
Finally, don’t mention the M word — mentor. You wouldn’t ask for marriage on the first date, would you?
My friend Ryan Holiday, author of Trust Me I’m Lying, says you should never flat out ask “Will you be my mentor?“:
Don’t ask anyone to be your mentor, don’t talk about mentorships, just leave the word alone. No one goes out and straight up asks someone they’re attracted to be their boyfriend of girlfriend–that’s a label that’s eventually applied to something that develops over time. A mentorship is the same way, it’s a dance, not a contractual agreement… If you email a total stranger to ask them to commit to give you hours of their time over a period of years and demand that this gift is to be called a “mentorship,” you’re going to be disappointed.
The Email
What does an intro email look like?
My friend Ramit Sethi, NYT bestselling author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich, has some templates you can use.
Here’s a quick breakdown of some of my thoughts meshed with his insights.
Subject line: I like to use the name of a mutual friend or contact that referred me. Otherwise, use something you share in common (alumni of the same school, etc.) or something attention getting.
First thing: introduce yourself and clarify the connection you mentioned in your subject line.
Politely flatter. It’s appropriate — if they weren’t awesome why would you want their help? It shows you took the time to learn about them. Highlight uncommon commonalities.
Be clear, but polite, about what you want. Short but not blunt. Do not waste their time.
Show you’ve done your homework. Can your questions be Googled? If so, to the ninth circle of Hell with you.
The easier you make it for them to give a yes, the more likely you are to get a yes. You’ll schedule around them. You’ll drive to them. You’ll bring coffee.
Proofread, edit, and make sure it’s brief. Take the time. A hastily sent grammatical abomination from your iPhone is a terrible idea. And if the length of your email elicits a gasp, a sigh or a comparison to the Game of Thrones books, you’re not done editing.
How To Handle The First Meeting
So they agreed to talk to you or meet with you. Great. I’m not going to tell you to be on time, be polite, and brush your teeth.
If you require that kind of advice you don’t need this article, you need preschool.
Some tips culled from Ramit, Ryan and my own experience:
Ask good questions. Good questions show you are smart and have done your homework, and make the mentor feel that they offer unique value.
Other than asking good questions, shut up. Ryan says ”The point of an accomplishment mentor is not for you to give them your opinion.”
Don’t ask for a job. This makes people feel awkward and undoes all the good work you’ve done so far.
Be likable. Here’s more on making people like you, using Dale Carnegie’s classic advice and making good conversation.
Again, never waste their time. Keep it short, hit your marks, create an impression you can build on and make an exit.
Do those and you’ll be in good shape. Of course, right after this is where most people totally drop the ball.
How To Maintain A Mentor Relationship
Many people send a great email, have a great meeting… and then they vanish off the face of the Earth and let the connection go cold.
From Ryan:
Stay in the picture. You are easily forgotten by busy people, remember that. The key then is to find ways to stay relevant and fresh. Drop emails and questions at an interval that straddles the fine line between bothersome and buzzworthy. It’s easier to keep something alive than it is to revive the deceased…but it’s on you to keep the blood flowing, not the mentor.
And the inevitable question people ask me: What do I say when I touch base with them?
After that first meeting, did you actually take any of their advice? (If not, stop reading now and just go watch cartoons, okay?)
The best answer, in my opinion, is simple:
I used your advice by doing _____. Here’s how wonderfully it turned out _____. Thank you so much!
Do what they said, get results, and let them know they made a difference. This is what mentors want.
If they engage you can follow up with:
I (did my homework) and figured (really impressive next steps) would be _____ but I’d love your insight. Do you think (well-thought-out-strategy #1) or (well-thought-out-strategy #2) is better?
You want these interactions to be conversational back and forths, not one-offs you need to regularly hit with a conversation defibrillator to keep the relationship alive.
And try to reconnect with them in person or on the phone at least annually.
Now Do It
I don’t know where I’d be without the mentors who helped shape me.
So no more “I don’t know how to do that” excuses. You have the pieces to the puzzle now.
You cannot — and should not — go it alone. You have much to learn from those who came before you.
Go back to the top of this post, follow the steps and get started.
As Eleanor Roosevelt once said:
Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.
6) Naps Are Steroids For Your Brain
Napping isn’t for the lazy. It’s one of the habits of the most successful people in any field.
Sleep is essential to learning. Naps are a tool that will make you the best.
Here’s Dan:
Napping is a high performance activity. If you looked into the habits of highly successful people you would see a lot of naps, a lot of recovery. It’s sort of our brains’ janitorial service. It helps us clean out the stuff we don’t want. It also helps us work on ideas while we’re asleep. Top performers use sleep as a tool.
4 Things Astronauts Can Teach You About A Good Night’s Sleep
Who knows about sleep? Astronauts.
They have to. Their bodies are cut off from many of the normal external cues that remind us what time it is.
But actually, it’s even worse than that.
In orbit they can experience a dozen sunrises and sunsets a day which makes their circadian rhythm go completely haywire.
When you’re in a tin can floating through the cold darkness of outer space, being off your game due to lousy sleep can have very bad results.
When sleep deprivation has you so messed up you don’t notice you’re taking photos of the walls instead of Earth, yeah, that could present a problem.
Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:
…cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev reported in his diary that he had a tendency to make mistakes on days following an unusually late bedtime; on one occasion he took fifty Earth-observation photographs through a closed porthole before realizing his error.
So NASA started doing some serious research.
3 Big Insights On Sleep
They quickly realized a few things:
1) You’re a slave to external cues
Without light, darkness and other contextual signals, your ability to regulate sleep times can be a mess.
Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:
Lacking the normal circadian cues of daylight and darkness, individuals, when permitted, tend to become desynchronized; that is, they retire to bed at a later hour and remain awake longer each night.
2) Your body doesn’t naturally stay on a 24hr cycle
Without something to rein it in, you’ll work off a 25.4 hour day. This drift compounds and eventually your sleep cycle can totally spin out of control.
Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:
If the individual is isolated without access to any time cues, however, the sleep/wake cycle and body temperature rhythms drift toward later times each day and are expressed in free-running periods of 25.4 hours; at this rate an individual’s sleep/wake cycle could drift nearly 10 hours per week in the absence of diurnal cues… In extreme cases, an individual can cycle completely around the clock.
3) You’re not very good at judging sleep quality
You may think sleeping with the lights on doesn’t affect you, but it does. And you won’t necessarily notice your reduced performance the next day, either.
Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:
…it is a folklore belief that all people adapt to regular sounds and are not affected by noises perceived during their sleep. In fact, the sleep of most people is disturbed by even the most regular sounds; for some individuals, the quality of sleep can be reduced without conscious recognition or complete awakening.
This info is more valuable than you think. Why?
We’re All Astronauts Now
As John Durant points out in his fascinating new book, The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health, due to modern technology, we’re allliving more like astronauts now.
Via The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health:
Today our bodies have become thoroughly confused by the artificial signals of modern life. Light is no longer a cyclical function of the sun, but of always-on indoor lights, TV screens, and computer monitors. Temperature no longer follows a dynamic cycle of cooling at night and warming during the day but sits at a static level set by the thermostat. Human chatter and social interaction used to follow a natural ebb and flow, but now we are more likely to live and sleep in isolation from real people, even while we have 24/7 access to artificial people (faces on TV, voices on the radio). Then, after utterly confusing our circadian rhythm, we try to take back control with stimulants (caffeine, nicotine) and depressants (alcohol, sleeping pills). Is it any wonder that a third of Americans are chronically sleep-deprived?
Maybe you think this doesn’t affect you — or at least not much.
You’re wrong. Remember #3 above.
Research done on non-astronauts has shown the same thing. After 2 weeks of 6 hours of sleep a night, you’re legally drunk:
…by the end of two weeks, the six-hour sleepers were as impaired as those who, in another Dinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straight — the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk.
But what did the chronically sleep deprived say when asked how they felt? “It’s not affecting me.”
Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are.
So if you are having reduced performance due to sleep issues, you may not be aware. This is a problem.
So what answers did NASA come up with?
What You Need To Do
In the past I’ve rounded up sleep research and documented my own sleep-hacking experiments. Let’s add some astronaut knowledge.
Given you probably don’t have to deal with the thruster jets of Skylab waking you up or the sounds of the hull of your ship expanding and contracting, I’ve edited the recommendations down to four points:
Maintain a consistent schedule, even on weekends. Keep in mind the “free-running” problem. Your body will push later if given the chance.
Take an hour to wind down before bed. Yes, you’re busy. But your time is not more precious than an astronaut’s. So take the time to wind down.
If you don’t have strong day/night cues, add them. Get sunlight in the morning. Dim the lights at night. Turn electronics off as bedtime approaches or use an application like f.lux.
Keep your bedroom dark, cool and free from noise. Even if you think “the light doesn’t bother you” or “the noise isn’t that bad” it can still reduce sleep quality.
Durant offers another solid piece of advice I follow myself: forget the alarm clock in the morning; set an alarm to remind you to go to bed at night.
Via The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health:
A useful technique is setting an alarm clock—not to wake up, but to get ready for bed. Set an alarm for an hour before bedtime. When it goes off, finish up any work on the computer, turn off the TV, turn off any unnecessary lights, and start to wind down for the day.
This prevents you from cheating yourself on sleep and allows you to wake up naturally.
(Even if “naturally” happens to be on the surface of the moon.)
7) Keep a Notebook
Eminem keeps a journal. Peyton Manning keeps a journal.
Top performers track their progress, set goals, reflect and learn from their mistakes.
Here’s Dan:
Most people who are taking an ownership role in their talent development use this magical tool called a notebook. Keep a performance journal. If you want to get better, you need a map, and that journal is that map. You can write down what you did today, what you tried to do, where you made mistakes. It’s a place to reflect. It’s a place to capture information. It’s a place to be able to track your progress. It’s one of the most underused yet powerful tools that I could imagine anybody using.
Strokes of genius: Here’s how the most creative people get their ideas
Where do strokes of genius come from?
Keith Sawyer tells an interesting story about breakthrough ideas in his book, Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity.
Researcher Vera John-Steiner wanted to know “What nourishes sustained productivity in the lives of creative individuals?“
She interviewed over 70 living creative geniuses and analyzed the notebooks of 50 dead ones (including Tolstoy, Einstein, etc.) to look at their work habits.
She assumed this was going to end up as a review of Eureka! moments in the greatest creative minds.
She even planned to title her book “The Leap” because it would be about those giant flashes of inspiration that led to breakthrough ideas.
But she was completely wrong.
Eureka! moments turned out to be a myth.
There was no inspiration moment where a fully formed answer arrived.
Strokes of genius happened over time.
A great idea comes into the world by drips and drabs, false starts, and rough sketches.
Via Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity:
Creativity started with the notebooks’ sketches and jottings, and only later resulted in a pure, powerful idea. The one characteristic that all of these creatives shared— whether they were painters, actors, or scientists— was how often they put their early thoughts and inklings out into the world, in sketches, dashed-off phrases and observations, bits of dialogue, and quick prototypes. Instead of arriving in one giant leap, great creations emerged by zigs and zags as their creators engaged over and over again with these externalized images.
She heard it over and over again in the interviews and read it in different forms in every notebook.
Via Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity:
Albert Einstein always said he thought in pictures: “Words do not play any role in my thought; instead, I think in signs and images which I can copy and combine.”
English writer Jessica Mitford engaged in a constant dialogue with her unfolding drafts: “The first thing to do is read over what you have done the day before and rewrite it. And then that gives you a lead into the next thing to do.”
The painter Ben Shahn described creativity as “the long artistic tug-of-war between idea and image.”
Poet May Sarton wrote, “The poem teaches us something while we make it; there is nothing dull about revision.”
It was never a clean, linear process.
Via Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity:
Successful creators engage in an ongoing dialogue with their work. They put what’s in their head on paper long before it’s fully formed, and they watch and listen to what they’ve recorded, zigging and zagging until the right idea emerges.
What can we take away from this?
Stop expecting inspiration to deliver a finished product.
Write all your ideas down as early as possible. (It’s no surprise so many of the geniuses kept notebooks.)
Stop discarding half-baked ideas. Those crappy ideas are the good ideas — they just need work.
Don’t think your first idea is the right one. And don’t think it’s perfect as-is.
Give it time. Deadlines don’t make you more creative.
Wrestle with your ideas. Dissect, combine, add, subtract, turn them upside down and shake them. Get ideas colliding.
f You Only Remember Two Words From This…
Dan says the two key words are “Reach” and “Stare.”
Reach: Always push yourself to the edge of your ability.
Stare: Look at those better than you and emulate them.
Here’s Dan:
I would say, “Reach. Get out on the edge of your ability. Get into your discomfort zone and reach past that.” And I would say, “Stare. Find somebody you want to be in two years, three years, five years, and stare at that person. See what they’re doing. See exactly what they’re doing, and steal that. Steal from them.”
Sum Up
Sadly, you weren’t born an expert.
But you can become one with practice and time. Start now. You’ll be amazed at what you can achieve:SOURCE :TIME
Hours are vital but you can get to mastery faster — muchfaster — by practicing the right way.
1) Be Uncomfortable
You learn best when you’re reaching. “Flow” is great. But flow is notthe best way to learn.
You want to be stretched to the edge of your ability. It needs to be hard. That’s how your brain grows.
Here’s Dan:
We learn when we’re in our discomfort zone. When you’re struggling, that’s when you’re getting smarter. The more time you spend there, the faster you learn. It’s better to spend a very, very high quality ten minutes, or even ten seconds, than it is to spend a mediocre hour. You want to practice where you are on the edge of your ability, reaching over and over again, making mistakes, failing, realizing those mistakes and reaching again.
What type of practice produces peak performance?
It’s “Deep Practice” (or Deliberate Practice) and I tend to focus on four parts:
1) Make your practice as similar to the real life scenario as possible.
Via The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How:
“One real encounter, even for a few seconds, is far more useful than several hundred observations.” Bjork cites an by psychologist Henry Roediger at Washington University of St. Louis, where students were divided into two groups to study a natural history text. Group A studied the paper for four sessions. Group B studied only once but was tested three times. A week later both groups were tested, and Group B scored 50 percent higher than Group A. They’d studied one-fourth as much yet learned far more.
Via Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To:
Practicing under the types of pressures you will face on the big testing day is one of the best ways to combat choking…
And:
During the initial shooting practice, all of the officers missed more shots when firing at a live opponent compared with firing at the stationary cardboard targets. Not so surprising. This was true after training as well, but only for those officers whose practice had been limited to the cardboard cutouts. For those officers who practiced shooting at an opponent, after training they were just as good shots when aiming at the live individuals as they were when aiming at the stationary cutouts. The opportunity to “practice under the gun” of an opponent, so to speak, really helped to hone the police officers’ shots for more real-life stressful shooting situations.
2) Don’t be passive. Testing yourself is far better than reviewing.
Via Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success:
Good decision making is about compressing the informational load by decoding the meaning of patterns derived from experience. This cannot be taught in a classroom; it is not something you are born with; it must be lived and learned.
Testing yourself is the best way to learn — even if you fail the tests.
3) Practice is not just repetition. Be ruthlessly critical and keep trying to improve on the constituent elements of the skill.
Via Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else:
Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.
Via The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How:
“Our predictions were extremely accurate,” Zimmerman said. “This showed that experts practice differently and far more strategically. When they fail, they don’t blame it on luck or themselves. They have a strategy they can fix.”
Via Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success:
When most people practice, they focus on the things they can do effortlessly,” Ericsson has said. “Expert practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.”
A negative attitude, not a positive attitude, makes you more likely to learn from your mistakes. In fact, the shift to focusing on negative feedback is one of the marks of an expert mindset.
Ruthlessly critical in practice, blindly optimistic on game day. It’s irrational, but it works.
4) Practice a lot: 10,000 hours worth.
Via Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else:
One factor, and only one factor, predicted how musically accomplished the students were, and that was how much they practiced.
And when the big day comes, make sure you know the methods to resist choking under pressure.
2) Stop Reading. Start Doing.
Keep the “Rule of Two-Thirds” in mind. Spend only one third of your time studying.
The other two-thirds of your time you want to be doing the activity. Practicing. Testing yourself.
Get your nose out of that book. Avoid the classroom. Whatever it is you want to be the best at, be doing it.
The closer your practice is to the real thing, the faster you learn.
Here’s Dan:
Our brains evolved to learn by doing things, not by hearing about them. This is one of the reasons that, for a lot of skills, it’s much better to spend about two thirds of your time testing yourself on it rather than absorbing it. There’s a rule of two thirds. If you want to, say, memorize a passage, it’s better to spend 30 percent of your time reading it, and the other 70 percent of your time testing yourself on that knowledge.
What’s the best way to learn from a book?
Don’t keep reading it over and over. Read it and write a one page summary.
Via Daniel Coyle’s excellent book The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills:
Research shows that people who (wrote a summary) remember 50 percent more material over the long term than people who follow (repeatedly read). This is because of one of deep practice’s most fundamental rules: Learning is reaching. Passively reading a book— a relatively effortless process, letting the words wash over you like a warm bath— doesn’t put you in the sweet spot. Less reaching equals less learning.
On the other hand, closing the book and writing a summary forces you to figure out the key points (one set of reaches), process and organize those ideas so they make sense (more reaches), and write them on the page (still more reaches, along with repetition). The equation is always the same: More reaching equals more learning.
3) The Sweet Spot
You want to be successful 60-80% of the time when training. That’s the sweet spot for improvement.
When learning is too hard, we quit. When it’s too easy… well, we quit then too.
Always be upping the challenge to stay in that 60-80% zone.
Here’s Dan:
You don’t want to be succeeding 40 percent of the time. That’s flailing around. You don’t want to be succeeding 95 percent of the time. That’s too easy. You want to constantly be toggling, adjusting the environment so that you’re succeeding 60 to 80 percent of the time.
What’s the sweet spot for optimal improvement?
While practicing, you want to be succeeding on 50-80% of attempts.
Fewer than that and you’re going to be confused and feel like it’s all luck.
More success than that and you’re not pushing yourself.
Via Daniel Coyle’s excellent book The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills:
Comfort Zone
Sensations: Ease, effortlessness. You’re working, but not reaching or struggling.
Percentage of Successful Attempts: 80 percent and above.
Sweet Spot
Sensations: Frustration, difficulty, alertness to errors. You’re fully engaged in an intense struggle— as if you’re stretching with all your might for a nearly unreachable goal, brushing it with your fingertips, then reaching again.
Percentage of Successful Attempts: 50– 80 percent.
Survival Zone
Sensations: Confusion, desperation. You’re overmatched: scrambling, thrashing, and guessing. You guess right sometimes, but it’s mostly luck.
Percentage of Successful Attempts: Below 50 percent.
4) Commit To The Long Term
Asking someone ”How long are you going to be doing this?” was the best predictor of how skilled that person would end up being.
Merely committing to the long haul had huge effects.
Here’s Dan:
The question that ended up being the most predictive of skill was “How long are you going to be doing this?” Commitment was the difference maker. The people who combined commitment with a little bit of practice, their skills went off the charts.
http://thetalentcode.com/2013/11/01/meet-resilient-mouse-your-new-superhero/
Commit to the long haul. Don’t give up. Even works for mice:
5) Find A Role Model
Watching the best people work is one of the most powerful things you can do.
It’s motivating, inspiring and it’s how you were built to learn. Study the best to be the best.
Here’s Dan:
When we stare at someone we want to become and we have a really clear idea of where we want to be, it unlocks a tremendous amount of energy. We’re social creatures, and when we get the idea that we want to join some enchanted circle up above us, that is what really lights up motivation. “Look, they did it. I can do it.” It sounds very basic, but spending time staring at the best can be one of the most powerful things you do.
8 Steps To Getting The Perfect Mentor For You
mentor
Mentors, mentors, mentors. Everyone’s always talking about them but no one really seems to know how to get a good one.
Thanks to the internet we have more information than ever — but not any more wisdom.
Contacting mentors is one of the things I think you should do every week.
Whenever I say that, the response is the same: How?
Here’s what research and experts have to say about picking, contacting and maintaining a relationship with the right mentor, A-to-Z. Strap in.
Mentors Matter
I’ve posted about what the most successful people in the world all have in common. One of those things is mentors.
For his book Creativity, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi interviewed over 91 of the most creative people in the world (including 14 Nobel prize winners.)
What did they have in common? By the time they were college age, almost every one of those earthshakers had an important mentor:
In our study we found that a few individuals were taken in hand by competent adult practitioners very early in life, many were recognized during high school, and most of the remaining had an important mentor by the time they were of college age. Again, recognition by a mentor is not strictly necessary, but it must definitely contribute to the realization of creative potential.
10,000 hours of deliberate practice makes you an expert but what makes you dedicate 10,000 hours to something in the first place?
As Adam Grant of Wharton explains, the answer is great mentors.
Why would somebody invest deliberate practice in something? It turns out that actually most of these world-class performers had a first coach, or a first teacher, who made the activity fun.
Not worried about accepting a prize in Stockholm or being a chess grandmaster?
Okay, brass tacks here: Research shows mentors mean promotions and career satisfaction.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
…past research has also found that people with mentors get more promotions and experience greater job and career satisfaction than those without mentors.
What Do Mentors Really Do?
Mentors generally offer three things.
1) They give career guidance.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
First, they offer career guidance-for example, by making suggestions on assignments a protege might take, or suggestions on what career path might be most advantageous.
2) It’s not all about work. Mentors provide much needed emotional support when times get tough.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
Second, mentors can provide emotional support around issues such as the inherent conflict between work and family, or can recommend methods for coping with a difficult boss or with work stress.
3) Mentors also often act like a role model, giving you something to emulate and aspire to.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
Third, a mentor may provide support to proteges by serving as an effective role model who demonstrates appropriate behaviors for different situations.
Some people might say, “I don’t need to worry about all this. My company has a mentorship program.”
Yeah, too bad that program sucks.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
Unfortunately, recent research has revealed that those in formal mentoring programs often fail to deliver on their rosy promises, and the participants may be left helpless and disillusioned. Possible reasons for this include a shoddy formal mentoring program structure, a matchmaking system that mimics blind dates from hell, or simply inadequate resources or rewards to support these programs.
And what about your greater career? If you’re a star do you think your company is going to tell you when it’s time to move on to greener pastures?
You need objectivity and you need someone who can give you advice that’s valuable over the long haul.
Via Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships:
Mentors external to an organization provide a different perspective on the protege’s career and profession, as well as on the situations they witness in their organization. Being too entrenched in one organization can lead to less innovative decision making, possibly embracing only a particular style of management, and finally an inability to imagine a career outside of that organization.
So you need to get your own mentor. Here’s how.
How To Pick A Mentor
I’ve done an entire post on selecting the best mentor for you. You can read thathere.
The quick and dirty version comes courtesy of Dan Coyle’s masterpiece The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills:
Avoid Someone Who Reminds You of a Courteous Waiter
Seek Someone Who Scares You a Little
Seek Someone Who Gives Short, Clear Directions
Seek Someone Who Loves Teaching Fundamentals
Other Things Being Equal, Pick the Older Person
The research also shows it’s good to look for someone who has a resume that shows grit.
And, believe it or not, happier mentors are better mentors.
Know yourself and what you need. If you don’t have these answers, a mentor can’t help you much.
Aspirational figures must “fit” with your career goals.
Role models who aren’t relevant or whose achievements are unattainable can make you 22% less satisfied with your career.
Via The 100 Simple Secrets of Successful People:
People who actively target someone to serve as a role model draw positive feelings from that person only if the role model’s achievements are both relevant and attainable. People who choose role models who do not fit that description wind up 22 percent less satisfied with their careers than people who do not have a role model at all. – Lockwood and Kunda 2000
Though I’m using mentor in the singular, I encourage you to be polygamous here — you need multiple mentors to cover the various areas of life.
More on how to select the perfect mentor here.
How To Contact A Potential Mentor
A referral from a mutual friend or contact is gold. But not everyone will be able to get that.
So what do you say in that first email?
You still want to leverage the power of some kind of similarity to build a connection.
Wharton Professor Adam Grant notes that he’s much more likely to reply when people highlight uncommon commonalities in their emails to him.
What’s that mean? Ways you two are similar that aren’t obvious. And this has scientific underpinnings:
As the psychologist Robert Cialdini sums up the evidence from Influence, “Similarity literally draws people together.” In Give and Take, I elaborate on this principle to point out that similarities matter most when they’re rare. We bond when we share uncommon commonalities, which allow us to feel that we fit in and stand out at the same time.
So you establish some kind of common ground. The next thing to keep in mind is equally important:
Wasting a mentor’s (or potential mentor’s) time in any form is a mortal sin.
Not only is it annoying, it shows you lack basic skills. It screams to a mentor, “This person isn’t ready for your help.”
Writing a multi-page email to a very busy person doesn’t show you’re serious — it shows you’re insane.
So respect their time and start small. Asking good questions is a great way to build a relationship.
But the key word here is “good” questions.
NEVER ASK A MENTOR A QUESTION GOOGLE CAN EASILY ANSWER FOR YOU.
Carve this in stone. Scrawl it in blood above your desk. Get a tattoo.
Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, highlights this tip succinctly: Do your homework.
It’s amazing how many would-be mentees or beneficiaries ask busier people for answers Google could provide in 20 seconds. That puts you on the banned list. Explicitly state what you’ve done to get answers or help yourself.
There is an old expression: “When the student is ready, the master appears.”
If you’re doing everything you can to advance your career, getting a mentor won’t be too hard. Why?
Because if you’re doing awesome work, people more successful than you will notice and want to help you.
If they don’t, you’re doing something wrong.
What, personally, makes me want to go the extra mile for someone?
When they demonstrate they have explored every conceivable avenue and they can go no further without me.
Seeing someone has done everything in their power shows they’re smart, they didn’t waste my time, and they’re resourceful.
Most mentors see themselves that way, so guess what? The two of you now have something very important in common.
Finally, don’t mention the M word — mentor. You wouldn’t ask for marriage on the first date, would you?
My friend Ryan Holiday, author of Trust Me I’m Lying, says you should never flat out ask “Will you be my mentor?“:
Don’t ask anyone to be your mentor, don’t talk about mentorships, just leave the word alone. No one goes out and straight up asks someone they’re attracted to be their boyfriend of girlfriend–that’s a label that’s eventually applied to something that develops over time. A mentorship is the same way, it’s a dance, not a contractual agreement… If you email a total stranger to ask them to commit to give you hours of their time over a period of years and demand that this gift is to be called a “mentorship,” you’re going to be disappointed.
The Email
What does an intro email look like?
My friend Ramit Sethi, NYT bestselling author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich, has some templates you can use.
Here’s a quick breakdown of some of my thoughts meshed with his insights.
Subject line: I like to use the name of a mutual friend or contact that referred me. Otherwise, use something you share in common (alumni of the same school, etc.) or something attention getting.
First thing: introduce yourself and clarify the connection you mentioned in your subject line.
Politely flatter. It’s appropriate — if they weren’t awesome why would you want their help? It shows you took the time to learn about them. Highlight uncommon commonalities.
Be clear, but polite, about what you want. Short but not blunt. Do not waste their time.
Show you’ve done your homework. Can your questions be Googled? If so, to the ninth circle of Hell with you.
The easier you make it for them to give a yes, the more likely you are to get a yes. You’ll schedule around them. You’ll drive to them. You’ll bring coffee.
Proofread, edit, and make sure it’s brief. Take the time. A hastily sent grammatical abomination from your iPhone is a terrible idea. And if the length of your email elicits a gasp, a sigh or a comparison to the Game of Thrones books, you’re not done editing.
How To Handle The First Meeting
So they agreed to talk to you or meet with you. Great. I’m not going to tell you to be on time, be polite, and brush your teeth.
If you require that kind of advice you don’t need this article, you need preschool.
Some tips culled from Ramit, Ryan and my own experience:
Ask good questions. Good questions show you are smart and have done your homework, and make the mentor feel that they offer unique value.
Other than asking good questions, shut up. Ryan says ”The point of an accomplishment mentor is not for you to give them your opinion.”
Don’t ask for a job. This makes people feel awkward and undoes all the good work you’ve done so far.
Be likable. Here’s more on making people like you, using Dale Carnegie’s classic advice and making good conversation.
Again, never waste their time. Keep it short, hit your marks, create an impression you can build on and make an exit.
Do those and you’ll be in good shape. Of course, right after this is where most people totally drop the ball.
How To Maintain A Mentor Relationship
Many people send a great email, have a great meeting… and then they vanish off the face of the Earth and let the connection go cold.
From Ryan:
Stay in the picture. You are easily forgotten by busy people, remember that. The key then is to find ways to stay relevant and fresh. Drop emails and questions at an interval that straddles the fine line between bothersome and buzzworthy. It’s easier to keep something alive than it is to revive the deceased…but it’s on you to keep the blood flowing, not the mentor.
And the inevitable question people ask me: What do I say when I touch base with them?
After that first meeting, did you actually take any of their advice? (If not, stop reading now and just go watch cartoons, okay?)
The best answer, in my opinion, is simple:
I used your advice by doing _____. Here’s how wonderfully it turned out _____. Thank you so much!
Do what they said, get results, and let them know they made a difference. This is what mentors want.
If they engage you can follow up with:
I (did my homework) and figured (really impressive next steps) would be _____ but I’d love your insight. Do you think (well-thought-out-strategy #1) or (well-thought-out-strategy #2) is better?
You want these interactions to be conversational back and forths, not one-offs you need to regularly hit with a conversation defibrillator to keep the relationship alive.
And try to reconnect with them in person or on the phone at least annually.
Now Do It
I don’t know where I’d be without the mentors who helped shape me.
So no more “I don’t know how to do that” excuses. You have the pieces to the puzzle now.
You cannot — and should not — go it alone. You have much to learn from those who came before you.
Go back to the top of this post, follow the steps and get started.
As Eleanor Roosevelt once said:
Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.
6) Naps Are Steroids For Your Brain
Napping isn’t for the lazy. It’s one of the habits of the most successful people in any field.
Sleep is essential to learning. Naps are a tool that will make you the best.
Here’s Dan:
Napping is a high performance activity. If you looked into the habits of highly successful people you would see a lot of naps, a lot of recovery. It’s sort of our brains’ janitorial service. It helps us clean out the stuff we don’t want. It also helps us work on ideas while we’re asleep. Top performers use sleep as a tool.
4 Things Astronauts Can Teach You About A Good Night’s Sleep
Who knows about sleep? Astronauts.
They have to. Their bodies are cut off from many of the normal external cues that remind us what time it is.
But actually, it’s even worse than that.
In orbit they can experience a dozen sunrises and sunsets a day which makes their circadian rhythm go completely haywire.
When you’re in a tin can floating through the cold darkness of outer space, being off your game due to lousy sleep can have very bad results.
When sleep deprivation has you so messed up you don’t notice you’re taking photos of the walls instead of Earth, yeah, that could present a problem.
Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:
…cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev reported in his diary that he had a tendency to make mistakes on days following an unusually late bedtime; on one occasion he took fifty Earth-observation photographs through a closed porthole before realizing his error.
So NASA started doing some serious research.
3 Big Insights On Sleep
They quickly realized a few things:
1) You’re a slave to external cues
Without light, darkness and other contextual signals, your ability to regulate sleep times can be a mess.
Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:
Lacking the normal circadian cues of daylight and darkness, individuals, when permitted, tend to become desynchronized; that is, they retire to bed at a later hour and remain awake longer each night.
2) Your body doesn’t naturally stay on a 24hr cycle
Without something to rein it in, you’ll work off a 25.4 hour day. This drift compounds and eventually your sleep cycle can totally spin out of control.
Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:
If the individual is isolated without access to any time cues, however, the sleep/wake cycle and body temperature rhythms drift toward later times each day and are expressed in free-running periods of 25.4 hours; at this rate an individual’s sleep/wake cycle could drift nearly 10 hours per week in the absence of diurnal cues… In extreme cases, an individual can cycle completely around the clock.
3) You’re not very good at judging sleep quality
You may think sleeping with the lights on doesn’t affect you, but it does. And you won’t necessarily notice your reduced performance the next day, either.
Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:
…it is a folklore belief that all people adapt to regular sounds and are not affected by noises perceived during their sleep. In fact, the sleep of most people is disturbed by even the most regular sounds; for some individuals, the quality of sleep can be reduced without conscious recognition or complete awakening.
This info is more valuable than you think. Why?
We’re All Astronauts Now
As John Durant points out in his fascinating new book, The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health, due to modern technology, we’re allliving more like astronauts now.
Via The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health:
Today our bodies have become thoroughly confused by the artificial signals of modern life. Light is no longer a cyclical function of the sun, but of always-on indoor lights, TV screens, and computer monitors. Temperature no longer follows a dynamic cycle of cooling at night and warming during the day but sits at a static level set by the thermostat. Human chatter and social interaction used to follow a natural ebb and flow, but now we are more likely to live and sleep in isolation from real people, even while we have 24/7 access to artificial people (faces on TV, voices on the radio). Then, after utterly confusing our circadian rhythm, we try to take back control with stimulants (caffeine, nicotine) and depressants (alcohol, sleeping pills). Is it any wonder that a third of Americans are chronically sleep-deprived?
Maybe you think this doesn’t affect you — or at least not much.
You’re wrong. Remember #3 above.
Research done on non-astronauts has shown the same thing. After 2 weeks of 6 hours of sleep a night, you’re legally drunk:
…by the end of two weeks, the six-hour sleepers were as impaired as those who, in another Dinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straight — the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk.
But what did the chronically sleep deprived say when asked how they felt? “It’s not affecting me.”
Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are.
So if you are having reduced performance due to sleep issues, you may not be aware. This is a problem.
So what answers did NASA come up with?
What You Need To Do
In the past I’ve rounded up sleep research and documented my own sleep-hacking experiments. Let’s add some astronaut knowledge.
Given you probably don’t have to deal with the thruster jets of Skylab waking you up or the sounds of the hull of your ship expanding and contracting, I’ve edited the recommendations down to four points:
Maintain a consistent schedule, even on weekends. Keep in mind the “free-running” problem. Your body will push later if given the chance.
Take an hour to wind down before bed. Yes, you’re busy. But your time is not more precious than an astronaut’s. So take the time to wind down.
If you don’t have strong day/night cues, add them. Get sunlight in the morning. Dim the lights at night. Turn electronics off as bedtime approaches or use an application like f.lux.
Keep your bedroom dark, cool and free from noise. Even if you think “the light doesn’t bother you” or “the noise isn’t that bad” it can still reduce sleep quality.
Durant offers another solid piece of advice I follow myself: forget the alarm clock in the morning; set an alarm to remind you to go to bed at night.
Via The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health:
A useful technique is setting an alarm clock—not to wake up, but to get ready for bed. Set an alarm for an hour before bedtime. When it goes off, finish up any work on the computer, turn off the TV, turn off any unnecessary lights, and start to wind down for the day.
This prevents you from cheating yourself on sleep and allows you to wake up naturally.
(Even if “naturally” happens to be on the surface of the moon.)
7) Keep a Notebook
Eminem keeps a journal. Peyton Manning keeps a journal.
Top performers track their progress, set goals, reflect and learn from their mistakes.
Here’s Dan:
Most people who are taking an ownership role in their talent development use this magical tool called a notebook. Keep a performance journal. If you want to get better, you need a map, and that journal is that map. You can write down what you did today, what you tried to do, where you made mistakes. It’s a place to reflect. It’s a place to capture information. It’s a place to be able to track your progress. It’s one of the most underused yet powerful tools that I could imagine anybody using.
Strokes of genius: Here’s how the most creative people get their ideas
Where do strokes of genius come from?
Keith Sawyer tells an interesting story about breakthrough ideas in his book, Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity.
Researcher Vera John-Steiner wanted to know “What nourishes sustained productivity in the lives of creative individuals?“
She interviewed over 70 living creative geniuses and analyzed the notebooks of 50 dead ones (including Tolstoy, Einstein, etc.) to look at their work habits.
She assumed this was going to end up as a review of Eureka! moments in the greatest creative minds.
She even planned to title her book “The Leap” because it would be about those giant flashes of inspiration that led to breakthrough ideas.
But she was completely wrong.
Eureka! moments turned out to be a myth.
There was no inspiration moment where a fully formed answer arrived.
Strokes of genius happened over time.
A great idea comes into the world by drips and drabs, false starts, and rough sketches.
Via Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity:
Creativity started with the notebooks’ sketches and jottings, and only later resulted in a pure, powerful idea. The one characteristic that all of these creatives shared— whether they were painters, actors, or scientists— was how often they put their early thoughts and inklings out into the world, in sketches, dashed-off phrases and observations, bits of dialogue, and quick prototypes. Instead of arriving in one giant leap, great creations emerged by zigs and zags as their creators engaged over and over again with these externalized images.
She heard it over and over again in the interviews and read it in different forms in every notebook.
Via Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity:
Albert Einstein always said he thought in pictures: “Words do not play any role in my thought; instead, I think in signs and images which I can copy and combine.”
English writer Jessica Mitford engaged in a constant dialogue with her unfolding drafts: “The first thing to do is read over what you have done the day before and rewrite it. And then that gives you a lead into the next thing to do.”
The painter Ben Shahn described creativity as “the long artistic tug-of-war between idea and image.”
Poet May Sarton wrote, “The poem teaches us something while we make it; there is nothing dull about revision.”
It was never a clean, linear process.
Via Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity:
Successful creators engage in an ongoing dialogue with their work. They put what’s in their head on paper long before it’s fully formed, and they watch and listen to what they’ve recorded, zigging and zagging until the right idea emerges.
What can we take away from this?
Stop expecting inspiration to deliver a finished product.
Write all your ideas down as early as possible. (It’s no surprise so many of the geniuses kept notebooks.)
Stop discarding half-baked ideas. Those crappy ideas are the good ideas — they just need work.
Don’t think your first idea is the right one. And don’t think it’s perfect as-is.
Give it time. Deadlines don’t make you more creative.
Wrestle with your ideas. Dissect, combine, add, subtract, turn them upside down and shake them. Get ideas colliding.
f You Only Remember Two Words From This…
Dan says the two key words are “Reach” and “Stare.”
Reach: Always push yourself to the edge of your ability.
Stare: Look at those better than you and emulate them.
Here’s Dan:
I would say, “Reach. Get out on the edge of your ability. Get into your discomfort zone and reach past that.” And I would say, “Stare. Find somebody you want to be in two years, three years, five years, and stare at that person. See what they’re doing. See exactly what they’re doing, and steal that. Steal from them.”
Sum Up
Sadly, you weren’t born an expert.
But you can become one with practice and time. Start now. You’ll be amazed at what you can achieve:
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