Performance Pilot by Ross Bentley

Author:Ross Bentley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Phil Wilkes
Published: 2017-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

PERFORMANCE TIP

Natural talent is just more (and better) practice.

Basketball great Michael Jordan would show up for a game before other members of his team to practice his shots. When Tiger Woods was not winning everything in sight in 2001, he claimed it was because he was working on shots he would need specifically for the Masters later that year. Some people doubted his claim until he won the Masters again. Martina Navratilova, winner of 167 singles titles in tennis including a record nine Wimbledon titles, said, “Every great shot you hit, you’ve hit a bunch of times in practice.”

The stories of Formula One driver Michael Schumacher’s commitment to practice and being the best is part of his legend. After a day of testing at Ferrari’s test track, where he had just completed the equivalent of two full Grands Prix race lengths, he would spend a couple of hours in the gym, working out.

Philosopher Will Durant wrote, “We are what we repeatedly do, therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit.” Numerous studies have shown that to achieve mastery in any complex field, a minimum of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is the general requirement.

A study at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music divided the school’s violinists into three categories based on their potential. They then calculated the aggregate average time each group had spent practicing since they had begun playing the violin. All the subjects had started playing the violin at roughly the same age (five years old), but the amount of time they had spent practicing before arriving at the Academy varied greatly. By the time they had turned twenty years old, all the students with the potential to be virtuosos had totaled over 10,000 hours of practice and were averaging 30 hours of practice per week. Those students categorized as good enough to perform professionally, but not as virtuosos, had each totaled above 8,000 hours of practice. The students destined for amateur status, or to be music teachers, had totaled just over 4,000 hours each.

Other studies have added a very important point regarding the number of hours it takes someone to master an activity. It’s not just how much practice you put in, but also what you practice that matters. The virtuosos not only practiced more, but they also practiced more difficult pieces. Looking at superstars in all activities, they practice the challenging things. For example, while many professional golfers practice by playing rounds, Tiger Woods is famous for having spent hours dropping a ball in a sand trap, stepping on it to make it even more difficult to hit, and then practicing hitting out from there.

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