The Difference between good and GREAT is 10,000 hours. Malcon Gladwell in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, repeatedly mentions the ‘10,000 Hour Rule’, based on a study by Anders Ericsson. He shows that success in any field is largely due to practicing a specific task for around 10,000 hours.

If this is so, then perhaps our biggest mistake is to believe success is SOLELY the result of our intelligence, ambition, and hard work.

If you want to be great at anything, you have to do the practice. Even Bill Gates met the 10,000 Hour Rule when he gained access to a high school computer in 1968 at 13 yo and reportedly practice programming on it for 10,000 hours.

Florida State University psychology professor Anders Ericsson agrees this is one of the keys to success, what he calls “deliberate practice”—a “lifelong period of . . . effort to improve performance in a specific domain”.

You can spend decades running a few miles each day, banging on the piano for twenty minutes each morning, or speaking a language for a few hours in a class, and you might end up ‘Okay’.

But if you want to be great, exceptional…a real success, it's much more a matter of purposeful, focused practice, which may take decades to clock up those 10,000 hours.

GREAT = TEN THOUSAND hours of FOCUSED PRACTICE … added to your smarts, gifts, commitment, determination, and hard work.

Dan Pink suggests these 5 Steps to Mastery. Follow these steps—over and over again and you’ll get there quicker:

1. Have an objective to improve performance
“Deliberate practice is about changing your performance, setting new goals, and straining yourself to reach a bit higher each time”, according to Ericsson. He reminds us, “People who play tennis once a week for years don’t get any better if they do the same thing each time”.

2. Repeat, repeat, repeat
Repetition matters. Basketball greats don’t shoot ten free throws at the end of team practice; they shoot hundreds of times each day.

3. Seek a constant, constructive feedback
General praise such as, “you’re doing great”, doesn’t help you improve. Seek specifics. If you don’t know how you’re doing, you won’t know what to improve.

4. Focus on what you need to improve
While many of us work on what we’re already good at, says Ericsson, “those who get better, work on their weaknesses”..

5. Be prepared for mental and physical exhaustion
Learning is making new connections in the brain. It’s not a leisurely stroll in the park. It’s working yourself past your previous capacity – stretching that capacity. You should be feeling a mental or physical stretch. This is tiring. That’s why so few people commit to it, but that’s why it works.

Ask anyone who’s trained for a marathon, learned a new language, or run a successful business and they will tell you they spend a lot more time slogging through tough tasks and much less enjoying the rewards.

So keep yourself motivated, at the end of each day, ask yourself,
❓Did I do more?
❓Did I do it well?
❓Did I learn what I committed to learning?
❓Did I complete the challenge I set?
❓Did I make those calls I promised I would?
❓Did I eat those five servings of fruits and vegetables?
❓Did I write those four pages?.

Remember that what you focus on grows. Don’t focus on what you didn’t do, because you will only strengthen that.

Look for small measures of improvement. Reminding yourself that you can’t be a master by day 3, but you can in 3,000 days if you improve each day.

Don’t look for perfection, but before you go to sleep each night, ask yourself the small question:
❓ Was I better today than yesterday? ❓