One of the greatest miracles we witness is the growth of children. From the newborn stage, where they are completely dependent on their parents for survival, the growth accelerates by the day. By the time they reach 8 years of age, not only can they walk and talk, but even understand and express complex expressions and write sentences. The pace of learning is so fast that an 8-year-old can learn around 3,000 words per year.
But something changes from this point on. As we get older, the pace of growth slows down, and even stagnate or reverses for some. What is it that a child knows but we forget as we get older?
Is it merely a matter of practice or there’s more at play here? And, above all, are there any exceptions that we can learn from?
Mastery: A Mindset, Not a Miracle
Before 2008, the professional cycling team of Great Britain was the definition of mediocrity. Since 1908, British cyclists had won just one gold medal at the Olympic Games. It was even worse in Tour de France, one of cycling’s biggest events, with no British cyclist having won in 110 years.
In fact, things were so bad that one of the top bike manufacturers in Europe even refused to sell bikes to the team, afraid that it would hurt sales if others saw the Brits using their gear.
But everything was about to change. The governing body of the British cycling team had planted a tree in 2003, which was about to give fruits, starting with the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
In 2003, Dave Brailsford was hired as the new performance director. And while the ultimate goal remained the same, to get the team to the pinnacle, his philosophy was different, which he referred to as “the aggregation of marginal gains.” This approach was like first principles, in which, he tells, “The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”
Brailsford and the coaches first left no stone unturned, making small improvements to not just usuals like the comfort level of bike seats, tire grip, and aerodynamics of racing suits, but even often overlooked areas. They tested different massage gels for the fastest muscle recovery, got pillow and mattress for best sleep for each cyclist, and even made sure no dust was present in the team’s freight truck that could degrade the performance of bikes.
As all such hundreds of 1% gains accumulated, the result turned out to be far better than anyone could have imagined. Within 5 years of this new practice regime, the British Cycling team dominated the cycling events at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, winning 60% gold medals. Four years later, the bar was raised higher by the team as they set 9 Olympic records and 7 world records in the London Olympics.
The cyclists from this team next went on to dominate Tour de France, winning Tour de France 5 times in 6 years from 2012 to 2017. Over the ten years from 2007 to 2017, British cyclists won 178 world championships and 66 Olympic or Paralympic gold medals and captured 5 Tour de France victories in what is widely regarded as the most successful run in cycling history.
The world has always been blessed with high performers, pushing the boundaries of possibilities, from entrepreneurs to athletes. But such individuals are often regarded as “gifted” and their feats a “miracle.” Thankfully, the story of the British cycling team above tells us that we don’t need to borrow this assumption from the masses. There is indeed a method to mastery.
Feedback, Not Fear
Now imagine, how would have the story of the British cycling team turned out had its governing body dissolved itself due to a century led in shame earlier. Why did they not think of themselves as a failure and give up? There would have been no story of excellence for us to hear today!
But this is exactly what many people do upon facing a setback or “failure” in life. And this precisely is the secret that makes children better learners: they are free from any social pressure or bias.
As toddlers try to walk on two legs for the first time but fall again and again, do they give up? No! If they would have done so, all adults would have grown up as knee-walkers. All that children care about is learning to walk, not about “success” or “failure.” Their minds are free from these limiting concepts.
But as they enter schools and grow older, they learn something new. The education system starts grading their performance, marking every mistake as a failure, and sometimes even treating them badly for lower marks. As you saw earlier in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, “sense of belonging and love” is a basic human need, and when a mistake threatens this need, the children start looking at mistakes as the end of the world. A fear for mistakes sets in, and the learning spirit dies. Eventually, they start giving up after a few mistakes, considering it a failure, a dead end.
To become a world-class performer at any task, we need to change this mindset. We need to become a child again. Start looking at mistakes as feedback, not something to fear. Each mistake tells us that something in our process is not working, and we need to improve that. In a way, each mistake, no matter how small, is an opportunity for improvement.
Our mistakes are the greatest teacher.
A true teacher, who guides us by feedback, not fear. And when we start learning from mistakes and making 1% improvements, some magic happens.
The “Eighth Wonder”
Albert Einstein once said, “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn't … pays it.”
Both Apple and Amazon, some of the biggest companies today, were non-existent a century ago. Their founders made them what they are within one lifetime, starting from scratch. How do you think this was possible?
Often, we think that great results need great effort. We overestimate the effort behind our life goals but underestimate the value of small actions we can take towards them every day. The beauty of small actions, these 1% improvements, is that while they may be unnoticeable in a silo, they lead to huge results when put together.
Here’s the underlying math: If you get 1% better each day for a year, you’ll be 37X better by the end, whereas getting 1% worse each day would leave you at almost 0X!
What you repeat gets compounded. There’s both bad and good news in this:
Bad news: Occasional improvements don’t matter if overall you are getting worse by the day, like being indecisive, unpunctual, and a liar
Good news: Occasional slips don’t matter either, as long as you make improvements more often than getting worse
If you look around, the effects can be spotted easily. Small differences in choices made every day, which seem to not matter in the short term, lead people on different trajectories in the long term, and a few years down the line, these people end up in completely different situations. So, what can we do to get better?
Practice. Deliberate Practice!
Have you ever tried tying shoelaces? Do you need to think about it consciously, or do your hands move automatically?
People often overvalue outcomes, success & failure matter to them more than learning, as trained by society. But the problem is that the more you focus on future results, the less present you become in the process. You fall for mindless activity.
In mindless activity, the actions are automatic. And when your “practice” is based on mindless activity, you repeat what you have always done, and thus also end up reinforcing your mistakes. The opportunity for improvement is overlooked, just like in the case of tying shoelaces over years of repetition. Such a person cannot improve even if they practice for 10,000 hours. Naturally, mastery demands otherwise.
For mastery, your practice needs focus. It might sound easy but is often the difference between world-class performers and everyone else. It is easy to focus on your mistakes and find improvement opportunities for a day, or even a month, but slowly you start slipping. You get comfortable. And comfort is the enemy of progress.
Walk the path of deliberate practice.
Be methodical in your approach. Commit to the process. Practice like the British cycling team, always making 1% gains. Remember, “what gets measured gets improved.”
Here are the steps to deliberate practice by psychologist Anders Ericsson:
Specific goal: Have a short-term target for each practice session
Intense focus: Set sessions of optimum length to stay focused (mostly 20 min – 50 min). If you wish to practice for longer, break the period into multiple sessions with short breaks in between
Immediate feedback: Check what works and what doesn't within each session
Frequent discomfort: Push the limits frequently
If you break down any life goal with the deliberate practice system, no goal is too big. Remember, failure is when you stop improving.