The Way to Mastery

The week before summer vacation, my guitar teacher requested his students to practice playing guitar three hours daily during the vacation. They should do it in three different time of the day with one hour each time to improve the efficiency.

“Three hours a day? That is impossible”, complained one student.

“I already have difficulties to practice one hour per day now”, said the other.

My guitar teacher smiled and asked: “Do you know how long I practice when I started guitar lessons at age of four?”

He paused and waited for the reaction of his students. They were quiet and curious to learn what their teacher has to say.

“Four hours a day, at age of four.” He emphasized his age.

The students who complained felt ashamed, but were still reluctant to commit the three hours.

The teacher continued: “Four hours a day is just for the beginning. After some experiences my practicing time increased to eight hours a day.”

“Waw.” The students opened the mouths and eyes wildly.

“After some more experiences I increased my practicing time to twelve hours a day.”

By that time I realize how my guitar teacher can work 16 hours with a regular job at the government institute and a full time guitar teaching job.

The room was filled with silence. No one was able to make any tone. The teacher went on: “I know you all want to play the instrument well. You want to make a difference in your life. And you want to have fun playing it. However, any remarkable achievement is tightly linked with efforts and persistence, some times with pain and suffering. This is the way of mastery, maybe the only way.”

How to Become Smarter?

I seldom receive any SMS (short messages via mobile phone), so I was positively surprised to get an SMS from a friend asking: “How can I become smarter?”

This is a really good question and my immediate reaction was: “Read a lot, talk often to smarter people and take on challenging assignments.” After responded the SMS, I thought it might helpful to find some examples.

Read a lot books. My daughter Sophia is very smart. I believe that the key reason for her smartness was that she read a lot books during the early years. She could finish reading a book within one a two days. And she already read thousands of books.

Talk to smart people. I knew some self improvement trainers often interviewed hundreds of top people to get insights how those people are successful. Afterwards they become star trainers, because they unconsciously apply the methods they learned from the interview for their daily work and life.

Take on challenging assignment. There are people who were not particularly smart from their scores at the school or at the university. But they are keen to be successful in their professional life. So they create their own business or apply for challenge jobs. Since the job is so demanding, they have to work enormous amount of time, meet and resolve unbelievable problems. Afterwards, they are able to respond sharply and quickly to any challenges.

Smartness is less a question of genes, but a question of deliberate practice.