The Little Book of Talent

Half the subjects were told to announce their goals, while half were told to keep quiet. The subjects who announced their goals quit after only an average of thirty-three minutes, and reported feeling satis ed with their work. Those who kept their mouths shut, however, worked the entire forty- ve minutes, and remained strongly motivated. (In fact, when the experiment ended, they wanted to keep working.)
Telling others about your big goals makes them less likely to happen, because it creates an unconscious payo —tricking our brains into thinking we’ve already accomplished the goal. Keeping our big goals to ourselves is one of the smartest goals we can set.

TO BUILD HARD SKILLS, WORK LIKE A CAREFUL CARPENTER

A high percentage of top performers keeps some form of daily performance journal.

Napping is good for the learning brain, because it helps strengthen the connections formed during practice and prepare the brain for the next session.

Practice begins when you get it right.”

Rewind the mental tape and play the move again in your mind. Memorize the feeling, the rhythm, the physical and mental sensations. The point is to mark this moment— this is the spot where you want to go again and again. This is not the nish—it’s the new starting line for perfecting the skill until it becomes automatic.

ten to one is even better.

As the saying goes, “It’s not how fast you can do it. It’s how slowly you can do it correctly.”

Hey, Look at Me! re ex. This urge for speed makes perfect sense, but it can also create sloppiness, particularly when it comes to hard skills (see Tip #8).
We trade precision—and long-term performance—for a temporary thrill. So, slow it down.
Super-slow practice works like a magnifying glass: It lets us sense our errors more clearly, and thus x them.

be precise and measured. Go slowly. Make one simple move at a time, repeating and perfecting it before you move on. Pay attention to errors, and x them, particularly at the start. Learning fundamentals only seems boring—in fact, it’s the key moment of investment. If you build the right pathway now, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and trouble down the line.