From Val’s space, Thanks. http://zakxu.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!746D3A02D93DC7FE!420.entry

Specially agree on the 10-year rule and "practice makes perfect".

==================================

What it takes to be great—notes

Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work

Talent doesn’t mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It’s an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well. (Golf champ Tiger Woods never stopped trying to improve when he begin to play golf at 3 years old.)

No substitute for hard work

Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule.

Practice makes perfect

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call "deliberate practice." It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

The skeptics

Not all researchers are totally onboard with the myth-of-talent hypothesis, though their objections go to its edges rather than its center.

Real-world examples

Winston Churchill, one of the 20th century’s greatest orators, practiced his speeches compulsively. Vladimir Horowitz supposedly said, "If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don’t practice for three days, the world knows it."

The business side

Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations, deciphering financial statements – you can practice them all.

Adopting a new mindset

You aren’t just doing the job, you’re explicitly trying to get better at it in the larger sense.

Feedback is crucial, do everything you can get the feedback.

Be the Ball

Through the whole process, one of your goals is to build what the researchers call "mental models of your business" – pictures of how the elements fit together and influence one another. The more you work on it, the larger your mental models will become and the better your performance will grow.