Table of Contents
You have to master the primary key skills needed to win in your primary fields of interest. Mastery of key skills has long been associated with better productivity and performance at both macro and individual levels. Increased skill is often the goal of educational and economic policy because it tends to promote increased economic growth. Skill is also considered the silver bullet for individual workers, since those with deeper skills typically earn higher incomes and experience greater work satisfaction. That’s not always the case, though. Skilled workers are sometimes undermined by bad strategy, leadership, job design, or human resource practices. We all know someone who had a lot of skills but wasn’t given a chance at work.
Determine Your Key Skills
One thing is certain that not having the requisite skills to reach success in your field is a serious deficit. Without greater skill acquisition, there’s no progress in your career, so it’s essential that you identify the major skills you need to develop so you can win today and in the future.
When we say “skill,” we often mean a broad range of knowledge and capabilities that allow you to perform adequately in any given area. General skills might include communication, problem-solving, systems thinking, project management, teamwork, and conflict management. There are also specific skills for any given task or company, such as coding, video production, finance, and computational skills. And, of course, there are personal skills such as self-control, resilience, and other forms of emotional intelligence.
Action plan: The goal for you is to determine the five key skills you need to develop over the next three years to grow into the person you hope to become.
Growth Mindset
One principle lies at the heart of this effort: Everything is trainable. No matter what skill you want to learn, with enough training and practice and intention, you can become more proficient at it. If you don’t believe this, your journey to high performance stops here. Perhaps the three best findings of contemporary research tell us that you can get better at practically anything if you keep a growth mindset (the belief that you can improve with effort), focus on your goals with passion and perseverance, and practice with excellence.
When people say, “I can’t,” it’s usually code for “I am unwilling to do the long-term training and conditioning necessary to achieve that.” Remember: Everything is trainable.
“I believe the true road to preeminent success in any line is to make yourself master in that line.” – Andrew Carnegie
Progressive Mastery Concept
Whenever you want to master a skill, you have two choices: You can hope to develop that skill with some practice and repetition, or you can ensure that you become world-class in that skill through progressive mastery. The concept of progressive mastery is very different from how most people approach skill development. Most people get interested in an idea, try it a few times, and gauge whether they are “good” at it. If they are not good, they chalk it up to a lack of natural ability or talent. At this point, most quit. And those who carry on think they have to use brute repetition to get better, hoping that simply by doing a thing enough times, they will become proficient and progress.
For example, let’s imagine you want to get good at swimming. If you’re like most people, you’ll get some guidance from someone who already knows how to swim. Then you’ll start swimming. You’ll swim more and more, hoping to increase your stamina and speed. You’ll just keep getting in the pool over and over and trying to improve. You imagine that time in the pool is the secret to becoming a better swimmer.
This, it turns out, is one of the least effective ways to master a skill. Repetition rarely leads to high performance. And that’s why it’s important to understand “progressive mastery.”
Steps to Progressive Mastery
These are the steps to progressive mastery:
- Determine a skill that you want to master.
- Set specific stretch goals on your path to developing that skill.
- Attach high levels of emotion and meaning to your journey and your results.
- Identify the factors critical to success, and develop your strengths in those areas (and fix your weaknesses).
- Develop visualizations that clearly imagine what success and failure look like.
- Schedule challenging practices developed by experts or through careful thought.
- Measure your progress and get outside feedback.
- Socialize your learning and efforts by practicing or competing with others.
- Continue setting higher-level goals so that you keep improving.
- Teach others what you are learning.
Let’s see how these principles will make you a better swimmer much more quickly than mere repetition ever could. Instead of just jumping into the pool once in a while and trying to get better, what if you tried this:
- You determined that you specifically wanted to develop your skill as a freestyle swimmer. (You decided you weren’t going to mess with the backstroke, breaststroke, or butterfly.)
- You set goals for how fast and efficiently you entered the water, swam a lap, executed a turn, and finished your last ten meters.
- Before every practice, you reminded yourself why it was so important for you to get better at this, and you talked about your goals with someone who cared about your performance. Maybe your why is to get fitter, win a swimming competition.
- You determined that a critical factor to success was your ability to work your hips efficiently in the water and that your major weakness was a lack of finishing stamina.
- Every night, you visualized the perfect race, imagining in detail how you would move through the water, kick off the turn, power through fatigue, go for it in the last few strokes.
- You worked with an expert swim coach who could give you regular feedback and who helped you design harder and harder practices to reach higher and higher goals.
- You measured your progress in a journal every time you swam, and reviewed the journal, looking for insights on your performance.
- You consistently swam with people you really enjoyed swimming with, and you entered competitions so that you could face better swimmers than you.
- After every swim session, you set higher goals for the next session.
- Once per week, you formally mentored another swimmer on your team or taught a swim class at the local community center.
Can you see how this approach would lead to much better results than just hopping into a pool and trying to get better? Even if you spent exactly the same number of hours in the pool, these principles would help you outperform mindless repetition. (Inspired from “High Performance Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That Way” by Brendon Burchard)
