Quotes About Mastery

There is nothing remarkable about it, all one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.

The man who never makes a mistake always takes orders from one who does.

The goal is always the same: to break a skill into its component pieces (circuits), memorize those pieces individually, then link them together in progressively larger groupings (new, interconnected circuits).

Kids, please don't try this at home. We're professionals.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art." —Leonardo Da Vinci

In the book The Dip, Seth Godin explains the importance and benefits of becoming the best in the world at what you do. As Godin explains in The Dip: "The rewards are heavily skewed, so much so that it's typical for #1 to get ten times the benefit of #10, and a hundred times the benefit of #100.

It would be many years before I began to understand that all of life is practice: writing, driving, hiking, brushing teeth, packing lunch boxes, making beds, cooking dinner, making love, walking dogs, even sleeping. We are always practicing. Only practicing.

Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. Plie, eleve, battement tendu. She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.

Even the most creative skills—especially the most creative skills—require long periods of clumsiness.

To sum up: it's time to rewrite the maxim that practice makes perfect. The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect.

Super-slow practice works like a magnifying glass: It lets us sense our errors more clearly, and thus fix them.

If you were to visit a dozen talent hotbeds tomorrow, you would be struck by how much time the learners spend observing top performers.

GIVE A NEW SKILL A MINIMUM OF EIGHT WEEKS

One does not become a master coach by accident.

Skills of proficiency are about doing a task the same way, every single time.

We think of effortless performance as desirable, but it's really a terrible way to learn

Many hotbeds use an approach I call the engraving method. Basically, they watch the skill being performed, closely and with great intensity, over and over, until they build a high-definition mental blueprint.

is for amateurs.

Ignition and deep practice work together to produce skill in exactly the same way that a gas tank combines with an engine to produce velocity in an automobile

Great teachers focus on what the student is saying or doing," he says, "and are able, by being so focused and by their deep knowledge of the subject matter, to see and recognize the inarticulate stumbling, fumbling effort of the student who's reaching toward mastery, and then connect to them with a targeted message.

As football coach Tom Martinez likes to say, "It's not how fast you can do it. It's how slow you can do it correctly." Second, going slow helps the practicer to develop something even more important: a working perception of the skill's internal blueprints—the shape and rhythm of the interlocking skill circuits.

As Vladimir Horowitz, the virtuoso pianist who kept performing into his eighties, put it, "If I skip practice for one day, I notice. If I skip practice for two days, my wife notices. If I skip for three days, the world notices.

No time plus no space equals better skills.