7 Secrets Top Athletes Can Teach You About Being the Best at Anything
We'd all like to be better at what is most important to us. Top athletes know the secrets to constant improvement but most of us don't hang out with gold medalists or top coaches and we're not familiar with the sports research. So I called a guy who is. David Epstein is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Sports Gene Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance. It's an excellent read whether you're a sports fan or not and covers a lot of the science on how we can get better at anything. In this post you'll learn, And a lot more. Let's get to it. You get told you don't have natural talent at something. Or you're not smart enough. Not fast enough. So you get discouraged and quit. But new research is showing some abilities don't make themselves visible until challenges get hard enough. Here's David, There's a new factor in sports research called "trainability." Some people may not have natural talent but they may be highly trainable. They start out below average but improve far faster. When we measure these people on day one they get told they "don't have it." But after a few weeks or months they're blowing away the so-called naturals. The lesson? Hang in there. For more on what the most successful people do that makes them great, click here., So talent's not as big an issue as you may have thought. But where should you focus your energy?, What do prodigies have in common? Ellen Winner at Boston College calls it the "rage to master." It's an insatiable desire to get better at something specific. Here's David, We think of prodigies as little miracle kids. And yeah, when you look at tests of working memory they score off the charts. But that's the only metric they all have in common. So they don't have completely alien super-brains. A huge part of why they're so good is they found the thing they had natural talent for and relentlessly applied themselves. And that's something we can all do. Here's David, To learn how you can go from dreaming to doing, click here., So you know what you're passionate about and you're working hard. What's the best way to get started? You'll be surprised, When did you learn the most and learn the fastest? There's no debate it's when you were a baby. You didn't get clear instructions from anybody on anything and yet you learned some of the most complex things in the world, like walking and talking. This process "implicit learning" isn't just for babies. We're often too focused on executing very specific steps and so we don't take the time to fumble around and make mistakes like when we were kids. As adults we think we don't have time for it but it's one of the reasons we don't learn as well as when we were little. Here's David, And it's not just speculation. Research with young surgeons is showing the power of learning like a baby. Here's David, To learn about grit and resilience from a Navy SEAL, click here., What's the main question you should be asking yourself when trying to improve?, In The Sports Gene, David tells the story of what happened when top baseball batters went up against a female softball pitcher. Join over 161,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts, How To Stop Being Lazy And Get More Done  5 Expert Tips, 6 Things The Most Productive People Do Every Day, New Harvard Research Reveals A Fun Way To Be More Successful