8 Things the Most Successful People Do That Make Them Great

...you need to align your effort with the way your brain was designed to learn.

Hours are vital but you can get to mastery faster — much faster — by practicing the right way.

TIME Magazine | 11 April 2014

You want to be stretched to the edge of your ability. It needs to be hard. That’s how your brain grows.

We learn when we’re in our discomfort zone. When you’re struggling, that’s when you’re getting smarter. The more time you spend there, the faster you learn. It’s better to spend a very, very high quality ten minutes, or even ten seconds, than it is to spend a mediocre hour. You want to practice where you are on the edge of your ability, reaching over and over again, making mistakes, failing, realizing those mistakes and reaching again.

Keep the “Rule of Two-Thirds” in mind. Spend only one third of your time studying.

 

The other two-thirds of your time you want to be doing the activity. Practicing. Testing yourself.

The closer your practice is to the real thing, the faster you learn.

Our brains evolved to learn by doing things, not by hearing about them. This is one of the reasons that, for a lot of skills, it’s much better to spend about two thirds of your time testing yourself on it rather than absorbing it. There’s a rule of two thirds. If you want to, say, memorize a passage, it’s better to spend 30 percent of your time reading it, and the other 70 percent of your time testing yourself on that knowledge.

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