During the last few days I found myself wanting to hold on to this time of introspection and solitude, reveling in the wonderful calm between the old year and the new. Greedily, I wanted for these days to go on forever!
This morning however, looking out of my window into the fresh sunlight of a bright Californian day, I noticed a slight shift and the excitement of anticipation that started to creep in. Wow, a new year! Starting afresh! And I knew that I was ready to move on and welcome the New Year and the many adventures and opportunities it will most certainly bring!
Wishing you a wonderful and exhilarating 2009! Enjoy life, feel good about yourself and go for what you want!
~Karin
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Today I want to share an inspirational thought with you by Coaching Maven and CoachVille CEO, Dave Buck:
“The current economy is based on creating and selling STUFF in mass quantities to people who are thought of as ‘consumers’. Well, this model is crumbling because people everywhere are rising in consciousness.
The more conscious you become, the less stuff you desire. You become less and less a consumer, and more and more a creator.
What you desire is to create your life with joyful and fulfilling experiences that contribute to the lives of others; is more about fulfilling experience and less about accumulating stuff. Yes, you will still desire a few nice things, but even those things will be based on beauty and meaning over quantity. This is what I have called: The Inspiration Economy.”
Wow, what a great statement!
In today’s world people are cought in the neverending chase of wanting more and more stuff only to realize that when they get it, it was not really it! It was just another car, another meal, another pair of jeans. By the end of the day the real question remains: What is it you truly need? What makes you deeply happy? Once that question is answered, you may not want very much.
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Today I want to share with you an article by Michael Neill, The Genius Catalyst, that fits right in with learning and mastering a new craft:
In Malcolm Gladwell’s fascinating new book Outliers, he quotes research by Dr. Daniel Levitin into the amount of practice it takes to achieve world-class expert status in whatever field you happen to be involved in.
In Levitin’s own words:
… ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert — in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is the equivalent to roughly three hours per day, or twenty hours per week, of practice over ten years. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people don’t seem to get anywhere when they practice, and why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.
In researching this further online, I came across this fantastic blog entry by David Seah:
What to Do? Just Do!
Starting first with that 10,000 hours of practice: I’d had a similar thought about leveling-up abilities based on a magnitude-of-10 hour scale:
- at 1 hour … you know some basics
- at 10 hours … you have a pretty good grasp of the basics
- at 100 hours … you are fairly expert
- at 1000 hours … you are an experienced expert
- at 10000 hours … you are a master
I originally got this idea when reading about pilots, who seem to always mention how many hours of flight time they’ve logged. Hours of experience are a good metric, and I’ve noticed that this pattern seems to recur (up to 100 hours, anyway) for me. It’s not always exactly this many hours, but as an order-of-magnitude analysis it holds true.
While 10,000 hours over 10 years is a daunting proposition, consider this:
- 1000 hours is pretty doable. That’s a little less than a year of full-time work.
- 100 hours is even more achievable…you could do that over a few months on the side, or just slam through it in a very intense couple of weeks.
- Even spending 10 hours practicing something is going to make you significantly better at it. If you spent 10 hours practicing one song, or learning how to juggle, or learning how to bowl strikes…you’re going to learn something.
- One hour? That’s worthwhile too. You could spend an hour writing your signature over and over again to make it cooler. I’ve done that at least a couple of times in my life.
While breaking down the 10,000 hours to mastery in this way can certainly make it seem less daunting, another distinction I have found useful in this arena comes from motivator Anthony Robbins, who recounts his experience of booking himself out as a speaker 3 times a day to anyone who would listen. As Robbins says in the book Awaken the Giant Within.
While others in my organization had 48 speaking engagements a year, I would have a similar number within two weeks. Within a month, I’d have two years of experience. And within a year, I’d have a decade’s worth of growth. My associates talked about how “lucky” I was to have been born with such an “innate” talent. I tried to tell them what I’m telling you now: mastery takes as long as you want it to take.
When someone tells me “I can’t draw well”, or “I’m no good at sports”, or “I’m not a natural writer”, I invariably ask them “how many hours have you spent practicing?” It is very rare indeed that the answer is anywhere near 100 hours, let alone 10,000. The implication is that their apparent lack of skill is usually less a function of a lack of anything on the inside than it is a reflection of a lack of time and effort spent on the outside.
For me, the point of all this is not to give up on something you’d love to do because you’re apparently not very good at it. Almost any worthy goal will succumb to an investment of time - and time is the one commodity that we all have in equal abundance!
Today’s Experiment:
1. Think of a complex skill you have mastered in the course of your lifetime.
Example: Playing skills (chess, a musical instrument, or a sport); Work related skills (coaching, teaching, brain surgery, etc.); Language skills (learning French, Russian, HTML, etc.)
2. Make a “best guess” as to how many hours you put in between your initial interest in the skill and your relative mastery of it. Over what period of time did you put in those hours?
Example: 250 hours over 1 year, 100 hours over 8 years, 1000 hours in 3 months, etc.
3. Now, choose a skill or project that you are currently working on, and make a “best guess” as to how many hours you have put in to it so far, and how many more hours you will need to put in to get where you want to go.
Example: I’ve put in 60 hours so far; I probably need to spend at least that much time again to get to the level I want to reach.
4. By when would you like to have completed your project or mastered your skill?
A simple calculation will tell you how many hours you need to put in each day, week, month, or year to get where you want to go in the time frame you want to get there.
Copyright © 2008 Michael Neill. All Rights Reserved
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Create A Project
If you read last week’s post and made your list of things you love to do, or talked to your friends and family about your gifts and talents, you probably got a good idea by now what it is that you want to do. Welcome to the project stage of starting your own business!
To get going, select a few things from your list that you can turn into a project. This can be anything from throwing a dinner party (you love entertaining and/or cooking) to starting a blog, finding a husband, writing a book, learning how to make jewelry, or anything else that you are interested in. It does not matter how crazy your idea, if you are curious about it, it passes. Chances are, whatever you love doing, somebody is already making a living doing it.
The important part about this stage is to take immediate action! Have you ever noticed how easy it is to get distracted from a great idea? If you don’t take action right away, the idea fades into the background until you forget about it all together. So do it, now!
Another crucial point is to take simple, easy steps. Time and again I have seen people get so overwhelmed with starting a business that they never take the first step. Be aware of this! Also, notice the voices in your head going like this: “Oh, this will probably never work, or, there are already so many people out there doing this, or, I am not good at this, or, I need to get a degree/certification/credit before I can start.” It’s your fear talking. Don’t listen and keep going!
Back to your project. Let’s use an example. Say your friend invited you to an evening of palm reading. You went to check it out and you fell in love with it (There is an institute for this, The International Institute of Hand Analysis). Voila, you have a project.
Every good project has a beginning, a middle and an end as well as a time line.
- Part One: Find out more about Palmistry. Search the internet, read books, find blogs, take sessions with a palm reader, get to know other palm readers, etc. As a time line you can set three or four weeks for this stage.
- Part Two: Learn your craft. Attend classes or seminars, connect with other, like-minded people or put together classes for a professional palm reader. You can also create a website or start your own blog on the subject. Depending on the learning curve, part two may take several weeks or even months. In my experience, you’ll never feel quite ready to move on, so don’t spend too much time here. You will always keep learning.
- Part Three: Put together your own small session or seminar. This can be as simple as asking a friend to organize a palm reading evening at her house, offering a class at a community center, or doing single finger print readings. At this point you start charging a small fee for your service.
These steps are simple examples of how you can go about starting a project like learning a new craft. You can do this while having a job, working regular hours or taking care of your family. Simple as that!
How to stay on track: Life is designed to pull you off track! Here are a few ways to stay on course.
- Form a support team. Do you know other people who are working on a business or project? Set up weekly meetings to check in, set goals, report on progresses and to cheer each other on. This is invaluable!
- To do lists. Knowing what you are doing each day will help you to stay focused. Personally, I love writing my to do lists every night. Checking things off the next day will increase your drive and give you energy. Beware of being too hard on yourself. The list is a guideline, the project is a game. Have fun with it!
- Set weekly and daily goals. Again, this helps with staying focused and monitoring progress.
- Last, but not least, celebrate! Enjoy your project and celebrate your achievements. If you like, email me about it and lets celebrate together!
Photo Source: Certified Su via Flickr under a Creative Commons License
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