Anything? When you set at to improve your skills in some domain, there will always be domain-specific techniques and approaches that should follow. However whatever you decide to improve at, there will be common principles that apply. Whether your goal is to become good at mathematics, at lifting weights, at coding, at controlling your emotions, at making money, many lessons from one domain will apply to another.
What is your goal? The most basic question is what you’re trying to achieve and why. This is important because having this in mind will focus and motivate you. You need to ask yourself:
What specifically am I trying to do or learn?
Why am I doing this, and is it for the right reasons? Is this a worthy goal?
What will be the tangible life benefit when I succeed?
What sacrifices am I willing to make — am I serious about this?
Is this goal realistic?
What will I need to do to achieve this?
What will be your process? Determining how you will go about your goal is an iterative process. Your process determines your success. This will be the primary focus of this article.
Set Your Expectations
Set your expectations: Probably what you are trying to achieve is difficult. You need to enter into this process with this expectation in mind.
Expectations and motivation: A primary reason that people lose motivation and fail is that they assume that they will improve or see results at an unrealistic pace. When your progress fails to meet this expectation, you may conclude: I’m not good enough, I’m not smart enough, I don’t have natural talent, I should try something else. People tend to have both:
An overly pessimistic view of what is possible with hard work.
An overly optimistic view of what will be required to achieve their goals.
It will be challenging: Almost any worthy goal will be challenging, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience in goal-oriented behavior. You need to work under the assumption that:
It will be hard.
It will not seem like you are making any progress, and actually you may realize that your skills are worse than you thought.
It will seem like others are able to achieve the same things with far less effort.
You will experience significant setbacks.
You will devote substantial effort and seem to experience no tangible results.
Mindset: You need to internalize these expectations in order to maintain your motivation. You must expect all of these things will happen so that when you experience them, you will realize that nothing is necessarily wrong with your approach. You’re doing great! But improving is hard though, much harder than you realized perhaps.
The illusion of a lack of progress: Not seeing results does not mean your are not making progress. Iterating on your process, putting in time, experiencing failure and setback is the progress. It is a mistake to only judge your progress by the results it yields. You need to be process-oriented rather than result-oriented. If your process is fundamentally sound, you will make progress over time. Your focus should be on improving your process, not on whether or not you obtained the short-term results that you wanted.
Comparison to others: You may have heard: “Never compare your chapter 1 to someone else’s chapter 20.” When you see someone far ahead of you, you usually don’t have a view into the path that led them to this point.
Bias in observation: Usually people aren’t in a hurry to show you their failures and embarrassments! When you observe others, you’re really only going to view their successes and very few of their failures. And this will make it appear like the path to success is just a long string of escalating wins. For every win you see, there is a large set of invisible failures that you will never see — but they are always there.
The portrayed narrative of others’ lives: And it is only natural for people to portray their story in this way! Who doesn’t want to be seen as the champion? Who doesn’t want to be the person who got everything they wanted — who was so talented that they never saw a setback? Even people who have achieved a lot still may feel insecure about their position and are worried about how they are perceived. While you are comparing yourself to them, they are comparing themselves to others with even loftier individuals that make them feel like failures too.
Time and linearity: The story of other peoples success may be a lot longer and less linear than you realize. For me personally I made a very conscious decision that I wanted to become excellent at academics when in the year 2001. This is almost 23 years ago at this point! I scored 55% in my final yearly examination in grade 7. Our classes were ranked A, B, C, D, etc. I was put into the F class in grade 8. I think there was only 1 class below that. And it would be been easy for me to assume that I was stupid, and that I should try something else. But really I did poorly because I had absolutely no idea what I was doing or how to approach academics. I spend the next several years in high school, slowly climbing up the ranks. From F to D to B by my final year. And really, I didn’t start to stand out until about 2009, 8 years and thousands of hours later. Fast forward to 2019 and I completed a doctorate in applied mathematics as the top student, a full 18 years after I started my journey.
Say that you had scored 55% in grade 7. Likely you scored better than I did. What conclusions would you have drawn from this? Would you have stopped trying?
And now think of where you are now, and imagine how much can change in 10 or 20 years time. Imagine how different the outcomes can be based on what conclusions you draw from your own experiences, and what you ultimately decide to do.
Don’t make decisions based on noise: When your have a result-oriented mindset, it is easy to draw overly strong and incorrect conclusions from a short-term setbacks. Maybe you didn’t get the job you wanted. Does this failure reveal something that is wrong with your process or was it just bad luck? You need to carefully decide what lessons you can and cannot draw from your experiences. You need to distinguish very carefully between what you know (or know with relative certainty) and what you suspect (but really don’t have enough evidence to conclude).
Lessons you can learn, conclusions you can make: Maybe this setback provokes some introspection on your process. So maybe you were overly nervous and you felt like you couldn’t demonstrate your understanding of a topic. This is the kind of conclusion that it safer to draw. You know you felt nervous, and you know that it impacted your abilities. What other aspects of your preparation have gone better? What other aspects or your performance were you unhappy with and wish to improve? Maybe you couldn’t sleep the night before and your energy was low and your thoughts unclear. How are you going to make sure that you avoid these mistakes next time you interview?
Conclusions that you cannot make without more data: Maybe you believe that the interviewer didn’t like you, that you didn’t have great chemistry? Maybe you’re just bad at communication? “I need to be more likeable!” But really it can be very hard to determine these kinds of things — Most people overestimate how much they can deduce about how and what people think. You could be right, but really you don’t know. If you felt that way, it is good to write this thought down and think about it in future. Ideally you would get direct feedback from the interviewer if you can get it! But it would be a mistake to take a suspicion from a single data point, and conclude that you need to totally change your entire approach based on this. The interviewer might have just had a baby, and was tired — The problem might be on their end! You need to slowly collect data over time to make this kind of conclusion. If you’re consistently getting the same feedback that your interpersonal communication is at fault, then you have more certainty that this is a problem and you need to change your approach.
Your Process
You must have a process: It is very important to decide on an approach to improvement.
Iterate: It’s very unlikely that the approach that you initially chose will be the best one. You need to constantly re-evaluate your process over time. Ask yourself: