six keys to achieving excellence

The six keys to achieving excellence we've found are most effective for our clients:

1. - Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.

2. - Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great
performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of
practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That's when most of us have the most energy and
the fewest distractions.

3. - Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a
break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of
focus to any given activity.

The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than4 ½ hours a day.


4. - Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more
equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create
cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.


5. - Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to
rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It's also during rest that the right hemisphere
becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.


6. - Ritualized  practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeisterhas
found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you'll take on difficult tasks is to
ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them
without having to squander energy thinking about them.

Source:
Tony Schwartz is the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of Be Excellent at Anything. Become a fan of The Energy Project on Facebook and connect with Tony at Twitter.com/TonySchwartzand Twitter.com/Energy_Project.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/08/six_keys_to.html