When You Don’t Get Better with Repetition

Remember how they always say that you get better with reputation? Do you think this is true all the time? What about if you keep repeating something wrong over and over and you get 10% improvement instead of 30%?

This how all started. I was reading Great at Work the other day, and the following paragraph caught my attention:

Top performers did less and more: less volume of activities, more concentrated effort. This insight overturns much conventional thinking about focusing that urges you to choose a few tasks to prioritize. Choice is only half of the equation—you also need to obsess. This finding led us to reformulate the “work scope” practice and call it “do less, then obsess.”

Hansen, Morten T. Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More (pp. 5-6). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition

And then this ...

 

Power of One: Pick one and only one skill at a time to develop. It’s hard to master a skill if you’re also working on ten others.

Hansen, Morten T. Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More (p. 75). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Let me try to digest that with something I am trying to excel at which is writing and drawing (you would figure this out by reading this blog 😅)

If I want to be a better writer, should I read more books or take two paragraphs that I like and study them word by word? (Got this tip from Safi Bahcall)

If I want to better at drawing, do I entirely focus on how small details make a difference or should I keep copying tons of illustrations without being fully in the moment?

What’s this process even called? Exploration? Awareness? Attention? Focus? And when this process should be applied? In the beginning or half-way through the learning process?

 

I don't know the answer to that, but it's something I am trying to figure out.

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