Training

He mentioned the factors you might expect: genetics, luck, talent. But then he said something I wasn’t expecting: “At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.”

The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily.

This is why the “bad” workouts are often the most important ones. Sluggish days and bad workouts maintain the compound gains you accrued from previous good days. Simply doing something is huge. Don’t put up a zero. Don’t let losses eat into your compounding.

Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way. Professionals know what is important to them and work toward it with purpose; amateurs get pulled off course by the urgencies of life.

Habits create the foundation for mastery. When you know the simple movements so well that you can perform them without thinking, you are free to pay attention to more advanced details.

To become great, certain skills do need to become automatic. But after one habit has been mastered, you have to return to the effortful part of the work and begin building the next habit.

What made him different from previous coaches was his relentless commitment to a strategy that he referred to as “the aggregation of marginal gains,” which was the philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do. “The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”

More precisely, your habits are how you embody your identity. When you make your bed each day, you embody the identity of an organized person. When you write each day, you embody the identity of a creative person. When you train each day, you embody the identity of an athletic person.

Each habit not only get results but also teaches you something far more important: to trust yourself. You start to believe you can actually accomplish these things. When the votes mount up and the evidence begins to change, the story you tell yourself begins to change as well.

Cus was a strong believer that in your mind you had to be the entity that you wanted to be. If you wanted to be heavyweight champion of the world, you had to start living the life of a heavyweight champion. I was only 14, but I was a true believer in Cus’s philosophy. Always training, thinking like a Roman gladiator, being in a perpetual state of war in your mind, yet on the outside seeming calm and relaxed.

Cus wouldn’t let me fail. When I felt like quitting and I got discouraged, he just kept on inspiring me. Cus would always say, “My job is to peel off layers and layers of damages that are inhibiting your true ability to grow and fulfill your potential.” He was peeling me and it hurt! I was screaming, “Leave me alone. Aarrgghh!” He tortured my mind. He’d see me sparring with an older guy and it was in my mind that I was tired and I wasn’t punching back at the guy, the guy was just bullying me, and Cus would talk to me about that, make me confront my fears. He was such a perfectionist. I’d be hitting the heavy bag with combinations and Cus would be standing there, watching.

He trained me to be totally ferocious, in the ring and out. At the time, I needed that. I was so insecure, so afraid. I was so traumatized from people picking on me when I was younger. I just hated the humiliation of being bullied. That feeling sticks with you for the rest of your life. It’s just such a bad, hopeless feeling. That’s why I always projected to the world that I was a mean, ferocious motherfucker. But Cus gave me the confidence so that I didn’t have to worry about being bullied ever again. I knew nobody was ever going to fuck with me physically.

No matter what any one says, no matter what the excuse or explanation, whatever a person does in the end is what he intended to do all along.

My boy’s business is to put big, strong, scary men in their place.

Cus was all about manipulation, psychological warfare. He believed that 90 percent of boxing was psychological and not physical. Will, not skill.

He thought that punching hard had nothing to do with anything physical, it was all emotional. Controlled emotion.

Besides watching old fight films, I devoured everything I could read on these great fighters. Soon after I moved in with Cus, I was reading the boxing encyclopedia and I started laughing reading about a champion who only held his title for a year. Cus looked at me with his cold piercing eyes and said, “A one-year championship is worth more than a lifetime of obscurity.”

When I started studying the lives of the great old boxers, I saw a lot of similarity to what Cus was preaching. They were all mean motherfuckers.

Practice is so hard that doing a lot of it requires people to arrange their lives in particular ways. The two top groups of violinists did most of their practicing in the late morning or early afternoon, when they were still fairly fresh. By contrast, violinists in the third group practiced mostly in the late afternoon, when they were more likely to be tired. The two top groups differed from the third group in another way: They slept more. They not only slept more at night, they also took far more afternoon naps. All that practicing seems to demand a lot of recovery.

Cristiano trains at least 3 times a day.

Yet what is even crazier is that he dedicates the remaining of his time to recovery. He naps 3 times a day — even after receiving 7 hours of sleep.

Cristiano’s schedule is the definition of the man who has dedicated himself to the beautiful game.

Comfort zone. Learning zone. Panic zone.

It’s designed specifically to improve performance.

It can be repeated a lot.

Feedback on results is continuously available.

It’s highly demanding mentally.

It isn’t much fun.

Step one, obvious yet deserving a moment’s consideration, is knowing what you want to do. The key word is not what, but knowing. Because the demands of achieving exceptional performance are so great over so many years, no one has a prayer of meeting them without utter commitment.

After a long and exhausting wrestling practice, and with no shortage of studying to do, it was tempting to hit the showers. But instead, after most workouts I would run two miles to get in top shape. I knew that if I didn’t discipline myself to make that extra effort, I wouldn’t be as competitive.

Wrestling taught me what every young person needs to learn at some point: discipline. I had to watch what I ate. I sometimes spent time in a rubber suit running around in the heat of the school’s boiler room. There were many moments when I’d be ready to toss it in and go off with friends to have a milkshake at the diner. But I kept at it for more than ten years.

Fear of public speaking is often cited as one of the more common fears that people have. My view of how to handle it is straightforward and parallels my attitude about a lot of difficult tasks: Just do it!

After a few weeks on the campaign trail, my wife, Joyce, and my campaign manager took me aside and told me the brutal truth: I was not a good public speaker. I put my hands in my pockets, they said. I looked at my notes more than at the audience. I spoke too closely to the microphone.

Very few of us are good at something when we first start out. We get better with practice. Joyce and Ned decided I needed to practice in an empty auditorium while they offered blistering words of criticism, which as you might imagine was not the most pleasant experience.

If you’re coasting, you’re going downhill.

Dad wrote that the decision to quit was my call. But he went on to say, “Once you quit one thing, then you can quit something else, and pretty soon you’ll get good at being a quitter.”

The worst possible meeting is when the person you are meets the person you could have been.

Knowledge is the beginning of practice; doing is the completion of knowing.

Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever. That surrender, even the smallest act of giving up, stays with me. So when I feel like quitting, I ask myself, which would I rather live with this?

When his crews were not flying missions, they were subjected to relentless training, as LeMay believed that training was the key to saving their lives. “You train as you fight” was one of his cardinal rules. It expressed his belief that, in the chaos, stress and confusion of combat (aerial or otherwise), troops or airmen would perform successfully only if their individual acts were second-nature, performed nearly instinctively due to repetitive training.

Dr. Taylor practiced her popular TED talk more than 200 times.

Athletes may imagine the successful completion of a physical task thousands of times before achieving it. This mental mapping ensures that when the body moves, it’s more likely to follow its pre-ordained path.

That’s a common problem in analysis of competitive games. A team will look way worse when they’re up against a better opponent.

They make far more mistakes because they are getting pressured or feel the need to do unusual things since their normal strategies don’t work.

Many people say that I’m a hard worker, but I wouldn’t be able to catch up with the younger players otherwise. When I first started my pro-gaming career, I was like 16-17. I was the youngest player on the team, but now I’m the oldest. It feels that I should lead the team both in and out of the game, so I tend to work harder.

Thankfully, the results correspond to my practice. If I don’t practice, I’m really bad. I’m so bad that the performance isn’t becoming of a pro gamer. But if I do practice hard, I get repaid for all the hard work. How much I’m proud of and respect myself depends on how much I practice. That’s one of the reasons why I keep trying hard.

I can’t sleep until I’m satisfied. You know, there’s that expression, “riding a bus” (to get carried). I can’t understand that. Maybe it’s because of my position. It doesn’t feel like winning if I “ride a bus.” This might be one of the reasons that I’ve been able to be active this long. Sometimes people say that I’m really strong; if I’m not, I wouldn’t be able to be in this spot today.

Always look at the other player’s nickname. There are lots of youtube channels that show master tier players dueling it out in a flashy manner, but those montages are all meaningless. Against better players, that duel wouldn’t have happened in the first place.

Một bạn trẻ có tài, trước tiên phải biết làm chuyện khó, thích làm chuyện khó. Nếu khả năng làm chuyện khó chưa có thì phải tập làm chuyện khó nhiều năm liền. Gian nan đo năng lực mỗi người.

“Thực tế, nhiều người rất ngại làm công việc khó, cứ thấy việc khó là né, đùn đẩy cho người khác. Nếu không thích làm chuyện khó thì làm sao có khả năng giải quyết vấn đề khi khởi nghiệp?. Làm chuyện khó là làm cả những việc trong gia đình, ngoài xã hội, ở công ty… bản thân mình phải là người thích làm chuyện khó thì Sếp mới giao những việc mới, việc khó hơn.

Khi làm chuyện gì mình phải toàn tâm, học được nhiều thì mình sẽ nhuần nhuyễn rồi mới tiến bộ. Còn ý tưởng hay thì ai chả có, 1 đống ý tưởng nhưng làm được hay không mới quan trọng.”

Their kids are behind, right from the first year of primary school, where kids from wealthier families start off already being able to read and write well, a gap that continues to grow over the years. Many develop a sense of inferiority and start to feel demoralized about going to school, the situation becoming “a self-fufilling prophecy that shapes learning behaviors.”

Practice. Practice. Practice. There’s a reason they’re called “social skills” and not “social gifts.”

There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.

No people in history have ever survived who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies.

You can dislike the one or the other, but you have to respect them, not because they are so successful, but because they care. Ronaldo cried after he lost a game and Messi didn’t talk to anyone after a defeat. That’s the kind of behavior I like to see.

Tập quán vẽ trong tưởng tượng, đấy là những việc các bạn cần phải luyện tập thường xuyên.

However, if I were ever to go back, I would choose not to. It was that difficult. As much as we accomplished, we worked just as much. Every movement and CS I would take gave me immense stress. But at the same time, due to everything we put in, I knew victory was ours. Right before the World Finals, we ate with Coach Kkoma. We were so certain we were going to win and I said, “It wouldn’t make sense if we lost. If we lose, it means God has abandoned us.”

After 2016, a very daunting thought came to mind. “If I keep living like this, I am going to die.” I even thought to myself “How long will I have to live like a machine for?”

A bar of iron costs $5, made into horseshoes its worth is $12, made into needles its worth is $3,500, made into balance springs for watches, its worth is $300,000. Your own value is determined also by what you are able to make of yourself.

You are terrible at this
That’s why I keep practicing
Others are much more successful than you
Those guys work hard. They inspire me
But you want to throw it all away and give up, right?
Oh, several times a day! But then I push on
I’m… trying to discourage you
Ha! My own brain says much worse stuff to me

Tennis players wise up faster. Many start the same way by “just doing it,” digging up a tolerant partner and smacking the ball back and forth. They usually don’t get very far that way. In the beginning especially, they spend more time chasing down wayward balls than hitting rallies. It soon dawns that they won’t improve much if they can’t even keep the ball in play.

Why, Irvin asked the Russian coach, did they do all that work on this exaggerated stroke? Because, came the answer, one of world champion Alexander Popov’s big advantages was his habit of always having one hand in front of his head to lengthen his body. So the coach wanted all of his freestylers to make that a habit too, and he knew it didn’t come naturally. They would simply have to make it natural, “burn it into the nervous system” by running that loop over and over for hours a day until each swimmer’s nervous system owned it.

Your most important task here is to learn the right way — patiently and mindfully — to practice all skill drills. Give yourself unlimited time to acquire effortless ease. You are not on a schedule to advance to Lesson Two. If you cultivate these attitudes and habits in Lesson One, your skills will be stronger and sounder at each subsequent stage.

Perhaps it’s because of the need to such fierce concentration on keeping your stroke efficient, with every lap feeling harder than the last. But whatever the reason, this race tests it all: your mental focus, the staying power of your efficiency, and the quality of your conditioning.

An essential insight for mastering any challenging skill is that every brief, but thrilling, spurt forward will be followed by a much longer plateau slightly higher than the previous one. True masters learn to “love the plateau,” continuing to practice enthusiastically even was they seem, on the surface, to be stagnating.

My favorite definition of a careful writer comes from Joe DiMaggio, though he didn’t know that’s what he was defining. DiMaggio was the greatest player I ever saw, and nobody looked more relaxed. He covered vast distances in the outfield, moving in graceful strides, always arriving ahead of the ball, making the hardest catch look routine, and even he was at bat, hitting the ball with tremendous power, he didn’t appear to be exerting himself. I marveled at how effortless he looked because what he did could only be achieved by great daily effort. A reporter once asked him how he managed to play so well so consistently, and he said: “I always thought that there was at least one person in the stands who had never seen me play, and I didn’t want to let him down.”

If you would like to write better than everybody else, you have to want to write better than everybody else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you’ve written against the various middlemen - editors, agents and publishers - whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards not as high. Too many writers are browbeaten into settling for less that their best.

Writers have to jump-start themselves at the moment of performance, no less than actors and dancers and painters and musicians. There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in the current of their energy that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody thinks of the effort they made every morning to turn on the switch.

You also have to turn on the switch. Nobody is going to do it for you.

Regardless of whether you are an entrepreneur or whether you are an employee of a large company, the absolute prerequisite is that you must know your stuff. There is no substitute for this.

Obvious form of social facilitation is competition: in general, performance is enhanced if people believe that they are competing with others — even if there is no prize. It seems that the mere presence of others, rather than the atmosphere of competition, is the crucial element. Even when people are asked not to compete, they work faster when they can see others working.

Social facilitation can be produced by simply telling the person that others are performing the same task elsewhere. Hence, your motivation to study may be increased by hearing that a classmate is already hard at it.

This is what you deserve. You could be good today. But instead you choose tomorrow.

The left hand is useless at almost everything, for lack of practice. But it guides the reins better than the right. From practice.

I placed discipline above all else and it might have cost us several titles. If I had to repeat things, I’d do precisely the same, because once you bid farewell to discipline you say goodbye to success and set the stage for anarchy.

If you can assemble a team of 11 talented players who concentrate intently during training sessions, take care of their diet and bodies, get enough sleep and show up on time, then you are almost halfway to winning a trophy. It is always astonishing how many clubs are incapable of doing this.

I always felt that our triumphs were an expression of the consistent application of discipline. It may surprise some to learn that much of the success comes from not getting carried away or trying to do the impossible and taking too many risks. I had a habit of sitting down in January and looking at the fixtures for the remainder of the season for both United and our principal opponents, and would tot up the points that I thought each club would obtain. I was never too far off and the exercise helped illuminate how important it was to grind out the unglamorous 1-0 results. During these sorts of games, we would concentrate on maintaining a compact midfield and yielding nothing.

Since both my parents worked their fingers to the bone, I somehow just absorbed the idea that the only way I was going to improve my life was to work very hard. It was baked into my marrow. I was incapable of coasting and I have always been irritated by people who frittered away natural talents because they were not prepared to put in the hours. There’s a lot of satisfaction that comes from knowing you’re doing your best, and there’s even more that comes when it begins to pay off.

At United we have been blessed with many players who have this sort of winning attitude. When winning becomes a way of life, true winners are relentless. Corny though as it sounds, the very best footballers were competing against themselves to become as good as they could be. It was no accident that players like Ronaldo, Beckham, the Neville brothers, Cantona, Scholes, Giggs and Rooney would all have to be dragged off the training ground. They all just had a built-in desire to excel and improve. Gary Neville, for example, pushed himself harder because he knew that he did not possess the natural talent of some of his team-mates. I never used to worry about what he was up to on a Friday night because, certainly in his younger years, he would always be in bed by 9.30 p.m.

We all felt ourselves to be outsiders in some ways, and people who feel like outsiders do one of two things: they either feel rejected, carrying a chip on their shoulder and complain that life is unfair, or they use that sense of isolation to push themselves and work like Trojans. I always used to tell the players, “The minute that we don’t work harder than the other team, we’ll not be Manchester United.”

When Carlos Queiroz started running training sessions, a couple of players didn’t like the sessions because they were to repetitive. I stopped the training session and told them, “When I was a player I wished I’d been coached by Carlos. All the repetitive things we are working on will become second nature on Saturday when you have no time to think.” All our planning and preparation was to help guard against a sudden rush of animal instincts in the heat of the moment. When a game starts to go in the wrong direction, it is so easy for players - especially the youngsters - to be controlled by their heart than their head. That’s the last thing you want. But don’t forget that football is an emotional game and there can be bad tackles or refereeing decisions that can affect people.

All of our drills on the training grounds, all our tactical talks and assessment of competitors were done as a way to hammer into the heads of the players the need to stick to the plan. It is very hard to persuade extremely competitive spirits to be patient. Yet very often our victories were squeaked out in the last few minutes, after we had drained the life from our opponents. Games - like life - are about waiting for chances and then pouncing on them.

There were plenty of times when Lady Luck blew in our direction - it happens all the time in football. Yet preparation had a lot more to do with our success than a few fortunate breaks.

Part of the pursuit of excellence involves eliminating as many surprises as possible because life is full of the unexpected. That’s what our scouts, our youth system and the innumerable training sessions were all about.

Relentless homework, all of it unglamorous, was a mainstay of United.

The crowd looked at the goal Beckham scored from the halfway line against Wimbledon in 1996 as if it was some sort of miracle. It was nothing of the sort. He must have practised that same kick hundreds of time so, when opportunity struck in south London, he seized it. The same goes for lots of goals scored by the United players. They had been scored, or certainly practised, for hundreds of hours during training sessions.

Another exercise that I used to employ to keep myself honest was to ask myself which member of our first team squad would be able to command a starting place with Real Madrid or AC Milan or whatever team happened to be Champions of Europe that year. That little mental exercise always illuminated our weaker spots.

My interview for the position as manager of Queen’s Park was a disaster. I was completely unprepared. I wasn’t sure who I was going to meet and I certainly hadn’t thought about the questions I would be asked, let alone have a list of topics that I wanted to discuss. So when I arrived, thinking I was just going to see the chairman of the club, I was surprised to find a large interview committee, including men I had played with. There must have been 12 of them in the room. I was nervous. I didn’t know how to handle myself. I was shockingly bad. I spent the whole interview trying to justify myself and my record, rather than just being myself. When I came out of the room I knew I had failed and I felt really disappointed.

I have yet to encounter anyone who has achieved massive success without closing themselves off from the demands of others or forgoing pastimes. I’m not suggesting that being completely obsessed with a pursuit leads to a healthy lifestyle or eternal happiness, but I just cannot imagine how, if you aspire to be better than everyone else, you can have balance in your life. If you have two people of equal talent it will be the way in which they marshal their ability that will determine their eventual success. Some people are just better at shutting out the rest of the world than others, and that means they have more time to foster their talent or improve their organization.

Unfortunately there are a couple catches. One is that you can’t choose the point on the curve that you want to inhabit. You can’t decide, for example, that you’d like to work just two or three times as hard, and get paid that much more. When you’re running a startup, your competitors decide how hard you work. And they pretty much all made the same decision: as hard as you possibly can.

It may seem unlikely in principle that one individual could really generate so much more wealth than another. The key to this mystery is to revisit that question, are they really worth 100 of us? Would a basketball team trade one of their players for 100 random people? What would Apple’s next product look like if you replaced Steve Jobs with a committee of 100 random people? These things don’t scale linearly.

Lúc ấy mặt trời vừa mọc lên chỗ thảo nguyên giáp chân trời. Thiết Mộc Chân lên ngựa, năm ngàn người ngựa đã sắp hàng chỉnh tề trên thảo nguyên. Quân tướng nước Kim thì vẫn ngủ mê mệt trong trướng chưa tỉnh.

Thiết Mộc Chân lúc đầu thấy quân Kim người mạnh ngựa khoẻ, binh khí sắc bén, rất có ý kính sợ, đến lúc ấy thấy họ đam mê hưởng lạc, khịt mũi hừ một tiếng.

It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.

The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement. Good intentions were not enough, not when so much depended on my skills, when the difference between tragedy and triumph was defined by one or two millimeters.

When I think of competition it’s like I try to create against the past. I think about Michaelangelo, Picasso, the pyramids. That’s the reason why I put 5,000 hours into a song like “Power”.

I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.

Opposites are two sides of the same thing; strength is the tension of opposites; “Strife” (competition) “is the father of all and the kin of all; some he has marked out to be gods, and some to be men; some he made slaves and some free.” In the end, Heracleitus concluded, “strife is justice”; the competition of individuals, groups, institutions, states, and empires constitutes nature’s supreme court, from whose verdict there is no appeal.

You’re not wound up about this at all?

How would I be wound up? I’m either ready or I’m not. Worrying about it right now ain’t gonna change a damn thing. Right? Whatever’s gonna happen is gonna happen. I’ve either done everything I can to be ready for this, or I haven’t.

Please bear in mind much time is required to build up an air force. It cannot be done overnight — 18 months are required to reach quantity production in planes — note I said reach — 2 years are needed to train personnel to make them competent to handle our complicated aircraft. Delay in beginning will make for undue haste to catch up and frenzied haste makes for waste and extravagance.

Pay the price of success.

85 percent of self-made millionaires admitted that they were no more intelligent or talented than others, but that they “worked much harder” than anyone else, for a much longer time. Don’t waste time. Get going. Move fast. Develop a sense of urgency, a bias for action.

You can only become great at that thing you’re willing to sacrifice for.

There will never be ‘the right time’ in your life to do a great thing. You must create that time and greatness will follow.

It is useful to take your place at the bottom of the hierarchy. It can aid the development of gratitude and humility. Gratitude: There are people whose expertise exceeds your own, and you should be wisely pleased about that. There are many valuable niches to fill, given the many complex and serious problems we must solve. The fact that there are people who fill those niches with trustworthy skill and experience is something for which to be truly thankful. Humility: It is better to presume ignorance and invite learning than to assume sufficient knowledge and risk the consequent blindness. It is much better to make friends with what you do not know than with what you do know, as there is an infinite supply of the former but a finite stock of the latter. When you are tightly boxed in or cornered — all too often by your own stubborn and fixed adherence to some unconsciously worshipped assumptions — all there is to help you is what you have not yet learned.

But if you do not make clear what you want clear, then you will certainly fail. You cannot hit a target that you refuse to see. You cannot hit a target if you do not take aim. And, equally dangerously, in both cases: you will not accrue the advantage of aiming, but missing. You will not benefit from the learning that inevitable takes place when things do not go your way. Success at a given endeavor often means trying, falling short, recalibrating (with the new knowledge generated painfully by the failure), and then trying again and falling short — often repeated, ad nauseam.

Life would be simple if that were the case. But there is the you now, and the you tomorrow, and the you next week, and next year, and in 5 years, and in a decade — and you are required by harsh necessity to take all of those “yous” into account. That is the curse associated with the human discovery of the future and, with it, the necessity of work — because to work means to sacrifice the hypothetical delights of the present for the potential improvement of what lies ahead.

There is a near-instantaneous transformation that comes as a consequence of attainment. Like impulsive pleasure, attainment will produce positive emotion. But, also like pleasure, attainment is unreliable. Another question thus emerges: “What is a truly reliable source of positive emotion?” The answer is that people experience positive emotion in relationship to the pursuit of a valuable goal.

But you take aim at a trivial goal anyway, and develop a rather shallow strategy to attain it, only to find it is not satisfying because you do not care enough. It does not matter to you — not deeply. Furthermore, the fact that you are not pursuing the goal you should rightly be pursuing means that you are feeling guilty, ashamed, and lesser at the same time.

This is not a helpful strategy. It is not going to work. I have never met anyone who was satisfied when they knew they were not doing everything they should be doing. No matter how much we wish to discount the future completely, it is part of the price we paid for being acutely self-conscious and able to conceptualize ourselves across the entire span of our lives.

Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight than knows not victory, nor defeat.

The black belt represents the beginning — the start of a never-ending journey of discipline, work, and the pursuit of an ever-higher standard.

Creativity is a journey of suffering, of infinite frustrations, of insecure joy.

I’m not talking about craft; that goes without saying. The professional is prepared at a deeper level. He is prepared, each day, to confront his own self-sabotage. The professional understands that Resistance is fertile and ingenious. It will throw stuff at him that he’s never seen before.

The professional prepares mentally to absorb blows and to deliver them. His aim is to take what the day gives him. He is prepared to be prudent and prepared to be reckless, to take a beating when he has to, and to go for the throat when he can. He understands that the field alters every day. His goal is not victory (success will come by itself when it wants to) but to handle himself, his insides, as sturdily and steadily as he can.

The professional, on the other hand, understands delayed gratification. He is the ant, not the grasshopper; the tortoise, not the hare. Have you heard the legend of Sylvester Stallone staying up three nights straight to churn out the screenplay for Rocky? I don’t know, it may even be true. But it’s the most pernicious species of myth to set before the awakening writer, because it seduces him into believing he can pull off the big score without pain and without persistence.

The professional arms himself with patience, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming out in each individual work. He knows that any job, whether it’s a novel or a kitchen remodel, takes twice as long as he thinks and costs twice as much. He accepts that. He recognizes it as reality.

The professional steels himself at the start of a project, reminding himself it is the Iditarod, not the sixty-yard dash. He conserves his energy. He prepares his mind for the long haul. He sustains himself with the knowledge that if he can just keep those huskies mushing, sooner or later the sled will pull in to Nome.

Now consider the amateur: the aspiring painter, the wannabe playwright. How does he pursue his calling?

One, he doesn’t show up everyday. Two, he doesn’t show up no matter what. Three, he doesn’t stay on the job all day. He is not committed over the long haul; the stakes for him are illusory and fake. He does not get money. And he overidentifies with his art. He does not have a sense of humour about failure. You don’t hear him bitching, “This fucking triology is killing me!” Instead, he doesn’t write his triology at all.

The amateur has not mastered the technique of his art. Nor does he expose himself to judgment in the real world. If we show our poem to our friend and our friend says, “It’s wonderful, I love it,” that’s not real-world feedback, that’s our friend being nice to us. Nothing is as empowering as real-world validation, even if it’s for failure.

The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.

The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell.

Someone once asked Somerset Maugham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. “I write only when inspiration strikes,” he replied. “Fortunately it strikes very morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

That’s a pro.

In terms of Resistance, Maugham was saying, “I despise Resistance; I will not let it faze me; I will sit down and do my work.”

Maugham reckoned another, deeper truth; that by performing the mundane physical act of sitting down and starting to work, he set in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that would produce inspiration, as surely as if the goddess had synchronized her watch with his.

What are we trying to heal, anyway? The athlete knows the day will never come when he wakes up pain-free. He has to play hurt.

Do you understand? I hadn’t written anything good. I might be years before I would, if I ever did at all. That didn’t matter. What counted was that I had, after years of running form it, actually sat down and done my work.

Grandiose fantasies are a symptom of Resistance. They’re the sign of an amateur. The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.

The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don’t just put off our lives today; we put them off until our deathbed.

The office is closed. How many pages have I produced? I don’t care. Are they any good? I don’t even think about it. All that matters is I’ve put in my time and hit it with all I’ve got. All that counts is that, for this day, for this session, I have overcome Resistance.

But do you know how hard it is to maintain a long-term outlook when stocks are collapsing?

Like everything else worthwhile, successful investing demands a price. But its currency is not dollars and cents. It’s volatility, fear, doubt, uncertainty, and regret — all of which are easy to overlook until you’re dealing with them in real time.

The inability to recognize that investing has a price can tempt us to try to get something for nothing. Which, like shoplifting, rarely ends well.

When you say, “I’m going to do this,” and “I’m going to be that,” you’re really putting it off. You’re giving yourself an out. At least if you’re self-aware, you can think, “I say I want to do this, but I don’t really because if I really wanted to do it, I would just do it.”

I don’t believe in superstitions.

But I did feel that there was something special about the nickname “Emperor of Terran” that was given to me. Though I regularly practice over ten hours and my entire body feels like it will melt down, I hold myself up, thinking,

“I should live up to that name.”

There is nothing more important than learning to strive under difficult and frustrating circumstances to play fair.

It’s about showing up and getting started, and then something amazing happens or it doesn’t happen, all that matters is that you enable the chance for something to happen and for that you have to sit at your desk and you have to draw and do and make decisions and hope for the best.

First, consider that most of the positive emotion people experience does not come from attaining something. There is the simple pleasure (more accurately, the satisfaction) that comes from having a good meal when hungry, and there is the more complex but similar satisfaction that is associated with accomplishing something difficult and worthwhile. Graduation Day marks the event. It is a celebration. But the next day that is over, and you immediately face a new set of problems. You are no longer king of the high school: you are bottom dog in the work force. You are in the position of Sisyphus. You strove and struggled to push your boulder to the pinnacle, and you find yourself, instead, at the foot of the mountain.

But very often failure is a consequence of insufficient single-mindedness, elaborate but pointless rationalization, and rejection of responsibility.

Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would not otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man would have dreamed would come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now.”

Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction from having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swab jockeys or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because these candy-asses don’t know how to be miserable.

In terms of Resistance, Maugham was saying, “I despise Resistance; I will not let it faze me; I will sit down and do my work.”

Life is much like going to the gym. The most painful part is deciding to go. Once you get past that, it’s easy. There have been many days I have dreaded going to the gym, but once I am there and in motion, it is a pleasure. After the workout is over, I am always glad I talked myself into going.

Invest first in education. In reality, the only real asset you have is your mind, the most powerful tool we have dominion over.

A third is that progress happens too slowly to notice, but setbacks happen too quickly to ignore.

What we do repeatedly hardens into habits. The longer you carry on, the tougher it is to change. All your best intentions about doing the right thing “later” are no match for the power of habits.

Later is where excuses live. Later is where good intentions go to die. Later is a broken back and a bent spirit. Later say “all-nighters are temporary until we’ve got this figured out.” Unlikely. Make the change now.

The real point about the Prussian system was not that it was free of errors, but that the general staff carefully studied its past mistakes and readjusted training, organization, and weapons accordingly.

Almost every day, he went to bed past midnight. Many people thought that, as PM, he could go to his office as he liked or go to bed as he wished. When I was on duty, almost every night, I saw him working in his room till past midnight.

He never missed a day of exercise unless there was severe lightning and thunder and he was very serious about his fitness regime.

If the navy was less impressive in size, then that was to a large degree due to the fact that the creation of a powerful battle fleet took at least one to two decades.

Emotional labor. That’s the labor most of us do now. The work of doing what we don’t necessarily feel like doing, the work of being a professional, the work of engaging with others in a way that leads to the best long-term outcome.

The last step is so often overlooked: The part where you show up, regularly, consistently and generously, for years and years, to organize and lead and build confidence in the change you seek to make.

Enough small moments. Shortcuts taken, corners cut, compromises made. By degrees, inch by inch, each justifiable (or justified) moment adds up to become a brand, a reputation, a life.

Every day, we change. We move (slowly) toward the person we’ll end up being.

To overcome an irrational fear…. Replace it with a habit. If you’re afraid to write, write a little, every day. Start with an anonymous blog, start with a sentence. Everyday, drip, drip, a habit. If you’re afraid to speak up, speak up a little, everyday. Habits are more powerful than fears.

It’s easy to start a blog, but of course, starting a blog doesn’t really deliver a lot of value. Posting 4,100 blog posts in a row, though, isn’t easy. It’s do-able, clearly do-able, and might just be worth it.

You can already guess the problem with little lies. They blur the line, and they lead (pretty quickly) to big lies. The worst kind of little lies are the ones you make to yourself. Once you’re willing to lie to yourself, you’re also willing to cheat at golf, and after that, it’s all downhill.

I don’t feel like it What’s it? Why do you need to feel like something in order to do the work? They call it work because it’s difficult, not because it’s something you need to feel like. Very few people wake up in the morning and feel like taking big risks or feel like digging deep for something that has eluded them. People don’t usually feel like pushing themselves harder than they’ve pushed before or having conversations that might be uncomfortable. Of course, your feelings are irrelevant to whether or not the market expects great work. Do the work. Ignore the feelings part and the work will follow.

Laziness in a white collar job has nothing todo with avoiding hard physical labor. Instead, it has to do with avoiding difficult (and apparently risky) intellectual labor.

The only way to get mediocre is one step at a time.You don’t have to settle. It’s a choice you get to make everyday.

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.

10 years spent learning, 4 years spent refining, and 4 years as a wild success.

It is easy for the policy of bluff to succeed in the short run, but in the long run it can succeed only if it is able to postpone forever the test of actual performance, and this even the highest quality of statecraft cannot assure.

The best that luck and political wisdom can do is to use the initial success of a policy of bluff for the purpose of bringing the actual power of one’s nation up to its reputed quality.

And at the end of practice, I’d climb out of the pool with a sense of accomplishment. As it had with my father, doggedness became one of my greatest strengths. Things may seem insurmountable, I told myself, but you’ll always get out of the pool.

The leader must learn to cut to the heart of a situation, recognize its decisive elements and base his course of action on these. The ability to do this is not God-given, nor can it be acquired overnight; it is a process of years. He must realize that training in solving problems of all types - long practices in making clear unequivocal decisions, the habit of concentrating on the question at hand, and an elasticity of mind - are indispensable requisites for the successful practice of the art of war… It is essential that all leaders - from subaltern to commanding general - familiarize themselves with the art of clear, logical thinking.

I do not believe, for example, that some men are just “naturally” cool, courageous, and decisive in handling crisis situations, while others are not. “He doesn’t have a nerve in his body” is a popular cliche. Of course some men may be stronger, less emotional, quicker, smarter, bolder than others. But I think these attributes are for the most part acquired and not inherited, and many times acquired suddenly under stress. The public likes to glamorize its leaders, and most leaders like to glamorize themselves. We tend to think of some men as “born leaders.” But I have found that leaders are subject to all human frailties: they lose their tempers, become depressed, experience the other symptoms of tension. Sometimes even strong men will cry.

It was a lesson I never forgot. Preparedness is the key to success and victory.

Pay every debt, as if God wrote the bill.

Public commitments tend to be lasting commitments. Whenever one stakes a stand that is visible to others, there arises a drive to maintain that stand in order to look like a consistent person.

“To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And those who fall behind get beaten.” The Russia of the czars had suffered “continual beatings” because it had fallen behind in industrial productivity and military strength.

“Acceleration of the country’s socio-economic development is the key to all our problems; immediate and long-term, economic and social, political and ideological, internal and external.”

To which it might be remarked that the final statement could have been made by any government in the world, and that the mere recognition of economic problems is no guarantee that they will be solved.

Global competition is now knowledge-based. Capacity can be increased simply by injecting capital to build mega power stations, giant dams, and state of the art industrial parks.

Raising capacity is another ball game. The capability of a population can be raised only through education and training. And education has long gestation periods.

As reporters, our craft is writing. We are wordsmiths. To keep in top form, a writer has to exercise his vocabulary and command of language in the same way a single handicapper in golf hits 200 balls on the practice range every day. Dr. Goh taught me how to exercise my vocabulary. He told me to pick a word, any word, and write out its five synonyms. Turn it over, and write out its five antonyms. Start with hot and cold.

In the middle of the night we stopped to refuel at an Air Force base in Germany. Dave got off the plane and headed right to the base’s gym, where he worked out for an hour, and then we were off and flying again.

Firstly, my schedule has always been packed. However, it’s true that I’m definitely practicing less than I used to. In 2013, I would play for 15 hours a day, but now I only play 10~12. The key to keeping up these hours even with a busy schedule is my desire to win. I absolutely abhor losing. If I fall behind, I get angry and practice more.

Police, firefighters, EMTs, and increasingly, teachers need to know where to focus when the adrenaline kicks in. This is at least in part the reason for disaster drills: when the alarm sounds and the fear kicks in, they need to spring into action.

Experienced athletes often perform better in front of an audience, because the anxiety is a source of physical strength, and, importantly, because experienced athletes (and other performers) know where to focus when anxiety kicks in. Inexperienced performers, on the other hand, tend to get rattled by an audience, because they don’t know what to do with the excess energy. And in these situations, the presence of an audience makes things worse.

The key to optimal performance in any endeavor is to practice. But practice isn’t just about getting more comfortable with your speech or your slide decks or your lines; it’s also about getting comfortable with playing your role. Practice is how most of us learn to do most things, and using power, like most things, get easier — more natural, more skillful, and more automatic — the more you do it. It requires developing muscle memory and establishing routines for managing your attention, your mindset, and your physical body.

Rather than feeling ashamed of what he didn’t know, he became obsessive about learning. I read like crazy. If you are prepared, I’ve learned, that is where your confidence comes from. And the more you do it, always, the more your confidence grows.

The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”

An expert player can understand a complex position at a glance, but it takes years to develop that level of ability. Studies of chess masters have shown that at least 10K hours of dedicated practice (about 6 years of playing chess 5 hours a day) are required to attain the highest levels of performance. During those hours of intense concentration, a serious chess player becomes familiar with thousands of configurations, each consisting of an arrangement of related pieces that can threaten or defend each other.

Learning high-level chess can be compared to learning to read. A first grader works hard at recognizing individual letters and assembling them into syllables and words, but a good adult reader perceives entire clauses. An expert reader has also acquired the ability to assemble familiar elements in a new pattern and can quickly “recognize” and correctly pronounce a word that she has never seen before. In chess, recurrent patterns of interacting pieces play the role of letters, and a chess position is a long word or a sentence.

The acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions. When these conditions are fulfilled, skill eventually develops, and the intuitive judgments and choices that quickly come to mind will mostly be accurate. All this is the work of System 1, which means it occurs automatically and fast. A marker of skilled performance is the ability to deal with vast amounts of information swiftly and efficiently.

People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.

I hate it when people tell me, “You are talented.” The word “talent” implies a natural gift. As if there is a miraculous superpower that helps an artist produce decent work.

Some people probably do have an aptitude for drawing or writing, and that makes it easier for them to create, but even this is worthless if you don’t hone your skills through years of practice. If there is any kind of talent I would consider relevant, it would be natural enthusiasm, which keeps you going despite the difficulties and frustrations that are inevitably part of creative work.

Luyện tập hơn tất cả mọi người. Luyện tập nghiêm túc. Bắt đầu luyện tập. Luyện tập cái gì? Ơ phải luyện à?

The difference between who you are now and who you were five years ago is largely due to how you’ve spent your time along the way. The habits we groove become who we are, one minute at a time. A small thing, repeated, is not a small thing.

Practice as much as you feel you can accomplish with concentration. Once when i became concerned because others around me practiced all day long, I asked my professor how many hours I should practice, and he said, “It really doesn’t matter how long. If you practice with your fingers, no amount is enough. If you practice with your head, two hours is plenty.”

I just draw everyday. I’ve drawn everyday since I was a little kid. If you drew everyday for fifteen years, you would be good at it too. Anyone would.

It’s not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with the problem longer.

As a computer scientist and mathematician, Levin approaches his daily routine with data, precision and pattern-recognition. “I tend to come up with precise routines and repeat them obsessively every day. In perfect detail, every morning at home looks the same. By cutting out the contemplation of what to do next, I achieve extreme efficiencies.”

If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.

You need determination and you need to take losses in your heart. You have to care. I care.

When I lose, I care about put so much time into it that if I lose, it’s really disappointing. When I come home I ask, ‘Why did I lose?’ I watch the video of the game over and over again and I won’t be able to sleep until I’ve identified why I lost. Then I tell myself, ‘Next time I’m going to win.’

The underlying truth of this anecdote, like any other about the beginnings of his professional and life career, is that this conqueror of the international retail world, the man who provokes enormous curiosity and huge admiration most definitely threw himself unconditionally into the university of life. What is awe-inspiring about this is that after many decades of “attending class,” he still never miss a day. He has never taken a sabbatical year and he still wins top marks in all the international competitions.

From then on, every effort is concentrated on working out which aspects can be improved, which features didn’t turn out the way they had hoped and so on.

Things (toys, bigger houses, money, status, etc.) don’t supply anywhere near the long-term satisfaction that getting better at something does.

It is the evolution, not the rewards, that matter.

The need to have meaningful work is connected to man’s innate desire to improve.

To gain strength one has to push one’s limits, which is painful. Develop a reflexive reaction to psychic pain that causes you to reflect on it rather than avoid it. Go to the pain rather than avoid it. If you choose the healthy route, the pain will soon turn into pleasure.

Life doesn’t give a damn about what you like. It’s up to you to connect what you want with what you need to do to get it and then find the courage to carry it through.

You shouldn’t be upset if you find out that you’re bad at something — you should be happy that you found out, because knowing that and dealing with it will improve your chances of getting what you want.

Pay the price of success.

The brain has muscles of thinking as the legs have muscles for walking.

Pop had a mantra. “Son, you get out of it what you put into it.” When I would get frustrated, those words were gentle persuasion to try again. Because of them I understood very early that no matter how many physical gifts a person might have, to refine them, you must bust your butt. I quickly bought into the idea that the road to success is paved with sweat and calluses.

Get in the habit of preparing yourself for upcoming tournaments and rounds. Part of my preparation for the challenges of Augusta National includes watching videos of past Masters. Knowing how the course plays in various conditions factors in to my overall game plan.

At the same time, there’s no substitute for constant study to master one’s craft. Living in history builds your own shock absorber, because you’ll learn that there are lots of old solutions to new problems. If you haven’t read hundreds of books, learning from others who went before you, you are functionally illiterate - you can’t coach and you can’t lead. History lights the often dark path ahead; even if it’s a dim light, it’s better than none.

Mastering your chosen vocation means you are ready when opportunity knocks.

“You are a very persuasive young man,” he said, handing me a book about a Roman centurion, “but it would be best if you did your homework first.”

Combat involves a level of intensity that is difficult to prepare for even with the most grueling training. How do you prepare your men for the shock of battle? For one thing, you need to make sure that your training is so hard and varied that it removes complacency and creates muscle memory - instinctive reflexes - within a mind disciplined to identify and react to the unexpected.

The first is competence. Be brilliant in the basics. Don’t dabble in your job; you must master it. That applies at every level as you advance. Analyze yourself. Identify weaknesses and improve yourself. If you’re not running three miles in 18 minutes, work out more; if you’re not a good listener, discipline yourself; if you’re not swift at calling in artillery fire, rehearse. Your troops are counting on you.

Imagine the thrill and anxiety of doing something for the first time: your first trip to the zoo, first visit to the dentist, first time behind the wheel, your first kiss. Roosevelt mentions the first time speaking in front of a large audience and the first time in battle. That’s “buck fever,” and there is really only one cure, “habit.” “What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool-headedness. This he can get only by actual practice. He must, by custom and repeated exercise of self-mastery, get his nerves thoroughly under control.”

The view I take of this shot is markedly different from the view most spectators seem to have formed. They are inclined to glamorize the actual shot since it was hit in a pressureful situation. They tend to think of it as something unique in itself, something almost inspired, you might say, since the shot was just what the occasion called for. I don’t see it that way at all. I didn’t hit that shot then — that late afternoon at Merion. I’d been practicing that shot since I was 12. After all, the point of tournament golf is to get command of a swing which, the more pressure you put on it, the better it works.

Dominating oneself ought to become a sort of habit, a moral reflex acquired by a constant gymnastic of the will especially in the tiniest things: dress, conversation, the way one thinks.

If you haven’t done the work, why should you expect it all suddenly come together, especially when the pressure mounts?

My goal — and it may be unattainable — is to groove my swing to the extent that I play my best golf all the time. There is only one way that’s going to happen: Practice and more practice. Long ago, I committed myself to the idea that there are no shortcuts to improvement. The best way to ingrain the correct movements and positions is through repetition.

Roommates remembered Kissinger sitting in an overstuffed chair, reading at all hours of the day and night, biting his nails bloody. One recalled that Henry “worked harder, studied more… read till 1 or 2 am, had tremendous drive and discipline… he was absorbing everything.”

We spend very little time learning how to deal with the mental side of the game. What do we do on the first tee with 20 people watching? What do we do going to the last hole when we’re in the lead? Let’s start by doing all the thinking before we start our pre-shot routine. This includes how you want to play the shot, the conditions, and any swing thoughts. Once this is done, you start your routine, which should be the same every time. Think about nothing when you swing.

As a club pro, the 2 things I tried to teach my pupils were patience and my now well-documented mantra, “the harder I practice, the luckier I get.” Unfortunately, it’s easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than to get the average weekend golfer to practice. It is the hardest thing about being an instructor.

In golf, as in other areas of life, the phrase “the easy way out” comes into play. Many golfers chose to hope or spend money in an attempt to buy improvement rather than have to read, practice, or learn how to improve. But putting does not succumb to such desires or offers of cash. Rather, just to make things interesting, the game throws in a number of unknown and unknowable factors that make success a statistical uncertainty.

Long before I arrived at Augusta for the 2001 Masters, I practiced that draw with my driver and 3-wood. For 2 months solid, I would devote a little extra time on the practice tee with that specific shot in my mind’s eye.

We found that no matter how a player became during a practice session, he would have regressed the time we started a new session the next day. However, with almost every session, he would get better more quickly than in previous sessions.

But always, before every full swing, wedge shot, or putt, religiously execute your preshot ritual. That’s the only way to train your subconscious to accept it and make it a habit.

By always practicing properly, always using your ritual, and never doing it any other way, your subconscious will gain maximum trust in it. And this will give you the best chance of performing under pressure. Never lie to yourself, never do it quickly to get it over with, never drag out the time to make sure you do it properly. After a few thousand times, you won’t even realize you used a ritual or made a swing. And that’s when you know you’re succeeding.

Who are we seeking to become? We get what we invest in. The time we spend comes back, with interest. If you practice five minutes of new, difficult banjo music every day, you’ll become a better banjo player. If you spend a little bit more time each day whining or feeling ashamed, that behavior will become part of you. The words you type, the people you hang with, the media you consume…

A chapter on sand play is a good place to remind you that you can never prepare too much or too well for what is going to happen in golf.

“He would take me right up to the breaking point and he’d back off.”

I’d say, “Either hit or get off the course.”

“That’s it, Tiger. The training is over. And I promise you that you’ll never meet another person as mentally tough as you.”

You need to know what it is about the swing that makes the ball fly higher or lower, with more or less spin, longer or shorter. If you know the swing requirements for the shot you are trying to produce, you can practice, improve, and turn your short game into a subconsciously controlled, automatically performed “feel” game. But you can’t get to that point without basing it on something sound and reliable, without understanding intellectually what it is you have to do to make a shot happen. Then you need to know when to gamble.

Never hit a shot if you have any anxiety about its outcome. If you haven’t practiced the swing sufficiently, if you don’t have the confidence to pull it off at least 90% of the time, then it’s the wrong shot and you shouldn’t try it.

That’s right — 90% of the time. I’m going to put 10 balls down and you’re going to bet me your paycheck that 9 of 10 will land near the target. If you can’t make that bet, don’t try that shot.

Once I have his attention, I ask, “Without looking back, what did that shot just do? Where did that ball go?” Most of the time they can’t tell me. They have learned absolutely nothing, so they have wasted the time it took to get ball and body into position and make the swing. This isn’t practice, because they aren’t learning anything. It’s just exercise.

Play like you’ve practiced and practice like you’ll play.

I can’t overemphasize the value of proper repetition: Just because you can hit a shot doesn’t mean it’s committed to memory and will be there when the pressure is up. Practice, practice, and practice some more until it will be there whenever you need it.

Changing a habit from cognitive to autonomous is not easy and takes tremendous amount of time and dedication. Doing drills is just scratching the surface. Taking it from practice to the course is another level of deep understanding that varies from player to player. There is no fast track but correct repetitions applied over time helps. Bravery by the player to take it to the course and not get frightened by the attempt to change to improve their golf skill also helps.

The world’s best athletes need coaches, and you don’t?

Phần lớn trường hợp khi người ta nói “thời cơ đã đến” thì thời cơ thực sự đã qua mất rồi. Như nói “đến bữa” có nghĩa là đến lúc ăn cơm, còn thời gian nấu cơm nhất định phải là trước lúc “đến bữa.”

Public speakers say that the secret to success is preparation. Their advice: “Prepare one hour for every minute of the speech.” Not only to know the material but also to build confidence. You benefit when you channel all that loose energy and nervousness into confidence. And then when you deliver your speech you appear “better” than the audience because you know your stuff.

This can’t be stressed enough: prepare, prepare and prepare.

Play like you’ve practiced and practice like you’ll play.

(1) As they improve, they need to work on different things; and (2) they get more careless in their practice habits. Both changes lessen their improvement rage, and can dampen enthusiasm.

They have no understanding that it takes tens of thousands of good repetitions to ingrain a habit in long-term muscle memory. Even the most gifted athletes need thousands of practice shots to get good. Yet weekend golfers, intelligent and successful in their workday worlds, expect to own a good swing right away.

I can sum up the best antidote for stress and anxiety in one word: preparation. When you’re prepared, you know what you’re talking about, and when you know what you’re talking about, you deliver it well. When you deliver it well, the anxiety goes away. This cycle of confidence does more to alleviate stress than any breathing exercise, handholding, medication, or any other tool or crutch possibly can.

If you don’t go out and put in the work, you don’t go out and put in the effort. One, you’re not gonna get the results. But two and more importantly, you don’t deserve it. You need to earn it.

A wise Prince, therefore, should pursue such methods as these, never resting idle in times of peace, but strenuously seeking to turn them to account, so that he may derive strength from them in the hour of danger, and find himself ready should Fortune turn against him, to resist her blows.

So, the first lesson of this book echoes recurring themes of the last: practise regularly, and don’t mind making mistakes in the process. Mistakes are not bad so long as you correct them as soon as you see them. You will find that assessing your ability will help you make you more objective about your work. However, this new knowledge won’t happen overnight, so be patient. And remember: the time you spend altering your drawings to improve them is never lost — that is how you will improve your skills.

The skill evident in his paintings and drawings came out of continuous practice. He declared that his epitaph should be: “He greatly loved drawing.” He would often trace and retrace his own drawings in order to get the movement and grace he was after. Hard work and constant efforts to improve his methods honed his natural talent.

Writing, like so many creative acts, is hard. Sitting there, staring, mad at yourself, mad at the material because it doesn’t seem good enough and you don’t seem good enough. In fact, many valuable endeavors we undertake are painfully difficult. But talking, talking is always easy.

When you are not practicing, remember, someone somewhere is practicing, and when you meet him he will win.

Producing a book is like producing a film. For every hour of action on a film, thousands of hours of footage were produced and discarded. Not one by many sponsors and individuals work behind the scenes to create a brief sequence of shots. It is the same way with a book, even though it may appear still on paper.

It did not matter that war seemed unlikely in the here and now. The attitudes of other powers were changeable, and although they were reasonably well disposed to China today, one wanted the capacities to make sure one could deal with them if that changed tomorrow. No responsible Chinese government could have done otherwise.

I try to make my practice session emulate tournament conditions. The goal is to structure range time so it’s as difficult and mentally exhausting as possible, so that when I go play in a tournament it just feels like simple golf.

Train now when it’s still easy, and you’ll be prepared for it when it gets tough.

This isn’t about punishing yourself; it’s about expanding your comfort zone, getting more comfortable in uncomfortable situations, and improving your self-discipline, resilience, and confidence. You train yourself to do the things that are tough. And you train yourself to say no to the things that are hard to say no to.

It is because all decisions are taken and implemented under fire that there is a need for the force to have undergone appropriate drills and procedures — a necessity true to this day, regardless of the number of men. Without these drills and procedures commander will fail to move their commands fast enough in relation to the enemy to bring effective fire to bear and thus retain the initiative — in other words, be the ones dictating events.

I am fond of pointing out to entrepreneurs and executives that “in theory, you don’t need practice.”

Define the cost of success and be ready to pay it. Because nothing worthwhile is free.

And when I say, “Do it,” I mean “Do it properly 20K times.” Note that I didn’t say do it quickly and carelessly a few times, then hope for improvement. It takes 10K proper repetitions to begin to form a proper habit, and 20K to ingrain and own it.

Training commenced — and so did the mind games. “Train as you fight” was our religion. The instructors turned up the pressure and set individuals and entire classes up for failure. Failure in training identifies weaknesses so as to prevent them in the field, because as the common saying goes in the tactical community, “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

Each drill was designed to make lessons stick. They say, “Amateurs train until they get it right; professionals train until they get it wrong.” That may not sound right, but here’s what it means. When you train until you “get it wrong” it means you’ve trained until you’ve discovered new, out-of-the ordinary situations that you might have to deal with later on — and which might get you or someone else killed. If you’ve already encountered them in training, you’ll be prepared for them. If you encounter them for the first time in the field, well… good luck… because you’ll need luck at that point.

What we do repeatedly hardens into habits. The longer you carry on, the tougher it is to change. All your best intentions about doing the right thing “later” are no match for the power of habits.

One of the big differences between amateur and pro golfers is how we practice. I see amateurs out on the driving range just hitting golf balls one after another without thinking. All they’re doing is ingraining bad habits. It drives me crazy to see that. Every shot you hit should matter. Every shot you hit should have a purpose. Ask yourself: “Why am I here?”

Tom Watson believes this: The point of playing golf is playing golf well. He does not accept any counterargument.

He had promised his family and sponsors that he would work harder than anyone on the PGA Tour. He had told his girlfriend that he was giving himself just 5 years to make it as a professional golfer. He practiced with such intensity that at first this was the only thing the other golfers noticed about him. To them he was simply that odd guy who seemed to practice every hour of every day.

Mastery doesn’t come from an infographic. What you know doesn’t mean shit. What do you do consistently?

During practice, remember it is your bad shots that determine your score. Practice your weaknesses, while spending only routine maintenance time on the strengths of your game. Try to hit 10, then 15, then 20 shots in a row, without a really bad one. Only after you eliminate your bad shots are you ready to focus on making your good shots better.

Play like you practice. This is the best secret of the game. And the only way to do that is to be smart enough to practice like you are going to play. It’s slower, it takes more effort, and you have to be more careful, but it works.

When you get frustrated and discouraged (and you will), ask yourself this question: “Do I have the patience to practice smart enough to improve?”

He would begin a typical day by waking at 6am and working out until 8. After he showered and ate breakfast, we would meet on the practice tee at 9 for 90 minutes of hitting balls. From 10:30 to 11 he would practice putt, then play as many as 9 holes on the course until noon. After a 1-hour lunch break, we’d meet at 1pm for an hour of short-game work, followed by another 90 minutes of hitting balls. From 3:30 to 4:45 he’d played 9 holes, and then return to the putting green until 6pm. This would be followed by an hour of shoulder exercises before retiring for dinner at 7.

I never once saw him hit a careless shot in practice.

But he was almost always calm and poised on the course or the practice area. There, he was in his element — and observing his comfort there, I could see that he truly loved hitting a golf ball.

He enjoyed the details. He never hit a shot without knowing exactly how far his target was, so he always had a yardage in mind with every shot he hit. He’d pull out the range finder before hitting at a flat on a practice range. When he switched targets, he’d pull put the gun and figure out the new yardage. He never failed to do this.

He’d seldom hit more than 25 balls in a row before stepping away. He might sit down in the cart and just stare out silently for a few minutes. “I’m just thinking about what we just did.” Because what we were working on would usually be something that was uncomfortable, he was making sure he understood where he was in the process and where he was going. To me, it was an example of a great performer doing “deliberate practice.” It’s the most difficult and highest level of practice because it requires painstaking focus on weaknesses. A lot of players hit a lot of balls but focus only on their strengths. The great improvers are willing to get uncomfortable and make the mental and physical effort to correct a flaw, which often involves difficult “opposite-oriented” remedial learning. But that was Tiger in major-championship preparation mode.

When I called Tiger back, I told him to get in front of the mirror in his hotel room and practice his backswing for 30 minutes, working on starting his takeaway straighter back and keeping his eyes level. Then to practice his downswing for 30 minutes, getting the club more in front of him and feeling like he was adding loft as he came down. “Do that, bud, and you’ll be good to go tomorrow.”

Tiger called me back the next morning, a few hours before his starting time. He said he’d worked 2 hours in front of the mirror before going to bed. Then, when he awoke at 2am to go to the bathroom, he looked in the mirror and started working on his swing again. He said he spent another 90 minutes working on the same stuff before going back to bed. Then after rising in the morning, he did another hour of mirror work, a total of 4.5 hours of studying positions and movements since I’d passed along my suggestions.

He taught us that we had to be mentally disciplined every day in practice if we wanted to be disciplined on the game days and that attitude would always win out over ability.

He goes entirely by instinct, an instinct honed, of course, by a lot of practice and playing experience.

The trusting mentality is essential for getting ready to play competitively. If you want to be able to trust your swing on the golf course, you have to spend time doing it on the practice tee.

There is no substitute for actually “doing it.” You may dream of running marathon, but you won’t actually start to believe you can until you’ve put some serious mileage on your Nikes.

They remembered the three wars that had achieved their unity. They forgot the patient preparation that had made them possible and the moderation that had secured their fruits.

To become an effective strategist requires constant practice in strategic thinking. It is a daily discipline, not a resource that can be left dormant in normal times and tapped at will in an emergency.

It take about 12,000 storyboard drawings to make one 90-minute reel, and because of the iterative nature of the process I’m describing, story teams commonly create ten times that number by the time their work is done.

If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that’s one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy.

Confidence comes from preparation. So when the game is on the line, I’m not asking myself to do something that I haven’t done thousands of times before. So when I prepare, I know what I’m capable of doing, I know what I’m comfortable doing, and I know what I’m not comfortable doing. So in those moments if it looks like I’m ice-cold or not nervous, it’s because I’ve done it thousands of times before. So, what’s one more time?

There is no such thing as natural touch. Touch is something you create by hitting millions of golf balls.

Good practice is usually harder than the competition it prepares you for.

Hogan hit more golf balls than almost anyone.

You have to invest in your mind. It’s a muscle and it needs to be trained. You don’t just become mentally strong. It doesn’t just happen.

I was a ball-beater. I hit more balls than anybody. I’d hit 400-500 a day.

Aim to do drill and technique work to the best of your ability, do not feel pressured to rush through this aspect of the session. A drill worth doing is a drill worth doing well.

Experience looks like intelligence to us because we didn’t see the hours our favorite instructors and mentors spent banging their heads against their own notebooks.

A coach is someone who can give correction without causing resentment.

I didn’t fail 1K times. The light bulb was an invention with 1K steps.

Praising with statements such as “You are terrific!” or “You’re just so good at this” can often have the opposite effect you intend. Rather than praising for ability, we should make it a habit to praise the effort, persistence, and perseverance that it takes to succeed.

The first and certainly worst mistake was, to put it bluntly, complacency. I assumed I could go on living on my talent without really working on my game. Mistake No. 2 came when with the big cut in tournaments came a cut in practice and playing time of almost half.

All my life I’ve tried to hit practice shots with great care. I try to have a clear-cut purpose in my on every swing. I always practice as I intend to play. And I learned long ago that there is a limit to the number of shots you can hit effectively before losing your concentration on your basic objectives.

Fighters pilots understand the critical importance of habit. I asked one how he managed to keep his concentration while having surface-to-air missiles shot at him. He didn’t hesitate to tell me that it was “training” that made him successful: “Up there, you just do what you are trained to do. You don’t really think about it too much. You just do it.”