Deliberate practice makes perfect

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, he presents 10,000 as the magic number of practice hours a person must devote to achieve mastery.  This popular but simplistic view assumes that anyone can achieve mastery given the requisite number of hours.

Other books, such as the Art of Learning and the Talent Code, respect the enormous distinction between practice and deliberate practice.

The moral is that while the success of many experts can be correlated to a minimum number of practice hours, mastery can be attained much more quickly by optimizing practice/training for quality, focus, and intensity over quantity of hours.

Feelings and behavior

Feelings aren’t always logical, but they’re always “true” in the sense that our emotions are whatever they are, for right or wrong reasons.

We can empathize with others by acknowledging that ALL of their feelings are valid, but not all of their behavior is acceptable.

This is not only true and useful in negotiating conversations with children, but also for us children who have lived through a few decades.

Why discipline is the way to freedom

World-renowned former Navy Seal Jocko Willink coined the phrase “discipline equals freedom”.

It seems counter-intuitive that being more stringent leads to liberation.  But financial discipline gives you more money and choices, a disciplined time-management system allows you to be spontaneous and more free with your schedule, and a disciplined nutrition and exercise regimen keeps you free from health issues.

We have adequate control over many of the variables we care about. The amount of freedom we have is simply the result of operational effectiveness of disciplined systems.