Prep Your Mindset
Deliberate practice can be summarized as:
Activities designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.
The key ideas behind deliberate practice is that it:
- Pushes you just outside your comfort zone
- Repeated often
- Feedback on results in continuously available
- It’s highly demanding mentally
- It’s difficult
- It requires good goals
Challenges that fit the criteria:
Set yourself a small, finishable challenge that teaches you something further outside your comfort zone instead.
- Understand that your abilities can be developed
- Your intelligence is not up for judgment
- Don’t run from difficulty, engage with error
- Abilities can be developed, process and learn from errors
- You don’t need constant validation
- Praise the process, effort and strategy
- Push out of comfort zone so neurons can gain new stronger connections
- Transform the meaning of effort and difficulty
- Live in places that create growth
- Doing well in life is more than your ability to learn quickly and easily
- Characteristic that emerged as significant predictor of success: grit (passion and perserverance for very long term goals)
- Grit is unrelated or inversely relatred to measures of talent
- The ability to learn is not fixed (Growth Mindset) it can change with your effort.
- The brain changes and grows with challenge
- Failure is not a permanent condition
- Our lives are regularly punctuated by career crises, by moments when what we thought we knew - about our lives or careers - comes into contact with a threatening sort of reality
- We’re surrounded by snobs, snobbery is a global phenomenon
- Snobbery: anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are.
- We live in a society which has pegged certain emotional rewards to the acquisition of material goods
- Dominant emotion in modern society: ENVY which is linked to the spirit of equality
- When you can’t relate to someone you don’t envy them
- Spirit of equality mixed with a deep ineqaulity in modern society
- Society has a combination of “You can do anything” mentality and low self esteem
- Meritocracy: if you have talent and energy and skill nothing will hold you back!
- This means your position in your life is merited and deserved
- Leads to increased rates of suicide
- “It’s a sin to judge any man by his post” -St Augustine
- You don’t know anyone’s true value
- Fear of judgment and ridicule of others
- Tragic Art: an art form devoted to tracing how people fail and awarding them a level of sympathy that ordinary life would not afford them
- Nothing at our society’s center that is non-human.
- Nature: an escape from the human anthill
- Feel in contanct with something that is non-human
- What does success mean? You can’t have it all. What is the element of loss?
- Our ideas of success are not our own.
- Outward forces define what we want and how we view ourselves.
- Make sure our ideas of success are our own.
- Randomness of winning and losing process
I really liked this exercise, as I have been working on certain aspects of emotional intelligence via meditation. I recognize that I have a lot of room for growth, especially in recognizing my emotions and using that awareness to make better decisions, as well as improve the way I interact with others. This gave me further food for thought and a bit more direct focus.
First and foremost, this topic is something I feel very strongly for. I recognize the ways that I have had bias in the past and the fact that it is an ongoing struggle for each individual to overcome. For myself, I did score “well,” but it did give me pause to recognize for example this assessment:
“I don’t spend time with, or actively avoid, people who challenge my opinions or decisions.”
I am very open and work very hard to understand a plethora of races, genders, cultures, classes etc…and I work very hard to be inclusive and understanding of the wide array of vantage points this world has to offer. However, I also recognize my avoidance of people who I consider bias, who perhaps don’t share similar political views as me, or perhaps engage in what I consider to be discriminatory behavior. On this note, I recognize my need to understand and relate to such people in a better way as I am certain that I will encounter many in my career. The questionnaire made me think about my father, who was subject to his bias until his workplace offered a diversity and inclusion course, and how if I were able to engage with individuals in a more effective way, it would perhaps be better than completely avoiding their discriminatory existence.