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Practice = Success

Fortune magazine has been running a series of articles profiling work habits of great people. There are a ton of lessons to be learned. In their current installment they discuss "The Myth of the Natural" and describe how most people achieve greatness through consistent hard work and practice.

There is discussion of what is know as the "10 year rule" that researchers have established as a minimum time to work hard and practice daily before becoming great.

Most people have no drive for anything like that type of dedication. They believe that going to school or just doing a job for a period of time will make them successful. That could not be further from the truth. The cold, hard reality is that if you want to become excellent you need to go much, much further. You need to practice relentlessly.

You need to push yourself to make one more phone call, get one more thing off your desk, read one more chapter, etc.

Whatever it is that you do, do it longer and better than everyone else. Do that for a minimum of 10 years and you have a shot at being great.

At the end of the article there is also a discussion about how most people find this very uncomfortable. It is much more comfortable to believe you are where you are in life because you haven't found your place, not because you haven't worked hard enough.

Posted by David on October 31, 2006 08:09 AM|Permalink

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