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October 26 - November 5, 2022
The key to strengthening your biceps—and, as we’ll learn, any muscle, be it physical, cognitive, or emotional—is balancing the right amount of stress with the right amount of rest. Stress + rest = growth. This equation holds true regardless of what it is that you are trying to grow.
the cycle looks like this: 1.Isolate the muscle or capability you want to grow 2.Stress it 3.Rest and recover, allowing for adaptation to occur 4.Repeat—this time stressing the muscle or capability a bit more than you did the last time
common process across almost all great intellectual and creative performers, regardless of their field: 1.Immersion: total engagement in their work with deep, unremitting focus 2.Incubation: a period of rest and recovery when they are not at all thinking about their work 3.Insight: the occurrence of “aha” or “eureka” moments—the emergence of new ideas and growth in their thinking
Just as our muscles deplete and run out of energy, as we’re about to see, our minds do, too.
Growth comes at the point of resistance; we learn by pushing ourselves to the outer reaches of our abilities.
students who were forced to struggle on complex problems before receiving help from teachers outperformed students who received immediate assistance. The authors of these studies summarized their findings in a simple yet elegant statement: Skills come from struggle.
Growth comes at the point of resistance. Skills come from struggle.
“It’s only when you step outside your comfort zone that you grow. Being uncomfortable is the path to personal development and growth. It is the opposite of complacency.”
embraces the challenge, seeing failure not as a setback but an opportunity to grow. “If I never pushed the envelope, if I never struggled, I would never get better,” he
A little doubt and uncertainty is actually a good thing: It signals that a growth opportunity has emerged.
you should regularly seek out just-manageable challenges: activities that take you out of your comfort zone and force you to push at the point of resistance for growth.
It isn’t experience that sets top performers apart but the amount of deliberate practice they put in.
Expertise is not about a certain number of hours practiced. Rather, it’s about the type of work that fills those hours. Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.
So what exactly makes perfect practice? Ericsson found that top performers actively seek out just-manageable challenges, setting goals for practice sessions that just barely exceed their current capabilities. But that is only half the story. What really differentiates deliberate practice is deep concentration.
Across the board, when great performers are doing serious work their bodies and minds are 100 percent there. They are fully engaged in the moment.
By doing one thing at a time and devoting his full concentration to that one thing,
His insistence on single-tasking ensures that he learns and grows from every document he drafts and every interaction he’s involved in. “It’s not that I can’t multitask,” he says. “But when I do multitask everything suffers. So I just don’t multitask. Ever.”
engaging in a task with singular focus is how we grow from stress.
•Remember that quality trumps quantity.
Walter Mischel, PhD, is a world-renowned expert on willpower at Columbia University.
Mischel has found that one of the best methods for self-control is to move the object of desire out of view. (Or in the case of vibrating phones, perhaps “out of feel.”)
top performers across all fields are unable to sustain intense work and deep concentration for more than 2 hours. Outside
Great performers, Ericsson found, generally work in chunks of 60 to 90 minutes separated by short breaks.
While the exact work-to-rest ratio depends on the demands of the job and individual preferences, the overall theme is clear: alternating between blocks of 50 to 90 minutes of intense work and recovery breaks of 7 to 20 minutes enables people to sustain the physical, cognitive, and emotional energy required for peak performance.
The growth-mindset students were willing to push themselves harder, sought out just-manageable challenges, and viewed productive failure as a positive.
the fixed-mindset students avoided challenges and quit when the going got tough.
If we cultivate a growth mindset and believe that skills come from struggle, then we are more likely to expose ourselves to the good kind of growth-promoting stress. But the power of mindsets doesn’t stop there. It turns out that our mindset toward stress not only determines if we’ll expose ourselves to it, but also how we’ll respond.
how we view stress weighs heavily on how stress influences us.
Fortunately, according to the authors of this paper, simply telling yourself “I am excited” shifts your demeanor from what they call a threat mindset (stressed out and apprehensive) to an opportunity mindset (revved up and ready to go). “Compared to those who attempt to calm down,” the authors conclude, “individuals who reappraise their anxious arousal as excitement perform better.” Put differently: The sensations you feel prior to a big event are neutral—if you view them in a positive light, they are more likely to have a positive impact on your performance.
Mindfulness is about being completely present in the moment, fully aware of yourself and your surroundings.
“Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow,” Thoreau famously
“As we sleep, our brains replay, process, learn, and extract meaning. In a sense, they think.”
the equation stress + rest = growth. During our waking hours we expose ourselves to all kinds of psychological stimulus (stress), and during our sleep (rest) we make sense of it all. As a result, we’re literally more evolved when we wake up the next morning.
It’s not that they sleep because they are elite. They are elite because they sleep.
hard work only becomes smart and sustainable work when it’s supported by rest.
The irony is that resting hard often takes more guts than working hard. Just
“Consistency was another way to tamp down terror.”
On Writing, King puts it simply: “Most of us do our best work in a place of our own.”
If stress + rest = growth is the foundation upon which our talent is built, then our routines and environments help us to fully express that talent.
you should identify and strive to cut out all the superficial things in your life. You should be fully intentional with how you spend your most precious resource of all: time.
“You need to say no to a lot of things so that when it’s time to say yes, you can do so with all your energy.”
It is only by becoming a minimalist that we can become a maximalist.
Peter Drucker, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
James Clear, “The single greatest skill in any endeavor is doing the work. Not doing the work that is easy for you. Not doing the work that makes you look good. Not doing the work when you feel inspired. Just doing the work.”
The best performers are not consistently great, but they are great at being consistent. They show up every day and they do the work.
Perhaps the real secret of world-class performers is not the daily routines that they develop, but that they stick to them. That they show up, even when they don’t feel like it. Call it drive, call it passion, or call it grit; whatever you call it, it must come from deep within.
physical fatigue occurs not in the body, but in the brain. It’s not that our muscles wear out; rather, it is our brain that shuts them down when they still have a few more percentage points to give.
The brain, Noakes remarked, is our “central governor” of fatigue. It’s our “ego” shutting us down when confronted by fear and threat. In other words, we are hardwired to retreat when the going gets tough.
Even if failure doesn’t mean physical injury, our ego doesn’t like emotional injury, either—it doesn’t want to risk getting embarrassed, so it ushers us down the safe route. It’s only when we transcend our “self” that we can break through our self-imposed limits.
In a paradoxical twist, the less we think about ourselves, the better we become.
