PRACTICE
Sarah Fisher has spent much of her life exceeding the speed limit. She started racing quarter midgets and karts seriously in elementary school and won her first World Karting Association Grand National Championship as a preteen. In 1999, the year she turned 19, she became the youngest woman ever to compete in the Indianapolis 500. By the time she retired in late 2010 she’d competed in that race nine times.
The regimen required to stay in peak racing form for all those years was “grueling,” she says, laughing. “I’m glad I don’t do that any more!” After spending the first half hour of the day attending to the administrative work of what became Sarah Fisher Hartman Racing, the team she founded in 2008, she’d spend 90 minutes to two hours lifting weights, running, and doing other drills with the USA Diving team, which is also headquartered in Indianapolis. In addition to working out, she’d do mental training. “Our sport is so fast, you have to have very good reaction timing,” she says, so she’d practice that. Then, after lunch, she’d come back to the shop to dive into any marketing or accounting tasks necessary to run her 25-person small business, but also to focus on other aspects of performance improvement. With race cars, “it’s not like you can fire it up and go around the block,” she says, and renting a facility and running an average test could cost $50,000–$100,000 per day. So she did a lot of simulator-based training and wind tunnel tests, and studied the data that came out of the race car. “Reviewing that data—how the car rides on the road, how it rolls, different displacement—that gives you really good feedback,” she says. If you decipher that, “you can figure out changes to make next time.”
Judging from her schedule, it seems Fisher spent around half her time as a professional driver actively trying to get better at her job. The professional musicians I’ve interviewed over the years develop similar schedules. Even as they face e-mail barrages, travel woes, and demands from their PR reps to have breakfast with reporters, they are still there at the piano, with the violin, or singing scales for hours each day. Obviously, there’s something to the old joke about how you get to Carnegie Hall.
Most people have no intention of playing on that historic stage or driving in the Indianapolis 500. Yet, if you think about it, your job is likely a performance of sorts, too. And you, too, would take your career to a new level if you spent time every day trying to improve at the tasks associated with your job.
Practice is, simply, performing or working at something repeatedly to become proficient. We do a lot of things repeatedly but seldom with the goal of improving. Unlike Fisher, “we drive almost every day, but we rarely get better at driving,” says Doug Lemov, managing director of Uncommon Schools and coauthor with Erica Woolway and Katie Yezzi of the Practice Perfect book mentioned in the section on planning. “The economy is full of tasks like that. Mammographers get better when they start the job, but after the initial improvement at the job, they totally flatten, or even get worse.” It’s often the same with teachers—something Lemov knows from training 10,000 of them over the years—with sales people who go on autopilot, or with scientific researchers. “Think about the social and economic cost of the failure to get better—of repeating every day, but not practicing. It’s kind of dizzying.”
Anything that involves skill can be practiced and, if you’d like to become better and more efficient at what you do, probably should be practiced. The best kind of practice—the “deliberate practice” identified by Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer in their famous 1993 Psychology Review paper on the schedules of elite musicians—ideally involves immediate feedback on one’s performance and a high volume of repetition to shore up specific skills.
Take writing. The red pen gets a bad rep. You can improve at writing by having people critique your prose and then revising with those edits in mind. Sure, receiving that criticism can be painful, but it’s how you learn and get better. Over time, you can serve as your own critic (“What is my point? Do I come out for it or against it? Can I say this in fewer words?”). In a pinch, a machine can help. In his essay on “Structure” for the January 14, 2013 New Yorker, John McPhee describes using the text editor program Kedit’s “All” command to show how many times he’s used “the legions of perfectly acceptable words that should not appear more than once in a piece of writing.” These are words like “expunges” or “ameliorate,” he notes, which McPhee then expunges to ameliorate his prose. To increase the volume of your writing, you can keep a blog or a daily journal. The higher the volume you require of yourself, the more efficient you will become. In three years of writing 6–7 posts per week for my various blogs, I have probably doubled my speed in cranking out 500-word persuasive essays. The posts may not be perfect now, but they’re certainly better than they were the first time I figured out where the “publish” button was on WordPress.
Or consider public speaking. The best speakers are not necessarily gregarious individuals. They’re simply well-practiced sorts who’ve honed their material to the point where they know what people will react to and they’ve learned to manage that reaction. Negotiating can be practiced. Cold calling can be practiced. Meetings can be practiced, particularly those in which you might encounter hostile questioning. Anything that happens live, that you can’t do over again, is ripe for practicing, says Lemov. “I couldn’t imagine going into a performance review and wasting that opportunity by not practicing beforehand,” he says.
If you’re not sure which skills you can practice, try polling your coworkers on which skills they think matter in your line of work. Start with the most frequently mentioned one first. What is the standard of excellence for that skill? How can you practice to get better?
The employees of Hill Investment Group build practice into their days through a culture of constant feedback. “If we had a meeting with you, and you were considering hiring our firm, after you’d leave we’d gather and ask ‘what did we do well,’ and ‘what do we need to fix in presenting our story or message, listening, or asking better questions,’” Hall says. “That can be a fragile discussion, unless culturally you have a commitment really to view it as an opportunity.” Everyone is subject to feedback, including Hall. “The most common feedback for me,” he says, “is to make it shorter, make it tighter, give the bullet point and then be quiet. Don’t get so hung up on inspiring them to see it the way you see it.”
Lemov, Woolway, and Yezzi recommend instituting drills, which are distorted simulations of reality that allow you to focus on a specific skill, just as a basketball player, in practice, might attempt 20 3-point shots in a row. If you’re practicing for media interviews, for instance, you could have friends ask you potential interview questions over and over again so you can memorize how to respond. Once you memorize plausible responses, practice delivering them in a casual, spontaneous manner. As Lemov notes, “repetition sets you free. It automates things, so your mind can think of bigger things” like remembering to smile at the television camera when the host says your name, because chances are the camera just cut to you. If your team is facing a meeting with an unhappy client next week, you might stage a mock meeting and drill the presenters with potential questions. Yezzi suggests that “At staff meetings, carve out 15 minutes to practice.” Even a little goes a long way, because people crave practice. Once you start, people want to do more. In general, people want to get better at their jobs. They want feedback and they want suggestions of what to do with that feedback.
That’s what Grace Kang has discovered. Kang started New York City’s Pink Olive boutiques after spending the early years of her career at major department stores, including Bloomingdales. “I am mentally trained to look at my selling every Monday,” she says. With the data in hand, she can improve her own performance as a curator, experimenting with new product mixes, like a larger paper and home decor section, for instance, after her reports showed that these products moved fast. She also carves out time to get on the phone with her designers to share the data on “what’s working, what’s not working.” Curiously, Kang reports that these designers, who may sell through multiple channels, often don’t hear back from customers. “Offering that feedback to our designers is invaluable to them,” Kang says. “My manager and I spend a lot of time really educating them about what sells. If something is doing well by another designer, we really do share that with our designers, so they can act on it and create something special for us,” she says. “It’s time consuming, but the return is huge.”
You may not be able to devote half your workdays to improving your skills and your team’s skills, but given how massively most people underinvest in this discipline, turning practice into a daily activity “Will make people better at their work,” says Lemov. That “is a fundamental competitive advantage.”