Things I have learned in 183 so far.
I loved the article by Bednar and the school being a DPC. Idaho is a "Temple of learning" and first I need to work on my testimony of Jesus and Christ and his plan.
I love this quote by Richard L Evans
You know, it is a wonderful thing to be faithful, but a much greater thing to be both faithful and competent. There is no particular virtue in being uninformed, certainly no virtue in ignorance. When young people can acquire the skills, the techniques, and the knowledge of these times, and along with it have a spiritual commitment and a solid faith and cleanliness of life, there is nothing that you can’t achieve; nothing in righteousness or in reason. (From an address given to the young people at the Northwest Inland Division Gathered for Zion’s Camp, October 15, 1971)
I love Ricks Mission Statement:
The mission of Ricks College has four important and interrelated parts:
1. Build testimonies of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ and encourage living its principles.
2. Provide a quality education for students of diverse interests and abilities.
3. Prepare students for further education and employment, and for their roles as citizens and parents.
4. Maintain a wholesome academic, cultural, social and spiritual environment.
The difference between sacrafice and consecration. I love this
The word sacrifice means “to offer or surrender
something valuable or precious.”
Consecration is related to but different from
sacrifice. The word consecrate means to develop and “dedicate to a sacred
purpose.” Sacrifice is what I will offer, surrender, yield, or give
up. Consecration, on the other hand, is to fully develop and dedicate to a sacred
purpose.
Do what you love and the money will follow. I struggle with that. At my age I can totally do that. I have money already to provide for my basic needs but when I was 18, well, maybe I love basket weaving, but that degree will not get me very far in providing for my family. I will be thinking about that one a lot this term.
At first I was beginning to get really nervous about the work it will take to finish the degree then I read an awesome article in my Web Design class. I want to include it in my blog so I don't forget it. This is what I have learned that has made the biggest impression on me this week in school. (When I wrote my report I honestly thought the article came out of the entrepreneurial class - it fit that well. I could not find it and finally found it in my web design class. It goes perfectly with my business class)
First I am going to post my thoughts and write up on the article, the article itself is below that.
What it take to be Great
The article was very interesting and could
be used in any part of our lives, personal, business, with our church callings,
or out in the community. Having a mental model of your situation is priority.
For example
a stay at home mom:
· You create a mental image of your
home and your family.
· You make goals from that mental
image.
· You work at those goals.
· You evaluate weekly how those goals are
doing.
· You readjust those goals.
· All along you take the time to read
books on how to raise kids, how to have a better relationship with your
husband, how to clean, or how to cook.
· You take what you have read and you
incorporate your new learning into your day to day life so you can meet your
goals, so you can meet your mental picture of what your family to be.
· You get teenagers that give you a
difficult time.
· You ponder and pray what to do.
· You focus on what is happening and
why.
· You read, take classes, talk to others
who have been through it, gather ideas of what you can do to solve the problem
· You remember your mental image of
what you desire.
· You readjust those goals.
· You work hard and never give up.
No one needs to be naturally talented to
be a mom, a wife, a homemaker. What you
do need is a willingness to try, to learn, to work hard.
My mother is a convert to the gospel and
was raised as an only child. She had an older brother but he went to prison
when she was 6 years old. Her mother was
in and out of the hospital due to TB.
Her grandmother dotted over her and she never really learned any
homemaking skills. All before she was 19
she had married, had a child, divorced, remarried, was pregnant with a second
child, and on her way to a second divorce.
Then she found the gospel.
With the Gospel she created this mental
image of what she wanted her family to be like.
She took Relief Society classes and learned how to cook, sew, organize,
clean, and have Family Home Evening. She
worked hard and long at her goals.
Her skills became so good she sewed a suit
for my brothers mission, my wedding dress, had a wedding cake business and ten
kids. One of her mental goals was to do
genealogy work for her family. She has
submitted thousands upon thousands of names; many of those names before the age
of computers. It did not come easy. She took a beginning class. Step by step she learned what to do next and
she has worked very hard in gaining her skills.
Now we can take the word homemaker and put
in any word you want. A seamstress, a baker, a wedding cake maker, a web
creator, a Young Women’s president, a
PTA president, a manager at Target, an engineer, a school teacher. The list is endless. For me I will substitute in my Family History
major. Maybe instead of teenager I substitute in a particularly difficult class
that I do not enjoy.
All, including my major, require the same
thing. You make a mental model, make goals, learn, reevaluate, readjust those
goals, keep that mental model in your mind, focus on what’s happening and why,
get feedback, learn some more, readjust some more and more importantly you WORK
HARD.
Now I plan to make a mental model in several
areas of my life. My home, my church
callings, my preparation for a couples mission in four years, my college
degree. First I will make an overall
mental model of my life, and then I will make several sub models for each of
the areas of my life. I can see that I
have done that already in some areas of my life. When I was called as building librarian, the
library was a mess. In my mind I envisioned
how I wanted the library. It took me
nine months to get to that point, some readjusting, and a lot of hard work. My
newest mental model; a bachelor’s degree; goals, learning, focus, feedback,
readjusting, and a lot of hard work. It is time to roll up the sleeves and get
to work.
*******************************************************
What it takes to be great
Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is
irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice
and hard work
(Fortune Magazine) -- What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Berkshire Hathaway (Charts) Chairman Warren Buffett the world's premier investor? We think we know: Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffett told Fortune not long ago, he was "wired at birth to allocate capital." It's a one-in-a-million thing. You've got it - or you don't.
Well, folks, it's not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don't exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that's demanding and painful.
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Scientific experts are producing remarkably consistent findings across a wide array of fields. Understand that talent doesn't mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It's an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well. British-based researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson and John A. Sluboda conclude in an extensive study, "The evidence we have surveyed ... does not support the [notion that] excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts."
To see how the researchers could reach such a conclusion, consider the problem they were trying to solve. In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, and go on to greatness.
The irresistible question - the "fundamental challenge" for researchers in this field, says the most prominent of them, professor K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University - is, Why? How are certain people able to go on improving? The answers begin with consistent observations about great performers in many fields.
Scientists worldwide have conducted scores of studies since the 1993 publication of a landmark paper by Ericsson and two colleagues, many focusing on sports, music and chess, in which performance is relatively easy to measure and plot over time. But plenty of additional studies have also examined other fields, including business.
No substitute for hard work
The first major conclusion is that nobody is great
without work. It's nice to believe that if you find the field where
you're naturally gifted, you'll be great from day one, but it
doesn't happen. There's no evidence of high-level
performance without experience or practice.
Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule.
What about Bobby Fischer, who became a chess grandmaster at 16? Turns out the rule holds: He'd had nine years of intensive study. And as John Horn of the University of Southern California and Hiromi Masunaga of California State University observe, "The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average." In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 20 or 30 years' experience before hitting their zenith.
So greatness isn't handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn't enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What's missing?
Practice makes perfect
The best people in any field are those who devote the
most hours to what the researchers call "deliberate practice." It's
activity that's explicitly intended to improve performance,
that reaches for objectives just beyond one's level of
competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of
repetition.
For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don't get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day - that's deliberate practice.
Consistency is crucial. As Ericsson notes, "Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends."
Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It's the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.
The skeptics
Not all researchers are totally onboard with the
myth-of-talent hypothesis, though their objections go to its edges
rather than its center. For one thing, there are the intangibles.
Two athletes might work equally hard, but what
explains the ability of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to
perform at a higher level in the last two minutes of a game?
Researchers also note, for example, child prodigies who could speak, read or play music at an unusually early age. But on investigation those cases generally include highly involved parents. And many prodigies do not go on to greatness in their early field, while great performers include many who showed no special early aptitude.
Certainly some important traits are partly inherited, such as physical size and particular measures of intelligence, but those influence what a person doesn't do more than what he does; a five-footer will never be an NFL lineman, and a seven-footer will never be an Olympic gymnast. Even those restrictions are less severe than you'd expect: Ericsson notes, "Some international chess masters have IQs in the 90s." The more research that's done, the more solid the deliberate-practice model becomes.
Real-world examples
All this scholarly research is simply evidence for
what great performers have been showing us for years. To take a handful
of examples: Winston Churchill, one of the 20th century's
greatest orators, practiced his speeches compulsively.
Vladimir Horowitz supposedly said, "If I don't practice for a day, I
know it. If I don't practice for two days, my wife knows
it. If I don't practice for three days, the world
knows it." He was certainly a demon practicer, but the same quote has
been attributed to world-class musicians like Ignace
Paderewski and Luciano Pavarotti.
Many great athletes are legendary for the brutal discipline of their practice routines. In basketball, Michael Jordan practiced intensely beyond the already punishing team practices. (Had Jordan possessed some mammoth natural gift specifically for basketball, it seems unlikely he'd have been cut from his high school team.)
In football, all-time-great receiver Jerry Rice - passed up by 15 teams because they considered him too slow - practiced so hard that other players would get sick trying to keep up.
Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age - 18 months - and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that's what it took to get even better.
The business side
The evidence, scientific as well as anecdotal, seems
overwhelmingly in favor of deliberate practice as the source of great
performance. Just one problem: How do you practice
business? Many elements of business, in fact, are
directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations,
deciphering financial statements - you can practice them
all.
Still, they aren't the essence of great managerial performance. That requires making judgments and decisions with imperfect information in an uncertain environment, interacting with people, seeking information - can you practice those things too? You can, though not in the way you would practice a Chopin etude.
Instead, it's all about how you do what you're already doing - you create the practice in your work, which requires a few critical changes. The first is going at any task with a new goal: Instead of merely trying to get it done, you aim to get better at it.
Report writing involves finding information, analyzing it and presenting it - each an improvable skill. Chairing a board meeting requires understanding the company's strategy in the deepest way, forming a coherent view of coming market changes and setting a tone for the discussion. Anything that anyone does at work, from the most basic task to the most exalted, is an improvable skill.
Adopting a new mindset
Armed with that mindset, people go at a job in a new
way. Research shows they process information more deeply and retain it
longer. They want more information on what they're doing
and seek other perspectives. They adopt a longer-term
point of view. In the activity itself, the mindset persists. You aren't
just doing the job, you're explicitly trying to get
better at it in the larger sense.
Again, research shows that this difference in mental approach is vital. For example, when amateur singers take a singing lesson, they experience it as fun, a release of tension. But for professional singers, it's the opposite: They increase their concentration and focus on improving their performance during the lesson. Same activity, different mindset.
Feedback is crucial, and getting it should be no problem in business. Yet most people don't seek it; they just wait for it, half hoping it won't come. Without it, as Goldman Sachs leadership-development chief Steve Kerr says, "it's as if you're bowling through a curtain that comes down to knee level. If you don't know how successful you are, two things happen: One, you don't get any better, and two, you stop caring." In some companies, like General Electric, frequent feedback is part of the culture. If you aren't lucky enough to get that, seek it out.
Be the ball
Through the whole process, one of your goals is to
build what the researchers call "mental models of your business" -
pictures of how the elements fit together and influence one
another. The more you work on it, the larger your
mental models will become and the better your performance will grow.
Andy Grove could keep a model of a whole world-changing technology industry in his head and adapt Intel (Charts) as needed. Bill Gates, Microsoft's (Charts) founder, had the same knack: He could see at the dawn of the PC that his goal of a computer on every desk was realistic and would create an unimaginably large market. John D. Rockefeller, too, saw ahead when the world-changing new industry was oil. Napoleon was perhaps the greatest ever. He could not only hold all the elements of a vast battle in his mind but, more important, could also respond quickly when they shifted in unexpected ways.
That's a lot to focus on for the benefits of deliberate practice - and worthless without one more requirement: Do it regularly, not sporadically.
Why?
For most people, work is hard enough without pushing
even harder. Those extra steps are so difficult and painful they almost
never get done. That's the way it must be. If great
performance were easy, it wouldn't be rare. Which
leads to possibly the deepest question about greatness. While experts
understand an enormous amount about the behavior that
produces great performance, they understand very
little about where that behavior comes from.
The authors of one study conclude, "We still do not know which factors encourage individuals to engage in deliberate practice." Or as University of Michigan business school professor Noel Tichy puts it after 30 years of working with managers, "Some people are much more motivated than others, and that's the existential question I cannot answer - why."
The critical reality is that we are not hostage to some naturally granted level of talent. We can make ourselves what we will. Strangely, that idea is not popular. People hate abandoning the notion that they would coast to fame and riches if they found their talent. But that view is tragically constraining, because when they hit life's inevitable bumps in the road, they conclude that they just aren't gifted and give up.
Maybe we can't expect most people to achieve greatness. It's just too demanding. But the striking, liberating news is that greatness isn't reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and to everyone.
_____________________
How one CEO learned to fly. Boeing chief James McNerney has now made his mark at three major companies. How? "Help others get better," he says.
No comments:
Post a Comment