Why you are not a Jack Welch and why experienced people can be less effective?

It is all about what that experience has done to you. It’s about how you practiced your ‘deliberate practice’.

The first step in deliberate practice is to identify a skill that you would like to improve.

Many people assume that just because they are ‘experienced’, their skills do not need any improvement. This is not true. You have been driving for years, yet you haven’t reached the skills of a race-course driver, right?

Similarly, if you have been singing in office gatherings, you haven’t become a pro singer unless you invested time in skilling up.

In fact, research shows why ‘experienced’ people are no better for their experience. If you receive some minimal training in psychotherapy, you will perform psychotherapy as well as trained psychiatrists, research shows.

And if you are a complete novice in the stock market, please go ahead and pick some stocks randomly. You will beat almost all of the financial experts!

Young doctors and nurses perform better than highly experienced doctors and nurses in many domains of medicine, perhaps because the younger ones attended their schools recently and remembered most things. In psychology, one study found that diagnoses by secretaries of psychologists were better than those of the psychologists. Having more years on your CV does not make you a Jack Welch.

Skills such as planning, risk management, project management, financial management,  customer relations, sales, etc., are all amenable to improvement through deliberate practice. You have to be willing to work on incremental challenges.

Here are some elements from the steps prescribed by Ericsson himself for deliberate practice: you need to identify a specific skill you need to improve rather than seeking a vague overall improvement in some general domain. This means that you should be able to measure your progress in a reliable way. Once you identify this, set specific improvement goals, preferably with an experienced coach, and undertake this practice under their guidance. These targets allow you to leave your comfort zone and practice increasingly difficult challenges. This will not be fun. Initially, a teacher may give you feedback on your performance, but later, Ericsson suggests, you should be able to monitor yourself.

If you want to reach mastery levels, you should pursue the most important goals in your life with the same level of passion. That means, subject to other factors, being willing to put in close to or over 10,000 hours of practice. We will discuss in later issues how to multiply your efforts significantly, so we will not need those many hours. For now, it serves well to know your number one priority in life and concentrate on that with razor-sharp focus.