Steps to Level Up Your Skills to Reach Your Goal with Ron Friedman

Crafting Your Scoreboard

• Ira Glass coined the term the Vision Ability Gap.
• This is when you know what your vision is, but you also know you’re not going to be able to execute that vision yet.
• You need some time to improve your skills.
• The first step in identifying this gap is to create a scoreboard.
• This is based on the scoreboard principle.
• Anything you measure, you will improve on.
• The key is to figure out what steps you need in order to improve.
• Then start tracking those steps and measuring your progress.
• For example: if you want to increase your water consumption, you would start tracking how many ounces of water you’re drinking every day.
• If you want to lose weight, keep a food diary.
• If you want to improve your focus, keep track of how many interrupted minutes you have over the course of the workday.
• There is a lot of data showing that humans are instinctually attracted to numbers.
• It’s evolutionary.
• You needed to know the difference between a large food source versus a smaller one, so you didn’t devote resources chasing the wrong one down.
• It also alerts you when you’re in danger.
• If you’re surrounded by a large group of strangers, your anxiety levels rise. But if you didn’t know the difference in size or numbers, you wouldn’t be scared.
• The business world utilizes this concept by tracking metrics.
• A good example is the Ritz-Carlton.
• They became one of the leaders in customer service by realizing that in order to drive business, they needed to keep track of their net promoter scores.
• These are the number of people who endorse their hotel after they leave.
• Tracking those scores led to insights that completely transformed the hotel.
• Tracking metrics have proven time and time again to lead to success, and this process can work for you.
• Start by taking a moment to figure out what specific attributes and tasks you need to do every day to reach your goals, and track them.

Understand Your Objective

• It’s very common for most people to shift from objective to objective.
• You can be focused on saving for retirement when a friend buying a car shifts your objective.
• Instead of optimizing your behavior for long-term wealth, you’re optimizing for status or having fun in the moment.
• This is aspirational whiplash, where you don’t know what you’re optimizing for.
• It’s also where misery comes from.
• You have to figure out what you’re optimizing for and then start tracking those metrics.
• There’s no way to know you’re improving if you don’t track your progress.
• You get a powerful emotional jolt when you see your scores rise.
• That jolt transforms into motivation.
• If you don’t have motivation, you’re not going to do the work.
• Getting that emotional jolt when you see progress, or the shame of not seeing your score improve—those are both very motivating.
• You want to harness that motivation.
• But tracking your score also illuminates anything that isn’t contributing to your score.
• An example is when entrepreneurs leave corporations, they become resistant to attending meetings.
• They are now keenly aware that meetings don’t contribute to their bottom line.
• Imagine if employees had metrics that showed them clearly what they needed to do in order to get their next promotion.
• They would be hyper-focused on that.
• Be sure to understand your objective and optimize your measurements to track those skills.

The Myth Of Practice

• For the most part, the definition of practice is too narrow.
• When you think about practice, it’s normal to think about practicing in the present.
• You’ve likely heard about deliberate practice.
• That’s the idea of doing something just outside of your ability and utilizing feedback to improve in the future.
• But athletes improve by practicing in the past and in the future.
• Research refers to practicing in the past as reflective practice.
• Reflective practice is taking a moment to think back on your past performance and identify gaps between your expectations and your experience.
• What did you expect versus what actually happened.
• One of the best ways to embrace reflective practice is through a five-year journal.
• There are five slots per page, one page for each day of the year.
• At the end of the day, write a brief summary of the day.
• The following year, you can see what you did today, but also what you did the same day last year.
• By the end of the book, you have five years of data.
• This process of continuously comparing what you did today versus last year strengthens your memory.
• But it also gives you a comparison of your expectations versus your experience.
• You can learn things about yourself with this insight and use it to fine-tune your metrics for success.
• Practicing the future is using imagery.
• This is the process of closing your eyes and thinking about what is going to happen.
• If you’re going to give a speech, visualize what it’s going to feel like walking on stage, feeling the clicker in your hand, feeling the heat of the lights shining down.
• Use your senses to imagine you’re there.
• This is not visualizing success.
• There’s research showing visualizing success does not work.
• When you use imagery, you’re front-loading decisions priming you to take action.
• Now, when you go on stage, you don’t have to react to the lights or freeze trying to find the clicker.
• You’ve anticipated that and front-loaded the experience.
• You’re more present and can execute more effectively.
• Research shows physicians make fewer mistakes during surgery when they use imagery. Public speakers are more persuasive. You can even learn to play instruments faster.
• Imagery is a powerful tool that is underutilized outside of sports.
• Studies have found that athletes who use imagery versus those who don’t are able to cut down on their physical practice.
• It helps avoid burnout and accelerates success.

Broaden Your Definition Of Practice

• Practice is usually defined as repeating a task over and over, until you get the desired result.
• This is problematic when it comes to success because your brain is actually working against you.
• Your brain tunes out repetitive tasks by automating them.
• Think about when you first started to drive.
• You pay less attention to the road now than back then.
• This same automation happens to everything you do over a long period of time.
• In order to get better at practice, you need to level up the degree of difficulty consistently.
• You can do that through novelty, or by interweaving different tasks within your practice tasks.
• Another way to keep practice challenging is by cross-training.
• Find a task that encompasses a lot of overlapping, similar skills.
• NFL players practice ballet in the off-season because it has a lot of overlapping skills but doesn’t use the same muscle groups.
• They can get better without burning out.
• Figure out which hobbies are fun but will also make you better at the skills to reach your goal.
• An example of this is improv comedy.
• A lot of executives and leaders are signing up not because they want to be funny, but because it teaches mindful presence and deep listening.
• Both are skills they need to be successful executives.
• To start, find five specific things you need to execute a successful day.
• You can also think about what things you want to avoid doing.
• Both of these focal points are key factors in leveraging a scoreboard effectively.
• Track both scores: things you want to do and things you want to avoid.
• It’s a simple exercise that you can start doing today that will lead you down the path to success.
• If you haven’t listened to the first episode with Ron, please be sure to listen, here.
• Be sure to check out the unedited, extended episode on YouTube, here.

Share With Us

• Take a screenshot of this episode, tag us on social media (@RonFriedmanPhD & @JimKwik), and share one thing you’re going to start tracking today.
• Get your copy of Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success, here.
• Get more information and visit Ron, here.