Develop Your Talent for Anything & Excel at EVERYTHING

1. Course Promo: Whatever skill or talent it is the you want to develop, I will teach you how to take your ability to the next level. Dedicated improvement in a particular skill can help you succeed at school or college, can help you reach levels of ability that you've always dreamed of. It can help you get a promotion at work or achieve your dream job. Beyond this, it can give us a deep sense of fulfillment and an enormous sense of meaning. It can help build our self confidence and belief. In this course, I will be explaining reasonable and practical steps that you can implement today that will help elevate your skills and talents for any purpose. My name is Francis, aka the talent hacker. And over the years, I've developed a core set of principles. I've used time and time again to succeed with my personal and professional goals. I graduated from the University of Cambridge with a doctorate in immunology. During this time, I've published in top journals, won awards for my research, presented internationally and taught at the university. Currently I work as a type of health care consultant in industry. I play the flamenco guitar and host the popular YouTube channel dedicated to the instruments. I've trained as a snowboard instructor in Canada and practice several martial arts over the years. In particular, the Brazilian martial art capoeira, having trained gymnastics and my youth, my current focus is on calisthenics and strength training. I also loved playing chess and learning languages, in particular Brazilian, Portuguese. I have used these experiences to create numerous online courses. And I wrote the book, talent hackers guide, how to accelerate anything, which has helped people from all over the world develop their abilities. This course is a condensed version of that book. So let me walk you through what you will learn from these lessons. We will build a comprehensive talent hacking strategy by first understanding your perceptions of talent itself and how it impacts your success. I will teach you how to develop an effective practice routine, achieve consistency with your practice. Source valid assessment of your progression and overcome challenges and plateaus. We will delve deep into our mindset, discuss attitudes that hinder our growth and learn techniques to better controlled. And finally, I will teach you how to put everything we've learned together and apply it towards developing multiple skills simultaneously. Upon finishing this course, we will have covered a comprehensive method of developing your skills and talents, which can be applied toward any of your passions, interests, and pursuits. 2. 1 - Where do many go wrong?: Before we get started with lesson one, let me just quickly explain some of the terms that I will be using throughout this course. To make my explanation simpler, I will use the word discipline to encompass any kind of physical, artistic, or creative interests or any field of study. For example, when I say your discipline, I could be referring to a language or an academic subject. Likewise, I could be referring to a sport or musical instrument. In addition, I'll use the word practice to encompass the activities within your discipline. For example, when I say your practice, I could be referring to your studying, learning, or training. Okay guys, let's get going. Throughout the course. We will address many cases where people go wrong and create targeted ways for us to correct these. However, before we take a dive into the details of skill development, let us first talk about the most common mistakes that so many of us make during our pursuits. The first is sticking to the idea that talent and ability are only things that we are born with. So there's no denying that Simone Biles has an extra ordinary innate talent for gymnastics. And the same is true for Usain Bolt was sprinting and Cristiano Ronaldo with football, however, for most human beings, we are not developing our skills just so we can compete at the top, 0.1 per cent, a very defined activity. We are developing our skills because of the reasons I outlined in the introductory video, the pursuit of self-development is enormously rewarding. It can have a huge impact on our success at work, in education, or just generally bring greater happiness to our lives. For example, becoming a good snowboarder for me has become a huge part of my identity and is genuinely one of the most fun activities I've ever experienced. The lessons that I've learned during my years of snowboarding even went on to influence my academic studies at the University of Cambridge. However, I have no desire to compete with Sean whites in the Olympic half-pipe or land or backside triple cork 1440. Obviously that was a bit of an exaggeration, but ultimately, I just want you to realize how meaningless the whole nature versus nurture debate is and how meaningless it is to compare ourselves with the world's elite. Likewise, it doesn't help to constantly compare ourselves with our peers or with people that we follow on social media. Yes, being competitive can be used constructively, but just be aware of when this is having a negative impact on you. The reality is, it doesn't matter who you are. There is always going to be someone better than you at something, but this doesn't stop the activity itself from being meaningful and fulfilling, often supporting your successes in life. In summary, let us approach our development optimistically with an open-mind and a desire to explore our discipline, I recommend that you concentrate on things that you can control in your life, which is what you do with your time and energy. When I was growing up, the 10 thousand hour rule was popular. And I am now very happy to see that this is mostly regarded as absolute nonsense. Obviously, devoted practice is a very important factor in skill development and is indeed something that we must be dedicated to. However, blindly pouring hours of effort into practice alone will not make you extraordinary. Building talent is not that straightforward. If you want to see how detrimental this approach can be, head to Google and search for the **** plan golf that you can read for yourself, a real-life example of the failure that the 10 thousand hour rule can bring. Unfortunately, I have fallen victim to this approach to, as a teenager, I used to spend hours and hours everyday practicing the guitar. All this succeeded in doing was killing my passion for the instrument and injuring my wrist, which took two years of rest to heal. To develop our talents, we need to adopt a strategic approach, prioritizing quality practice over the quantity of practice and favoring sustainable practice in the long term, instead of short-term progress. I will teach you how to do this in lessons 23 of this course. Today, we have so many digital resources available to us. Smartphone apps, e-book libraries, online courses, and even virtual reality platforms. However, don't assume that just because something uses the latest technology, then it must be better. It's probably worth highlighting that as these types of technologies only came into widespread use very recently in human history. Most of our heroes that we look up to develop their extraordinary abilities without computers and without the Internet. Now, I do realize that the use of modern technology can give us plenty of advantages. However, the most important aspect here is to ensure that either the content you're consuming or the activities you are doing are of high-quality. Also, this needs to be integrated into holistic plan for skill development. As such, I am a huge fan of flashcard apps for memory consolidation. But the key here is that flashcard apps fulfill a distinct function which is reinforcing our memory. As such, they can be a brilliant tool to support certain activities. We will talk about this later in the course. One example of a poor approach to skill development with modern technology is the exclusive use of certain smartphone apps for language learning. Most of these two package language learning into neat plans including set vocabulary, little quizzes, and exercises. They can perhaps be used as light entertainment or as a supplement to a more comprehensive learning program. But taken alone, smartphone apps is simply too superficial and fail to convey the full complexity of languages and then nuances, in summary, don't fall into the trap of assuming that just because something uses cutting edge technology, then it must be better. The tool itself is not the critical factor. The critical factor is you, how you integrate the different available tools into a comprehensive program of development and how you implement this in the long term. All of which will be explained in this course. Even if you already know your preferred ways of learning something, I want everyone watching this course to be open to the idea that they need to continue exploring how they learn best. We need to keep an open mind, be curious, explore different ways of learning so that we can better understand ourselves and what works best for us. My personal experiences, despite going on to study and one of the best universities in the world, I performed quite badly at school. And for much of my youth, my mindset was fixed into thinking. I had no talent for academic subjects. In actual fact, I simply hadn't yet discovered the methods of learning that worked best for me. I now know that I learn best by exploring a topic myself. Instead of having others described the topic to me, I also learn better by creating projects and problems to solve in relation to the topic. In other words, I have to be very active and learn by doing. So, let me reflect this onto you. Do you know your preferences when it comes to learning something? And do you ever get stuck in old ways of approaching your learning instead of exploring different ways? I will keep this one short and sweet. It's not enough just to watch this course. You have to make changes that you will implement in your day-to-day life. Now, it's okay to start small. You don't have to make loads of changes immediately, but you do need to commit specific actions in your life that will go on to create habits. I will be presenting many new ideas to you in this course. And after hearing some of them, you may not think they will be beneficial to you. My advice is, try it anyway. You can't conclude something isn't helpful if you never have even tried it. Again, skill development is about finding what works best for you, which only happens by exploration. You need to get out of your comfort zone and try new things. If you're watching this course, it means you have the desire to improve yourself and your skill set. Therefore, be active, be committed, be open to new experiences and action, those changes in your life. In summary, we have talked about some typical places where people make mistakes. These include sticking to the idea that talent and ability are only things that we are born with. Blindly pouring hours of effort into practice alone. Assuming that just because something uses the latest technology than it must be better, getting stuck in old patterns of learning and failing to action changes in your life. If you can overcome these, honestly, you're already on your way to hacking any talent you want. To finish this lesson. I've planned a little activity for you. This consists of several questions that I want you to answer honestly to yourself. It may even help to write your answers down. So please refer to the course materials PDF document to consider these and complete these. 3. 2 - Building an Effective Practice Routine: One critical factor I raised in the previous lesson was that frequent practice doesn't always result in consistent improvement. And I've noticed perhaps you have to, That's if people fail to see results from their practice, they tend to get bored and frustrated, then stopped practicing altogether. What I aim to do in this lesson is to share some concepts to improve the quality of your practice so that it is more effective at developing your skills. Many of the examples that I'm about to give now a drawn from my own experiences. However, the concepts remain the same regardless of the activity, please think about and apply these concepts to your specific disciplines. In my youth, I used to train gymnastics and my local club. And one thing I noticed was that it did not matter how advanced and ability that gymnasts were. They always draw the basics over and over, whether it was just part of their warm-up form the bulk of their off-season training regime or simply comprise part of their daily training. The basics are an essential routine to them. Many people think that beginner movements stop once you move past the beginner stage of training. But this is simply not true. The advanced gymnasts understood this and always draw the basics. Even though elite level gymnastics is full of indescribably complex and demanding movements. These movements are dependent on the possession of solid foundations, and these foundations only remains solid with consistent attention. The more we consider this concept, the more we see it's prevalent across disciplines. Singing lessons always used to just start with some time devoted to simply breathing correctly, making sure to engage the diaphragm and regulate the amount of air expanded on the exhale. From here, we would begin vocalizing scales with simple vowel combinations. For my flamenco guitar study, I practiced the simplest version of each of the primary techniques on an almost daily basis when used as a warm-up to the main activity, practicing the very basic skills is a brilliant way to prime the body in mind for more serious work, this ensures that the rest of the practice is completed with correct technique, which can do wonders for avoiding injury. And this makes consistent long-term practice more feasible. Okay? We now understand that high level ability is built upon solid foundations. And these foundations are maintained by making the basic elements of your discipline part of your essential practice routine? Yes, we know that they are an ideal way to warm up and prepare for an activity, but they should also be implemented more generally in our practice. As we have seen, such an approach works well for musical and athletic training. But what about for studying academic subjects? How do you drill the fundamentals and prime your mind for cognitive development? If you cast your mind back to the various subjects that you've recently studied from an academic textbook, you may recall that there are usually summary pages at the end of each section or chapter. These summary pages typically list concise points or diagrams to represent the take-home concepts of the topic. Furthermore, with the explosion of online content, there are plenty of academic resources available on YouTube which condensed fundamental concepts into short videos. I recommend that you take such information and use it to construct digital flashcards. These cards serve as an excellent way to drill the critical information and remind yourself of the central concepts which creates a solid foundation for more challenging learning. I personally use the computer program Anki and its associated iPhone. Now, these flashcards and must be constructed well so that you get the most benefit from the use. Luckily, good resources exist to teach you the optimal way of constructing the flashcards. Please refer to the course materials PDF document for links to several good tutorials on this. Anki is free to use on your computer and the video tutorials are free to watch on YouTube, the flashcards themselves can incorporate pictures and audio. Also, the flashcards can be tagged so specific topics can be found and reviewed with ease as you become more comfortable with the information, the Anki algorithm will gradually increase the length of time between revisions, shifting the information from your short-term to long-term memory. During my doctoral studies, I would run through my Anki flashcards daily to drill the fundamentals. At present, I work as a scientific and medical consultant in the pharmaceutical industry. And shortly before important meetings or large presentations, I will review flashcards on medical terminology, clinical guidelines and scientific concepts, all usefully tagged as essentials in Anki. And I do this on my iPhone. As you use Anki more and more, you will discover how to make flashcards so that they fit your learning style best. Again, this is a path of discovery on what works best for you. In the beginning, it does take a bit longer to construct and review your Anki flashcards. But after you gain some experience, it should not take any longer than ten to 15 minutes each day to review. At the time of recording this, I have over 8,500 cards in my Anki decks covering all kinds of different topics, from languages to computer coding, stock market investing, science, medicine, and chess. Given this, I don't spend any longer than ten minutes per day reviewing my Anki decks regarding learning languages are common approach here is to utilize frequency lists. Particularly observant among you may have noticed that our day-to-day conversations don't involve a huge range of words. Conversely, we mostly tend to talk about the same sorts of topics where we live, what we did earlier that day, how we feel, what we want to eat, or about our hobbies and interests. In other words, these are the foundational elements of day-to-day spoken language. Therefore, if you were to learn the thousand most common words in a particular language, you could probably communicate with that language in many standards situations. Should you go to the publicly available database for my favorite digital flashcard program, Anki and search for frequency lists, you will likely find many available to download for free. However, I much prefer making my own and I believe this personalization contributes to memorization and understanding. I typically will do an online search for a frequency list and construct the Anki flashcards myself, incorporating plenty of images and audio to make them a stimulating and engaging as possible. Frequency lists are the basics of a language only comprising the simplest and most common words. However, when used as a tool alongside a more comprehensive learning strategy, your flashcard database will provide an invaluable resource. Incorporation of regular revision will be of enormous benefit. In summary, a high level of skill is built upon solid foundations. Identify the fundamentals of your discipline, use them to build your foundation and then maintain it by incorporation into your routine practice. In order to plan our path toward greater abilities, we must understand a number of things where we are right now, where we want to get to and why exactly we want to do it. Knowing this will help us to construct a planet that is specific to our current liabilities, goals, and motivations. So let's consider the following as examples. Say your partner is Spanish and you wish to improve upon your basic understanding of the language so that you can understand your partner and their family when they were conversing together in Spanish. Here we can see that we want to take a beginner Spanish speaker to a level where they're listening skills are competent enough to understand native discussion or say your discipline is football. As your position as goalkeeper, you intend to build upon your intermediate level of experience by improving your skills with close range defense of the goal. Here we can see that we want to take a player with some experience and develop a very particular aspect of their skill for their position. The reason it is important to consider this is it constantly changes our abilities, change, our goals, change our environment changes. To construct an effective practice routine, it needs to be specific for you. So regarding your discipline, where are you right now? Where do you want to get to and why exactly do you want to do it? Now that we have acknowledged our starting points and clarified our ideal end point, let us begin structuring our path. Here, it is important to recognize that any discipline can be conceptually broken apart into smaller components. For example, the first few years of martial arts practice is typically splits into the following strikes and attacks, defensive movements, unlike sparring with perhaps the rows and grappling, depending on the martial art beginner language books typically guide their readers through exercises to build the following correct pronunciation and basic speaking skills. Listening skills, knowledge of common vocabulary such as greetings and common phrases, and the superficial appreciation of the culture. Academic textbooks educate the student by breaking the subject apart into its constituent concepts and topics which are explained in separate chapters or sections. Given this, I want you to write down the components that comprise the discipline that you aim to develop. These components should be based upon your current ability level and goals for the future, as we discussed in the previous parts of this lesson, ideally, they will cover the most significant aspects of the discipline and you should try to reduce any redundancy where possible. This may still be a confusing idea, but we will walk through some examples very shortly, which I hope will clarify the concept further. But first, what is the advantage of this approach? Breaking down a discipline into the so-called principal components will enable you to simplify your practice, to understand the details within each individual component. Three, allow you to work on each component separately for gradually combine each component. And five, identify where your strengths and weaknesses lie. So here is how to identify your principal components. And the great thing is, it's probably already been done for you to a certain extent. For example, I had an advert through Instagram recently for a training session on skiing, which told me that the principle components for skiing, our balance, edging, rotation, and pressure. And by this they mean learning to control these factors when on the skis, as mentioned previously, academic textbooks are split into distinct chapters or sections in relation to the significant topics or concepts. And this is usually true for language books and online courses to the martial arts usually list out the different skills required to attain the belt above. If you have a teacher, instructor or more experienced friend. Ask for them to help with identifying your principal components. I've sometimes even posted on online forums to get help here. Okay, so let's wrap this up with a number of complete examples. In each of these, we will consider the current level of ability that aim for the future and the consequential principal components. Let's go back to our example of the football player as your position as goalkeeper, you intend to build upon your intermediate level of experience by improving your skills with close range defense of the goal. With this in mind, you identify your principal components as reflexes and reaction time, explosive power, hand-eye coordination, and agility. Now in our example where your partner is Spanish and you wish to improve your basic understanding of the language so that you can understand your partner and their family when they are conversing together. Here, you identify your principal components as listening skills, knowledge of common phrases and slang, and knowing vocabulary for general and topical subjects. For a final example, say you're a first-year student of medicine and need a comprehensive introduction to immunology for upcoming exams, it is likely that the exams themselves would outline the topics, but it would typically comprise the following principle components. Innate immunity, adaptive immunity, common auto immune, and inflammatory diseases. The use of common immunomodulatory drugs in the clinic. Okay, that's enough examples. Now it's time for you to think about this. Consider your discipline and how it can be broken down into smaller parts. I want you to write down what are the principal components of your discipline. Again, feel free to consult any books or YouTube viewers, ask your instructor or more experienced friend, or even asked online for help. There are plenty of ways to figure this out. Once you have identified your principal components, I recommend you intentionally work to develop each one of the principal components. Here, a concentrated effort on each individual principal component should be incorporated into your routine practice. As you develop each principal components separately, you will find that they integrate to progress your ability as a whole, you don't become an advanced practitioner of martial arts by only training or punching technique or of medicine by only studying one organ of the body. For me, the focus development of your principal components is analogous to the construction of a Formula One racing car. Each part of the car is meticulously developed and crafted, which when assembled into a complete machine, creates a blindingly fast vehicle. However, if even one part has a fault, the speed of the car suffers. As a result, you might be thinking, how do I work to develop each individual components? This matter is essentially covered by the remainder of this course. However, I do appreciate that you may want some immediate examples. So let's refer again to our examples. The principal components of explosive power from the scenario of the goalkeeper could be developed with a variety of exercises in the gym that specifically target this aspect of athleticism. The principal components of listening skills from the scenario of the language learner could be improved by listening to Spanish podcasts or by watching entertaining YouTube videos made by Spanish speakers. The principal component of common immunomodulatory drugs from the scenario of the first-year medical student could be improved by referencing a pharmacology textbook. All by referring to the many high yield condensed video classes available for free on YouTube. I hope that you can see that for athletic or physical disciplines, you can develop the principal component with specific exercises or training drills for academic disciplines. This can comprise focus studies to understand significant topics. Again, be resourceful here we have plenty of information available to us from YouTube video content, online forums, online communities, and Google searches for articles. Consult any instructor, mentor, teacher, or more experienced friend. Just a quick tip for when you are doing your regular practice routine or training, it is good to tackle the most challenging areas. First, there is a principle components which you either find boring and difficult or awkward. I recommend that you make it a priority by placing it at the very beginning of your practice, by leaving them for the end of your practice, there is a tendency for them to be overlooked and neglected. And here the internet has plenty of means for the gym about skipping leg day. Anyway, these particular principle components often represent our weaknesses. And it can be beneficial to double down your efforts and attention on this. An important point to acknowledge is that as you develop, your level of ability and goals will change. Therefore, your principal components change, therefore, your routine practice should change. I recommend regularly assessing your principal components and asking yourself whether they are still suitable as a very rough guide. If I'm spending a significant portion of my weak on one particular discipline, I usually reassess my principal components every few months. However, this can vary depending on your discipline. The principal components of my flamenco guitar practice have largely remained the same for years. If you do find that your principal components and no longer suitable, you will need to rework through this approach. In order to restructure your path as assessment is such an important factor in reaching a high level of skill. I have dedicated an entire lesson to this later on in the course. Consistent with our focus on efficient and effective activities, let's think about how we actually allocate our time for practice throughout the week. Should we block our available time altogether or should we spread it out evenly throughout the week? Ultimately, any form of skill development, whether cognitive, physical, or artistic, relies on the building of new neural connections. This process is facilitated by repeated priming and stimulation from the activity itself. We want to remind our mind and muscles as regularly as possible. Therefore, if we had three hours available to dedicate to practice for a given discipline, we should spread that timeout evenly across the week as opposed to just investing the entire three-hour period on one day. For example, we could allocate a one-hour practice session on Monday, on Wednesday and on Friday, or perhaps we could schedule 30 minutes sessions from Monday to Saturday. The logistics of this will depend on the activity itself, your schedule, and your personal preferences. But the take home point is shorter and more frequent sessions better than those that are longer and infrequent. Let's illustrate why this is an effective approach. With some examples, if you were to work out in the gym for three hours straight, the first hour would probably consist of quality exercise. However, the remaining two hours would probably lack focus and good performance. These two hours would be much better spent on different days when you could give each exercise the attention that they deserve and consequently optimize your gains. Extending this concept towards academic pursuits. It's commonplace for students to maximize the quality of their study sessions by using variations of the Pomodoro technique. Here, alternate blocks of rest and study are repeated throughout the day to maximize learning potential the exact times this objective, my personal preference is to alternate between 40 minutes of study and 20 minutes of rest. I usually find that if I study any longer than 40 minutes, my mind starts to wander and I get distracted. It is here that I'm wasting my time. It could be better spent recharging properly for a subsequent study session, you will be amazed at the impact that consistent implementation of shorter and more frequent sessions can have on your progress, consistent with less than six of this course, experimentation and challenge setting. I have played around with the amount of time I allocate to practice in different disciplines. I'm often left surprised at how much more progress I've made by reducing the time allocated for practice but increasing the frequency. Musical and linguistic endeavors particularly benefit from this approach. With less time, you feel more driven to invest all of your attention into the activity and fully focus your efforts. So in summary, we need to prioritize quality practice instead of the quantity of practice, we need to make the fundamentals of our discipline ingrained into our routine practice. We should regularly think about our current skill level and our goals so that we can correctly identify our principal components and construct a personalized practice routine. We should revise this regularly in case anything changes for us. And finally, we should prioritize consistent practice sessions that are shorter and more frequent, similar to the previous lesson, I have a number of questions for you in the course materials PDF document. So go take a look at those now, answer them honestly. And when you're done, Let's continue on with the next lesson. 4. 3 - Attaining Consistent Practice: We all know that if we want to develop a high level of ability, consistent effort in the long term is required. If someone asked you to write a 364 page book, it will be difficult to accomplish this in three months. Conversely, if you were to write one page every day for one year, it'll be much more feasible and it will be way more likely to result in a decent book too many times in my own life, I've tried to achieve too much in the short term, which has resulted in psychological burnout or physical injury. Or I've just simply being unable to maintain my motivation and the long term, which is prevented me from reaching the more advanced levels of ability. Now, it's too easy for me to just stand here and tell you that you need to prioritize long-term practice. We all know that's important, but life is not that simple. It is very hard to stay motivated in the long term in the real-world when you have a busy lifestyle with various demands and social commitments. In this lesson, I will give you some clear guidance on how to shift your mindset to prioritize sustainable practice and teach you how to combine that approach and some practical ideas so that your practice becomes more consistent in the long term. Ultimately, we want to throw away these ideas of exciting short-term wins and almost adopt and economic approach where we approach our practice a lot like long-term investing. Not only does this build remarkably high levels of skill, but it also makes the practice itself more enjoyable and rewarding, which only feeds back to continue our development. Before we get into the nuts and bolts of the matter, let me share with you a quick tip that has really helped many people with their motivation because it doesn't matter what the activity is. There will inevitably be times where your energy is low and it feels like a grind. Your motivation and enthusiasm maybe burning to lose that extra bodyweight come New Year's Day. However, after several months of regular gym visits and a more restrictive diets, we feel that inevitable decline in dedication on those days when it feels particularly tough. I like to remind myself of several inspirations. This can take numerous forms. My guitar practice, I use a playlist on YouTube of several videos of favorite performances. Likewise, for going to the gym, I have a playlist of videos of several calisthenics athletes who I follow online. Visual content works particularly well here. However, in some cases, this is simply a text list of things that inspire me to see some personal examples of my inspiration lists. Please refer to the course materials, PDF documents. I don't rely on this every day. As some days the motivation is already there. But this can be utilized as a tool to drive your enthusiasm for those specific days when your motivation is lacking, serves as a reminder for all those reasons why you've set yourself the goal to practice in the first place. So what inspires you to practice? I don't want you to consider this too much. I just want you to quickly think of whatever ramps up the internal fire to get you going. Whether it's a photo of your hero, a momentous occasion in sports, a particular song, something your friends said, a quote from your idol, a photo of yourself doing something several years ago. It really does not matter. What is most important is that it charges you up to practice store. This is an easy to access list, either in text form or as a playlist. And have it readily available for when you need that boost and try not to make it too long. Keeping the list short and concise will force you to select points that have the most personal impact, whether it's to provide an impetus to head to the gym four nights a week or two. Realign your thoughts with the big picture during years of university studies. Inspiration lists can be an invaluable resource of stimulation and momentum. But even more so by thinking this through and creating the list we are reaching to the core of who we are. We are uncovering those deeply meaningful factors that drive us forward. This introspective understanding is very powerful and can aid in many circumstances in life. Now, let's consider an important practical matter. I want you to get your calendar, identify suitable times to practice for the coming week and schedule these in. Now, it's too easy to tell yourself that you will practice whenever you have time, as life goes through his busy periods, you will inevitably forget or let something else take priority. I can guarantee that even if you are very busy, if you just put some forethought into your schedule, you will create sufficient time for regular practice. You may have to wake up earlier, go to bed later, have a quicker lunch, skip that conversation by the kettle with your work colleague, arranged for your partner to take care of the kids or simply delete Instagram off of your phone. But saying that you don't have time is complete nonsense. There are plenty of people in the world with demanding careers and a family who still managed to engage in consistent practice. They're just organized and use their time effectively. Not only is actively allocating time in your calendar to dedicated practice useful on a logistical and practical level. It also has a profound psychological impact once you allocate specific dates and time. So your practice, it creates the expectation and it becomes concrete, it becomes your priority. So utilize these mindset advantages to keep consistent and enjoy the rewards that come with it. An acronym that I live by is kiss. Don't worry, this course hasn't suddenly taken a turn to the creepy, I'm referring to the kiss principle, keep it simple, stupid. A common mistake with practice is to rely upon some overly complex or convoluted routine, hopefully by following my instructions from the previous lesson, you will have already taken some steps to simplify your practice. But now let's see what we can do to make our approach to skill development even more straightforward, it should be self-evident that humans are far more likely to consistently do something if it's simple and easy. A typical example of where people go wrong is say your goal is to slim down and lose weight. So you have created some elaborate routine in the gym. This consists of many different exercises with a variety of different gym equipment with each requiring a different weight and a different number of reps. How motivated are you going to be to do this in the evening when you're feeling mentally exhausted after a busy day at work. And how likely are you going to be able to procure all the different equipment required for this routine in a busy gym during peak Jim hours. And furthermore, I hope your diet isn't looking too complicated either because then that's another thing to worry about. Okay, let's make a start. I want you to write down a list of everything that you do in a normal practice session for your discipline and for each point, right? Exactly why this is beneficial to you. Now, I want you to revise it with a minimalist approach. Take everything unnecessary and overly convoluted and either discard it or simplify it. I want you to focus only on the aspects that will bring you maximum yield. To go back to our gym example, if you intend to build upper body strength and power, do you want to prioritize bicep curls or chin ups in your routine, bicep curls isolate the pulling muscles of the arms, whereas chin ups involved several larger muscular groups of the entire upper body. Clearly, you get more bang for your buck with chin ups. And thus, this exercise is a great means of simplification for a strengthening routine. Try to apply this concept in your own discipline. Prioritize this low quantity with high impact approach. Furthermore, if you need to set up any equipment for your practice, try and think of a way to minimize the time needed for this, whatever it may be, painting, playing an instrument, setting up your equipment for an experiment. Try where possible to reduce this preparation time and kiss. Keep It Simple Stupid. In the context of academic studies, find textbooks or other resources that have made a concentrated effort to focus upon and present the key points of a subject, many books and now being produced, focus on presenting a condensed version of an entire syllabus. Despite my earlier warning regarding the use of digital technologies, I am amazed by the fantastic high yield medical and scientific videos that are now on offer for free on YouTube. And I'm sure many now exists for any topic. Back in my undergraduate days, our only option was to use whatever huge textbooks were available in library by all means, when you are required to dive into a specific topic and dig out the details, pick up the weighty textbook and spend hours required to understand all of the intricacies. However, I recommend only adding in that level of complexity where it is absolutely required for your specific goals. This is a very important topic and we will talk about this more and less than four. So for now, I only want to give a brief mention in relation to achieving consistency, integrating social experience of practice is key for some people to maintain a steady practice routine in the long term with the ease and finding communities within your local area or online, I recommend connecting with like-minded individuals who motivate you to practice. Whether it's meeting up with your hockey team mate at the weekend to draw passes, spending one study night a week in the library with a classmate or having a band to perform with once a month. Such experiences add richness and stability to your discipline, even if you consider yourself quite introverted. I really do think this table have a huge impact. So I recommend you at least give it a try and see how it works for you. That is a huge psychological benefit of just simply acknowledging that the hacker talent you will need to develop bit by bit over the long term, there will be good and bad days, exciting times, and boring experiences. It's a long process, but ultimately a journey that will literally change who you are as a person and bring more richness to your life. I also want you to acknowledge that your abilities will vary over time as I think this helps to deal with those bad days. Unfortunately, everyone has this tendency to connect their ability with one ballpark value, usually the best value, and they become fixated on this. However, their true ability level clearly exists within a range and it is a mistake to fixate on the uppermost value of that range. For example, like most gymnastics skills, learning a handstand requires an almost daily practice routine. And it's only when you practice a distinct skill nearly every day that you fully realize how much your ability can vary from day to day. Some days I would hold a solid free standing handstand with ease for over 30 seconds and the next day it'll be a real challenge even to hold it for a couple of seconds, my ability wouldn't really be explicitly linked to any specific factors such as fatigue. It's usually here where people start getting superstitious. When people would ask me how my handstand training was going or when thinking introspectively about my training, I would usually declare my whole time as being within the upper range of my ability level. This was clearly not true and had instead become a value that I had become fixated upon. My true ability was a range of whole times varying between ten seconds and thirty-seconds. To set my focus upon my maximum whole time was a sure-fire way of creating much frustration during daily training when I was not able to match that time or get close to it, I would say that most people approach their practice in this manner without fully appreciating how their ability is. In fact a range. They declare specific distances they can run, speeds at which they can sprint, and specific weights they can lift. Chess players get obsessed with that either ranking. All this is fine in the context of measuring your ability, having a target and improving upon your ability. All I'm saying here is don't become fixated on a specific number. Instead, appreciate how your true ability is arrange. My improvement in hand, Stan hall times didn't go from ten seconds to 20 seconds than to 30 seconds. It went something more like 0 to ten seconds to eight to 20 seconds to tend to thirty-seconds. Don't be frustrated on those days where you are performing around the lower limit of your ability range. I totally acknowledge that this is easier said than done. I used to become and still do become incredibly frustrated on days where I pick my guitar up and struggled to play, even though most basic songs, the songs that I could usually play my sleep instead tried to realize that this is just one occasion of many, which makes up the whole. It's more important to practice than to not practice. Be in it for the long haul mentally. So what do we do when we are performing at the lower limit of our ability range? As I've just mentioned, that not getting frustrated and not ending your practice prematurely is a good start, but bad days like this inevitably come. So how do we maximize the yield from this practice session despite our poor performance? I hope you can appreciate that even if our performance is not sitting within the upper levels of our ability range and giving us that satisfactory psychological high, we can still achieve consistent development and improve our skill and the long term. Practicing within the lower levels of our ability range. Improvement doesn't happen from just one session. It results from the accumulation of multiple sessions of practice. Therefore, your one band session is actually just a minor part of a collective. Gains can still be made. The first initiative is to simply readjust your expectations and acknowledge that today will not involve a remarkable performance. The important part here is that talent hacking does not revolve solely around remarkable performances. Take a step back and revisit some basics. Can you drill some basics to reinforce those neurological connections that you have been building? Perhaps this could be used as an opportunity to revisit or reconsider more fundamental skills. Maybe if you run through your warm-up routine again or do it again, but at a slightly greater intensity, this would function to prime yourself better for today's practice, instead of focusing on high performance, could you instead focus on analyzing and assessing your technique? Usually on those days where my hands just cannot play the demanding flamenco songs that I had been expecting. I instead start writing new music or solidify current song ideas. This is usually a slow process that is more reliant on exploring ideas and trying different chords. In other words, it is not very demanding performance-wise. I'm not required to play within the high levels of my ability regardless of your approach with today's performance law, don't be arrogant and keep striving to reach that upper limit of your ability. Think outside the box, experiments a bit and see the big picture. Having a set day in the future when you know you will be attending or participating in an event relating to your discipline is a remarkably effective way of driving you to practice. My wife, for example, regularly signs up for local races on those days when her enthusiasm is feeling depleted and there is a real struggle to put on those running shoes. Just the thought of needing to be adequately prepared for an upcoming event can be unnecessary driver to put in the work. It doesn't necessarily need to be a competitive event though. Being a spectator or attending exhibitions and expos can provide inspiration. Perhaps your language learning could benefit from a weekend trip to the appropriate country. Cheap flights can always be found. Or maybe a local Science Festival can provide the impetus to prepare for upcoming exams. Furthermore, one concept that I want to stress it is they need to explore a topic participating in or attending events introduces you to different aspects of your discipline. Helps you to become acquainted with different social communities and exposes you to new ideas all in an enjoyable and exciting environment. Therefore, do local search for any upcoming events in your area. Whether it's a competition you can take part in or just a gathering of local enthusiasts, make it a regular occurrence and take advantage of the motivational boost. We all have days when we hit snooze on the alarm clock, struggled to get off the sofa or cannot put down the smartphone. We tell ourselves that today is but a momentary lapse and tomorrow will be different when this happens, I want you to ask yourself if there's any specific reason why you don't want to practice today. Really drilled down here and be honest. The more honest you are with yourself, the more likely you are to find a feasible solution to the lack of enthusiasm. Did you go too hard in yesterday's session in the gym so that you feel physically drained today? Well, lower the intensity so they're consistent training is more sustainable or you just simply border of your practice. If so, maybe you should revise your practice routine and experiment with some new ideas to rekindle your interest. Revisiting the idea from the previous section that perhaps signing up for an event could provide some excitement to kill that boredom. Have you hit a wall with your practice and feels stuck in a rut? Well, disgust this plateau with your instructor or fellow enthusiasts. Perhaps they've had similar experiences and can provide support or new direction to surpass the plateau for my musical pursuits, I know that I constantly need to be working on learning and new composition or writing a new song. Otherwise, I just really struggled to find any motivation to pick up the guitar. It's not enough for me to just play the same songs every day. Boredom inevitably comes and my routine practice eventually fails. As such, I am always mindful to include the rehearsal of new songs in my routine practice, it's important to really make the effort to understand your struggles here as they may be unrelated to the actual practice itself. An interesting realization came to me once when I realized that a great source of enjoyment for my sessions at the gym actually comes from the music I listened to during the workout. So being bored of my current Spotify playlist also happens through impact my enthusiasm to exercise. Therefore, I always make the effort to source new and interesting music. They listen to one of the gym. There will certainly be times when you are simply too busy with live to consistently practice and develop your discipline. Whether it's moving to a new house, needing to travel frequently for work, having a baby or being slammed at work. This experience is ubiquitous. The key is how you respond to this. It's not possible to actively work on development of your discipline. I recommend that you drop back to what I call maintenance phases. These are blocks of several weeks where I regularly implement a stripped down version of my normal routine practice. The emphasis here is the name suggests, is to simply maintain my skills. Such an approach is common in team sports. Weather off season is used to go easy on the training, attend to any injuries, have a psychological break, and prepare for the next season. Similarly, maintenance phases are utilized by competitive bodybuilders between shows and events. My maintenance phase may involve less than half of what I would normally do during my development phase. But at least I'm not going to lose those skills that I've worked so hard to build. We can spend less time practicing during a maintenance phase because it requires less time to maintain a skill than it does to develop a skill. If you stop your practice altogether, it can take several weeks or months of practice just to get back to your previous level of skill. However, if you drop back to maintenance phase, you save all that time required to rebuild your skill. And instead, you can get right back to your development phase as soon as life permits, given the enormous breadth of disciplines and the variation between people, the approach for the maintenance phase will be specific for you. Perhaps it will just be your normal routine practice but done less frequently. Perhaps it will be a version of your normal routine practice, but stripped back to the most important elements, a certain degree of experimentation will be required here, some trial and error will be needed to discover the required work to maintain your skills. Personally, I require very little effort to maintain my school with the guitar, but a lot of effort to maintain my power for strength training, whereas I can get away with practicing a strip back version of my normal guitar practice once or twice a week for 30 minutes. I require at least three intense lifting sessions for around an hour in the gym. A word of warning though, regarding maintenance phases, they do not work well in the long term. The goal here should always be to return to your normal development phase within several weeks. Or if you're really pushed for time several months at times where I've sat within maintenance phases for too long, boredom eventually overcomes me and my skill level declines. Development phases are very stimulatory for us, which keeps us engaged. If they are not applied regularly enough, it becomes very difficult to stay interested. Maintenance phases are another tool for the talent hacker. There an effective means of progression in the long term and alternation between maintenance and development phases of practice can help us keep on top of the chaos of everyday life. In summary, our priority needs to be on sustainable practice. There can be continued in the long term on occasions where you really need that extra boost of motivation to complete the day's practice, remind yourself of your primary inspirations with an inspiration list, try to think ahead and plan so that you can be absolutely sure that you will have sufficient time for practice, make the necessary logistical arrangements, and organize your calendar if you're struggling to find available time, try to keep your practice routine and any setup required for your practice as simple and easy as possible. If you benefit from social interaction during your practice, make sure to integrate social engagement as much as possible. Be sure to check out any local events that are happening around you. And on those days where you really struggled to find motivation. Really be honest with yourself and trying to understand why this is. There may be an easy solution. Always remember that your level of ability can vary wildly from day to day. At the end of the day, we're only human. So don't beat yourself up if you're having a bad day. Instead, tried to shift your focus away from performance-based activities, move towards something less demanding. They can still be of benefit. Finally, in those moments where you are limited by time, temporarily, drop your practice back to maintenance phases. Focus on whatever important thing is going on in your life whilst maintaining your current level of skill. And then when it's over, go back to a development phase and continue progressing with your skills. So it's time for some introspection. As before, I have some questions in the course materials PDF document that I want you to consider. So head over and give those a thing when you're done, Let's continue with the course. 5. 4 - Immersion: Growing up in the nineties, I was fascinated by martial arts. And I used to love those cheesy martial arts films where our hero who had to cultivate their fighting talent will go and live in the mountains with some mysterious martial arts master, our hero would immerse themselves in the fighting art training under the watchful and demanding I of the master and develop their inner power to overcome whatever challenge lay in their future. Cheesy films aside, we know that immersion can be a powerful tool to learn in practice and understand the cultural aspects of our disciplines. If you've ever had the opportunity to go live in a different country to learn the language. You will know this is unquestionably the quickest and most authentic way to learn. But again, in the real-world, we don't all have the freedom to suddenly pulls our lives and go live in the mountains with martial arts masters or move to a different country to learn a new language. Unfortunately, because that's my dream. Anyway, we need to find ways of simulating an immersive learning environment and recapitulate that authentic experience, as we have seen, Immersion has obvious applications for language learning, but can be used in so many more contexts. When most people tried to master a skill, they only ever scratched the surface. If you want to hack a talent, you will need to dive in deep, breathe a topic, embrace the discipline and a variety of ways. So in this lesson, I'll be giving you some ideas on how to immerse yourself in your chosen discipline. We are living in an age where we have endless content available at our fingertips. So much so that there are now initiatives to restrict it. This contents can either be utilized productively as a means to add value to your discipline by providing additional knowledge, educational entertainment, and increased exposure to ideas. Or it can be detrimental to your life by sucking time out of your day and by serving simply as a distraction of all of the contents available, it makes sense to focus your attention on the highest-quality available. Sean knows which present redundant information and cookie cutter material. There is a wealth of different online platforms available, and I recommend searching across multimedia to find the best sources of knowledge to immerse yourself in. Who were the top instructors or entertainers for your discipline? And do they create online content? Are there any YouTube channels that produce high-quality videos? What are the available podcasts? Are there any popular books for sale or audio book versions that you can pick up? Have you searched for any blogs or vlogs. Such resources can represent a constant source of new ideas and inspiration. One resource that has been so beneficial to my flamenco guitar practice is the use of various online platforms. This has been a significant advance and exposure as a musician with traditionally need to move to Spain and gain entry to a prestigious college to gain access to such resources. The past year, I've been learning how to play chess. And it's been amazing to see how the most well-respected grandmasters often stream lessons for free on Twitch. Also, chess competitions are always being broadcast live online, but as described earlier, don't just assume that their latest technology is best. The format is only relevant to your preferences. The content itself is the most important aspect. Online courses and platforms are not a complete solution. However, when used in combination with other resources, they can represent a powerful tool. Such platforms will also usually grants free access for a limited time, giving you the chance to trial the platform and check whether it is a good fit for your learning style, whatever methods you prefer, Be sure to consult a variety of different resources. Take advantage of whatever high-quality and entertaining content is available. Just be cautious not to let this waste your time and detract from the actual practice and progression of your discipline. What action which will take you far on your talent hacking journey is to connect with a community of like-minded enthusiasts, where possible, I always recommend this primarily involves a physical community as opposed to a virtual one. I believe there are greater benefits to be gained from engaging with a group of people in real life, instead of via an electronic device in the palm of your hand or a desktop screen. Psychologists refer to humans as a hyper social species that we are absolutely dependent on frequent social interaction for fulfillment and for development. It's become apparent that as virtual technologies become more commonplace in our lives, That's interactions via digital means cannot fully replace those that occur in physical settings. For one, digital communication does not give the same sense of belonging that can be gained from face-to-face interactions. The impressions that digital interactions have upon as a different, they do not give the same emotional impact that may of course changed in the years ahead with further technological advancements. However, for now, let us delve into the topic further and relate it to our skill development is outlined in my introduction. Talent hacking isn't just about developing a high level of ability in your discipline. It's about developing yourself holistically and broadening your mind. And face-to-face interactions are critical to this. Not only will such an experience add to your social skills and confidence, but the happiness gained through regular engagement with your community and the shared triumphs you experience is truly a measurable. There is research to show that this can literally add years to your life. Lifelong friendships can be found, a new cultures can be experienced. It's important to stay here that, yes, virtual communities can also be very useful. In our age. They are literally inevitable. They're very easy to find and join. You can engage with the community without leaving the house and communicate at whatever time suit you best. In some situations, they are the only option available. It should no physical community exist within a reasonable distance from you. I've personally benefited a lot from online forums, for example. But again, I recommend finding a community to join in-person, even if that only involves participating in an annual or quarterly gathering, which may require several hours of travel to attend. A crucial aspect of your development is to explore and be put outside of your comfort zone, both of which are more likely to occur when you put away your electronic device and venture outside. Okay, So we've talked a lot about the behavioral and social benefits of the physical community. But how will joining 18 in the practical aspects of our talent hacking goals? My answer to that is in more ways than you could possibly imagine at this point. I also want to stress that this is true for people who consider themselves introverted. To my introverted students do not discredit the following. And just because you are slightly less reliant on person to person interactions than extroverts being part of a community of like-minded and enthusiastic people, or bring greater motivation and adherence to your practice, you are more likely to persevere through the inevitable low points of your practice. You are accountable to a group of friends and can benefit from their support. Being part of a community gives you access to a wealth of knowledge. As you hit plateaus and new challenges, you can draw upon the experiences of your peers to guide you further along your journey. Furthermore, you will gain greater exposure to different aspects of your discipline, which you may have never considered previously as you become more embedded within a community, I suggest taking on more administrative or managerial responsibilities. This is a great opportunity to give back to the community by supporting it and contributing to its growth. It's introduces you to the logistical aspects of group working and further integrate you into different teams. This is one of the aspects of the course where in addition to skill development, I really want to emphasize the impact on personal fulfillment and enjoyment. Communities can represent a huge source of this. An additional recommendation that will bring huge rewards is to be involved in teaching less experienced members of your community, no matter what level you are, there's always an opportunity to pass on your experience and knowledge. Not only will this reinforce your understanding of the skill, but it also develops your ability to teach, instruct, and communicate your skill with others. This creates a deeper level of understanding to your discipline. But furthermore, I can guarantee that abilities such as this are of huge benefit to all areas of life. For me personally, such experiences benefitted me massively in academia and positively impacted my scientific career. Even though my teaching experiences involve martial arts and snowboarding, regardless of the discipline, the social interactions you experienced in relation to the guidance of others can influence and numerous aspects of your life. So even when you are, the students, always seek opportunities to also be the teacher. This is one of my favorite things to do for any discipline and I cannot state its advantages enough. The history of any discipline is full of remarkable stories, eccentric characters, unknowns, and burning questions. I feel that you only fully appreciated discipline and its current status when you understand its story, whether it's a sports, an art form, a style of music, and academic field, an appreciation of where the discipline came from and how it was shaped, or add a profound depth of understanding. Such an endeavor adds color to the subject, detail, to the practice, flesh to the bones, and personality to the pages. I always use the love hearing. My university professors talk freely about the history of their field, describing the quirks of their predecessors, the questions they wrestled with at the time, and the advances they made over the decades. Being aware of such details really add subtlety to your understanding. When you do come to practice, it makes you very aware of the heritage which has preceded you. In turn, your practice becomes less of a routine endeavor and more of an appreciation of the factors that have led to the genesis of your discipline can also makes conversations with your fellow enthusiasts far more interesting. You have way more topics to connect on and share. In summary, immersion is a powerful tool that can be used in numerous ways to elevate your talents. Try to be creative and think of different ways to increase your exposure to different aspects of your discipline. Utilize online content and online communities, but always prioritize physical communities in your locality, even if it means you need to invest a bit more time and effort to do so, no matter what level of ability you are, you will benefit greatly from teaching others and acting as a mentor. Finally, appreciate your discipline in its totality and read widely about it. Learn the history, the important figures who have shaped it and understand its current limitations. Now that we've reached the end of this lesson, it's time for you to reflect the teachings upon your goals. Please refer to the course materials PDF document to see the questions I have for you and get introspective when you're done, Let's continue with the course. 6. 5 - Active Assessment: Part of the talent hacker philosophy includes regular self-assessment. You can only develop your weaknesses if you can identify them. First of all, of the tools detailed in this guide, the self-assessment part will likely be the most challenging. You need to put aside your ego and acknowledge your weaknesses. You need to seek criticism from others and yourself as assessment is critical to achieving consistent growth, tried to shift your focus away from your own ideas of perfection. Instead, focus on incremental improvement over time. People waste months or even years of their time with inefficient practice simply because they were unaware of some basic flaw in their activity. Some of the ideas that we'll be presenting in this lesson, we'll be new to you and we'll certainly take you out of your comfort zone because of this, a lot of people choose not to follow my guidance here and subsequently severely diminished their potential for improvement. Here I want to remind you of less than one where we covered that a major mistake people make is a failure of action. Do not prematurely assume something will not help you before making a substantial effort at trying it for yourself. Do not stop yourself from trying just because it makes you feel uncomfortable. Instead, be active, be committed, be open to new experiences and action, these changes in your life. In this lesson, I will be teaching you different strategies that will enable you to effectively derive internal and external assessments of your practice and ability. This will allow you to identify ways to continue your improvement and attain consistent development. Many people don't realize that a significant part of academic work includes public speaking. You need to regularly present your research internally to the university, either for departmental meetings or two assessment panels that continue onto the next year of study, you need to present your research or international conferences to publicize your findings and find collaborators. This can be a terrifying experience for most people to try and overcome this, I decided to treat the whole affair as a skill to develop. I've been recording myself for the development of skills in other interests such as my pronunciation and speaking skills in Brazilian Portuguese. And to improve my timing when playing the flamenco guitar. Therefore, I decided I would privately record myself giving an academic presentation, watching it back was a tough experience at first, my voice was monotonous and they spent far too long rambling on about insignificant details. So I practice the presentation and recorded this again. This time focusing on varying the tone of my voice and describing some of the points more concisely this time around, I had a better idea of what I wanted to say. So my words came easier. I sounded more confident when I watch myself back as I practiced more and recorded my efforts, I found different areas to work on, such as my body language, and found different ways to describe technical and complex concepts using stories or analogies. I found the process so useful that are utilized it before every major presentation. This did take up a lot of time in the beginning, especially when my presentations were long. But as my skills got better and better, this process took less of my time after a year of routine practice concentrating on my vocal tone, body language, and conciseness of speech. Much of this has now become a habit. This process took my presentation skills from average, they're excellent and by the end of my doctoral research and won several awards, my academic presentations. This can be applied to so many different disciplines. Now, do this regularly for everything that I aim to improve that whether it's hand stands playing the guitar speaking Portuguese. One critical factor here is to focus on stepwise progression. Identify one area where I thought I could improve and kept that in mind for the next time it came to record myself. Likewise, identify one area where I thought I did well, which I wanted to maintain for all subsequent presentations. If you generate a long list of weaknesses, it will be hard to work on them all simultaneously. In the next recording, just pick one or maybe two things at a time to focus on and work at it bit by bit. It's always important to acknowledge your strengths alongside your weaknesses. No matter how hard it may be to watch yourself or listen to yourself back, you need to identify things that you've done correctly and continue to do them as you practice, I promise you, this does get easier the more you do it. In the modern age, we all have supercomputers available in our pockets and smartphones offer ample opportunity to record ourselves. Next time you're practicing and activity. Bring out the camera and film yourself once or twice, following the steps that I outlined before, it's fine if your smartphone doesn't capture the best quality video or audio, we only need something that will facilitate self-assessment. Again, this may feel odd to begin with. Who's going to see? You are welcome to keep this experience completely private. Just remember to delete the videos afterwards. However, if you do feel comfortable enough, I do recommend sharing some of your recorded clips with a trusted friend to source constructive criticism. I have a number of good friends that I met over Instagram, and we all do this on a regular basis to provide guidance and direction for each other. This method of crowdsourcing constructive criticism can yield remarkable gains in your improvement. So give it a go today, make a quick recording of yourself during your activity or practice. Watch your back and kindly critique yourself. If you have a trusted friend or mentor. Their opinion on it to, as mentioned before, only tried to work on one or two areas of improvement at a time. You can't improve everything at once. Also, acknowledge the good with the bad. Try and pick out one thing you're proud of and carry this forward as you try to overcome your weaknesses. A useful strategy that I've employed in the past for skill development comprises a modification of an approach used for patient management in the medical field of Rheumatology called treats a target, in essence, treat to target consists of the following steps. Selecting a realistic target, deciding how to assess the target, deciding when to assess if the target has been reached, and a commitment to changing course if the target is not achieved, ideally, one would include some form of shared decision-making in this, hopefully the benefits of such an approach of self-evident. Far too many people set vague goals with no idea of when they want these goals achieved and ended up finding themselves a year later, still far from reaching their goals. As with the medical field, the challenge here often lies with setting a suitable timeline for the goal. It's quite difficult to decide when exactly is an appropriate time to have fully accomplished your goal. Here, I find it useful to be realistic but ambitious. Also realized that the main benefit is simply the act of mentally setting a timescale for your pursuit. This adds a pledge to the target. Shared decision-making is an element of Hector targets and should be easy to include in most scenarios. So consult your instructor, more experienced friend, or consistent with the previous lesson, anyone else in your community of enthusiastic, an example of hack to target comprises the following basic approach. As an example, say that I am a beginner guitarist. Thus, a realistic target will be to learn a song with a technical difficulty appropriate for a beginner, I will assess whether I have succeeded in learning this on recording myself performing it, and sending the video to several close friends for constructive criticism to decide when to assess if my target has been reached. I asked my guitar instructor, who broadly speaking thinks it would take roughly two or three months to learn. Also, I post about my plan on an online guitar forum to ask the opinions from fellow enthusiasts. After this feedback, I decide to set a three-month timescale on my target, set a reminder my calendar, and commit to regular practice. So after three months, I'm not competent enough to play most of the song, but still struggle with one or two difficult parts. Regardless, I record a video of myself performing the song as best as possible and send it out for comments. I take the feedback on-board constructively and use it as guidance to shake my future practice. In addition, as my target was not fully reached, I commit to spending an extra 20 minutes at the end of my routine practice to work specifically on those parts of the song that gave me the most trouble. It may also be worth consulting my instructor or community on whether I'm approaching the learning of those specific parts correctly. There's always consider how hacked to target may be employed specifically for you. Experiment a bit and give it a go, the results may just surprise you. This tip is for the bold among you. During times of my life where I haven't had the luxury of having any available money to pay for an instructor or even have a local community of enthusiasts for support. I have sought guidance on the Internet. Internet forums can be a great place to share your progress and seek informed opinions or constructive criticism. I personally find Youtube a bit to public for certain content and usually enjoy the relative privacy and niche interests of particular online forums. Reddit can be a useful resource here, there are a huge number of platforms for language learning and you can access a wealth of support from natives if you reciprocate the help in the early days, I would literally hang about on chat roulette, online chat website that pairs random users for web cam based conversations and attempt to conversations and Portuguese with native Brazilians. That was a lot of fun, but very chaotic and inefficient as it could take a while to find a sensible person to speak with, things have become a bit more sophisticated now however, these days, I either post my Portuguese writing on Ital key for 0 cost, community-driven revisions and corrections, or arrange for informal Skype chats using into panels. Just the quick note about crowdsourcing feedback on the Internet. Unfortunately, I do have to highlight the fact that not all feedback will be constructive. You may occasionally get nasty comments in these circumstances. It's always obvious if someone is just trying to be mean and get attention and you must simply ignore these people. Delete the comments. Don't reply to them, don't engage with them. Nothing useful will come from these people, despite playing the guitar for over 20 years now and reaching a very high level of ability, I still have people who leave quite nasty comments on my playing. However, this is usually one last comment for every 50 helpful comments. So I choose to focus on the 50 helpful comments and forget about the haters. Therefore, I still recommend that you explore online and see what are the available platforms. Could be harnessed to source feedback and assessment on your progress. And when you do start seeking feedback, please be sure to return the favor and help others in the same situation. The act of keeping a log book to document and record aspects of practice and performance is not something I've used extensively. However, some of my students have testified to the value of it. And I have benefited from one at certain times. Therefore, I did want to at least mention the approach. As I do imagine the idea could be beneficial to some students. The usefulness of a logbook will relate to the individual's preferences, the nature of their activities. If routine practice sessions have not yet become habit, it can be useful to document the number of hours practiced or tasks that were completed in each session when refining different practice regimens or ideas, a lot book could be a useful Canvas to collect and revise your thoughts. It can also be useful to reflect on how certain sessions or weeks have felt to you. Did you enjoy your activities? What has been working well during your practice? What aspects of your practice could be removed or changed? Considerations such as this, are well suited to documentation in log books. Such an approach seems widely used in power lifting wherever it is commonplace to see cruise documenting the results from the current session. The weight lifted, the number of sets and reps, how they feel on the day. Elite level athletes are well-known for recording their experiences and actions on a daily basis. This way, they can correlate mindsets and performance with other factors such as their diets, sports psychology counseling, or their mindfulness practice. When I've kept log books in the past, I adopted the use of Evernote, the digital note-taking system. It's very easy to search through years of notes is it simply requires typing in particular keywords in the search box, much like Google, I personally keep a record of all of my previous workout regimes, which has become a useful resource to refer to and pass on to others for guidance. I have tried to keep log books, my flamenco guitar practice, but I'd never really felt it's so useful in this context as I consistently recommend investigation and exploration are required on your behalf, it is worth trailing the use of a logbook for a set period of time to test whether it could be a useful tool for your progress. In summary, the development of high levels of skill are dependent on regular assessment. Internal and external sources of constructive criticism can help guide us toward more effective means of improvement and growth. Some useful ideas include recording yourself and keeping a log book and always remember to refer to instructors, mentors, more experienced friends, online communities and forums or social media contact for help. When we do receive feedback, we need to put aside our ego and consider it deeply. We need to use it to guide our practice and shape our future plans. As before, please consult the course materials PDF document for some introspective thinking. And when you're done that, let's continue our talent hacking journey. 7. 6 - Achieving Continued Progression and Overcoming Plateaus: As part of our skill development, we will naturally encounter moments in time where our ability plateaus. And as your ability reaches more advanced levels, we will tend to encounter them more and more. So next time you reach a plateau, don't give up in frustration or become bitter, your temporary barrier. Instead, let's appreciate how far we've come and how fortunate we are to be able to have the freedom to spend our time doing things that ultimately we really enjoy. Let's explore our activity a bit and shake up our routine so we can find what works best for us and stop pressuring yourself to progress a certain way. We all progress at different rates and hit plateaus at different times in our growth. Part of the reason we get so frustrated here is because we simply put unrealistic expectations on ourselves as covered in lesson one. Stop comparing ourselves to others. Don't work to be better than other people. Work to be better than yourself from yesterday and work because you enjoy the activity. Slow progress is still progress and you never know once you've worked through the plateau, you may be fortunate enough to see a phase of rapid growth afterwards. Plateaus are frustrating. Also give us the biggest sense of euphoria when we manage to overcome them. Don't quit and deny yourself that amazing feeling of smashing through a plateau. Furthermore, the more we overcome, the more we learn what works best for us and the better we understand our personal way of smashing through plateaus, It helps in all areas of life. Let's continue this lesson by talking about different methods to achieve continued progression and overcome plateaus. Similar to the artist who begins by outlining the defining features and shapes on the canvas, then gradually adds color in detail. Anything complex can be broken down into a simple model. I've yet to find any athletic pursuit or advanced academic discipline which defies this rule. During my doctoral studies, I was working on a project to develop novel high performance computing tools to automate analysis of clinical data. I told myself computer coding, largely using the approaches outlined in this course. And was now at the very forefront of technology, trying to design complex tools to aid in the development of new medical therapies. Several times a week, my project would come up against the barrier and the advice of my mental was always the following. Strip, the concept down to a basic outline, accomplish this simplified model first, in my case, if I wanted to automate the analysis of several clinical data sets simultaneously. First, I needed to figure out how to automate the analysis of just one dataset. If I wanted to build an interactive 3D plots of the gene expression data. First, I needed to figure out how to build a static 2D plot. Once I had accomplished an outline of what I wanted to achieve as a final end point, I would then begin adding complexity to this outline until I had my desired goal. There's always, this principle is applicable beyond computational biology. When I write music, I start by setting out the basic idea of the song by outlining the main chords and melodies. From here, I then start adding technical complexities or enhance certain melodies. When teaching people to do handstand, we use the support of a wall to build sufficient strength and develop correct technique once the student has reached a certain level of comfort with wool supported hand stands, we then increase the complexity and work toward being able to perform the handstand without any external aid. The take-home point is the following. Whatever barriers may exist in your talent hacking goals, first, accomplish the simplest version of that goal, and then work to build up the complexity of that version until you have fully completed the goal. One of the key aspects of the talent hacker philosophy is to explore your discipline. Unfortunately, investigation doesn't come naturally to many, and this needs to be actively applied by exploring your discipline, you have the opportunity to understand what works best for you. Shake up your routine, practice a bit, be curious and have some fun along the way. Often, we get stuck doing the same thing in our routine practice, this is essential to a certain extent as repetition builds familiarity and understanding of the subtleties to your discipline. But repetition in excess is a sure way for your practice that becomes stilted and rigid by experimenting with different elements of your routine, your approach becomes more dynamic and flexible. This diversifies your understanding of your discipline and your knowledge of the different tools available for continued progression, your experimentation may be very simple, such as placing the elements of your routine practice in a different order, doing it at different times of the day or for different lengths of time. Such experiences may help discover more efficient or effective ways of practice. For example, I know through years of experimentation with training, my strength tends to be lowest in the morning and highest around mid afternoon. I experienced less injuries when I implement longer warm-ups and I prefer training on an empty stomach. Also, I prefer to reserve the most difficult workouts for the weekend. Again, I have learned what is best for me and I only got there by experimenting with different elements of my training for years. Experimentation can however, go much further than this. As an example, let's return to our scenario in lesson two of the goalkeeper intending to improve close range defensive the goal, one of the principal components identified was reflexes and reaction time are goalkeeper does already practice this with their team and regularly drilled several exercises for the skill. However, boredom has crept in and he feels that he hasn't seen any improvement in some time. Here is where our goalkeeper could explore and experiment. New options of exercise and drills can be found on YouTube or from online articles. He could ask his coach for other ideas that could be applied for training. He could try and create new drills himself. He could see how his reaction times change at different times of the day. Perhaps he could search for drills from other sports that rely on quick reactions such as boxing, maybe some caffeine before practice would enhance his reaction time. The aim of exploration is to attempt something new and pull yourself away from your familiar paths. In the short-term, it does feel a bit like goofing around, but in the long term, the experience is critical. One way of introducing more experimentation into your practice is to set yourself different projects or challenges. Here you can let your curiosity and ambitions fuel you. It's okay to fail. And to be honest, I do in most cases, the personal benefit comes from the experimentation and exploration rather than the roaring successes. Therefore, do not be disheartened if you don't succeed. I genuinely feel you have more to gain by failing with your projects and challenges. Clearly it's not a challenge if you succeeded with ease. I see different challenges floating around on social media from time-to-time, which additionally are a great way of engaging with your virtual community. When I wrote this lesson, the 30-day handstand challenge was circulating on Instagram. Here, people were attempting to better their hand Stan Technique, Ideally achieving a free standing handstand through daily training over 30 days. I remember trying a similar challenge way before the days of social media is existence. I failed miserably, but I learned some valuable lessons on my mindset such as how to not obsess about performance and all my oversight of the simple things like wrist strength, despite the relatively minor improvement in my handstand performance over 30 days of training. This challenge as a vector for exploration, where I discovered new aspects of the skill that benefited me in other ways. Language learning isn't endeavor, which is very much dependent on consistent exposure. If you're not living in the country at the time, necessary daily practice can become tiresome. So one project they sent myself to break the routine and experiment was to learn a Brazilian song, to sing and play on the guitar. This is one of those great scenarios where two of my passions came together, music and languages. I recommend that you reflect these ideas for experimentation on your interests and goals. If you have some free time coming up, set yourself a project which you can pursue alongside your normal practice routine. Think of a fun challenge to try and perhaps you could involve your friends or community, blog or post about these online and see what constructive feedback you can source, be creative and curious, embrace failures, and be prepared to learn some unexpected lessons along the way. The funny thing about some plateaus is at times we are in fact improving, but it's just that we are improving in ways that are hard to actually detect and identify. Sometimes you just need to continue what you're doing and give enough time to be in a situation where you can see your improvements to create the environment where you can allow this to happen. I'd like to shift my priority away from skill development and instead focus on the aspects of the discipline that I find really fun. Now, if you're following my advice about experimentation and challenge setting, hopefully you are having a bit more fun, but really sit back and think about other things that bring more funds your activity. Do you get a buzz from listening to entertaining podcasts? Have you got a friend you can practice with who always brings lots of fun to the activity. Is there an entertaining YouTube channel that you can refer to? One of the most frustrating activities that I've experienced is chess. The psychological response to losing a match, or indeed several matches in a row is actually really, really tough. And most online chess forums are just full of people this bantering about losing streaks and getting stuck at plateaus at the time of recording. I am actually going through this right now. However, I've been through this before and so I know what to do. I know that I enjoy my matches more when I actually play less daily online matches and tournaments are tough. By playing less, I find the matches that I do have less stressful. Therefore, I have more fun playing, instead of playing tons of games, I spend my time watching, entertaining lessons from some of my favorite online content creators, such as international master John Bartholomew and grandmaster hickory Nakamura. Again, this simply brings more fun to the activity and relieves some of that frustration of the plateau. Allow me to continue on with my routine practice. So what activities can you spend time doing that bring more fun to your discipline? What can you do to relieve the tension and rekindle the enjoyment of your practice. Have a think about this and be sure to rely upon it when you're feeling stuck in a rut with any plateaus, It's natural to form preconceptions on how to do something or what it will feel like once you do it. We make such preconceptions that even on a subconscious level, the key here is to be aware of our preconceptions and not let these holders back. They can, if we let them inadvertently stagnate how we go about developing our talents and restrict our mindsets. Following the ideas that I've just mentioned can help to shake us out of such practical and psychological stagnation and forces to abandon long-held preconceptions. But it doesn't always address the issue directly. As an example, it always amazes me how black and white it could be when teaching people to snowboard, you'd have students who would come in with a Predetermined idea of what you should do to be able to snowboard. These individuals were half follow instructions and half do whatever else they thought was necessary to stay upright. They would typically try to steer the board with their rear foot and twist the upper body to recollect any imbalances usually ended with a crash to the ground when they were finally able to snowboard, they would retain these awkward habits. Contrast this against those individuals who came in with a more open mind and willingness to approach the learning process. Under the guidance of the instructor, the students realized how simple snowballing could be if you just follow the instructions and experienced the new sensations come with learning to snowboard. The requirement to sometimes do nothing with your body and just glide. The feeling of the transition of weight from the heels to the toes. The centralization of body weight by bending the knees. This latter type of students would pick up snowboarding in a remarkably short period of time. The fact is, if you cannot competently snowboard, you currently do not understand what competent snowboarding feels like. Instead of trying to do things the way you think you should, you should embrace the unknown and experienced the new sensations that come with a new activity in your own practice, do not let any of your own presumptions stop you from fully realizing new states of understanding and ability. This isn't a topic that I want to cover it length as the benefits of visualization has been discussed extensively elsewhere, from athletes to business professionals. Visualization is espoused as being a key aspect of high performance. I agree with this to a certain extent. Visualization is another tool that you should use to reinforce the habits and skills that you've built already. It is, however, not a magic trick that solves your incapacity to develop incredible skill and performance that requires a comprehensive method, which I'm trying to provide with this course. Apologies if this is obvious to some, but listening to some iconic figure talk about how visualization elevated them to their current height is full of bias. You only hear the circumstances where it has been associated with success, not the many other circumstances where it resulted in failure. Regardless, if you don't already experiments with visualization and try to apply it in different scenarios. Personally, I use visualization a lot for perfecting my technique with hand stands and waited calisthenics. I also used to use visualization a lot before I had to give academic presentations to large groups of people, which I spoke about in the previous lesson. Part of this involved visualizing myself, delivering the presentation, and answering questions from the crowd confidently, I would visualize my body language and tone of voice. I really do feel that this effort helped to create some kind of mental structure which help provide psychological readiness and challenging and pressured scenarios. Are there any aspects of your activities that could benefit from visualization? Are there any difficult situations that you could visualize overcoming, again, be creative and open-minded here, experiment a bit and see how it impacts your performance. In summary, plateaus or simply a natural part of skill development. To hack a talent, we need to get creative so that we can understand what works best for us. By doing this, we start creating a toolbox of methods that help us to smash through plateaus. We then become more experience with overcoming them. And this has a big impact on all areas of life. I recommend that when you do encounter plateaus, always ask yourself if there is a simpler version of your goal that you can achieve first, once you do achieve the simple version, gradually increase the difficulty or complexity until you have your desired outcome. Let yourself be curious and allow your pursuit to take you in different directions. I recommend that you play with experimentation and challenge setting. Also readjust your focus on activities that bring fun and enjoyment. Try to be aware of any preconceptions that may be having a negative impact in preventing you from progressing. And finally, think about any ways you can utilize visualization to create a mental structure for wider activities. Guys, is the end of lesson six, and it's time for some talent Hackett introspection. Let's reflect some of the ideas given from this lesson onto your disciplines. Please check out the questions listed in the course materials, PDF documents, and when you're done, Let's continue on to lesson seven. 8. 7 - Maximise your Opportunities for Success: Even if we are not fully conscious of it, I see fear is something that we frequently experienced throughout our lives. An important realization is that fear evolved in humans for a reason and thus, it does have utility and purpose. The key is to not let it stop us from reaching out toward new heights, prevents us from exposure to new environments and preclude our personal growth. If we constantly get into our natural feelings of fear, it will inadvertently govern our path. However, by accepting fear is a natural part of personal growth. We can begin to be mindful of the sensation, decide whether the fear is justified or not, and use the experience positively to bring us closer to our goals. Until now, the course is mostly centered upon the practical aspects of skill development. However, these activities are usually done with some endpoint in mind, such as a competition and exam, performance or an application. It says here that we encounter a common fear, which is that a failure. The first time I can remember acknowledging this in my own life was as a young boy facing an upcoming tests at school. I remember being reluctant to even study for the test for fear of not getting the result that I wanted. If I studied hard and didn't get the top scores, that would have been a failure to me. However, if I made no effort to study and got low marks, at least I could just justify that to myself. And it didn't feel like a failure. Here. I hope you can appreciate how self-defeating this mindset was. It prevented any commitment from the very earliest stages of skill development. I've seen this behavior from so many different people throughout my life. If we are enabled to take that very first step toward a destination, how can we ever hope to actually get there? How can we ever hope to encounter the adventures and fulfilling experiences along the way because of our fears. So many of us never take those first steps and therefore deny ourselves any opportunity for future growth and success. Many idols from the past and present similarly came to this realization. Capitalize on the idea to grant as much future opportunities for themselves as possible. The more attempts you make, the more likely you are to find success. I would like you to consider what is more likely that you succeed one time after trying 20 times, or that you succeed one time after trying two times. And how about if you try 0 times? I have been locked in places in my own life where I have been the person attempting 0 times, I have given myself 0 opportunities for personal growth and success. In truth, failure should not be defined as not achieving a high grade on a test, not being awarded the promotion at work or not attaining your parents ideas of success. Instead, failure should be defined as not taking those small steps that are required to get you closer to your goal. The take-home point is, we should strive to be closer to our goals today than we were yesterday. Does fear of failure ever stop you from taking those first steps or stop you from continuing those steps halfway through the journey, how can you maximize your opportunities and give yourself the best possible chance of success? Today, I've taken the mindset that being scared is a good thing for me. If I'm a bit scared of doing something, I can usually rationalize that it will ultimately end up being good for me in the future. The truth is, even after years of experience, I still find that intimidating to give presentations at large events, have one-on-one meetings with eminent medical experts and be responsible for the expenditure of large sums of money. However, fear is a natural response, the unknown, I would rather step into the unknown, being conscious of my fear than have my fears prevents me from career growth. Let us try and think of fear as something positive, thick and add an element of excitement to your experiences. If your pursuits do result in success, it can give that success in even deeper sense of accomplishment. To finish off this lesson, there's an article that you need to read. Please head over to the course materials, PDF documents, and get the link and have a read to summarize this lesson that do not let fear Hindi or opportunities in light of tried to maximize your opportunities that may not always result in success, but they will always bring you one step closer to success. 9. 8 - Multi-Disciplinary Mastery: By now, your talent hacking tool kits should be stocked with numerous strategies to develop your skills, overcome plateaus, achieve consistent progression, and stay mentally engaged. But what if we want to develop multiple disciplines simultaneously they can use is that you are already familiar with the tools. In this lesson, I'm going to teach you some tricks to apply them strategically and achieve multidisciplinary mastery. I just wanted to give a brief mentioned to perhaps the most obvious book beliefs, elegant approach, this simultaneous skill development. Before we move on to the more practical approaches, should he have enough time available, you could simply construct practice routines for your different disciplines or skills in accordance with less than two. Scheduled these all in your diary. Say for example, you want to learn the piano and prepare for an upcoming marathon. For this approach, you would have four to five piano practice sessions per week and three to four runs per week, all of which would be allotted in your diary. This is quite a time-consuming approach and provided that you have a family or a full-time job, such as strategy can be difficult. I've only ever been able to manage this during my student days when I had more time available and had longer holidays, perhaps it is feasible to develop two separate disciplines at the same time, or maybe even three. But my personal opinion is that this strategy is better suited for the short term. Typically, I would employ this approach during quiet times of the year such as summer holidays or around Christmas. And then follow this strategy outlined in the next section of this lesson for the remainder of the year, consistent with less than six experimentation and challenge setting, I do recommend that you at least try scheduling multiple practice sessions simultaneously, even if only to discover something new about your learning style and preferences, it can be tricky to keep on top of all of the different activities, exercises, and drills for multiple disciplines. Here, a simple tick list, either use daily or weekly, or a logbook, can be used to ensure that you are completing the necessary tasks for each of your disciplines. Something that we touched on very briefly in lesson three was the concept of maintenance phases. Here, we reduce our routine practice to a minimum amount needed to maintain our skills and prevent any loss of ability. It takes much more time to build a house than it does to maintain it. Although you need to invest a substantial amount of time into skill development, less effort is required for its maintenance. The benefits of maintenance phases is that you free up more time to prioritize the development of other skills of disciplines. Even if we're not concentrating our efforts on developing a skill, we can still maintain it in the background. In less than three, we introduced maintenance phases as a tool to prevent any loss of your hard won skills during this busy moments in life. Here, we shall employ a strategy with maintenance phases to mask the multiple skills simultaneously. As an example, say we have two disciplines that we intend to develop. We are hoping to improve our tennis game, which we short-term discipline a. And we're also attempting to learn French, which we shall term discipline B. As we are in the summer, we decide to capitalize on the good weather and social aspects of tennis with us, prioritize discipline a, and develop our tennis skills in accordance with the strategies outlined in the previous lessons of this course. After three months of dedicated routine practice and training, we dropped discipline a to a maintenance phase and only spend the minimum amount of time necessary to maintain our current level of skill. At this point, we have more time available and switch our focus to learning French discipline B. We spend the next three months concentrating our efforts on learning French, prioritizing the development of this skill. Meanwhile, we adhere to their reduced tennis training schedule in the background in order to maintain the abilities that we had developed in the summer after three months of concentrating on discipline B, we are in the festive holiday season and we want some extra physical activity to burn off that surplus festive calorie intake. Therefore, we switch back to discipline, a, prioritizing our tennis training, minimizing our French language practice to a maintenance phase. I hope you can see in this hypothetical example that we can rotate our priorities in order to fit in with life by concentrating our time on one discipline whilst maintaining the other discipline in the background, we have an efficient strategy to develop multiple skills simultaneously. As an added benefit, switching between different disciplines works wonders for keeping you interested as your practice experiences regular revitalization. In this example, I only chose three months as the time period for the development phases because this, generally speaking, is my personal preference, more or less. However, three months was just used to illustrate the examples. In real life terms, please choose a more appropriate period of time for your preferences and learning style. Furthermore, the scenario given here use two separate disciplines, French and tennis. However, priority rotation is equally applicable for separate skills within a discipline. For example, I'm currently using priority rotation to develop the Static Front Lever hold skill a, and the press to handstand skill, be it my calisthenics training. Therefore, this strategy can be used in a variety of different circumstances for your specific talent hacking pursuits. You may want to change your approach throughout the year in relation to how much time you have available during those moments of the year where you have less demands. You could utilize that time by having two or more distinct development of phases going on simultaneously. Then when you get busy, you could swap your approach for priority rotation, which is when we have one discipline in the development phase and another in a maintenance phase, this generally works well for me, but some trial and error will be necessary to find what works best for you. I recommend starting small, working on too many goals at the same time is a recipe for disaster. Developing several skills simultaneously is a skill in itself build up slowly and get a feel for it before you expand the number of disciplines, under-development of good introduction would be to first try priority rotation with two disciplines, establish your maintenance phases and become accustomed to the strategy, then introduce a third discipline into the mix. Perhaps you already work on several disciplines and could use some structure to your approach to maximize your gains. Try adopting these strategies and see if they result in greater improvement. Perhaps you've never been ambitious enough to try and develop more than one discipline at a time, maybe you would discover greater potential in yourself by attempting several simultaneously. Again, experimentation is key. Neither strategy here may apply for you, but whilst trying them, you may develop your own techniques along the way. Multi-disciplinary mastery requires extra focus on efficient use of your time. This isn't a topic that I want to cover it length as a simple Google search will return numerous guides to improve your productivity. And I have listed several good resources for this in the course materials PDF document, what I would like to highlight here, or what I feel to be the most critical areas where you can acquire significant talent, hacking games, our day-to-day lives are full of extra moments where we can create extra opportunities for development. How often do you travel for work? Do you need to walk from location to location for errands or for classes. This time can be utilized by listening to podcasts and audio books. I regularly spend three to four hours a day in the car or train. And instead of losing this time, listening to repetitive radio stations burn through a huge number of books each month for certain disciplines such as languages, auditory media can even serve as the primary form of activity for your maintenance phase. Even smaller periods of the day, such as when you are doing the laundry, cleaning the bathroom, tidying your room, or cooling down after a workout can cumulatively result in the potential for hours of learning. If you have an hour-long lunch break at work, spend the first half hour eating and catching up with colleagues. And then the second half hour going for a walk with an audio book. Not only will you utilize your time for time hacking, but I guarantee you, you will feel far more refreshing, invigorated for the afternoon, another time of the day where I am terrible for throwaway hours of opportunity or the late afternoons and evenings, a onetime, I developed the bad habit of spending an hour or two just scrolling through my Instagram feed. This wasn't the productive exploration to aid my skill development, as described in lesson four, was simply an attempt to switch off my brain and relax. Now, procrastination in downtime are important, but not when they're done an access, social media is intentionally constructed to be addictive. It truly is a sink for time. That is not to say it cannot be used productively. It just very rarely is. I recommend that you limit your time on social media once or twice a day for a restricted period is really all that is needed. Anything more than this is simply just filling time. Like me, you may feel exhausted at the end of the day and need to switch off, but this can be done productively as detailed in lesson four, source several YouTube channels that produce high-quality and entertaining content in relation to disciplines. Watch some videos on these channels. Instead of spending your downtime scrolling minus D through social media posts, this requires minimal concentration and efforts being very well suited to your tired and fatigued state of mind, but can still yield important gains. Another time that you can utilize others, one or two-minute moments during the day where you are waiting for something, when you're waiting in line for a coffee, taking a short break from your computer screen at work or hanging around for a friends who arrive, instead of opening up Instagram or Facebook on your phone, open up that Anki app, as described in lesson to make the fundamentals autonomous. Anki is an excellent tool for talent hacking. Even if you complete a handful of flashcards in these few available minutes, they will get you closer to completing your daily flashcard revisions during times of intense study, I've had many cards to review each day. And this simple tip has helped me stay on top of my academic pursuits. We all know someone who just appears to have a knack for anything they turn their attention to. These people may indeed possess some magical intrinsic quality, which makes them able to excel in any pursuits. Or perhaps more likely, as I hope you can understand by now, these individuals have developed the ability to decipher a skill and construct a plan of development that suits them. But if you've already developed a skill to a good level, you probably already have the ability to pick up a related skill relatively quickly. For example, perhaps you already play musical instruments and have noticed that you find that easier to learn other instruments in comparison to your friends who've never studied music. Perhaps you find it easy to understand other languages that have shared roots or similar ancestry to your native tongue. What I'm trying to get across is all of you watching this already have experiences and skills that lend advantages in related activities. Such observations led me to come up with the concept of the ultimate talent hacker. I reason that if someone was to hack a variety of different disciplines encompassing a diversity of skills, that person would develop a comprehensive toolkit of abilities which could be applied in many different circumstances for rapid apprehension. Continuing with this idea, I began considering what disciplines someone would need to hack in order to attain such a capability, I realize this is almost something of a thought experiment, but as I've taught you in this course, you may learn something new by experimentation. So I wanted to end this course by floating this idea. If nothing else, I hope this experimental ideas serves as a challenge among my ambitious students. My current thinking is that the ultimate talent hacker would be a competent practitioner of the following, an academic subject and athletic activity, a creative endeavor, and a non native language. For example, this could involve psychology, swimming, the piano, and any language that was not learned during early childhood. As another example of a set of disciplines, this could involve economics, cyclin, painting, and the non native language. Such a diversity of pursuits should yield extensive experience with far-reaching applications. I welcome any thoughts on this idea and would certainly appreciate any direct feedback from those who undertake the pursuits. In summary, we have seen how we can take all of the tools, ideas, and strategies given throughout this course and combine them to achieve the development of multiple skills simultaneously. This will require us to alternate between development phases and maintenance phases for multiple disciplines, we will need to put extra consideration into how we use our available time. Maximizing it as much as possible by learning simple productivity hacks and being even more mindful of our weekly schedule so that we can ensure adherence to multiple practice routines. Multi-disciplinary mastery requires even more focus and dedication to stay on top of your goals. However, the more you do it, the more you learn what works best for you and the better you get at it, it can yield remarkable results in the end, empowering you to develop your talent for anything and accelerates everything. With the end of lesson eight, I now invite you to engage in some introspection by answering the questions in the course materials PDF document, please consider these and then continue to the final part of the course. 10. Course Wrap Up & Key Points: By now, I hope you have a solid understanding of the core strategies that can be applied to develop your talents. This toolkit can be implemented in a wide range of circumstances to progress your skills to the next level. Even if you think that these strategies are not typically something you would consider doing, I recommend at least trying them. The results may just surprise you. I've seen too many people held back by their reluctance to actively work through something new. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is a quote that springs to mind. I just want to end the course by highlighting a final thought. Nowhere in this course have I referred to the teachings as rules at its core, talent hacking is simply a self-directed investigational approach, which utilizes all available resources to elevate one's abilities. We are all unique and what works for some may not work for others. I hope that by exploring yourself and your discipline, you ultimately adapt the teachings from this course to your own means and determined the best system for you. I want to end by summarizing the core teachings of this course. So here are my talent, hacker philosophies. One, there are no bad talents, only bad approaches to explore your discipline and immerse yourself in it. Three, focus on quality practice instead of the quantity of practice for planned for consistent and sustainable practice, five, regularly assess your progress and subsequently reconsider if your development plan is still appropriate. Sex, give yourself the greatest chance for success by seizing as many opportunities as possible. Seven, pass on your experiences, knowledge, and wisdom to your peers, contribute wherever possible to support your community. I really hope this course has had a positive impact on your life beyond the successes that are realized in your studies or career. I hope that the experience is gained from your talent. Hacking pursuits bring confidence, joy, and wisdom. If this course has benefited you, please leave a review on this website. If you've had any thoughts on the course, I want to share any personal experiences I would love to hear from you. Just get in contact with me via the ways listed in the course materials PDF document. Finally, please do consider sharing this course with your friends directly, all over social media posts. Take care.