Getting better at things you care about in life

I came across this insightful TED Talk, that I found to be quite useful with some practical tips.

Eduardo tries answering the important question “Why aren’t we getting better at the things that we most care about, even though many of us spend a lot of conscious time working hard at them?”

Do watch this video. Here is the gist of the talk (more as a note-to-self). There are two kinds of zones in our life:

• Learning zone: where our goal is to improve. We do activities designed for improvement, concentrating on what we haven’t mastered yet. Hence we expect to make mistakes, knowing that we will learn from them.
• Performing zone: wherein our goal is to do something as best as we can, to execute. Then we concentrate on what we have already mastered and we try to minimize mistakes.

People who are effective and successful deliberately alternate between the two throughout their lives. The reason many of us don’t improve much despite our hard work is that we tend to spend almost all of our time in the performance zone. This hinders our growth, and ironically, over the long term, also our performance.

An important advice is to consciously create opportunities of low-stake situations where its okay to experiment, practice and make mistakes. One must move away from the need to put up a flawless execution every time that an activity is pursued. After all a great tightrope walker doesn’t practice new tricks without a net underneath.