“You can practice shooting eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong, then all you become is very good at shooting the wrong way. Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise.”
– Michael Jordan
An excerpt from – How to Become the Best at Anything, Chapter 8, Deliberate Practice and Learning
“To become the best takes practice, lots and lots of practice. I have mentioned the 10,000-hour rule. It takes about 10,000 hours of practice to get really good at something and not just any type of practice, but deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is practicing to get better.
The classic example is a man who has gone golfing almost every weekend for the past twenty years. He has a great interest in the sport and has fun with it. He reaches a certain level of expertise and plateaus there after about seven years. He is good enough to win occasionally playing, against his friends. He has fun, although after twenty years of practice why hasn’t he become a great golfer? Because he was not practicing to get better, he was not using deliberate practice, he was just participating in the sport. When you practice, you need to be practicing something that will help you become better…”
If you practice incorrectly you will develop a bad habit.
Bad Habits
“A bad habit may be the cause of your poor performance. A bad habit that actives without you consciously thinking about it is very hard to correct, although not impossible. Bad habits may be your largest obstacle to becoming the best. A bad habit, like a good habit, is an automated sequence. You have to un-automate the bad sequence and replace it with the correct sequence so that the correct sequence becomes automated. How you do this will depend on the bad habit. Your coach will be able to help you with this.
To help correct a bad habit, think about what you should be doing. Do not focus on what you should not be doing. Focus on the positive. Focus on what you should be doing.”
