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Standards and Practice – Audio

Hi, I’m AJ Hoge and welcome to this month’s VIP lesson. Standards and Practice… Standards and Practice.

What am I talking about? Really, what this month is about is how to achieve mastery or how to achieve excellence, excellence, excellence in some area of life. First we might ask why? What is the purpose of achieving excellence in some area? It doesn’t matter what the area is. Everybody, for some reason, has certain areas in their lives where they would like to achieve excellence, a high level of skill.

For some people it’s sports, maybe there’s a sport and you want to be excellent at that sport. Maybe it’s parenting, you want to be an excellent parent for your children. Maybe you have a sales job, you want to be excellent at sales and persuasion. Maybe it’s your career, some other aspect of your career. Maybe you’re a lawyer, you want to be an excellent lawyer. You’re a doctor, you want to be excellent at being a doctor, whatever it is. But the first question we should ask is why? I mean really when you think about it, why be excellent why not just be good?

It’s much easier just to be good, quite honestly. It’s much, much easier just to be pretty good, pretty good, and honestly, being pretty good is enough for most situations in life. And, quite honestly, in most parts of your life you will choose to be good or pretty good and that’s enough and that’s fine because, because we don’t have enough time to be super excellent at everything. Nobody is excellent at everything they try to do, nobody. So, we have to choose and that choosing depends on what’s important to you in your life, what your values are and also, just what you love.

We tend to become excellent at things we really, really love. It’s very, very, very difficult to become excellent at something you don’t like very much or that you only like a little bit. It’s tough. I won’t say impossible, but it’s very, very tough. It requires a huge amount of willpower and discipline to become excellent at something that you don’t really like so much or you only like a little bit. It’s far easier to become excellent at something that you absolutely love doing, and we’ll talk about why in a minute.

Now excellence brings certain rewards and I believe that most of the rewards, most of the benefits of excellence come from the process of trying to achieve it, not from the end result. So, it’s the practice and the practice and the practice, the discipline, the effort, the high standards you have for yourself, constantly raising your standards. It makes you a better person and it helps you in all other areas of your life become a better person. It helps you to become a better problem solver. Helps you to deal with difficult situations in all parts of your life. So that’s when the process of trying and working to become excellent is very beneficial.

And then becoming a master at something, when you become a master of something you enjoy the biggest rewards of that field. If it’s something that involves a job, career or money you’re going to make the most money as a master. The super master accountant makes far more money than a very good accountant. A super master lawyer makes far more money than a very good lawyer. A super master English teacher makes far more money than a very good English teacher. And, it doesn’t matter, choose any scientist whatever it doesn’t matter, choose any field that is true.

And if it’s not about money there are other rewards. In a sport you’re gonna to get the most championships, you’re gonna get the most fame, the most glory, the most satisfaction, the most joy and happiness and greatness from being a true master; excellent. So, how do we achieve that? Well, that’s what this month’s about, two things… Standards and Practice and they’re connected.

Let’s talk about standards first, what is a standard? A standard, it’s a little bit like a goal, but it’s really, more close to the meaning of expectation. It’s an expectation for yourself. It’s what you expect of yourself, what you expect yourself to do. That’s what a standard is.

So we can have high standards, medium standards, low standards. In general, in English we use these phrases a lot, especially high standards and low standards. Someone with high standards they expect a lot from themselves. They expect themselves to be very good. They expect themselves to improve. They expect themselves to do better. They expect themselves to be excellent. Those are high standards, kind of like goals but they’re also just expectations of themselves.

And someone with low standards, they kind of expect themselves to not be very good or they just don’t care so much. All right, so their goals, their efforts, everything is kind of low. So, of course, you need super high standards in your life right? Well, that’s what Tony Robbins teaches sometimes but I actually disagree with him about this. I don’t think he’s right. Sometimes we need very high standards, but sometimes high standards are not good for us. Sometimes standards that are too high they hurt us. They cause us not to succeed, they actually block our success. They actually block our improvement.

Why? Think about it though. I’ll give you an example from my own life. People on Twitter know that I am doing Jiu Jitsu now right. Jiu Jitsu it’s kind of like a wrestling. It started in Japan, also went to Brazil. They changed it. If you know mixed martial arts or anything like that you’ve heard of Jiu Jitsu and especially Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. So I’m doing that and I started it two months ago and I love it. I love it! Love it, love it, love it… practicing all the time, almost every single day. I love it.

So, should I have high standards? Imagine if I had super high standards. I’m just starting out, I’m definitely a beginner, only two months. Now imagine if my standard, my expectation, my goal was to be a world champion; not only a world champion but to be as good as one of the greatest Jiu Jitsu players of all time. For example, if you know Jiu Jitsu you know who I’m talking about, Marcello Garcia. Marcello Garcia is Brazilian, lives in New York now, one of the greatest. He’s super amazing, like the Michael Jordan of Jiu Jitsu.

Now just imagine right now as a two month beginner, if I decided my standard, my expectation, my goal is to be as good as Marcello Garcia. Would that help me? No, that would be crazy. That would be crazy and it would hurt me. Because, number one, it’s probably impossible. I probably never will be as good as him. He started at a much younger age. I’m 49 years old, I’m just starting Jiu Jitsu at 49, most of the really, really great and by great I mean like superstar, best in the world level. Those guys start when they’re very young and they’re doing it all the time. Those guys also tend to do it full-time, it’s their only focus in life. They’re training two times a day, four, five or more hours every single day for years and years and years and years, starting at a young age. Also, the truly top guys, they’re just very physically talented, perhaps genetically talented. So, am I likely to ever be as good as Marcello Garcia? Probably not, but even if I somehow could be, right now it’s still a bad standard because it’s too far, it’s too high and will only frustrate me. It would frustrate me and destroy my motivation. It would destroy my love of Jiu Jitsu, because I would go onto the mat think, Marcello Garcia, and then I would get destroyed and badly beaten by another white belt, another low level beginner. So I would think, oh my God this is terrible. I’ll never become as good as Marcello Garcia and it would just destroy my motivation, so too high a standard.

Your standards need to be very specific. Your standards, your goals, your standards should be just a little bit above where you are now. They should be relevant meaning– connected to, appropriate for– your current situation. So if you’re a beginner your current standard should be to become an intermediate level. That’s a good standard and you could find a good intermediate level person and say, I’d like to be as good as him or her. That would be an excellent standard, and then when you reach that level, of course, then you have to adjust your standards this is the thing.

See, a standard isn’t just something that you always have. Again, this is where I disagree with Tony Robbins a little bit. I think a standard is something you change constantly, constantly adjusting your standards, constantly raising them little by little as you go up, so boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. If I was already a black belt and super good at Jiu Jitsu, maybe winning national tournaments yeah, then maybe I could have the standard… I’ll be as good as Marcello Garcia. I’d be closer to that. Still probably would not happen, but at least it would be more relevant to my situation.

All right. Now, of course, too low standards are also not good. Too low standards make us lazy. If your standards are below your current level or just at the same then you’re not gonna go anywhere, you just lose your motivation, you become lazy. So you develop your standards, they’re just a little bit above where you are.

The next thing you have to do to achieve those standards is practice, practice, practice, you know this. Now this is where this idea of love comes in. You read a lot about people saying that to be a master, to be excellent you need 10k hours of practice, 10,000 hours of practice. That’s a lot. Now, this is a general idea, it’s not specific. There’s not super specific research about this, this is a general idea and really, if you use efficient and effective methods, better methods than other people use than, I believe, you can cut that time in half. You could cut it to 5000 hours, to be world-class, super excellent level.

So, what kind of practice. It’s not just practicing, deliberate practice is what you need, focused practice, intelligent practice with full concentration. That’s the kind of practice that leads to excellence. A lot of people they just practice, like for example with English, they’ll listen to English kind of but they’re not really listening carefully. They’re distracted. They’re thinking about something else. They’re looking around. So, it’s not quality practice.

Quality practice is listening to Effortless English with full focus and full concentration, carefully listening to the pronunciation, carefully listening to the phrases, repeating, deep learning, all of those things I teach you. That’s quality practice and that’s far more effective. It will help you to become excellent faster.

Now, the next thing about practice, it’s usually good to start slowly first, to practice slowly and carefully with full concentration and then later as you become advanced then you focus on speed. This is another thing with English and with many things in life, people focus on speed too soon.

AJ I can’t understand movies they talk too fast. Okay, well that’s all right, it doesn’t matter. That will happen. You will understand the speed, the speed comes later. First, focus on slow is smooth. This is a phrase from the Navy Seals, I’ve talked about in other lessons. Slow is smooth means that first you practice very slowly and perfectly, precisely so that you learn carefully and deeply. You repeat a lot. You go more slowly than you need to, so that you super deeply learn it and you really gain excellence in mastery. Then, when you gain that excellence in mastery, then the speed comes much more easily. The speed will then come automatically.

Your listening, understanding will speed up very quickly. Your speaking fluency speed will also speed up. It’s also true for sports. Again, like let’s say tennis right, the best way to practice tennis is first, let’s say you’re practicing your overhand serve is to practice it very slowly and precisely. Get all of the movements exactly correct as your coach teaches you. I’m not a tennis player, so I can’t tell you. I don’t know how to do a serve, but I know there’s a precise correct way to do it, right?

There’s a way that your grip should be. There’s an angle for your shoulder. There’s a way your body should move. There’s a way you should throw it up. There’s a way your eyes should look.

All of these things…

Your hips should move a certain way. Your feet should move a certain way.

If you try to do that fast too soon, you’ll practice fast but you’ll practice wrong things. You’ll make mistakes and then you’ll repeat the mistakes again and again and again very quickly and then the mistakes will become automatic. And this is the problem many intermediate level people have, because they practice too quickly and therefore they practice mistakes then they have these mistakes as habits and then it takes a lot of work to break those bad habits, those bad techniques and relearn again correctly. This is why so many coaches, especially in sports, will encourage you to practice correctly first in a very slow precise way until your technique is perfect. Then and only then try to go faster.

I’m doing exactly this in Jiu Jitsu also, so the really good Jiu Jitsu guys they’re super-fast with their techniques. Yes, it’s great to be fast, it’s useful when you’re fighting the other guy, but Jiu Jitsu also demands very precise techniques. If you forget one detail for a technique it will not work, so you must do every little part correctly. So, if you practice too fast and you forget one part then when you’re fighting you’ll try it fast and it won’t work and you’ll; why didn’t it work? Because the practicing was bad. This is true for almost anything you practice, so slow deliberate practice first. I’m gonna teach you very specific ways of practicing better anything… English, sports, business career… anything. I’m gonna teach you that in the commentary, so go to the commentary. Listen to the commentary, I’ll teach you those very, very, very specific ways to improve your practice so you’ll improve faster. Fewer hours to achieve world-class mastery.

I our interactive lessons we have a little excerpt, a little part from a book called ‘Talent is Overrated’, which is an excellent book.

All right, I’ll see you in those other lessons.

Bye for now.