PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE!

Practice is vital for success whatever you do or want to do. My experience over  lifetime spent working with schools makes me realise that the essential elements in success are master coaching, deliberate practice and hard work but the more I read the more I begin to see that the science suggests that to become really world class other factors loom large.

Of course watching the Olympics and Paralympics makes you realise that practice and hard work are essential if you want to be successful at anything. It is obvious that if you want to succeed you need great coaching, focused and intense practice and you must train hard but our ability to get more out of training, to adapt to training and also to get off to a good start is also important, and those factors are complex and some are clearly genetic. While success then is down to hundreds of different factors, all interacting with one another, we need to understand that the 10,000 hour concept is a brilliant motivational tool, a way to encourage people to train more and a way to inspire people to take responsibility if they simply want to improve their performance.