DEVELOPMENT MUST BE QUALITY OVER QUANTITY

A special thanks to my friend Sefu Bernard for passing this article on to us via his the LLaBB facebook page. It is an outstanding blog post by Daniel Coyle, the author of "The Talent Code." It's a great post for your team because it deals with the concept of "putting time in" to improve when the process needs to be about what you "put into the time."  Here is what Coyle has to say about it:

Okay, it’s happened: 10,000 hours is officially in the mainstream. Athletes, musicians, students, businesspeople are counting away, waiting for their practice odometer to tick over and — presto! — they’ll be world-class experts.

Sorry, but that ain’t how it works.

Why? Because when you count the hours, it’s easy to lose track of the real goal: finding ways to constantly reach past the edge of your current ability.

The real lesson of 10K is not about quantity; it’s about quality. It’s about getting the maximum possible gain in the shortest amount of time — and to get that, you don’t focus on the time, but on the gain. You put your focus on improving the practice, which happens two ways: through better methods or increased intensity.

To be clear:

1. Certain kinds of learning — deep, or deliberate practice — are transformative.

2. That transformation is a construction process.

3. That construction process depends on your intensive reaching and repeating in the sweet spot on the edge of your ability.

You are what you count. If you count hours, you’ll get hours. But if you find a good way of measuring your intensity, or measuring your improvement, that’s what you’ll get.