“Dreams are not conceived in a vacuum. For better or for worse, each of us is born into someone else’s story! . . . Every move we make, every risk we take, sets the stage for someone else. Your brave is someone else’s breakthrough. We think right here, right now. God is thinking nations and generations.”- Mark Batterson
In Chapter 2 (“Ambidexterity”) of Win the Day, Mark Batterson tells the story of Joshua Haldeman. In 1950 he uprooted his family and moved to South Africa. With the help of his wife, Winnifred, and their children, he disassembled his plane. A 1948 single-engine Bellanca Corsair. Then, he packed the plane in crates and shipped it to South Africa. Once, there, Haldeman put the plane back together.
A few years later, Joshua and Winnifred embarked on a round-trip flight from South Africa to Australia. A thirty-thousand mile journey. In comparison, Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight covered 3,600 miles. Most significantly, it’s believed the Haldeman’s are the only private pilots ever to have made that flight in a single-engine airplane. While few people know of the Haldemans, they’ve heard of their grandson – Elon Musk.
Above all, Mark stresses, you only become an expert one way: lots of practice. However, if you practice the right thing the wrong way, you’ll fail to achieve the results you’re looking for. Instead, ‘deliberate practice’ provides the key. And, this practice consists of three dimensions:
- Well-defined goals. Such goals allow you to measure progress as well as facilitate a feedback loop.
- Reverse engineering. This involves studying the best practices of others. Next, you adopt these practices and then adapt them to your own unique situation.
- Effort. Deliberate practice requires that you exert near-maximal effort. Certainly, that’s neither fun nor easy. Therefore, you must attempt things that lie just beyond your ability. The technical term = just manageable difficulty, or JMD.
Finally, Anders Ericcson, who coined the term deliberate practice, adds:
“There is no point at which performance maxes out and additional practice does not lead to further improvement.”
Today’s question: How were your dreams not conceived in a vacuum? Please share.
Tomorrow’s blog: “Your point of greatest giftedness, weakness”
