The Practicing Mind by Thomas M. Sterner

It’s important to think about the progress and not the goal. Therefore, it’s important to focus on the process and forget the outcome. No matter how far you walk, no matter how far you sail, the horizon will forever stay away. This is described in the book as setting a goal to “reach the horizon”. This is because with your perspective shift, and your new adjacent possible, your wants and ambitions grow as well. Or, at least, the outcome you want today won’t bring you the happiness you think it should, when you achieve it two years from now. Secondly, due to the happiness treadmill, you will never really achieve the outcome you want. Just like when playing a computer game, while the ultimate goal is to beat the game, the joy comes from the process of doing it, not from achieving the goal. You need to be mindful, you need to be aware of what is happening right now, and forget about your future plans and ambitions. Therefore, to be successful, you need to approach practice from a perspective of having fun, from a perspective of lack of judgment, from a perspective of the present moment. If practice is a sorry chore, you will avoid it. The missing insight in both of those is that it’s not the outcome that matters but the process.įirstly, you won’t spend the necessary 10,000 hours if you won’t feel like doing it. A related insight is that 10,000 hours doing a thing makes you an expert.

Sports studies say 60 repetitions per day for 21 days. Practice is applied learning which requires a lot of repetition. The latter doesn’t imply the former, but the former does imply the latter. The core idea of the book is that practice isn’t the same as learning. Books Lifestyle Movies Music Philosophy Programming RPLKTR # Thomas M.

The Practicing Mind by Thomas M. Sterner