How to get better at the things you care about | Eduardo Briceño | Day 39 – 100 Days 100 Thoughts

Hello Folks,

The title intrigued me more than anything else. All of us have a few things we care about, few things we love to do but at some point in time we feel that we are not getting any better at it. We put in a lot of hard work yet we feel that we are not getting any better and feel very pathetic about it. Why does this happen and why is it important to get better at things we care about plays a huge role in our journey. Eduardo Briceno gives a wonderful talk on the topic –  “How to get better at the things you care about”. Watch this wonderful ted talk below.

Welcome Back !!

In this talk, Eduardo talks about two zones namely Learning Zone and Performance zone. We all are fascinated by something and go into the learning zone and once we move to the performance zone we fail to come back to the learning zone. We learn a lot in the learning zone and we try to master it in the performance zone. We don’t want to go back to the learning zone rather we want to master the learnings and make the most out of it. This looks good and ambitious on the surface but rather going back to the learning zone only can help us evolve to the next level in the things we care about.

As Eduardo says there are a lot of things that are stopping us from getting back to the learning zone. The major of those is the lack of a cushion or a safety net. He says that even in schools we are creating a high-risk situation that prevents us from making mistakes and learn. In all places, we are expected to be flawless, and making mistakes are seen down with contempt. This prevents us from learning and concentrates more on performance. Without learning performing better is not possible and in order to learn we need to create a safety net for ourselves. It can be a mentor, it can be an online course, it can be spending a day just to learn. It can be anything but dedicate some time to learn daily and discuss your learning with the people you trust. You can see yourself getting better at the things you love and care about.

I would like to finish the post with the quote from Eduardo Briceno, “What if, instead of spending our lives doing, doing, doing, performing, performing, performing, we spent more time exploring, asking, listening, experimenting, reflecting, striving and becoming? What if we each always had something we were working to improve? What if we created more low-stakes islands and waters? And what if we got clear, within ourselves and with our teammates, about when we seek to learn and when we seek to perform, so that our efforts can become more consequential, our improvement never-ending and our best even better?“.