No doubt you've heard this cliche before: "practice makes perfect". Although this is generally used as a form of encouragement, I prefer the phrase practice makes progress.

Of course in order to make progress it's important to practice new skills mindfully, with focus and attention. As this author states: 

"An hour training session with a wandering mind can drastically decrease the learning process. Eight minutes a day of mindfulness has been shown to be the minimum amount of time to start seeing physical changes in the attention centers of the brain."

Eight minutes minimum. I point this out because, based on the "minutes viewed" data on my tutorials, most of us struggle to stay attentive for more than 3 minutes. While this could say something about my ability to create engaging videos, consider how much information you may be missing in those remaining 5 minutes.

Of course this equation becomes...

Last week, I shared the four stages you generally go through on the path to fitting mastery.

As you move along the path through the four stages you'll undoubtedly be confronted with failure. While we all try to avoid it, failure is an extremely important part of achieving mastery in a subject, as long as you are able to consider it a helpful friend.

I know you've heard it before, but have you embraced it?

If you're not quite there yet, the key is to learn from the failure. Take a step back, zoom out and consider what may have gone wrong and how you might approach it differently based on the new knowledge the failure brought to the surface.

Those who succeed are those most willing to experience failure first.

With failure comes new knowledge as long as you move through the process like this: develop a hypothesis, test it out, analyze the results, develop another hypothesis and continue until you succeed.

This looks alot like the sample...

Mastering any skill can be a long road so I googled "the path to mastery" and landed on this article. It certainly provided some insight-especially about the 10,000 hour rule. If you're not familiar with that rule it basically states that if you spend 10,000 hours doing any one thing, you'll achieve mastery of that subject, but here's another perspective.

The author of the article makes this statement:

"The number of hours is arbitrary, and what really matters is "deliberate practice" where we are highly focused, have integrated feedback from experts, and work on the correct technique…"

This struck me quite profoundly when considering how most of us approach fitting. In essence this statement defines what the path is made of. The stops we make along the path to mastery are what the author refers to as "stages of competency", of which there are four.

So what stage are you at? You can let me know HERE or HERE.

Next week, I'll share some tips on moving through the stages...