Quick ways to become a master at anything

Hours are vital but you can get to mastery faster — much faster — by practicing the right way. So how can you and I do that? Here are seven steps experts use:

 1) Be uncomfortable

You learn best when you're reaching. "Flow" is great. But flow is not the best way to learn.

You want to be stretched to the edge of your ability. It needs to be hard. That's how your brain grows.

Here's John:

We learn when we're in our discomfort zone. When you're struggling, that's when you're getting smarter. The more time you spend there, the faster you learn. It's better to spend a very, very high quality ten minutes, or even ten seconds, than it is to spend a mediocre hour. You want to practice where you are on the edge of your ability, reaching over and over again, making mistakes, failing, realizing those mistakes and reaching again.

2) Stop reading. Start doing.

Keep the "Rule of Two-Thirds" in mind. Spend only one third of your time studying.

The other two-thirds of your time you want to be doing the activity. Practicing. Testing yourself.

Get your nose out of that book. Avoid the classroom. Whatever it is you want to be the best at, be doing it.

The closer your practice is to the real thing, the faster you learn.

Here's John:

Our brains evolved to learn by doing things, not by hearing about them. This is one of the reasons that, for a lot of skills, it's much better to spend about two thirds of your time testing yourself on it rather than absorbing it. There's a rule of two thirds. If you want to, say, memorize a passage, it's better to spend 30 percent of your time reading it, and the other 70 percent of your time testing yourself on that knowledge.

 3) The sweet spot

You want to be successful 60 to 80 percent of the time when training. That's the sweet spot for improvement.

When learning is too hard, we quit. When it's too easy… well, we quit then too.

Always be upping the challenge to stay in that 60 to 80 percent zone.

Here's John:

You don't want to be succeeding 40 percent of the time. That's flailing around. You don't want to be succeeding 95 percent of the time. That's too easy. You want to constantly be toggling, adjusting the environment so that you're succeeding 60 to 80 percent of the time.

 4) Commit to the long term

Asking someone "How long are you going to be doing this?" was the best predictor of how skilled that person would end up being.

Merely committing to the long haul had huge effects.

Here's John:

The question that ended up being the most predictive of skill was "How long are you going to be doing this?" Commitment was the difference maker. The people who combined commitment with a little bit of practice, their skills went off the charts.

If a nuclear bomb exploded in downtown Nairobi, what should you do?

You can always look to movies to figure this stuff out, right? And in movies, since nuclear radiation is BAD, the thing to do is to get away from it as quickly as possible. In the movies, electronics are fried, too, the response is chaotic, and hundreds of thousands of people die.

Interestingly enough, though, the government has done quite a bit of work to figure out what exactly would happen if a suitcase nuke — which, I know, doesn't really exist, but, for the sake of this example, bear with me — actually did explode a few blocks from the state House.

And curiously, and perhaps hearteningly, it turns out that there is quite a lot that you or I can do if we get stuck in Nairobi when something like that happens. Choices we make could very well make the difference between our imminent death and a relatively full and happy life, assuming the bomb is a one-off.

Did you know, for example, that:

1. The WORST thing for someone to try to do, in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion that they survive, is to get in a car and drive away?
2. Unless you're within about a third to a half a mile radius of ground zero and the shelter options are poor, the BEST thing for someone to do is to find a stable location inside a well-built apartment or office building — the majority of which will remain standing outside that half mile radius — and stay there for 24 hours?
   
   And if you were very close to ground zero and you did survive — and a lot of folks will — the best thing for you to do is to:
   
   A. Take immediate shelter somewhere, because fallout will rain down on you if you don't.
   
   B. Wait an hour.
   
   C. Then, walk about a half dozen blocks laterally until you find intact large buildings to shelter you.
3. The electromagnetic pulse from a ground burst will NOT, in fact, knock out all types of communication. Some? Maybe.
4. If you live in a single-family house with thin walls, your chances of surviving in the immediate aftermath of a blast and not getting cancer later are exponentially higher if you seek shelter in a bigger building, even one that might literally be next door?
5.  Rescuers should NOT put on radiation protection gear if it will slow them down. So long as the fallout has stopped falling, they're best advised to turn out in their normal gear.
6. Though thousands of people will die from the blast effects, almost all — about 96 percent — of the other potential casualties could be avoided if people understood the basics of what to do in the event of mass radiation exposure?
7. Did I mention that the worst place to be in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear blast is in a car trying to get away? The so-called DFZ -— the Dangerous Fallout Zone — will extend out as much as 20 miles, but it is likely to be extremely narrow. (If it's not, that means the concentration of radioactive particles will be lower). The vector and location of this zone depends on the wind. And its size will shrink with every passing hour.