on.the.upper.edge

Jag läste en tidning som hette Harvard business review när jag satt och väntade på att få gå in på min intervju idag. Jag älskade tidningen, redan från första sidan. Jag var så inne i tidningen att när jag blev inkallad hade jag inget annat än titlen i hjärnan! Jag ska beställa 12 nummer av den, dyr är den men så värt det!



Den tog upp massa olika ämnen inom Business, allt från ledarskap till hur man ska "put the social in social networking." Jag älskade deras rubriker och det verkliga innehållet av tidningen. En artikel jag fastnade för var "Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything" av Tony Schwartz - Harvad Business Review. 

Here, then, are the six keys to achieving excellence we've found are most effective for our clients:

1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That's when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It's also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you'll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

Källa: http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2010/08/six-keys-to-being-excellent-at.html