SUCCESS and DOING WHAT YOU LOVE – Special Guest Post by Personal Trainer Dave Parise (talking about the fallacy of hard work and the “10 year rule”)

Posted on 26. Dec, 2008 by Kaiser in Personal Training, Workout

MERRY CHRISTMAS! Hope you had a healthy and happy one – my gift was getting to take a week off from writing a blog post. That was thanks to Dave Parise, because right now I’m going to re-gift the excellent post he made on the brand new Super-Trainer Forum.

This post was pure magic, and I had to give it the credit it deserved. It was all about the issue of natural talent vs. the importance of mastery of something you love. The truth is very few us are born perfect (see picture on left). Everyone else, no matter who you’re talking about, had to put in a tremendous amount of effort before they reached the top of their game.

For those of you that don’t know Dave, he’s a mega-succesful trainer in Hamden Connecticut – he owns a studio, Results Plus, with over a dozen employees, has been on TV more times than you can count, and is now growing and transitioning into new, national level ventures.

I’m not one to go on validation, but the fact that he supports Super-Trainer is big – this is a guy that’s one of the OG’s in the business, so for him to agree with what we talk about here shows he’s not just about keeping up the status quo. Staying hip to the industry is what’s allowed him to succeed for so long, and he doesn’t appear to be resting on his laurels in any way. Here’s what he had to say:

Think Beyond Boundaries! by Dave Parise CPT

Consult not your fears but your hopes and dreams.

Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential.

Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what is still possible for you to do.

The more goals you set, the more goals you get!

The proper way to change people is through genuine kindness and concern. Desire is the key to motivation, but it’s the determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal – a commitment to excellence – that will enable you to attain the success you seek.

It doesn’t matter how many say it cannot be done or how many people have tried it before; it’s important to realize that whatever you’re doing, it is your first attempt at it. Remember, your attitude determines your altitude!

A Great Read for Fit-Pros

What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Warren Buffett the world’s premier investor? We think we know:

“Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffett told Fortune magazine not long ago, he was ‘wired at birth to allocate capital.’ It’s a one-in-a-million thing. You’ve either got it-or you don’t.”

Well, folks, it’s not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don’t exist (sorry, Warren). You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of smart work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that’s demanding and painful. Buffett, for instance, is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of potential investment targets.

Talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things, and you can even make yourself great. Understand that talent doesn’t mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It’s an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well.

No Substitute for Smart Work

The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It’s nice to believe that if you find the field where you’re naturally gifted, you’ll be great from day one, but it doesn’t happen.

There’s no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice.

Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need about ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established that researchers call it the ten-year rule.

What about Bobby Fischer, who became a chess grandmaster at 16? Turns out the rule holds: He’d had nine years of intensive study. The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average. In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 10 or 20 years’ experience before hitting their zenith.

So greatness isn’t handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn’t enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What’s missing?

Practice Makes Perfect

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, which reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don’t get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day – now that’s deliberate practice.

Consistency is crucial. Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends.

The Skeptics

Not all researchers are totally on board with the myth-of-talent hypothesis, though their objections go to its edges rather than its center. For one thing, there are the intangibles. Two athletes might work equally hard, but what explains the ability of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to perform at a higher level in the last two minutes of a game?

Certainly some important traits are partly inherited, such as physical size and particular measures of intelligence, but those influence what a person doesn’t do more than what he does: Some international chess masters have IQs in the 90s. The more research that’s done, the more solid the deliberate practice model becomes.

Real-World Examples

All this scholarly research is simply evidence for what great performers have been showing us for years. To take a handful of examples: Winston Churchill, one of the 20th century’s greatest orators, practiced his speeches compulsively. Vladimir Horowitz supposedly said, “If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don’t practice for three days, the world knows it.” He was certainly a demon “practicer,” but the same quote has been attributed to world-class musicians like Luciano Pavarotti.

Many great athletes are legendary for the brutal discipline of their practice routines. In basketball, Michael Jordan practiced intensely beyond the already punishing team practices. (Had Jordan possessed some mammoth natural gift specifically for basketball, it seems unlikely he’d have been cut from his high school team.)

Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age-18 months-and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that’s what it took to get even better.

What It Takes to Be Great…

This Side of Business

Dave Parise had the idea of becoming an uncommon personal trainer. His passion was over and above the idea of making money. He developed uncommon exercises, he ridiculed most “body builders’ gym science,” he laughed at “Muscle & Fiction” magazine. He built his dream with customer service, continuing his education, and thinking instead of following. Today he has earned a dollar for every ounce of passion and desire he possesses.

He deliberately practiced relationships, nurturing, pampering, and giving people more than they expected to get. It worked!

The evidence, scientific as well as anecdotal, seems overwhelmingly in favor of deliberate practice as the source of great performance. Just one problem: How do you practice business? Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations… you can practice them all.

Still, they aren’t the essence of great managerial performance. That requires making judgments and decisions with imperfect information in an uncertain environment, interacting with people, seeking information-can you practice those things too?

It’s all about how you do what you’re already doing… you create the practice in your work, which requires a few critical changes. The first is going at any task with a new goal: Instead of merely trying to get it done, you aim to get better at it.

Being a Fit-Pro involves finding information, analyzing it, presenting it, teaching it, and observing it… and observing it… and observing it! (Did I say to observe it?) Anything that you do at work, from the most basic task to the most exalted, is an improvable skill. When you take service beyond the workplace and follow-up with your client, you take your reputation to a whole new level.

Adopting a New Mindset

Arm yourself with a new mindset; go at your job in a new way. You aren’t just doing the job; you’re explicitly trying to get better at it in the larger sense. Research shows you will process information more deeply and retain it longer. You will want more information on what you’re doing and seek other perspectives. You will adopt a longer-term point of view. A positive mindset persists and remains creative and clear.

Again, research shows that this difference in mental approach is vital. For example, when amateur singers take a singing lesson, they experience it as fun, a release of tension. But for professional singers, it’s the opposite: They increase their concentration and focus on improving their performance during the lesson. Same activity, different mindset.

Feedback is crucial, and getting it should be no problem in business. Yet most people don’t seek it; they just wait for it, half hoping it won’t come. Without it, as Goldman Sachs leadership-development chief Steve Kerr says, “it’s as if you’re bowling through a curtain that comes down to knee level. If you don’t know how successful you are, two things happen: One, you don’t get any better, and two, you stop caring.” In some companies, like General Electric, frequent feedback is part of the culture. If you aren’t lucky enough to get that, seek it out.

Be the Ball

Through the whole process, one of your goals is to build what the researchers call “mental models of your business,” mental pictures of how the elements fit together. I call it “a preview of coming attractions” and how they influence one another. The more you work on it, the larger your mental models will become and the better your “performance attitude” will grow. (Positive self talk…)

Dave Parise – Super Trainer Advisory Board

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Yeah baby! That’s what I’m talking about! Way to set a strong tone for the forum with that one Dave.

The problem with most people is they don’t have this “thing” to do that will allow them to develop their talents. They don’t have that “game” that they’re passionate about, that they can work on to take their own abilities and lives to a higher level. That’s why I love Personal Training, because it doesn’t have barriers to entry. If you’re passionate about it and you like what you do, in a very short time you can expand to a high income. I couldn’t believe that people were really paying for this stuff when I got into it, and in a few years was making more than I thought was possible outside of a traditional career. I then refined it to a point where it became so easy that my entire concepts of work and value have changed. I’ve seen other trainers in the same time as me grow their businesses to even higher levels because they took advantage of the same benefits.

The idea Dave talks about here,” the 10 year rule”, has gotten a lot of media attention through the media blitz by Malcolm Gladwell for his new book “The Outliers” (Malcolm’s a great writer and I’ve read his last two books, but for some reason I don’t think I can stomach a third). The idea is also covered in another book Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin. It’s the idea that whatever your “talent” may be, it takes at least 10 years of focused work in that area until any individual achieves what can be identified as breakthrough success (multi-millions, world record, championship, etc.). Yeah you read that right – 10 frickin’ years! Better get started, and make sure you’re doing the right thing or you’re wasting your time – haha!!!

And that’s 10 years of balls to the wall effort mind you, not just a mild dabbling, waiting for the calendar to turn. You guessed it, that kind of effort is not possible unless you completely love what you do down to every fiber of your existence.

Speaking of effort, I don’t view Personal Training as a job (that’s why we talk about “dumping the gym” asap here). I don’t think Personal Training even has a definition. It’s about you getting better at human interaction, self esteem, business, and providing value. It’s getting better at the skills of mentorship. It’s excelling at your passions. If those passions relate to fitness, you’re in for a fun and worthwhile ride. If they don’t, you should probably be doing something else.

After this stage, when you’ve fleshed out all of your interests and passions, it’s time to focus your efforts. And by this time you should know exactly what to focus on. You’ll have a huge edge on 99% (probably more) of people who have chosen their life script and vocation arbitrarily. Any question why obesity, depression, divorce, and reckless spending are our societies favorite past times? Sorry, but I think I’ll pass.

Don’t you love this? Thanks to Dave Parise for putting this in words in a way few people can. If this busted your get rich quick bubble too bad. But if you really got the meaning, then this ride is much more fun!

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