Mastery Requires Both Impatience and Patience
Author James Clear offers pithy and prolific insights into many aspects of life. His wisdom hits home quite often the realms of productivity and success. I’m partial to this statement about mastery: “Mastery requires both impatience and patience. The impatience to have a bias toward action, to not waste time, and to work with a sense of urgency each day. The patience to delay gratification, to wait for your actions to accumulate, and to trust the process.” Test prep is all about reaching for mastery, attaining mastery for a moment, and displaying mastery when called upon. Be impatient to earn your best test scores: embrace a bias toward action and get to work. Be patient to prove your best test scores: Create a clear plan for success and work that plan. Leverage spaced repetition and the testing effect to improve over time, ideally under the tutelage of an expert coach.…
Muhammad Ali Knows Test Prep
Muhammad Ali is remembered as one of the greatest boxers of his era or any other, and he never tired of reminding the world of his greatness. His enduring fame as an Olympic gold medalist, heavyweight champion, and civil rights leader afforded him a platform from which he shared more than just poetic boasts. Ali communicated the cost of greatness to the world in both words and deeds. Anyone preparing to pit themselves against a tremendous challenge or competitor can learn from his insights… He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life. It’s not bragging if you can back it up. Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is…
Make This Your Year of Preparation
One topic I never tire of hearing, learning, talking, and writing about is preparation. What makes the principle of preparation so compelling? Simply put, all of our wildest dreams and aspirations become possible and perhaps even easy to achieve with the right preparation. Do you have big goals for this new year? Have you resolved to be better than you were last year? The path to everything you can hope for lies through preparation… We hope you choose to make this–and EVERY–year your year of preparation!
Meditations on Preparation: Effort
Results don’t materialize simply because we want them: we have to work for them. Hard work alone doesn’t guarantee success, but you can be certain that you won’t achieve your wildest ambitions without it! Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative EFFORT.
Meditations on Preparation: Ambition
Is it hubris to want to be the best you can be, to scale the heights of accomplishment to reach its pinnacle? Our most audacious goals are driven by our most fervent desires. Embrace your aspirations in order to make them reality. Achievement results from work realizing AMBITION.
Meditations on Preparation: Goals
All true preparation begins with the end in mind. Define your desired objective or outcome. Place your future self there, then look backwards and consider all the hard work, the training, the coaching, and the sacrifice necessary to achieve that victory. Before preparation even begins, commit to your GOAL.