The Depth of your Practice
Unless you practice it, you’re unlikely to have much of it. Knowledge and relationship building, listening, resilience, patience, self-control or mindset.
🎧 Watch my Build the Invisible Documentary here:
Practice of Resilience
Lawyer Josh Kaye, at international broadcaster and publisher Hearst, told me while interviewing him for Build The Invisible, how he had struggled for some time with conventional learning. He didn’t get the best grades until he started excelling in university. He said to me, perceptively:
“The thought of failure wasn’t that bad, because I had already done it.”
The stigma attached to getting things wrong before realising it’s possible to improve and develop liberated Josh at a young age. It gave him greater levels of resilience to battle through, because failure, in his eyes, was only temporary. It still hurt but he catastrophised things less and recovered quicker. He’d been effectively practicing getting over failures for years. His insecurity became a superpower.
Practice of Pressure
My English teachers Ms Critchley, Mr Knowles and Mr Morris at King David High school in Liverpool were constantly and consistently putting my class under timed, pressurised conditions. Our class was drilled. I learned at an early age how practicing exam papers in test conditions readied me for the real thing.
Practice of Patience
I remember growing up, flipping through Shoot, Match and InterSport football magazines and picking out a jersey for my birthday. If I ordered it in June, I might get it by July. Delivery took around 28 days and that was normal. I didn’t realise it at the time but I was practicing patience.
Now, in an age of Amazon Prime and same-day delivery, we’ve grown used to instant everything. That shift has perhaps made frustration feel more intense, and comparison more constant. When things take longer (careers, status, experience, relationships etc), it can feel like something’s wrong. But often, it may be the normal pace of things.
The delays, knock-backs and the waiting are part of the practice. Practicing how to handle rejection. Practicing resilience. The micro scars we collect aren’t signs of failure. They’re part of the work.
Other excellent examples include Brene Brown’s explanation on the practice of vulnerability or Dr Carol Dweck’s TedTalk on the practice of mindset. Dr Dweck Mindset highlights how practicing growth-based thinking can begin to rewire the brain. Neuroplasticity was not a word I was familiar with until I began to understand how practicing hard stuff works.
Practice of Hard Choices
That’s why the “practice of” has become a vital framework for me. It leads to my favourite theme of the “practice of hard decisions”. In this Naval Ravikant podcast, among the treasure trove of insight, is a quote that his personal trainer uses as his mantra.
“Tough choice, easy life. Easy choice, tough life.”
This was the keystone to knitting together my Build The Invisible book as I wove all these ideas around the practice of building knowledge, relationships, resilience and mindset.
The play-off can be simple or more complex. Gym workout or staying on the couch. Reading the book or watching the extra Netflix episode. Being annoyed the delivery is taking an extra day. Turning off/deleting your socials for a day a week to gain better traction. Hard decisions are liberating. I found it activated extra levels of self-control whilst making conscious decisions on how to act. It turns out regulating yourself is difficult. That’s why social media and distracting yourself from your underlying state is so enticing. That’s one of the topics I’ll be exploring at BTICon (my first conference) in London this year.
Doing the harder thing is hassle and friction. My grandpa Sol had this phrase “what’s having is worth working for”. I think my version is “what’s having is worth practicing for”.
Whatever it is you want to build, start practicing.
To Finish…
Here’s a Build The Invisible themed talk I gave on How To Get a Job in the Sports Industry