I listened to an interview once with the great violinist Isaac Stern. He was recounting a story of a fan approaching him and saying “I would give my right arm to play as well as you do”Isaac Stern’s reply was “No you wouldn’t, because that’s exactly what I did”
His basic message was – if you want to play the violin as a master, the most important ingredient is practice!
The same essential ingredient of every pro athletes’ success is that they regularly allocate time to practice.
Larry Bird, the famous basketball player was known for practicing over and over again.
“I don’t know if I practiced more than anybody, but I sure practiced enough. I still wonder if somebody – somewhere – was practicing more than me.”
Larry Bird
Michael Jordan was known to be regularly on the courts practicing before games (and usually by himself).
Practice, practice, practice is a regular mantra for athletes and musicians, but for some reason we seem to forget this when applied to business.
One way this applies is to skills development. Do you allocate time for your team to develop and practice their skills?
How about when you are training someone? Applying practice to training means allowing enough time in the training process to learn, do, receive feedback, and do it again (and then repeat!)
Another way it applies is to what we are striving for in our business – new ideas, new products, and new programs.
Many, many times I have seen (and experienced myself!) an entrepreneur launching a new venture, not achieving the desired results on the initial attempt, becoming frustrated and stopping.
If you were to dig a little deeper, often the initial attempt actually moved the entrepreneur forward (sometimes dramatically) and they were probably 70 or 80% of the way there.
When we are trying something new, we don’t know what we need to know until we start taking action based on what we THINK we should do, and what happens always shows us what we NEED to know in order to produce results.
Striving towards a result, and learning based on what happens (both what works and what doesn’t work) is how we learn and grow as entrepreneurs – our own Entrepreneurial University of Success.
That doesn’t mean that you don’t adjust or change tracts based on what you are learning.
It means the only way for you not be successful is if you stop.
“If at first you don’t succeed, try try, try again!” W.E. Hickson in Moral Songs