The Science of Intelligent Achievement summary

If you’re interested in mastering a new skill, you may have heard that it takes around 10,000 hours of practice. This may be true, but you can’t just pile on one consecutive hour of practice after another and expect to reap the rewards. Those hours need to be filled with Deliberate Practice, which is the second rule of Selective Focus.

In 1993, psychologist K. Anders Ericsson used deliberate practice to illustrate the difference between average achievement and exceptional achievement. He found that it was the hours people spent on deliberate, high-quality practice that made the difference.

As the author knows from personal experience, getting a cancer diagnosis can send you searching for answers. He reached out to friends, doctors and therapists, asking everyone for their opinions on how best to fight the disease.

While it’s natural to seek advice when things get tough, it’s also important to be selective in this regard as well, because the attitudes and opinions of others can be infectious and sometimes harmful. If you don’t want that to happen, you have to be highly selective about the opinions to which you expose yourself, which is why this is the third rule of Selective Focus.

The second tool of intelligent achievement is Creative Ownership, which is about freeing yourself up so that you’re working toward your own goals and no one else’s.

One of the primary ways of achieving Creative Ownership is to produce and market your own content. Now, you may be thinking that that sounds great, but that whenever you try to write, the results aren’t so hot.

In the quest for independent Creative Ownership, one of the most valuable assets to have is a loyal customer base. The question is, how do you gain customers when you’re just starting out?

One great tool for getting customers’ attention is lead magnets. A lead is essentially customer information, so a lead magnet is something that attracts customers and compels them to give you their details. If you’re a writer, a good lead magnet might be a site where you post your first book chapter for free and potential customers can provide their email to be the first to know when the rest of the book is published.

A pragmatic outlook can be useful in many situations. After the author was given his cancer diagnosis, life quickly became stressful, and that’s when he realized that the way forward was to be pragmatic, and focus on small, doable actions that would improve his condition.

A pragmatic outlook is not only good for your health, it can do wonders for your success as well, which is why the third tool of intelligent achievement is Pragmatic Growth.

How do you feel about to-do lists? Are they a useful tool for staying on top of things? Or are they a daily reminder of all the things you wanted to do but never got around to?

Well, if you’re not a big fan of to-do lists, you may be happy to hear that part of Pragmatic Growth is about accepting that to-do lists are often a waste of time. The truth is, making lists rarely leads to the kind of direct action that moves you closer to your goals.

In his role at the helm of countless productivity workshops, the author has worked with thousands of people who’ve helped him identify eight pitfalls to pragmatic productivity. You can think of the tips to avoiding these pitfalls as the ultimate tool kit for keeping you on the road to Intelligent Achievement.

The first pitfall is accepting gifts. As the saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, because chances are the person picking up the tab is looking for a favor. This doesn’t mean you need to be cynical and think everyone is selfish, but if you do get invited to lunch, it doesn’t hurt to question the motives and wonder whether it isn’t, say, just a ploy to get you to work overtime. In short: pay for your own lunch.