Building Blocks Are Your Foundation
Success Needs Deeper Understanding
How well do you understand how you perform?
Well enough to just get by? Enough to be satisfied with the results? Or do you understand your performance so deeply that you operate at a level that inspires others?
It’s not surprising that the deeper your understanding of what you do benefits you in 3 ways:
- It increases the ease of your performance.
- It enables a consistency in the quality of your results.
- It increases your ability to adapt your performance in changing circumstances.
Importantly too, as we consider more deeply the drivers of great performance, we begin to understand our true potential.
But only when we are truly committed to understanding the building blocks of our performance. 
I’m showing my age when I share my reflections of learning as a teenager during the Pre-Internet Age. In particular, I marvel now at all of the available online learning material, albeit of varying quality, that can support students of all generations.
While the accessibility of content may inspire learning, the limitation of online digital learning is that it doesn’t necessarily teach us the real ‘building blocks’ of what we need to know to improve our performance.
For example, let’s take learning learning the guitar. Despite the availability of online content to observe other people playing your favourite song, you still need to learn how to play the song. And before you even attempt to learn to play that song, there’s probably hundreds of hours of developing motor skills and hand-eye coordination, not shown online, that you need to commit to for you to come close to replicating your guitar hero’s exploits.
So what can you do?
In my book Learning Dangerously, article #41 titled, “The Biggest Threat To Your Success Is Inaction”, I emphasise the importance of learning about the ‘building blocks’ of performance to maintain your commitment to your success.
Often our inability to start or improve, usually labelled ‘procrastination’, is not so much an attitude problem, as it is a knowledge problem: we don’t really know what to do next or how to step up our performance to break out of a plateau or rut.
The key to avoid that situation is going deep below the surface of performance and understanding and practising the ‘building blocks’.
The easiest way to do this is to read the stories of people who have mastered their craft and learn about how they went about their process of learning and development. What is most notable is their commitment to understanding the deeper drivers of success – ‘builiding blocks’.
Michael Jordan, regarded as the greatest basketballer and one of the greatest athletes of all time is the perfect example. The stories and anecdotes about his commitment to practice and training are legendary. He was a master of his craft.
When we begin to understand our craft deeper we are able to unravel the mysteries, the uncertainty and the fear that can limit our ability to achieve greater results.
I love this quote attributed to Michelangelo:
“If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.”
But remember, working hard is not just about more hours and effort. It’s critically also about your deeper understanding of your performance. What more can you do to improve your outcomes?
There are 5 areas that you can immediately consider:
- Your mindset.
- Your skill.
- Your environment.
- Your tools.
- Your experience.
Ultimately, we are only limited by our own awareness. By deepening our awareness of our performance we are then able to realise our true potential, today, tomorrow and forever more.
But only when we seek to truly understand our ‘building blocks’.
Craig Stephens is the author of Learning Dangerously. Craig mentors and coaches people to build and implement strategies to improve their performance outcomes. If you want to improve your performance, contact Craig and realise the benefits of Learning Dangerously.
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