The Power of ‘Painful Practice’ for Your Personal Brand
Finding what you love doesn’t mean it should feel completely effortless. Where there’s pain, there’s progress.
They say find what you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life. But, with this approach, will you ever get any better? Any closer to your personal brand goals? Any more likely to achieve the results you desire? Perhaps the secret instead lies in practice. Not just mindless repetition, hoping for some improvement. But good old-fashioned painful practice. Intentional practice. Practice that actually pushes you closer to your personal brand vision.
In this blog, I’m sharing my top tips for practising your craft, whatever that may be for you.
Tip #1: Focus on ‘Making’, not ‘Making Art’
It’s likely your personal brand has big goals. But, are they focused on your output or input? That’s the part you can control.
Andy Warhol famously said:
“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.”
Whatever the ‘art’ of your profession or goals, focus on the ‘making’.
Tip #2: Painful Practice
In The Art of Work, Jeff Goins calls for “painful practice”. Because it is work after all. A far cry from the popular rhetoric that when you find what you love, you don’t have to work a day in your life. Goins reminds us that practising new skills is meant to be challenging.
During a workout, you stress and strain your muscles to create expansion. Mastering new skills for your personal brand is similar. If you’re truly challenging yourself, it should feel uncomfortable. How could you aim to be 1% better every time you practise?
Goins says:
“Researchers have argued that what we used to think of as natural talent is, in fact, the result of good old-fashioned practice.”
Push yourself to practise beyond your current abilities. As described so beautifully by Daniel Coyle in his book, The Talent Code:
“When you’re practising deeply, the world’s usual rules are suspended. You use time more efficiently. Your small efforts produce big, lasting results. You have positioned yourself at a place of leverage where you can capture failure and turn it into skill. The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your present abilities; to target the struggle.”
Tip #3: Deliberate Practice
Several authors have helped previously popularise the now infamous '10,000-hour Rule’. It proposes that it takes at least 10,000 hours to start to develop mastery in your field. It is based on the research of Anders Ericsson. Ericsson studied athletes, chess players, musicians and more. But, as Robin Sharma highlights in The Everyday Hero, Ericsson also pioneered another important term - ‘deliberate practice’.
When it comes to practising for your personal brand goals, don’t be what Sharma calls ‘The Hard Worker Who Never Got Any Better’. As he highlights, mere training over a long period doesn’t necessarily lead to mastery. What makes someone great is a particular type of practice. It is intentional and deliberate, rather than random or accidental. So, is there one thing you could try differently next time you practise?
As Danielle H Pink highlights in his motivation masterpiece Drive, Ericsson said:
“People who play tennis once a week for years don’t get any better if they do the same thing each time…Deliberate practice is about changing your performance, setting new goals and straining yourself to reach a bit higher each time.”
Tip #4: Practice in Public
In his book, The Practice, legendary Seth Godin also advocates for committing to practice. But, don’t simply hoard the fruits of your practice. As he says, ’ Ship your work’.
Why ‘ship creative work’?
Ship - because it doesn’t count if you don’t share it.
Creative - because you’re not a cog in a system, you’re a creator, a problem solver and a generous leader.
Work - because whether or not you’re paid for it, pursue it like a professional.
With the continuous cycle of creating and shipping, resistance and fear become disempowered.
Instead of aiming to create a masterpiece, focus on the smallest unit of your genius.
When it comes to your personal brand, you may want to write a best-seller. Or pursue another creative equivalent in your field. But, why not start by just writing? Write one blog post and then another.
The goal is not perfection, but consistency.
As Godin says:
“Identity fuels action, and action creates habits, and habits are part of a practice, and a practice is the single best way to get to where you seek to go.”
Putting Godin’s perspective together with the previous sections, this is where you ship creative work that is constantly getting better. Overtime, shipping 1% improvements compound into stunning results.
Tip #5: Failing Fast
You’ve likely heard the phrase,
“Throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.”
Practice might eventually make perfect, but embrace the mess along the way.
Eric Barker, in his book, Barking up the Wrong Tree, shares the ‘Spaghetti Problem’. It was designed by Peter Skillman, General Manager of Smart Things at Microsoft. The challenge was, in eighteen minutes, to build the tallest structure possible using:
20 pieces of art spaghetti
1 metre of tape
1 piece of string
1 marshmallow
Over five years, Skillman tested more than seven hundred people. This included engineers, managers and MBA students. They were all outperformed by one group - kindergarteners. In fact, the MBAs were the worst performing. What were the kids’ secret? They just jumped in. They started trying stuff. Failing quickly and also learning quickly. As Silicon Valley has popularised, they were prepared to ‘fail fast and fail cheap’.
So, when it comes to your personal brand, embrace practice. But instead of ‘making art’, focus on the ‘making’. Make practising your craft a little painful and deliberate. And do it in public. Embrace the mess that comes along with practice. Let others fear failure and perhaps fail slowly nonetheless. You’ll be busy failing fast and upward - in the direction of your personal brand goals.
