Motivation is a powerful, yet tricky beast. Sometimes it is really easy to get motivated, and you find yourself wrapped up in a whirlwind of excitement. Other times, it is nearly impossible to figure out how to motivate yourself and you’re trapped in a death spiral of procrastination.

So what is motivation, exactly? The author Steven Pressfield has a great line in his book, The War of Art, which I think gets at the core of motivation. To paraphrase Pressfield, “At some point, the pain of not doing it becomes greater than the pain of doing it.”

In other words, at some point, it is easier to change than to stay the same. It is easier to take action and feel insecure at the gym than to sit still and experience self-loathing on the couch. It is easier to feel awkward while making the sales call than to feel disappointed about your dwindling bank account.

This, I think, is the essence of motivation. Every choice has a price, but when we are motivated, it is easier to bear the inconvenience of action than the pain of remaining the same. Somehow we cross a mental threshold—usually after weeks of procrastination and in the face of an impending deadline—and it becomes more painful to not do the work than to actually do it.

Now for the important question: What can we do to make it more likely that we cross this mental threshold and feel motivated on a consistent basis?

Common Misconceptions About Motivation
One of the most surprising things about motivation is that it often comes after starting a new behavior, not before. We have this common misconception that motivation arrives as a result of passively consuming a motivational video or reading an inspirational book. However, active inspiration can be a far more powerful motivator.

Motivation is often the result of action, not the cause of it. Getting started, even in very small ways, is a form of active inspiration that naturally produces momentum.

I like to refer to this effect as the Physics of Productivity because this is basically Newton’s First Law applied to habit formation: Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Once a task has begun, it is easier to continue moving it forward.

You don’t need much motivation once you’ve started a behavior. Nearly all of the friction in a task is at the beginning. After you start, progress occurs more naturally. In other words, it is often easier to finish a task than it was to start it in the first place.

How to Get Motivated and Take Action
Many people struggle to find the motivation they need to achieve the goals they want because they are wasting too much time and energy on other parts of the process. If you want to make it easy to find motivation and get started, then it helps to automate the early stages of your behavior.

Schedule Your Motivation
During a conversation about writing, my friend Sarah Peck looked at me and said, “A lot of people never get around to writing because they are always wondering when they are going to write next.” You could say the same thing about working out, starting a business, creating art, and building most habits.

If your workout doesn’t have a time when it usually occurs, then each day you’ll wake up thinking, “I hope I feel motivated to exercise today.”
If your business doesn’t have a system for marketing, then you’ll show up at work crossing your fingers that you’ll find a way to get the word out (in addition to everything else you have to do).
If you don’t have a scheduled time when you write every week, then you’ll find yourself saying things like, “I just need to find the willpower to do it.”
An article in The Guardian summarized the situation by saying, “If you waste resources trying to decide when or where to work, you’ll impede your capacity to do the work.”

Setting a schedule for yourself seems simple, but it puts your decision-making on autopilot by giving your goals a time and a place to live. It makes it more likely that you will follow through regardless of your motivation levels. And there are plenty of research studies on willpower and motivation to back up that statement.

Stop waiting for motivation or inspiration to strike you and set a schedule for your habits. This is the difference between professionals and amateurs. Professionals set a schedule and stick to it. Amateurs wait until they feel inspired or motivated.

How to Get Motivated (Even When You Don’t Feel Like It)
How do some of the most prolific artists in the world motivate themselves? They don’t merely set schedules, they build rituals.

Twyla Tharp is widely regarded as one of the greatest dancers and choreographers of the modern era. In her best-selling book, The Creative Habit (audiobook), Tharp discusses the role rituals, or pre-game routines, have played in her success:

I begin each day of my life with a ritual; I wake up at 5:30 A.M., put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91st street and First Avenue, where I workout for two hours. The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go I have completed the ritual.

It’s a simple act, but doing it the same way each morning habitualizes it — makes it repeatable, easy to do. It reduces the chance that I would skip it or do it differently. It is one more item in my arsenal of routines, and one less thing to think about.

Many other famous creatives have rituals too. In his popular book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, author Mason Currey notes that many of the world’s great artists follow a consistent schedule.

Maya Angelou rented a local hotel room and went there to write. She arrived at 6:30 AM, wrote until 2 PM, and then went home to do some editing. She never slept at the hotel.
Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon writes five nights per week from 10 PM to 3 AM.
Haruki Murakami wakes up at 4 AM, writes for five hours, and then goes for a run.
The work of top creatives isn’t dependent upon motivation or inspiration, but rather it follows a consistent pattern and routine. Here are some examples of how you can apply ritual and routine to get motivated:

Exercise more consistently: Use the same warm up routine in the gym.
Become more creative: Follow a creative ritual before you start writing or painting or singing.
Start each day stress-free: Create a five-minute morning meditation ritual.
Sleep better: Follow a “power down” routine before bed.
The power of a ritual, or what I like to call a pre-game routine, is that it provides a mindless way to initiate your behavior. It makes starting your habits easier and that means following through on a consistent basis is easier.

The key to any good ritual is that it removes the need to make a decision: What should I do first? When should I do this? How should I do this? Most people never get moving because they can’t decide how to get started. You want starting a behavior to be easy and automatic so you have the strength to finish it when it becomes difficult and challenging.

How to Make Motivation a Habit
There are three simple steps you can take to build better rituals and make motivation a habit.

Step 1: A good pre–game routine starts by being so easy that you can’t say no to it. You shouldn’t need motivation to start your pre–game routine. For example, my writing routine starts by getting a glass of water. My weightlifting routine starts by putting on my lifting shoes. These tasks are so easy, I can’t say no to them.

The most important part of any task is starting. If you can’t get motivated in the beginning, then you’ll find that motivation often comes after starting. That’s why your pre–game routine needs to be incredibly easy to start.

Step 2: Your routine should get you moving toward the end goal.

A lack of mental motivation is often linked to a lack of physical movement. Just imagine your physical state when you’re feeling depressed, bored, or unmotivated. You’re not moving very much. Maybe you’re slumped over like a blob, slowly melting into the couch.

The opposite is also true. If you’re physically moving and engaged, then it’s far more likely that you’ll feel mentally engaged and energized. For example, it’s almost impossible to not feel vibrant, awake, and energized when you’re dancing.

While your routine should be as easy as possible to start, it should gradually transition into more and more physical movement. Your mind and your motivation will follow your physical movement. It is worth noting that physical movement doesn’t have to mean exercise. For example, if your goal is to write, then your routine should bring you closer to the physical act of writing.

Step 3: You need to follow the same pattern every single time.

The primary purpose of your pre–game routine is to create a series of events that you always perform before doing a specific task. Your pre–game routine tells your mind, “This is what happens before I do _.”

Eventually, this routine becomes so tied to your performance that by simply doing the routine, you are pulled into a mental state that is primed to perform. You don’t need to know how to find motivation, you just need to start your routine.

This is important because when you don’t feel motivated, it’s often too much work to figure out what you should do next. When faced with another decision, you will often decide to just quit. However, the pre–game routine solves that problem because you know exactly what to do next. There’s no debating or decision making. Lack of motivation doesn’t matter. You just follow the pattern.

How to Stay Motivated for the Long-Run
We have covered some strategies for making it easier to get motivated and start a task. What about maintaining motivation over the long-run? How can you stay motivated for good?

How to Stay Motivated by Using the Goldilocks Rule
Imagine you are playing tennis. If you try to play a serious match against a four-year-old, you will quickly become bored. The match is too easy. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you try to play a serious match against a professional tennis player like Roger Federer or Serena Williams, you will find yourself demotivated for a different reason. The match is too difficult.

Compare these experiences to playing tennis against someone who is your equal. As the game progresses, you win a few points and you lose a few points. You have a chance of winning the match, but only if you really try. Your focus narrows, distractions fade away, and you find yourself fully invested in the task at hand. The challenge you are facing is “just manageable.” Victory is not guaranteed, but it is possible. Tasks like these, science has found, are the most likely to keep us motivated in the long term.

Human beings love challenges, but only if they are within the optimal zone of difficulty. Tasks that are significantly below your current abilities are boring. Tasks that are significantly beyond your current abilities are discouraging. But tasks that are right on the border of success and failure are incredibly motivating to our human brains. We want nothing more than to master a skill just beyond our current horizon.

We can call this phenomenon The Goldilocks Rule. The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.

Working on tasks that adhere to the Goldilocks Rule is one of the keys to maintaining long-term motivation. If you find yourself feeling unmotivated to work on a task, it is often because it has drifted into an area of boredom or been shoved into an area of great difficulty. You need to find a way to pull your tasks back to the border of your abilities where you feel challenged, but capable.

How to Reach Peak Motivation
This wonderful blend of happiness and peak performance is sometimes referred to as flow. Flow is what athletes and performers experience when they are “in the zone.” Flow is the mental state you experience when you are so focused on the task at hand that the rest of the world fades away.

In many ways, we could describe flow as your state of peak motivation. You would be hard-pressed to find a state where you are more driven to continue the task you are working on.

One factor that researchers have found is linked to flow states is whether or not you are following The Goldilocks Rule we mentioned earlier. If you are working on challenges of optimal difficulty, then you will not only be motivated but also experience a boost in happiness. As psychologist Gilbert Brim put it, “One of the important sources of human happiness is working on tasks at a suitable level of difficulty, neither too hard nor too easy.”

In order to reach this state of peak performance, however, you not only need to work on challenges at the right degree of difficulty, but also measure your immediate progress. As psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains, one of the keys to reaching a flow state is that “you get immediate feedback about how you are doing at each step.”

Thus, we can say that measurement is a key factor in motivation. To put it more precisely, facing an optimal challenge and receiving immediate feedback about the progress you are making toward that challenge are two of the most critical components of peak motivation.

What to Do When Motivation Fades
Inevitably, your motivation to perform a task will dip at some point. What happens when motivation fades? I don’t claim to have all the answers, but here’s what I try to remind myself of when I feel like giving up.

Your Mind is a Suggestion Engine

Consider every thought you have as a suggestion, not an order. Right now, as I’m writing this, my mind is suggesting that I feel tired. It is suggesting that I give up. It is suggesting that I take an easier path.

If I pause for a moment, however, I can discover new suggestions. My mind is also suggesting that I will feel very good about accomplishing this work once it is done. It is suggesting that I will respect the identity I am building when I stick to the schedule. It is suggesting that I have the ability to finish this task, even when I don’t feel like.

Remember, none of these suggestions are orders. They are merely options. I have the power to choose which option I follow.

Discomfort Is Temporary

Relative to the time in your normal day or week, nearly any habit you perform is over quickly. Your workout will be finished in an hour or two. Your report will be typed to completion by tomorrow morning.

Life is easier now than it has ever been. 300 years ago, if you didn’t kill your own food and build your own house, you would die. Today, we whine about forgetting our iPhone charger.

Maintain perspective. Your life is good and your discomfort is temporary. Step into this moment of discomfort and let it strengthen you.

You Will Never Regret Good Work Once It is Done

Theodore Roosevelt famously said, “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” So often it seems that we want to work easily at work worth doing. We want our work to be helpful and respected, but we do not want to struggle through our work. We want our stomachs to be flat and our arms to be strong, but we do not want to grind through another workout. We want the final result, but not the failed attempts that precede it. We want the gold, but not the grind.

Anyone can want a gold medal. Few people want to train like an Olympian.

And yet, despite our resistance to it, I have never found myself feeling worse after the hard work was done. There have been days when it was damn hard to start, but it was always worth finishing. Sometimes, the simple act of showing up and having the courage to do the work, even in an average manner, is a victory worth celebrating.

This Is Life

Life is a constant balance between giving into the ease of distraction or overcoming the pain of discipline. It is not an exaggeration to say that our lives and our identities are defined in this delicate balance. What is life, if not the sum of a hundred thousand daily battles and tiny decisions to either gut it out or give it up?

This moment when you don’t feel like doing the work? This is not a moment to be thrown away. This is not a dress rehearsal. This moment is your life as much as any other moment. Spend it in a way that will make you proud.

An iPhone shortcut that allows users to automatically record their interactions with police is gaining popularity.Once installed, a user can simply say “Siri, I’m getting pulled over” or clicks a button on the screen saver to activate.

The shortcut will pause music, turn down the brightness and volume, place the phone in the “Do Not Disturb” mode to block any incoming calls, and start a video recording on the front-facing camera.

An alert will also be sent to a friend or close contact to inform them of the situation and your location. After the video is saved, another message will be sent saying that the user is safe.

The independent shortcut was developed by Robert Petersen and first released on Reddit in 2018.Petersen told Business Insider in 2018 that the app is essentially the “civilian equivalent” of body cameras worn by many police officers.

The developer has added on Twitter that none of the police officers he has spoken to “have had any issue with it all” and that he “has his reasons” behind the technology.

Its rise in popularity comes amid the widespread global protests and anger over police brutality.Thousands of people have marched against police violence since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.

Video captured on mobile devices shared the fatal arrest of Floyd on social media.The shortcut can only be downloaded and installed from Apple’s browser, Safari, on iPhone, and is not currently available on the smartphone’s app store.

Link to activate this feature :-

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/cc95be30b285469ea22b7cff11ce0737

This also no direct Android equivalent of the shortcut, but similar apps can be found on the Google Play Store to discreetly record videos.

As the covid 19 cases increasing swiflys in india and everyone is under distress during this pandemic it effecting especially the students as many of education institutions are planning to have their regular exams.But how will be it possible ? How will they condect it ? And most important question what are the measures for student saftys? 

Awakening is the phase that comes from the three words when they come together. Awakening is the way in which we change our vision towards our own life.
The three words are death, hope and moments

Death:-
when we die, it is not the things we did that we regret the most, it is the things we did not do. That’s what, what every book, story motivational speaker says live your life to the fullest because you never know when your time to leave this universe might come and you’ll regret things.If you are 15, 18, 22, 25 remember a time when you used to think how old are you today seem so far away?you don’t have any more time to waste. No one remembers the night they got plenty of sleep. On the day you got to eat cheesecake. Go out and do something fun. Tonight!the perfect moment will never come. You just continue to get older and look back wishing you had  participated in more things in school, wishing you had talked to that cute guy or girl, wishing you had told your parents that you love them more. At the end of the day, it’s not about which school you went to, which car you drive, how many followers you had, or how many bedrooms does your apartment have or any of that. It is about the memories you made in the love you had with the people you made them with. This isn’t Just another motivational post this is a chance for you right now to make a true lasting impact in your life. To live a better life. To go out and have fun, chase your dreams, make memories, most importantly spend time with your loved ones,because death might take you and me but we will leave the ones we love behind and they will be the people who are gonna cry their eyes out and whimpering all over.

Hope:-
Hope feels like such a silly little 4 letter word and yet it is still in our everyday language. People tell us to hope all the damn time and I find it rather repetitive, but a necessary task. We set alarms every night In the hope we wake up the next morning. We all say “umeed par duniya kayam hai”.without hope there wouldn’t be anything we know in this world. This world has lost its meaning because people throw it around and kick it in the dirt, but I still hope.I hope one day I’m waking up next to you with those sleepy and barely opened eyes and  arms wide open that you pull me closer for those last few cuddles before we have to go on with our mundane missions for the day.I hope I can kiss you wherever we are, if it be in public and private, and I pull away and you draw me and for one more.I hope that someday I wake up in a beautiful bed in Paris and make breakfast for my entire shooting crew. I hope one day you see the man that I see and feel confident because you are truly remarkable.I just hope that one day the simple things don’t get a full stop I hope to yours one day and that you will be mine. But who gives a damn about hope anymore.

Moments:-
I was laughing with my friends once. When I realize something. Life is nothing but moments the fight you had with your best friend is just a moment. The championship you lost is just a moment. The road trip you spent with your friends singing to throwbacks is just a moment. Every up and down every down and everything in between is just a moment that passes with time. You will remember these moments and you may not but what you will remember is the people you spend them with and the way you felt. The way she made you laugh and the way he made you cry, and the way they made you feel like you’re on the top of the world when you were nowhere but with your best friends. The way you to walked the long the Marine drive and Sat and talked for hours. All of those moments and feelings and people combine to make a big moment that we call life. In all of eternity, our life is just a moment. Appreciate the moment you’ve been given to spend it with,because no matter how beautiful or tragic a moment it is , it is a moment, it always ends. So hold on a little tighter smile a little bigger kiss a little harder laugh a little louder try a little harder forgive a little quicker and lover whole lot deeper because they are the moments you will remember when you are old and wishing you could rewind time. Not a thing lasts forever,mind you love does, my love would last I hope, so you better damn well enjoy before it is all gone.
ciao for now.

What a basic necessity to every relationship and to every other person it is time.
You know what is very appealing, very convincing, very sexy, it is humility. Being busy, being on the cloud and not having any sort of humility this is not how relationships work.
Now I know many people who organise slam me with comments like if we have work, we gotta work. now I’ll tell you this article is not for people who are being productively busy but this is for people who are being ignorant to the people around them into the relationships they are handling around them.
This article is also for those people who think that the people around them have gotten really ignorant and they think that they got no one to talk to.
Being busy and being ignorant is different just so you know. Being busy is working on making yourself better, being productive, working for your jobs, working for the betterment of your career, working on the betterment of your soul is being the productive busy, and being productive busy like this means extremely good, people who are indulging themselves into activities to make their career and life work should be supported no matter what.
The people who are ignorant and the people who are productively busy have a difference in them the people who are ignorant won’t be texting you for the entire day won’t be calling you instead will be indulging themselves into things like YouTube or Instagram or pubg or call of duty maybe or some other gaming channels on more entertainment sources instead of just working on the relationships.
The people who are ignorant and the ones who are productively busy have a difference in them the people who are productively busy will efficiently try and make efforts to maintain the relationships with everyone. The people who are ignorant will make absolutely no efforts to put into the relationship.
This blog contains this overview because I’m having my fair share of people who are ignorant and also those who are productively busy. Now as this overview is done I am going to tell you what to do to cope up with people like this.
we all know that being alone and being lonely so much different. Being alone is a choice sometimes being lonely is a situation you get stuck in. being lonely is like being in an extremely crowded room you are screaming on the top of a voice but nobody can hear you. being alone is like you are sitting in the quietest peaceful and beautiful hotel room reading a book with a cup of coffee or Coco and you can walk out any time and encounter in an adventure. Loneliness is not that, loneliness is something that keeps you entrapped it does not give you a choice.
that’s what you encounter when you have ignorant people in your life you do not get alone you get lonely. But it differs with the people if the person is productively busy all you have to do is understand, stay back and support.
But if the person is ignorant and you are getting lonely and you are just going up with the person my dear friend it is a Red flag.
when you have a person in your life who is extremely ignorant who pays no heeds and leaves you one question your mind gets questioned and you are jumbled up.
I’ll tell you when I do get lonely what is my solution. It is truly said tit for tat, I am not advising you to get ignorant instead get busy within building yourself. Paint portraits and landscapes, take up the hundred novel challenge, 30-day article challenge, cook the favorite meal challenge. Trust me when I tell you this cooking is therapeutic. Pick up the 30 ROM com movie challenge on Netflix. And of course, there are many more things you can encounter which will always keep you off your negative thoughts and definitely build up your own character and your own soul and you will have things to do with yourself which will form the base of your career.
Do not let others being ignorant to you affect your workspace. If the person is being ignorant it is the person who is Losing the relationship and trust me you are not at fault. Be proud of who you are and not ashamed of how someone else treats you. Owning your own story and loving yourself through the process is the bravest thing that you will never do. After all, you have to love yourself first you love someone else because you cannot pour from an empty cup.
Ciao.
 

What is Deliberate Practice?
Let’s define deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice refers to a special type of practice that is purposeful and systematic. While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.

Can You Achieve Anything With Enough Practice?
Deliberate practice does not mean that you can fashion yourself into anything with enough work and effort, though. While human beings do possess a remarkable ability to develop their skills, there are limits to how far any individual can go. Your genes set a boundary around what is possible.

However, while genetics influence performance, they do not determine performance. Do not confuse destiny with opportunity. Genes provide opportunity. They do not determine our destiny. It’s similar to a game of cards. You have a better opportunity if you are dealt a better hand, but you also need to play the hand well to win.

Regardless of where we choose to apply ourselves, deliberate practice can help us maximize our potential—no matter what cards we were dealt. It turns potential into reality.

Examples of Deliberate Practice
Joe DiMaggio was one of the greatest hitters in baseball history. I recently heard a little-known story about how DiMaggio developed his exceptional ability. Read more…
In some circles, golfer Ben Hogan is credited with “inventing practice.” Hogan methodically broke the game of golf down into chunks and figured out how he could master each section. Today, experts have a new term for his rigorous style of improvement.

In some circles, Ben Hogan is credited with “inventing practice.”

Hogan was one of the greatest golfers of the 20th century, an accomplishment he achieved through tireless repetition. He simply loved to practice. Hogan said, “I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning so I could hit balls. I’d be at the practice tee at the crack of dawn, hit balls for a few hours, then take a break and get right back to it.”

For Hogan, every practice session had a purpose. He reportedly spent years breaking down each phase of the golf swing and testing new methods for each segment. The result was near perfection. He developed one of the most finely-tuned golf swings in the history of the game.

His precision made him more like a surgeon than a golfer. During the 1953 Masters, for example, Hogan hit the flagstick on back-to-back holes. A few days later, he broke the tournament scoring record

Hogan methodically broke the game of golf down into chunks and figured out how he could master each section. For example, he was one of the first golfers to assign specific yardages to each golf club. Then, he studied each course carefully and used trees and sand bunkers as reference points to inform him about the distance of each shot.

Hogan finished his career with nine major championships—ranking fourth all-time. During his prime, other golfers simply attributed his remarkable success to “Hogan’s secret.” Today, experts have a new term for his rigorous style of improvement: deliberate practice.

While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.

The greatest challenge of deliberate practice is to remain focused. In the beginning, showing up and putting in your reps is the most important thing. But after a while we begin to carelessly overlook small errors and miss daily opportunities for improvement.

This is because the natural tendency of the human brain is to transform repeated behaviors into automatic habits. For example, when you first learned to tie your shoes you had to think carefully about each step of the process. Today, after many repetitions, your brain can perform this sequence automatically. The more we repeat a task the more mindless it becomes.

Mindless activity is the enemy of deliberate practice. The danger of practicing the same thing again and again is that progress becomes assumed. Too often, we assume we are getting better simply because we are gaining experience. In reality, we are merely reinforcing our current habits—not improving them.

Claiming that improvement requires attention and effort sounds logical enough. But what does deliberate practice actually look like in the real world? Let’s talk about that now.

Examples of Deliberate Practice
One of my favorite examples of deliberate practice is discussed in Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin. In the book, Colvin describes how Benjamin Franklin used deliberate practice to improve his writing skills.

When he was a teenager, Benjamin Franklin was criticized by his father for his poor writing abilities. Unlike most teenagers, young Ben took his father’s advice seriously and vowed to improve his writing skills.

He began by finding a publication written by some of the best authors of his day. Then, Franklin went through each article line by line and wrote down the meaning of every sentence. Next, he rewrote each article in his own words and then compared his version to the original. Each time, “I discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.” Eventually, Franklin realized his vocabulary held him back from better writing, and so he focused intensely on that area.

Deliberate practice always follows the same pattern: break the overall process down into parts, identify your weaknesses, test new strategies for each section, and then integrate your learning into the overall process.

Here are some more examples.

Cooking: Jiro Ono, the subject of the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, is a chef and owner of an award-winning sushi restaurant in Tokyo. Jiro has dedicated his life to perfecting the art of making sushi and he expects the same of his apprentices. Each apprentice must master one tiny part of the sushi-making process at a time—how to wring a towel, how to use a knife, how to cut the fish, and so on. One apprentice trained under Jiro for ten years before being allowed to cook the eggs. Each step of the process is taught with the utmost care.

Martial arts: Josh Waitzkin, author of The Art of Learning, is a martial artist who holds several US national medals and a 2004 world championship. In the finals of one competition, he noticed a weakness: When an opponent illegally head-butted him in the nose, Waitzkin flew into a rage. His emotion caused him to lose control and forget his strategy. Afterward, he specifically sought out training partners who would fight dirty so he could practice remaining calm and principled in the face of chaos. “They were giving me a valuable opportunity to expand my threshold for turbulence,” Waitzkin wrote. “Dirty players were my best teachers.”

Chess: Magnus Carlsen is a chess grandmaster and one of the highest-rated players in history. One distinguishing feature of great chess players is their ability to recognize “chunks,” which are specific arrangements of pieces on the board. Some experts estimate that grandmasters can identify around 300,000 different chunks. Interestingly, Carlsen learned the game by playing computer chess, which allowed him to play multiple games at once. Not only did this strategy allow him to learn chunks much faster than someone playing in-person games, but also gave him a chance to make more mistakes and correct his weaknesses at an accelerated pace.

Music: Many great musicians recommend repeating the most challenging sections of a song until you master them. Virtuoso violinist Nathan Milstein says, “Practice as much as you feel you can accomplish with concentration. Once when I became concerned because others around me practiced all day long, I asked [my professor] how many hours I should practice, and he said, ‘It really doesn’t matter how long. If you practice with your fingers, no amount is enough. If you practice with your head, two hours is plenty.’

Basketball: Consider the following example from Aubrey Daniels, “Player A shoots 200 practice shots, Player B shoots 50. The Player B retrieves his own shots, dribbles leisurely and takes several breaks to talk to friends. Player A has a colleague who retrieves the ball after each attempt. The colleague keeps a record of shots made. If the shot is missed the colleague records whether the miss was short, long, left or right and the shooter reviews the results after every 10 minutes of practice. To characterize their hour of practice as equal would hardly be accurate. Assuming this is typical of their practice routine and they are equally skilled at the start, which would you predict would be the better shooter after only 100 hours of practice?”Basketball: Consider the following example from Aubrey Daniels, “Player A shoots 200 practice shots, Player B shoots 50. The Player B retrieves his own shots, dribbles leisurely and takes several breaks to talk to friends. Player A has a colleague who retrieves the ball after each attempt. The colleague keeps a record of shots made. If the shot is missed the colleague records whether the miss was short, long, left or right and the shooter reviews the results after every 10 minutes of practice. To characterize their hour of practice as equal would hardly be accurate. Assuming this is typical of their practice routine and they are equally skilled at the start, which would you predict would be the better shooter after only 100 hours of practice?”

The Unsung Hero of Deliberate Practice
Perhaps the greatest difference between deliberate practice and simple repetition is this: feedback. Anyone who has mastered the art of deliberate practice—whether they are an athlete like Ben Hogan or a writer like Ben Franklin—has developed methods for receiving continual feedback on their performance.

There are many ways to receive feedback. Let’s discuss two.

The first effective feedback system is measurement. The things we measure are the things we improve. This holds true for the number of pages we read, the number of pushups we do, the number of sales calls we make, and any other task that is important to us. It is only through measurement that we have any proof of whether we are getting better or worse.

The second effective feedback system is coaching. One consistent finding across disciplines is that coaches are often essential for sustaining deliberate practice. In many cases, it is nearly impossible to both perform a task and measure your progress at the same time. Good coaches can track your progress, find small ways to improve, and hold you accountable to delivering your best effort each day.

The Promise of Deliberate Practice
Humans have a remarkable capacity to improve their performance in nearly any area of life if they train in the correct way. This is easier said than done.

Deliberate practice is not a comfortable activity. It requires sustained effort and concentration. The people who master the art of deliberate practice are committed to being lifelong learners—always exploring and experimenting and refining.

Deliberate practice is not a magic pill, but if you can manage to maintain your focus and commitment, then the promise of deliberate practice is quite alluring: to get the most out of what you’ve got.

Scientists have further decoded how mammalian brains perceive odors and distinguish one smell from thousands of others.

In experiments in mice, NYU Grossman School of Medicine researchers have for the first time created an electrical signature that is perceived as an odor in the brain’s smell-processing center, the olfactory bulb, even though the odor does not exist.

Because the odor-simulating signal was manmade, researchers could manipulate the timing and order of related nerve signaling and identify which changes were most important to the ability of mice to accurately identify the “synthetic smell.”

“Decoding how the brain tells apart odors is complicated, in part, because unlike with other senses such as vision, we do not yet know the most important aspects of individual smells,” says study lead investigator Edmund Chong, MS, a doctoral student at NYU Langone Health. “In facial recognition, for example, the brain can recognize people based on visual cues, such as the eyes, even without seeing someone’s nose and ears,” says Chong. “But these distinguishing features, as recorded by the brain, have yet to be found for each smell.”

The current study results, published online in the journal Science on June 18, center on the olfactory bulb, which is behind the nose in animals and humans. Past studies have shown that airborne molecules linked to scents trigger receptor cells lining the nose to send electric signals to nerve-ending bundles in the bulb called glomeruli, and then to brain cells (neurons).

The timing and order of glomeruli activation is known to be unique to each smell, researchers say, with signals then transmitted to the brain’s cortex, which controls how an animal perceives, reacts to, and remembers a smell. But because scents can vary over time and mingle with others, scientists have until now struggled to precisely track a single smell signature across several types of neurons.

For the new study, the researchers designed experiments based on the availability of mice genetically engineered by another lab so that their brain cells could be activated by shining light on them—a technique called optogenetics. Next they trained the mice to recognize a signal generated by light activation of six glomeruli—known to resemble a pattern evoked by an odor—by giving them a water reward only when they perceived the correct “odor” and pushed a lever.

If mice pushed the lever after activation of a different set of glomeruli (simulation of a different odor), they received no water. Using this model, the researchers changed the timing and mix of activated glomeruli, noting how each change impacted a mouse’s perception as reflected in a behavior: the accuracy with which it acted on the synthetic odor signal to get the reward.

Specifically, researchers found that changing which of the glomeruli within each odor-defining set were activated first led to as much as a 30 percent drop in the ability of a mouse to correctly sense an odor signal and obtain water. Changes in the last glomeruli in each set came with as little as a 5 percent decrease in accurate odor sensing.

The timing of the glomeruli activations worked together “like the notes in a melody,” say the researchers, with delays or interruptions in the early “notes” degrading accuracy. Tight control in their model over when, how many, and which receptors and glomeruli were activated in the mice, enabled the team to sift through many variables and identify which odor features stood out.

“Now that we have a model for breaking down the timing and order of glomeruli activation, we can examine the minimum number and kind of receptors needed by the olfactory bulb to identify a particular smell,” says study senior investigator and neurobiologist Dmitry Rinberg, Ph.D.

Rinberg, an associate professor at NYU Langone and its Neuroscience Institute, says the human nose is known to have some 350 different kinds of odor receptors, while mice, whose sense of smell is far more specialized, have more than 1,200.

“Our results identify for the first time a code for how the brain converts sensory information into perception of something, in this case an odor,” adds Rinberg. “This puts us closer to answering the longstanding question in our field of how the brain extracts sensory information to evoke behavior.”

New research untangles the complex code the brain uses to distinguish between a vast array of smells, offering a scientific explanation for how it separates baby powder from bleach, lemon from orange, or freshly cut grass from freshly brewed coffee.

A single scent can trigger a complex chain of events in what’s known as the olfactory bulb, the brain’s control center for smell. To unravel the intricacies of that process, researchers in the U.S. and Italy turned to a technique known as optogenetics, which uses light to control neurons in the brain. In research on mice, they used light to trick the brain into thinking it smelled a particular scent, then studied brain activity to understand the role different neurons play in a mouse’s ability to recognize that scent. Their findings were published Thursday in Science.

When we encounter a certain smell, it stimulates a specific pattern of activity among tiny spheres known as glomeruli, which are found in the olfactory bulb. The odor plays across these glomeruli like a melody across piano keys: Just as a tune is made distinct by which keys are pressed and at what point in the melody, a scent is made distinct by which glomeruli are activated and in what order.

A tune remains identifiable even with some tweaks: We can still place a melody marred by a wrong note or a mistimed beat. Likewise, we can still recognize a scent altered by some change in its characteristic activity pattern. The researchers wanted to understand how the specific combination of neurons that respond to a scent — including where they’re located, and when they’re activated — might affect whether the brain registers a smell as recognizable.

To do so, the researchers harnessed optogenetics to activate genetically engineered, light-sensitive neurons. The scientists used light to stimulate a specific pattern across glomeruli in mouse brains, which gave the mice the experience of smelling a particular scent — even though that scent that did not actually exist outside of their own heads.

You can do this experiment with the music. I’ll play different music and see which notes are more important, less important,” said Dmitry “Dima” Rinberg, a neuroscientist at NYU Langone Health and a senior author of the study. “We asked not on the level of the external stimulus, but at the level of stimulating neurons.”

The scientists trained the mice to respond in a particular way to this “synthetic smell.” Then, they introduced different tweaks to that pattern — like wrong notes in the melody — and watched to see which of those changes affected whether a mouse could still “smell” the scent.

Justus Verhagen, Yale researcher who studies taste and smell and was not involved in the research, said that the new paper builds on past research into the locations of olfactory neurons and the timing of their activation by bringing the two factors together into a single, comprehensive model.

The difference in the perception seems to follow fairly linearly with the magnitude of the change in either space or time of the stimulation of the olfactory system,” he said. “That linearity is kind of surprising because, in neuroscience, we’re very used to a lot of nonlinear effects.”

The study also cemented the findings of previous research, which has shown that receptors activated earlier are more essential to scent recognition than those activated later on.

“If I messed up with the first note, you have a much higher chance to misinterpret the melody than if I messed up with the 25th note,” Rinberg explained. That makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, he added — animals out in the wild need to make instantaneous assessments of danger. It’s what’s known as the primacy effect. Rinberg added that the effect carries over even to lower-stakes settings like smelling wine, where the specific notes that might suggest where the grapes were harvested only follow after we get past the immediately overwhelming impression of alcohol.

There are no immediate therapeutic applications of the research, Rinberg said. But a better understanding of how the brain perceives scent could one day shed more light on other scientific questions that also involve smell, such as why people sometimes temporarily lose their sense of smell when sick, which has been observed in some patients with Covid-19. Verhagen said research on the logic of the olfactory system could also be of use in developing new technologies.

“In terms of medicine, there is increased interest in brain-machine interfaces. And so it is very important to understand how the brain encodes stimuli,” he said. “If we understand that coding logic, we can use that to help people who have deficits.”