Grit and Deliberate Practice When Learning Anything
In Angela Duckworth’s excellent book titled, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance she argues that all people can optimize their achievement in all areas of life. In general, this means that everyone can improve their skills and achievements through what she calls grit. This can be broken down into four categories:
- Interest - you must have an intrinsic interest in what you are doing. Thus, in order to succeed in learning a language you must have an interest to actually do so!
- Practice - practice must be deliberate and purposeful (see below)
- Purpose - you must know why you are doing what you ultimate goal is (for Greek students our ultimate goal is to be able to rightly divide the Word of God in the original language that he inspired the apostles to write in)
- Hope - the mindset that you can do it and keep it all in perspective
With regards to practice I want to highlight what practice should look like from the book Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool.
Practice must be…
- Well-defined and have specific goals - Don’t make your goals too big but remember slow, steady, and simple wins the race
- Focused - you must remove all distractions and focus during your session
- Feedback - You have to review to understand your mistakes. This is of utmost importance in Greek. If you don’t learn from your mistakes you will not be making progress
- Get out of your comfort zone - learning and developing a skill is hard. Push yourself…they say “If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.”
The more you learn the more you brain will be putting together connections and your mental representation will grow and you will get better at assimilating new information.