A lot of us have this notion where we believe that if we keep working hard on something on our own, we will keep getting better at it. In fact, sometimes we even consider this to be a linear correlation where the more effort we put into something by ourselves, the more benefits we will start seeing manifest in our lives. Although it is true that working hard does make you better at any given task or activity, but it is limited in nature as well. It is limited because we do not know all the answers on our own about anything and so we need help from others to complement our knowledge regularly. And only once you do know in which direction your efforts should be directed will you really keep making progress. So really the focus is on working hard “by ourselves”. For example, you can try to build strength by pushing against a wall daily. While you will exhaust yourself daily from this laborious activity, you will definitely not see the results that you were hoping for or which you would have seen had you just followed what works for others and started lifting weights.
While everyone does always say to keep working hard, and I whole-heartedly concur as well, we need to look beyond that as well. We have to make sure that our efforts are being utilized in the most efficient way possible so as to bring us closer to our goals. And the best way to do that is to try to always be striving for improvements. By ourselves, we will definitely hit walls that we cannot possibly see beyond let alone climb over, but that is where the idea to get feedback from others comes along. Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I want to clarify that this does not mean that you should start announcing your goal to random people and ask for their feedback. That would have the opposite effect and it might lead you to become even less productive. I also do not mean that you should declare your goals to the people who are expert at whatever it is you are seeking. On the contrary, I strongly recommend you to never ever disclose your goals at the beginning and just focus on achieving them instead. So what do I mean that you should get feedback? Well this is not a traditional feedback which you might be thinking about right now. What you should be doing is actually actively competing your progress(at whatever level you are) to someone else’s who is doing better than you. It doesn’t matter if you are just a novice or if you have been working hard for years, different people can notice stagnation in their improvements at different times and that’s why you should always be trying to put your personal effort into practical scenarios. It is important to remember that the more harshly you face defeat in any practical setting, the more motivation and insight you should extract from it instead of feeling disheartened. The idea is to keep going under pressure to keep sharpening your blade. Much like how a boxer would spar with an actual partner rather than just hitting the punching bag all day and believing that his skills should keep linearly increasing. What you have to remember is the final destination of where you want to go and try to emulate it from the very beginning to build experience for it. For example, if you are preparing for an Essay exam then simply reading brilliantly written essays is not enough. You need to go through the the actual process of writing an essay in the required time by yourself and have someone else check it or compare it with another good essay by yourself(if former option is not viable). Lastly, I will try to give you an analogy for this, as well as another example as to help you understand what the “feedback” really means and why is it necessary to propel you to new heights of success.
A good analogy would be to consider yourself a raw iron ore from which we want to make a beautify and sharp sword that can cut anything. The crude ore is from where you are starting as you have little to no proficiency in this particular skill. The first thing we need is to heat the ore in order to eliminate impurities from it. This signifies the effort you have to put in by yourself. Heating is not a comfortable experience for the iron ore just as developing new habits to incorporate hard work into your existing routine and then sticking to them is very difficult for you. The pen-ultimate step is to hit to molten iron with hammer until it takes the desired shape you want. The idea here is for you to experience the actual level that you are trying to achieve even though you are sorely lacking for now. You should still emulate the final challenge as closely as you can and perform your best in those conditions. Every mistake you make would be like a hammer hitting the ore to bring it closer to its ideal shape. The last step is to of course let the heated sword cool off so that it becomes ready for use. And this is analogous to you understanding your shortcomings and figuring out the improvements that you can make to address them rather than getting disheartened from them.
All four states can be seen in a simple example of you learning to become better at a simple activity such as speaking or rather getting your point across to the other person in a debate. The first state you are in is like an iron ore i.e. you have limited knowledge about the subject itself and you do not know the coherent points to convey your thoughts to anyone else. The next step would be to heat the ore and get the impurities removed i.e. to do research about the topic itself and get to know the facts and figures so you can not only make an opinion for yourself that is beyond your “feelings” but also find supporting evidence for it. Now begins the hammering to give you the final shape i.e. you actually trying to have this debate with another person that is not imaginary and has an interest in the topic as well. This is where you try to explain your opinion and also why you have came to it in the first place. Your goal would be to convince that other person to agree by answering any and all questions he has. Without doing it practically, you will keep believing that your opinion is the correct one and that you have the correct evidence to support it, however, others will also sometimes come up with a counter argument which would stun you. This is perfectly fine and we want this to move on to the next and final step – the cool off. Now that you know what your shortcomings were, you should go back to the drawing board and see if you needed more research or whether it could have been prevented by better articulation. Now you are ready to be used and you are better than you were before. A final parting thought is to remember that most precious and strong swords do not just go through this process once and this cycle is iterated again and again until they truly become a cut above the rest. Similarly, you should go through the cycle again and again as well until one day you will find yourself on a plateau where you will overlook far around you.
