Perfect Performance Requires Perfect Practice

I was talk­ing to a coach of a very tech­ni­cal sport who told me about their 50X rule where young, elite ath­letes-in-train­ing have to be able to do a rou­tine per­fect­ly, 50 times in a row.

Only then do they not only have the tech­nique in their mus­cle mem­o­ry but the con­fi­dence to per­form under pres­sure, with pre­ci­sion, dur­ing competition.

This rule reminds me of my expe­ri­ence rac­ing cars and go karts. In that world, we call it ​‘seat time’ — that you need to do lots and lots of laps, ide­al­ly on the same cor­ners, try­ing dif­fer­ent things until you can con­sis­tent­ly make the right moves on every cor­ner, every time.

The same thing applies in busi­ness. Inspired by the 50X rule, it takes a while for some­one to tru­ly mas­ter any­thing. You can only learn and get bet­ter by doing some­thing again and again and again and again and again and again and again.

This leads back to the 14X advi­sors in Your Oxy­gen Mask First (Chap­ter 11, Quadru­ple Your IQ). If you want help, you need some­one who’s been there and done that 14 times. Of course, 50 times would be out­stand­ing, although in the world of busi­ness that’s next to impossible!

Per­fect Practice

So, are you and your teams get­ting enough prac­tice every week to per­fect your skills?

• A sales team to mas­ter role-play­ing, prospect­ing or key parts of the sales process
• An oper­a­tions team to mas­ter switchovers or safe­ty drills
• A finance team to mas­ter devel­op­ing and com­mu­ni­cat­ing insights from the data.

The high­est per­for­mance requires per­fect prac­tice to make skills auto­mat­ic. F1 race teams, for exam­ple, are able to do pit stops that include chang­ing all four tires in sec­onds. In fact, the fastest For­mu­la One pit stop is a stun­ning 1.82 sec­onds, achieved by Red Bull Rac­ing (Aus­tria) dur­ing the 2019 Brazil­ian Grand Prix. Guar­an­teed, they have fol­lowed the 50X rule.

The Chal­lenge

• Where can you and your team ben­e­fit from apply­ing the 50X rule? If you’re not sure, just look at the things that you or your team con­sis­tent­ly com­plain about — or that your cus­tomers might want you to perfect.