Shoutout to 7144605 and Pixabay.com

My choice book for this week is "Ultralearning" by Scott Young, and let me say, It has some great insights that self-taught learners can apply to elevate their efforts to master a skill.

Between these was a common component in areas such as sports, where players tend to isolate a part of the skills required to function with proficiency in a court and apply them to exercises. This is what's called drilling.

While drilling is nothing new, It seems like common education has forgotten the usefulness of drilling. But why's this?

You see, there's a dangerous line that drilling has to walk between: That of being faithful enough to the real-life conditions of the "game" and that of isolating only a fewto so as to not make It overbearing for the practicioner.

Also, drilling has a prerequisite for tackling things that are hard enough for the practitioner, as It is meant to improve and balance his/her skills. If you're good at math, but deficient in English, believe me, drills would be far more beneficial in the latter.

A big misconception that people have with regard to drilling is that it is only reserved for areas with cold facts and direct results such as physical training or games where abstraction is not needed. But this is far from the truth, as you can apply drilling to areas such as writing.

Let's take for example a self-taught writer, Benjamin Franklin, who worked long hours at a printing press and yet, had the time to practice writing, so he knew he couldn't waste It. This is why he began improving his skills with drilling.

He took articles and essays from his favorite magazine and began deconstructing them. If he wanted to improve the structure of his paragraphs, he tried to memorize one of the articles by just reading It one time, then spending a few hours without thinking about It and finally, when he came back, he tried to replicate the way he remembered It. Then he compared the result to what the author wrote and tried to decipher what made his delivery special.

You can see that drilling can be used in anything to improve yourself. The procedure should go like this:

1.- First, you practice all the skills at once like you were in a real-life scenario. From this, you figure out what areas you have weaknesses in.
2.- Identify which of those areas will bring you the most improvement by practicing It. Then create and practice drills.
3.- Go back to real practice and from that, test If what you practiced in drills worked. If not, regather and create a better drill.

These are the keys to success and improvement with drilling. I hope you have enjoyed this article and that you can apply drills right away to your projects. As always.