Practise until it’s second nature

The point of practice is to be able to forget about it.

You can perform without thinking about what you are doing. That frees your mind to think about the subtleties of exactly how you want to perform and to react in the moment to what your fellow performers are doing.

In business, practice brings us to the point where the possible solutions to any issue immediately present themselves.

Now you can see the issue clearly; you know the options available to you.

What is the best, the most beautiful solution?

All athletes and sportsmen and women practise a lot, for exactly the same reason.

They need to get to the point where their bodies automatically carry out the actions that they have painstakingly perfected, so that another part of their mind can focus on the subtleties of their performance.

Tennis players train until they can ‘instinctively’ return a 120 mph serve. In tournament play, they are able to give their return the weight and direction that can make it a winning shot.

Gymnasts train until they can unthinkingly carry out their complex routines. In competition, they can focus on adding grace and poise to their perfect execution in order to deliver a winning performance.

You might imagine that driving a Formula 1 racing car at over 200 mph would demand every ounce of your concentration. But, for top racing drivers, the physical act of driving and the analysis of their own performance becomes ‘automatic’, leaving them spare brainpower to think about their strategy for the race: to think about how to win.

In the 1990s, Willem Toet, now Visiting Professor of Aerodynamics and Honorary Fellow at Southampton University, was an engineer with Benetton Formula 1 when driver Michael Schumacher joined the team. Toet observed the following:

[Schumacher] seemed to have the ability to drive the car with his driving brain while having plenty of spare mental capacity to record extra information or discuss strategy with his engineers. The team engineers were stunned in the early days that Michael could drive the car for three laps and tell them what the car did corner entry, mid-corner and corner exit – for each lap. At first, we didn’t believe that he could accurately record all this information but, as the data logging improved, we were able to see what he was talking about and understood that, yes, he was able to actually record all this information in his head. You could look at the data but his comments were faster so, once you learned to believe him, you could set the car up more quickly because he would communicate the most important

pieces of information immediately.¹⁴

Willem Toet, Driving in Formula 1 – ‘Michael Schumacher, Some Background’