We continue with our Improve Your Talent series with a tenth tip from The Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle. Today’s tip falls into the first category for improving habits: Getting Started.  In this category, the idea is to focus on ideas for igniting motivation and creating a blueprint for the skills you want to build.

Coyle writes that “most talents are not exclusively hard skill or soft skills, but rather a combination of the two.”

He continues: “You might be surprised to learn that many top performers place great importance on practicing the same skills they practiced as beginners.  Peyton Manning spent the first segment of every practice doing basic footwork drills – the kind they teach twelve-year-olds.  Top performers like Manning resist the temptation of complexity and work on the task of honing and maintaining their hard skills, because those form the foundation of everything else.”