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Learn things as if you would have to teach them to somebody else. This will help you aspire to a real understanding and familiarity with the subject, and will help you to ask yourself searching questions of the things to be learnt.

To reach a professional standard, you should be practicing at least a couple of hours a day on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Don't kid yourself that you'll not improve at anything doing it once a week. You can't get any continuity.

The enthusiastic amateur practices for enjoyment two or three times a week. If you want to be a top professional, that has to become every day, and two or three times a day at that - not only for enjoyment, but for the enjoyment of seeing how far you can take it, how far you can push yourself, how far you can transform your specialism.

Music can keep you company and keep you awake while you're working alone. But un-plug the TV, the radio, the phone and even the doorbell when you need to invest time in your subject.

Starting anything new, like an exercise or sleep regime or an evening class, generally means temporary discomfort caused by the change of routine. You have to be prepared for this, and to bank on the fact that this initial discomfort will past fairly soon, and lead to much greater rewards.

Regimes and routines, any sort of patterns in the days and weeks, can be highly effective: offering security, and a sense of order and steady progression.

Whenever you are successful in achieving an important goal, no matter what, make a written note of how you achieved it.

Don't make learning any more isolating and lonely than it need be. Try to form study-teams and actively encourage each other through the difficult times.

Before training at something, take time out to prepare mentally so you will get the most out of yourself during each session.

During training, be prepared to take 5 minutes out to improve your mood or attitude. You need to be 100% committed. You may not be successful in turning around every wrong mood right away, but you'll increasingly get the hang of it.

While training, experiment with focusing on different kinds of feelings or thoughts. Which of them gets the best from you?

Work on holding total focus for short periods and try to gradually increase the time. The ultimate goal is to have total concentration and connection throughout your entire performance. Leading athletes achieve their best results when they focus completely on their performance rather than on the outcome.

Even in training, commit yourself to the highest quality of effort, otherwise you will unwittingly be learning to give only 75% of yourself.

Thorough preparation is the key. Make sure practice is as realistic as possible.

The really good doers are really good thinkers, too. The best people spend as much time on more planning and mentally rehearsing their game plan before putting it into operation. That's very true even in something as apparently physical and action-oriented such as sports and athletics.

Your mental-imagery should be viewing your world and your performance from the inside, not the out. i.e. Imagine your are actually performing the skill and feeling the action. It might take a year's daily practice of such imagery before you can go through your whole routine in your mind without losing a beat.

You've got to be prepared to invest in yourself and what you're aiming for. This requires you saying No to the 3rd pint of beer because you've got stuff to do the next day that's more important than that beer.

Self-motivation is the key to the development of talent. What would motivate you to learn what you need to?

If you practice a new habit twice a day, by the end of the year you will have put that habit into practice more than 700 times. The cumulative effects of such positive action can be awesome. The Japanese call this approach 'kaisen': the effort to improve a little each day.