Posted On: Sunday, 16 January 2011 by Rajiv Popat

You need your own mountain.

A set of challenges arranged in a coherent never-ending stream with constant sequential milestones where you can celebrate your doneness.

Each challenge focused around deliberate practice.

Unless you happen to be working for an organization that has a steady revenue stream through search and encourages your research project to stay alive for a year, deliberate practice, when you are constantly shipping is hard.

Spending a week on tuning your Ajax calls using JQuery instead of the ASP.NET update panel, when there is no concrete Return On Investment, is deliberate practice.

It is also hard to propose in a management meeting.

But you still need to learn how to do those Ajax calls and use them seamlessly in your application. Which is why you need your own mountains to climb. And you need to climb them, every week. Even if you climb just a few inches every week.

If you keep at if, after a while, the inches you climb might just start adding up.

The mountain can be a long running side project. A constant stream of training sessions you plan on taking. Or a series of technical articles you plan on writing. What ever it is, pick something which involves a series of coherently arranged never-ending challenges and constant sequential milestones.

So, what's your mountain?

If you haven't found one yet, might I suggest that you keep your eyes open and start climbing it as soon as you find it.

I wish you good luck.


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