Seven A’s of Accomplishment: Aptitude

In an earlier post, I identified and briefly described the “Seven A’s of Accomplishment”:

In my last post, I described the Attitude factor.  In this post, I will expand upon the Aptitude factor.  According to Wikipedia, Aptitude is “an innate, acquired or learned or developed component of a competency to do a certain kind of work at a certain level”.  Another definition describes it as “quickness and ease in learning”. Aptitude is also defined as “the potential to acquire skill: a natural tendency to do something well, especially one that can be further develop”.

In order to accomplish, you must have relevant Aptitudes (knowledge and skills) and you must be willing and able to acquire new ones as you go.  Relevant Aptitudes mean aptitudes that are related to what you want to accomplish.   While genes and other innate factors impact aptitude, nothing impacts it more than practice. Doing something over and over again is the key to mastering an aptitude.

Along with practice, “Meta-Aptitudes” are critical to successfully mastering an aptitude.  It has been shown that great performers not only spend significant amounts of time mastering their skill (around 10,000 hours according to published studies), they also develop and apply meta-cognitive approaches to help them with the process.   Studies have shown that top students succeed not only because they have higher intellects, but because they have developed strategies to learn better and faster.

Many successful individuals have high levels of curiosity that foster a constant yearning for knowledge.

If you want to accomplish something successfully, take time early on in the process to identify the critical Aptitudes that are necessary to accomplish what you want.  Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, look for key “Meta-Aptitudes” that enable you to be more successful in the process of Aptitude acquisition and development.

Finally, do not forget to put time into them.  Practice is CRITICAL to success!  And by all means, do not be afraid to fail.  It has been shown that failure is fundamental to learning.   Great performers learn to fail often.  They fail, learn and improve in order to build their Aptitudes to a mastery level.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO