Deliberate Practice
How do you get better? Turns out you need to know what exactly it is you want to get better at. Then do something about it!
Once you Identify your chosen skill to improve you can then start working on it through "Deliberate Practice".
Ben Franklin wanted to be a better writer so he worked on writing essays but not by just sitting down and randumly writing essays ...He first found the best written essays available,
He would take an essay and dissect it and rewrite it and then compare. He did this in many steps, so he would concentrait on different sub-skills to improve his writing skills in total.
First there is Sentence Structure: Summarizing and reformulating essays from the Spectator from England.
he would make brief notes of each sentence in an essay then in a few days he would go back to the notes and write the essay based on his notes then compare the original to his version. So he can see some of his falts and correct them.
He noticed one of his faults was vocabulary so he started rewriting the Spectator Essays in Verse (Poem style) this made him work with a thesaurus and an extensive stock of words depending on the rhyme and meter of his writings needs. then he would come back to the Poem once he forgot the original essay he would then covert the Poem back into Pros (a regular essay) then compareing the two.
He also noticed his organization issues , he would still make notes about each sentence of an essay, but this time put them on separate peaces of paper , mix up the notes and put them aside until he forgot about that essay. Then he would try to put the notes in order and try to write the essay... again he found many of his faults, and amended them.
This is a perfect example of a well structure deliberate practice, he did not have a teacher to guide him so he worked with what he could a great example of writing like the "Spectator", He also was very diligent in his practice times, he was working as an apprentice with his brother at the Print Shop so he would write in the mornings before work, after work and on Sundays why everyone was in church he would be at the print shop writing.
So Now my plan is to figure out what I want to improve, something like joke writing or speach writing and devise a plan on how I can find my faults and improve them in this fashion.