Stare and steal : Stare at who you want to become: Watching the videos of experts for brain mapping. Watch and listen so closely that you can imagine the feeling of performing the skills, project yourself inside the performer’s body. Become aware of the movement, the rhythm; try to feel the interior shape of the moves. 

Engrave skill on the brain : Either through video or audio. Watching the video of self-performing or experts on a consistent basis. Listening practice also helps. Watch and listen so closely that you can imagine the feeling of performing the skills, project yourself inside the performer’s body. Become aware of the movement, the rhythm; try to feel the interior shape of the moves.

Steal from the experts : When you steal, focus on specifics, not general impressions. Capture concrete facts: the angle of the left elbow of a batsman; the backswing and the follow through. Ask yourself:
What, exactly, are the critical moves here?
How to they perform those moves differently than I do?

Buy a notebook : What matters is that you write stuff down and reflect on it. Results from today. Ideas for tomorrow. Goals for next week. 

Be willing to be stupid or make mistakes : Willing to risk the emotional pain of making mistakes is absolutely essential, because reaching, failing and reaching again is the way your brain grows and forms new connections. In other words, the goal is the same: to encourage reaching, and to reinterpret mistakes so that they are not verdicts, but the information you use to navigate to the correct move.

Spartan over Luxurious : Humble spaces help focus attention on the deep practice task at hand: reaching, repeating and struggling. 

Before you start, figure out if it’s a hard skill or a soft skill :  

• Hard skill: Are actions that are performed as correctly and consistently as possible, every time. Hard skills are about repeatable precision, and tend to be found in specialized pursuits, particularly physical ones such as front foot defence, landing the ball on a mat on a pitch. The goal here is to build a skill that functions like a Swiss watch – reliable, exact, and performed the same way every time, automatically, without fail. Hard skills are about ABC: Always being consistent.
• Soft, high-flexibility skills: Are those that have many paths to a good result, not just one. These skills aren’t about doing the same thing perfectly every time, but rather about being agile and interactive; about instantly recognizing patterns as they unfold and making smart, timely choices. Soft skills tend to be found in broader, less specialized pursuits, especially those that involve communication, such as taking on a bowler sensing weakness in his skills, going after the bowlers on a flat track knowing the bowlers will have less chance if a batsman goes at them hard and so forth mostly tactical. With this we are not trying for Swiss watch precision, but rather for the ability to quickly recognize a pattern or possibility, and to work past a complex set of obstacles. Soft skills are about the three Rs: Reading, recognizing and reacting.

To build hard skills, work like a careful carpenter : When you learn hard skills, be precise and measured. Go slowly. Make one simple move at a time, repeating and perfecting it before you move on. Pay attention to errors, and fix them, particularly at the start. Learning fundamentals only seems boring-in fact, it’s the key moment of investment. If you build the right pathway now, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and trouble down the line. 

To build soft skills, play like a skateboarder : Soft skills are the result of super-fast brain software recognizing patterns and responding in just the right way. For example, Chris Gayle hitting a six off the penultimate ball in the Twenty20. Soft skills are built by playing and exploring inside challenging, ever changing environments. These are places where you encounter different obstacles and respond to them over and over, building the network of sensitive wiring you need to read, recognize, and react. To build soft skills you should behave less like a careful carpenter and more like a skateboarder in a skateboard part: aggressive, curious and experimental, always seeking new ways to challenge yourself.

To improve soft skill, focus on making a high number of varied reps, and on getting clear feedback. Don’t worry too much about making errors – the important thing is to explore. Soft skills are often more fun to practice but they are also tougher because they demand that you coach yourself. After each session, ask you, what worked? What didn’t and why?

Honour the hard skills : Most skills are a mix of hard and soft skills. Imagine playing a reverse sweep off the very first ball for a four off a spinner. Here you are trying to put pressure on the spinner by recognizing the pattern and taking a decision but the hard skill here is the heavily honed reverse sweep. Prioritize the hard skills because in the long run they are more important to you. Playing without technique is a very big mistake in pro cricket.

Basis i.e. hard skills are everything; there is not a great sportsman that has lacked in hard skills or basics.

If you are oak tree, first build the trunk (hard skills) and then build the branches (soft skills)

Don’t fall for the prodigy myth : Too much early success turns out to be a weak predictor of long term success particularly if it comes in your own age group. Many top performers are overlooked early on, and then grow quietly into stars. The risk of being a prodigy is that the praise and attention he/she receives leads them to instinctively protect their “magical” status by taking fewer risks, which eventually slows their learning. The talent hotbeds are not built on identifying talent, but on constructing it, day by day.