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Navigating through life requires you to perform on the different stages that comprise it.
You will need to be at your best during many moments in life, and you must learn how to be a good performer. To perform is to execute a planned action in flawless fashion, minimizing mistakes and maximizing the impact of your work.
Learning how to execute your plans flawlessly takes repetitive and extensive experience. Becoming a good performer in life takes going through many failures along the way, such as getting rejected after asking out your crush on a date. It also takes experience of winning, which is why kids should be encouraged to participate in competitive activities and present/perform in front of their peers.
Executing your vision into reality is an art form which is almost impossible to master but easy enough to get good at. There are many people every day who perform at the highest levels of their chosen crafts, and learning from these people is critical to improving your own performance. You can learn from master performers in any craft, and the nature of their craft does not limit the lessons you can learn from their performances.
Making Mistakes
The first thing that watching live performances of masterful practitioners teaches you is that even the best make mistakes. When watching a live performance, look for mistakes with an eye of a quality control specialist. Make sure you envision what a perfect product of the performance you are watching looks like, and measure how close the person you are watching gets to achieving a perfect performance.
There are no perfect performers, and you will get into the habit of looking for minor flaws in the performances of others as well as your own. You must be a critic who understands how hard it is to perform at a perfect level and not view mistakes as failures on the part of who you are watching. These people will make mistakes, but how they adjust to making these mistakes is what should be subject to your full focus and analysis.
Do not hold mistakes against anybody in a state of performing, and be empathetic to their cause. See if you can hypothesize why mistakes were made on their part, and learn from any patterns that you see. This is especially useful if you are watching performances to do with your own domain.
Learning from Adjustments
Masterful performers make mistakes at the same rate as any other humans do. However, through their preparation and repetition, the severity of the mistakes they make during performances is substantially lower than someone with a low skill level in that craft. Your eye must be tuned into the nuances of a craft to capture the mistakes that are made by those who are masters in that craft.
Knowing how to make adjustments during our time performing through life is essential to know. Masterful performers make adjustments which are difficult to catch for an untrained eye. Your approach to performing in life, however small your performance might be, should be one alike to a master performer who you watch online. Learn how to handle making mistakes and how to triage the steps of action required to mitigate mistakes during high-stakes performances.
You will learn many lessons from live performers in making adjustments, how to react when things go wrong, and how to handle surprises which you have not rehearsed for. Let your interest guide the lessons which you learn from live performances, and learn to look for these nuances rather than just enjoying the performance from a broader viewpoint.
Getting Into the Flow State
Perhaps the most important facet of watching live performances of masters in their craft, is learning what focus looks, feels, and sounds like. Getting into the flow state takes practice, time, and utmost dedication to your task. The performers who get it right – (win awards, beat competitors, give you the goosebumps) – are likely achieving a state of flow during their performance.
This state is not easy to see from the third-person, but is rather felt by those in attendance. The state of flow during a performance means all things lining up, and everything going according to the plans in place. Your analysis of live performances should include, if nothing more, a respect for the focus which is achieved while performing at the highest level. The distractions alone that professionals need to ignore is commendable. The expectations they need to manage is anxiety-inducing, and the art which they have to learn is complex beyond average comprehension.
You should take inspiration from live performances which get it right, and not simply overlook them as means for your own entertainment. Your time will be better spent improving yourself by watching masters at work making adjustments, making mistakes, and getting into a state of flow.