Are you experienced? If so, does that mean you're good?

This story from Time magazine is as inspirational as anything I've seen on why we can never coast. The piece talks about how experience alone doesn't make someone good at something:

"...rather than mere experience or even raw talent, it is dedicated, slogging, generally solitary exertion — repeatedly practicing the most difficult physical tasks for an athlete, repeatedly performing new and highly intricate computations for a mathematician — that leads to first-rate performance. And it should never get easier; if it does, you are coasting, not improving."

Guess that means I should fire up Brain Age on the DS again (the activity in the the first edition of the game where you quickly count people running in and out of a house makes my head hurt just thinking about it).

So there it is - the "secret" to success. Work on the hard stuff.