“How did it feel to fail 1,000 times when trying to invent the light bulb?” a reporter once asked Thomas Edison.
“The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps” he replied.
Acquiring elite-level hockey skills takes a lot of time…years and years of focused training with the intent on getting better each day. As you learn new stickhandling moves or techniques, for example, you will undoubtedly make mistakes. This is a good thing. Mistakes are signals that let you know forward progress is taking place.
Two things generally happen when an athlete experiences failure during training. Some players abandon the drill and move on to something different. The other group becomes determined to conquer the issue, so they continue to practice, and continue making mistakes, until they reach their goal.
So why do the first group of players abandon the drill? Possibly because it’s humbling to try and fail at something new, especially for high-functioning athletes for whom many things come easily. The perfectionist in us gets frustrated, ego damaged, and we seek to reclaim control and confidence with something easier. Or possibly because the player is content with their level of play and the team they are on, and/or they haven’t yet connected the dots from wanting to be elite and knowing the steps it takes to get there.
For players in the second group, the competitor in them takes over and now they’re on a mission. Learn from the mistake, make the adjustment, go again, repeat. Soon the mistakes get fewer and fewer, and before long they’ve developed mastery of the new skill.
Investing time to learn new skills is an essential part of personal growth. In contrast, players who are not willing to leave the comfort zone will have a much harder time propelling themselves forward.
The highly motivated and driven players look forward to training; they don’t view it as a chore. They embrace the afterhours training sessions in their basement or garage, when no one is watching, firing hundreds or thousands of pucks away on their shooting tarp or practicing toe drag pull shots on the slick tiles. Or they hit the weight room at 6am to work on lunges and squats before their 7am team skate.
If you trust that the desired results will occur if you put in the work, then you can start to view mistakes as a positive when training. Become a problem solver; figure out where the breakdown occurred, start over and try to get a little closer to mastering the move.
As the old phrase says: “Where there is nothing ventured, there is nothing gained.”
Edited in August 2024 from original article written by Lance Pitlick in 2017. Based in the Minneapolis area, Lance is a former NHL player with Ottawa Senators and Florida Panthers, played collegiate hockey with the Minnesota Golden Gophers, is a foremost hockey training professional both in-person and through onlinehockeytraining.com, and is the founder and former owner of Snipers Edge Hockey.
