Every activity you participate in your day to day life is constructed of a series of skills that you have. If you want to improve that activity, you need to improve the specific skills that form it. This can be done with almost any activity. For example, I break running down into things like cruise speed, cruise time, recovery time, breath control, stride length. When I go for a run I concentrate on one aspect to improve it.
The first step is to go through your normal experience of it and figure out what the component skills are. Once you’ve analyzed the activity into its basic skills its simply a matter of skill drilling.
If the subskill can be practiced separately from the rest of the activity then you can practice that skill directly. If, on the otherhand, the skill can only be practiced as part of the whole activity then you simply concentrate on improving that aspect of the activity while you go through it. Don’t be worried if other aspects of the larger activity suffer while you are concentrating on a specific sub skill, that’s normal.
You should concentrate on each of the subskills in turn and then practice the activity as a whole to integrate the components into one larger skill. If you are serious about improving your performance at the activity you can make this skill upgrading a continual cycle, analyzing what components you need to work on, skill drilling and then integrating the activity again. You are only 10,000 hours away from mastery.
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Edward E. Wilson 
If you tried to combine subskills in unconventional ways to form “new” larger scale skills, would that be skill hacking?
By: cubistjustin on November 9, 2009
at 4:26 am
It would indeed.
By: Edward on November 9, 2009
at 4:27 am
Good post. I have chniroc pain but I would never wish it on a child or anyone else for that matter. Those are good notes for parents.
By: Totorey on February 11, 2012
at 12:19 am