When my sister came to visit me this spring, she brought along her boss, Rob Roy, a former Olympic ski coach who lives in Bend, Oregon where he hikes, skis, and develops green building and affordable housing for seniors.

I was curious about what he had learned about fostering athletic excellence. As he talked, I realized that many of the principles he was sharing apply to writing, too.

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“What does it take to be world class at something?” I asked Rob Roy, former Olympic alpine and snowboarding coach. We had been hiking together and just arrived at the top of Back Mountain in the Santa Cruz Mountains. As we looked out over the rolling hills toward the ocean, he opened a bag of banana and orange slices and we munched while he shared wisdom gained from many years of working with the best athletes from Austria, Canada, Japan, and the United States. Although he was speaking about Olympic athletes, all the principles he expounded could also be applied, I realized, to becoming a world-class writer.

1. Surround yourself with the best.
Rob’s children were both competitive skiers, and when they were teenagers, he moved the family to Austria and enrolled them in a special high school for the nation’s best winter athletes. “The best in the world,” Rob says, are both “the same as you and me–and different.” When you go to school with the best athletes, he explained, you see that, just like the rest of us, they have two arms and legs. They are real people with fears and hopes. But you also get to see and learn from their intense level of focus. Rob’s children improved by living with their role models.

Fortunately, as a writer, you don’t have to move to Austria to surround yourself with the best, not only of our generation, but of all time. You can check them out from the library-for free. Almost all great writers, when asked for advice on how to achieve excellence, say, read! Read, read, read.

I have found my daily writing tends to be strongest when, right before I begin, I read passages of poetry or prose that are rich, rhythmic, and challenging. During that time, I have enrolled myself in a school of Olympic writers. While some people fear that reading while writing leads to imitation, for me, it only expands my sense of the potential of language. I also teach creative writing to high school students-and they make the greatest strides when I incorporate models, which stretch their sense of what is possible with structure, rhythm, and image.

Like Rob’s children, who got to see that the world’s best skiers are only flesh and blood, I like to go to author readings. When I first moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, I was amazed at the number of well-known writers who showed up in local books stores to read. Anyone could go. I could go. I could go for free!

I still remember my first author readings at local bookstores in the Bay Area: Sherman Alexie, Isabel Allende, Natalie Goldberg, Jane Smiley. All of a sudden, they weren’t mystical people bestowed with the blessings of talent and success. They sat down at their desks every day and wrote. They were body and mind like me. They had houses and pets and a desk and hours in a day. But like those world-class skiers, they had focus and resilience. They wrote when they were tired or mad. They wrote when they were rejected, and when they were rejected again. They wrote when they were poor or when they were too successful for their own good. They inspired me because they were ordinary and flawed like me-and because they are people of extraordinary focus, work ethic, and belief in their projects.

2. Imitate before you innovate.
Rob Roy believes that all skiers and snowboarders should learn basic principles–and learn them well. Only then should they begin to experiment and innovate. They need to devote years to fine-tuning their form–and their mental sharpness. Then, when they make a mistake–which they will–they have that solid, firm foundation to support them, a base from which they can recover. Once they are masters, they can begin to test innovative approaches, without risk of ingraining ineffective habits.

Many writers, eager to embark on their publishing careers, resist imitating other writers for fear of never developing their own voice. Rob’s skiers know that they have to observe, imitate, and take instruction from the best in order to reach the Olympic level. They accept that they will spend many years working under mentors. As writers, we don’t need to be afraid to study and imitate those who we admire, to accept a period of internship with our favorite authors and books, as we grow into our fullness and our own original voices and forms. Although experimentation at all stages of our growth is an important source of joy and discovery, we must take time to learn valuable techniques from the best authors. Even if we choose to abandon traditional approaches to poetry or storytelling, mastering story structure, scenes, specific detail, sense detail, etc. will give us more tools, more choices when we do decide to innovate.

3. Excellence takes time.
Rob says skiers or snowboarders take four to eight years of intensive training to reach Olympic caliber.

When I was in my early twenties, I wanted desperately to write. I devoted several years and labored many hours on a fiction-memoir hybrid. Looking back, of course, I know the book wasn’t a book. I sent it to a friend who was a working writer for feedback. She underlined a few lines and passages that were strong. She suggested I write in scenes. And instead of writing me a long list of my many flaws, she wrote me back what I would come to see was a kind sentence: “Don’t be in a hurry.”

At the time, I was offended, but she was right. We live in a culture that expects us to reach mastery quickly, that doesn’t acknowledge the years of mentorship needed to develop a craft. Several years ago, I read an article, which I can no longer find, directed toward instructors of college writers. Most believe that college students, by the time they graduate, should be at the peak of their writing proficiency. But the most recent research shows that most writers actually reach their full potential in their early forties. The doesn’t mean of course, that younger writers can’t be brilliant or that older, beginning writers can’t create fine work, but does acknowledge the time and effort it takes to become truly excellent.

4. Set goals in stages
Rob says to motivate Austrian skiers, you tell them, “There are only three places-first, second, and third-and nothing else counts.” “Anything else,” Rob says, “is perceived as an insult.” However, American skiers and snowboarders are motivated by a series of increasingly difficult, achievable goals. For example, for a first season, Rob might challenge a skier to finish in the top ten in all races. The next year, he set an incrementally higher goal.

Writers can also benefit from giving themselves challenging, yet achievable goals.

Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way explains that one of the ways writers sabotage themselves is with all or nothing thinking. Instead of setting a small writing goal, we say to ourselves that we can’t write until we build a separate studio, until we work part time, until our children leave home.

My best writing time is in the morning, around ten o’clock: I have a full-time job as a high school teacher, so I write in my muddy-minded afternoon. I prefer large blocks of uninterrupted time: I write in the fragmented half hours I have. I like quiet: I am writing this while my neighbor is noisily remodeling her house. I don’t have a private space to write: I write in the living room while my spouse wanders in and out. My situation isn’t ideal, but I set small goals and increase my challenge, and slowly my skills and knowledge and endurance and level of success improve.

5. This is a job. Treat it like a job.
In order to be the best in the world, Rob believes, athletes must do something ordinary: see their training as a job and treat it as a job. When someone is depending on us-our boss to complete a task or our family to bring home a paycheck–we go to work when we don’t feel like it. We go to work when we are depressed or unmotivated or have a headache or have just had a fight with someone we love. He asks the same of his skiers and snowboarders: they must show up ready to focus and work. “Leave your baggage at home,” he tells them.

Sometimes, impressed by the mystery involved in the creation of stories, we forget the most important ingredient in writing: showing up. Most writing success actually arises from the most ordinary of events: writers taking themselves seriously as writers, treating their work as a job. This principle may take different forms in people’s lives: it may mean setting a writing schedule and sticking to it; investing in “professional development” and taking some courses; or merely working on the days that we don’t feel like it–pushing through even when the writing feels sloppy and incoherent.

And writers, too, have plenty of baggage we can leave behind. We have self-doubt. Our parents told us not to become writers; our high school English teachers told us we had no talent. We fall in love or lose someone or go through a major change in our life. We write anyway.

6. No easy days.
In addition to treating their workouts like a job, Rob asks his athletes to give one hundred percent of what they have that day. “No easy days,” he says. What separates the world class from the merely great athlete, Rob believes, is a willingness to give fully.

Annie Dillard in her book The Writing Life gives the same advice to writers. She urges us not only to give our full attention and energy to our work, but to hold nothing back, to resist saving ideas for later:

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.

When we give fully, we can trust that our well will be replenished.

7. Train hard; race easy.
For decades the Nordic countries have dominated the ski events in the winter Olympics. What is their secret? Rob discovered one fundamental contrast: Americans trained light and raced hard; Europeans trained hard and raced easy.

The American coaches believed they should build their skiers’ confidence by giving them courses that they could easily master. However, on race day, the athletes were often under-prepared for unexpected challenges and adverse circumstances.

The European coaches, on the other hand, forced athletes to train in grueling conditions. As a result, they developed physical stamina, emotional resilience, and the mental sharpness to handle the demands of any race. Seeing the success of the Europeans’ model, the Americans have since changed their approach.

As writers, we also want to set challenging goals for ourselves. My high school students often give up when faced with difficult reading or complex concepts: they don’t know they have the endurance and skill to push through confusion and discouragement. They believe their minds are fragile-and secretly fear that if they work too hard, their brains might melt. So I compare the mind to a muscle: it wants to be exercised and to grow-and we don’t need to fear making it too tired or too frustrated. It won’t break!

To stretch ourselves as writers, we can try new forms. We can mine material that is emotionally or mentally a bit too complex for us. And because we are challenging ourselves, we will have days in which we feel exhausted, frustrated, discouraged, in which we doubt our capabilities and our ability to endure. But those long and faithful days of practice, our private victories and patience with our learning, will result in final pieces that, in the end, appear as effortless and graceful as a winning ski race.

8. Use a Worry Chair.
Rob knows that, especially for young athletes, preventing fears and emotions from creeping into workouts is not always easy. So he and his fellow coaches devised a strategy: The Worry Chair.

For a maximum of half an hour, any athlete can request to sit in a special chair where he or she can express fears and anxieties to an attentive coach. The chair works magic. Even though the athletes haven’t solved their problems, after articulating their emotions and having them heard, they are able to focus on their workout for the rest of the day.

I use a similar process in my own writing. Usually, when I begin my work, my worries withdraw into the background. But occasionally my emotions or fears are so overwhelming, I can’t concentrate. Instead of sitting in a worry chair and talking to someone, I write in my journal. Like the athletes, I give myself no longer than half an hour. Any longer, I can write myself into a deeper pit or use the journaling as a way to procrastinate on facing a difficult writing problem. The process of naming my feelings–even without resolving them-settles my interior dramas.

If, while I am writing, I find myself overcome with self-doubt, self-criticism, or disgust, I pause from the writing and allow that hypercritical part of my brain to vent in my journal for about ten to fifteen minutes. That internal criticism, which is so loud and aggressive, when given full attention and opportunity to speak, soon runs out of steam and new ways to criticize me-and then, when it has exhausted itself into silence, I can ignore it and get back to work.

9. Learn from mistakes; don’t dwell on them.
Rob recommends a delicate balance in our relationship to our mistakes. Of course, once athletes have become internationally competitive, they must pay careful attention to their blunders: even the smallest errors can slow racers the fraction of a second that will keep them from victory. In order to discern and correct mistakes, they must be humble, observant, self-aware, and able to accept criticism; they must avoid blaming and self-justifying.

At the same time, athletes who dwell too much on their mistakes are doomed to repeat them. If they feel fearful, guilty, or discouraged, that state of consciousness will harm their performance.

The most successful writers also maintain an objective stance in relationship to their work. Whether we are trying to improve our work habits, our time management skills, our courage in sending work out, or particular writing skills, we must also be curious instead of blaming or excusing ourselves. We notice our own patterns; we learn what supports or derails us in pursuit of our goals; we are patient with ourselves, as this process of learning takes time.

10. Be prepared for the unexpected.
Even the most well prepared athletes will, at some point, be surprised-by adverse weather or snow conditions, unexpected political dramas, and a personal tragedy. So in addition to teaching athletes to be disciplined and consistent, Rob preaches flexibility and adaptability.

He tells his athletes a story about a modern dance troupe on their way to perform in his hometown of Bend, Oregon. Driving over the mountain pass, they encountered an unexpected snowstorm that slowed their bus to a crawl. They would just barely make their performance time, but would miss their warm up. Instead of panicking, they changed into their costumes and practiced as best as they could in the narrow aisles. Their final performance was excellent: the discipline and focus in their previous practices laid a sturdy foundation; their willingness to be creative and adaptable ensured they could overcome unexpected obstacles.

So as we build our careers as writers, we must be disciplined and focused; at the same time, we can be gentle, patient, good natured, and flexible around the life events that inevitably arise and put kinks in our best-laid plans.

11. Be nice.
Rob says one of the most important rules of becoming a world-class athlete is: “Be nice.” “Don’t bring an attitude.” “Don’t ruin it for anyone else.” Great athletic feats almost always take place in a community: of coaches, families, teammates, equipment designers and manufacturers, and event organizers. The truly great recognize that their achievements are not fully their own and treat others with respect.

Rob says he doesn’t know if this rule applied to writing, but I believe it does. The process of writing and publishing takes place in community, and the more we honor each person in the process, the smoother our experience will be. “Nice guys finish last,” some say. As a high school teacher, I disagree. Students who are positive and kind earn the benefit of the doubt when their grades are hovering between an A- and a B+; behind closed doors, the scholarship committee chooses the nice student over the slightly more successful rude one. Even though we may not be aware of the blessing our kindnesses bring, they do ease our road to success. As writers, we can be gracious with even the odd personalities in our writing group; we can cultivate the friendship of bookstore owners and show patience with the harried editors. Friends we make in our communities–the woman who makes morning lattes, the man who walks his dog past the house may be our future readers or make appearances in our writing.

12. Use sound bites.
Imitate before you innovate. Train hard; race easy. Be nice. In the heat of competition or in the middle of a difficult workout, the mind can’t process long passages of prose. Reduce, Rob says, bits of meaningful wisdom into easy-to- remember sound bites.

Writers? We’ve got sticky notes we can paste to our computer, our bulletin board.

“Spend it all,” my latest sticky note reminds me, “Give it all; give it now.”