Deliberate Practice — The Fastest Way to Improve Your Skills
Design your practice deliberately, to improve faster.
You can become good at anything you want in life. You can learn any skill.
But you have to practice. And you have to practice well.
You may have heard that it takes 10 000 hours to master a skill. But you can try any new skill in 1 hour. You can learn some of the basics in 10 hours. You can become very good in 100 hours.
And you can become amazing in most skills, if you spend 1000 hours of quality practice. How far you want to develop your skill, depends on your commitment to put in quality practice.
What is quality practice then? There is no exact way to measure the quality of practice, but the gold standard for optimal practice is often referred to as deliberate practice.
What is deliberate practice?
Deliberate practice is the most effective method to rapidly improve any skill, and consists of intense, structured practice on essential aspects of the task being mastered.
The activities are designed for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.
Your goal is to extend your body and mind, and push yourself beyond the current limits of your capacity.
And to engage so deeply in a task that you leave the training session a changed person.
Characteristics of deliberate practice
Deliberate practice is characterised by the following traits:
- The practice takes place outside one’s comfort zone and requires a learner to constantly try things that are just beyond his or her current abilities.
- The practice involves well-defined, specific goals and often involves improving some specific aspect of the target performance. It is not aimed at some vague overall improvement.
- The practice requires your full attention and conscious actions. It is not enough to be at practice and simply follow the instructions of a coach. You must concentrate on the specific goal of the practice and make conscious adjustments to try and achieve it.
- The practice involves feedback and modifications of efforts in response to that feedback. In the beginning, most of the feedback will come from a coach, but as you progress, learners must learn to monitor themselves, spot mistakes, and adjust accordingly.
- The practice usually involves building or modifying previously acquired skill by focusing on particular aspects of those skills and working on improving a very specific part.
The term ‘deliberate practice’ was defined by the psychology professor Anders Ericsson, the world leading expert on expertise and high level performance. He claims these four criteria must be fulfilled to call it deliberate practice.
- You must be motivated to attend to the task and exert effort to improve your performance.
- The design of the task should take into account your pre-existing knowledge so that the task can be correctly understood after a brief period of instruction. The activities are at an appropriate, challenging level of difficulty.
- You should receive immediate informative feedback and knowledge of results of your performance.
- You should repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.
As you see, there are many requirements before practice is technically defined as deliberate practice.
It’s good to keep the requirements in mind, and try to fulfil as many of them as possible.
Even though you cannot always reach these standards , the closer you get to them, the faster you will improve.
There is nothing magical about 10 000 hours
The real goal isn’t practice, it’s progress. As legendary basketball coach John Wooden put it, ‘Never mistake mere activity for accomplishment.’
Every hour of practice has different quality.
Therefore, you cannot just accumulate 10 000 hours and claim to be world class.
How fast you improve, depend highly on how much you get out of each hour of practice.
The best in the world in any domain are masters at maximising how much they get out of each hour they practice. And their practice does not look anything like recreation.
It may take 10 000 hours to become world-class, but this number is not necessarily that important for you.
Would you only consider to start to dance, paint or surf if you could become world-class?
In reality you can become very good, much faster than this.
Your speed of progress depends mainly on the quality and intensity of each practice session, multiplied by the time you practice.
To achieve this level of practice, it’s required to be very committed to what you do.
Find the joy in working hard
If you can find the joy in working hard to improve, you have a big advantage when developing your skills.
By developing a curiosity and interest in improving, you can increase your tolerability for what can sometimes be thought of as ‘boring and repetitive’ tasks.
Small differences and improvements in your practice, may instead become a fascination and obsession.
You may not even find it boring.
Instead, you are motivated to get it right every time.
You enjoy improving every little detail.
If, on the other hand, you get bored as soon as you’ve managed to do something right one time, your rate of improvement will be much slower.
Amateurs work till they get it right. Masters work till they can’t get it wrong. -Harald Craxton, professor at the Royal Academy of Music.
For anyone who reach world-class performance, it becomes part of their identity to practice in this way.
They take pride in trying to perfect every possible detail in their skill.
Anything worthwhile in life, takes time and effort to achieve.
If you want to become very good, excellent or world-class at a skill it therefore requires commitment on improving a little bit, every day, for a long time.
As you improve a little bit every day, you will eventually become a lot better.
And as you start to appreciate that improvement can only be achieved through effort, you may start to enjoy the journey.
Repeating what you already know, but better
Deliberate practice doesn’t have to be learning something completely new. It can be the polishing of something you already know ‘quite’ well.
Doing things you already know, but better, is still very good practice.
After a while, many activities start to become sort of automatic, like brushing your teeth, tying your shoes or driving a car. At this time you are most likely not improving (and in many activities there is no need to improve).
When you are doing something automatically, you are just repeating what you already know how to do!
So, if you want to keep improving a skill, it’s important to avoid this type of automaticity.
While it’s probably not important to improve the way you tie your shoes, the improvement of other skills require that you specifically aim to improve your precision and speed.
Any good practice activity, should therefore try to push you out of automaticity, to a place where you feel a little bit uncomfortable.
Designing Deliberate Practice
When learning any skill; you would optimally have an experienced coach who can guide you, and help you tailor practice activities.
The coach can chose the best activities, help you improve learning strategies and give you feedback on your practice.
For anyone who wants to take advantage of deliberate practice, but don’t have access to a personal coach, the following strategies are good:
- Identify the expert performers in your field.
- Figure out what they do that makes them so good.
- Design purposeful practice around learning to do that yourself.
To effectively practice a skill without a teacher, it also helps to keep in mind the three Fs: Focus. Feedback. Fix it.
Break the skill down into components that you can do repeatedly and analyse effectively, determine your weaknesses, and figure out ways to improve them.
Remember that practice has to be designed for you and your current place in your development, to push you past what you can currently do. Next week, the practice will be different, because you have changed (advanced to a higher level).
Ask yourself questions!
Deliberate practice is the opposite of mindless practice.
Before practice, ask yourself: how can I improve? what exercises will help me learn this skill? who can I look to learn from? can I invent my own exercises that addresses what I want to achieve? Is there a better way to do this?
During practice, ask yourself: How am I doing? What adjustments do I need to make? Am I fully focused? If not, why not?
After practice, ask yourself: what went well? what went less well? How can I improve upon that for next time? Was the exercises to easy or too hard? How can they be adjusted? If you succeeded, what changes can you make next time, to keep developing further?
You are the best person to answer these questions for yourself. You are the expert on yourself after all. Even better, talk with your coach; who was observing you and may have noticed things that you couldn't see. He or she can help develop exercises for next practice and give you feedback on how to improve.
Take Home Message
- Deliberate practice is the most effective way to improve any skill.
- It involves activities designed to effectively improve specific parts of your performance.
- It requires your full attention, motivation to learn, feedback on how you are doing, high effort and many repetitions.
- Doing deliberate practice is hard and difficult, and it’s not always possible to fulfil all the criterias.
- The closer you can design your practice to look like deliberate practice, the faster you will improve at the skill you are learning.
- The way high level performers practice shows ways that we could all improve our practice. Use them as inspiration for how you can learn and grow faster.
Thanks for reading, sharing, and following! :)
My 100Hour Challenges:
