Have you been painting for years but don’t see yourself getting any closer to showcasing your canvas pieces at an art gallery? Why is it that you can work at a career you hate and see some form of progress – even if just in titles – but when it comes to a hobby you’re passionate about, it ends up staling and going nowhere? What really distinguishes extraordinary chess players, athletes, entrepreneurs, writers from the rest of the world?
In his book, Peak, Anders Ericsson reveals the secret of peak performance, and it’s encapsulated in two words; Deliberate Practice. According to him, not all types of practice are created equal. To achieve mastery in any field, the traditional type of practice – where a professional gains some knowledge, then moves to apply it in a real-world setting – is insufficient.
Instead, practice needs to be both continuous and deliberate.
Before we delve into what makes a practice deliberate, one must distinguish between knowledge and skills. Knowledge is the information you’ve accumulated in your head. Skill-building on the other hand, is learning how to do something. In a classroom setting, professors are encouraged to go beyond transferring physics concepts to the students (knowledge) and help them think like physicists instead (skill-building). Deliberate practice mainly focuses on skills rather than knowledge. Also, this type of practice is easier to implement in mature fields such as sports, music and chess. But that shouldn’t stop someone to apply some of the deliberate practice principles in their daily lives.
So what makes a practice deliberate?
– Building a skill by incrementally operating at the edge of your comfort zone. Unlike what you’ve been taught in school, scoring a 100 % all the time isn’t a good thing. It shows you’re not challenging yourself enough, and you’re being tested in concepts you’re very comfortable with. The best imagery about this can be found in the poem by the spoken word artist Sara Kay “Postcards” where she describes a boy who practices on his drum set all the time. She says, “Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Repeat the same mistakes over and over and you don’t get any closer to Carnegie Hall.”
– It relies on mental representations of how performance should be like and involves the study of what experts have done in that field before. For example, chess masters are known to spend hours studying games played by the masters. They don’t develop some incredible memory for where individual pieces sit on a board but also for the possible interactions, making their memory of the patterns very context-dependent.
– It has well-defined specific goals that can be measured and evaluated by an expert who can provide feedback. Because someone needs to really understand what expert performance looks like and how to get there from where you are now, a coach is usually required.
– It is usually not fun. Whether you’re spending hours studying the work of masters in solitary, or having to stop mid-practice because you’ve made a mistake, deliberate practice is usually hard work. If it’s not then you’re doing it wrong.
In a previous post, I wrote about how a lot of local companies do not invest in their employees’ professional development. However, the book does say that elements of deliberate can be adapted in the workplace without investing a lot. The idea is to always focus on the skill you want to improve, find someone who can mentor you by building scenarios where that skill is being tested. Ericsson also emphasized that the most effective interventions are those that have an interactive component such as:
– Role play
– Discussion Groups
– Case solving
– Hands-on training
And maybe once you’ve invested 10,000 hours into that deliberate practice, you might find yourself getting closer to an art museum, or Carnegie Hall.
It’s that simple.
But not easy.
