Deliberate Practice: Proven Way To Improve Fast

Deliberate practice is a type of practice that is purposeful and systematic. While regular practice can be countless repetition, deliberate practice requires that we have a specific goal and fully attend to it to improve performance. Deliberate practice is smart and hard work. It is the best way to develop skills and learn. While genetics influence performance, deliberate practice allows us to maximize that performance—to fulfill our potential.

The big challenge of deliberate practice is focus. Showing up and putting in the reps is one thing. It might be enough for a while, but later on, carelessly overlooking errors is going to be the difference between us reaching an amateur versus professional level. Concentration is crucial for deliberate practice. Disregarding tiny blunders is okay if we want okay results. But if we wish to make the most of deliberate practice and take ourselves to the next level, we need to focus and stay consistent. Mindlessness is the archenemy of deliberate practice.

Too often we mix getting better with doing the thing over and over again. Take, for instance, driving. We have all been driving for a while now. Decades. Does that mean every Joe and Jessica with more than 10 years under their seatbelt is a race-ready driver? No. This is because experience doesn’t mean expertise. Improvement requires attention and effort. It does not happen through osmosis. But what does deliberate practice look like? What makes a practice session effective?

Deliberate practice is a hallmark of achieving expert-level performance in any field. Yet there’s much more to it than ambiguous 10,000-hour rules. Going from okay, to good, to great and beyond is not that simple. That brings us to what “practice” is. At the core, it is the act of repeatedly performing an activity to hone a particular skill. Doing something and practicing it are wholly different. Practicing something is doing it with the intention to become better at it. Deliberate practice is therefore practice with a clear awareness of and attention on the components of a skill we are working towards and how to improve them. Regular practice is mindless repetition. Deliberate practice is laser-focused revision.

The primary characteristic of deliberate practice that makes it stand out boils down to feedback. When you are deliberately practicing something, you are dedicating your unwavering attention to assess whether you are improving or not. It is highly demanding. Whether it is purely intellectual, such as chess, business-related activities, or investing, or physical, like throwing darts or practicing your goal swing. Put differently, it’s not much fun, but it is the secret to top performance in every field. Consider it like a long, meticulous, headache-provoking session of self-critique. You are constantly on the lookout for errors and areas of weakness to improve upon, and you keep changing your approach until you find one that works.

Using deliberate practice helps us overcome limitations we might have deemed fixed. We can reach new heights. It is a universal technique, applicable for whatever we are trying to get better at. Anything from music, dance, cricket, and hockey, to surgery, therapy, trading, and writing can be enhanced by employing deliberate practice. The key is that we identify an objective standard for performance: for us to improve, we need to know what needs to change, otherwise we just plateau. Regular practice works for reinforcing and maintaining skills. But if we are looking to reach expert-level performance, to overcome plateaus at a high level, or to improve at a much faster rate, deliberate practice is the only way.

The core principles of deliberate practice are as follows. Specific-goal centered. It focuses on breaking tasks down into manageable components to sharpen particular parts of a technique or subject. Intensely-focused. Practice sessions have to be distraction-free. Immediate-feedback-oriented. The faster you course correct and refine, the better your progress. Pushes comfort zones. Deliberate practice puts practitioners into areas of difficulty on purpose to stimulate growth; adjustments on feedback are repeated until mastery is achieved. Lastly, it emphasizes reflection, analysis, and iteration. Deliberate practice is not easy.

Real life implications of deliberate practice:

• Music: a pianist practicing a difficult passage repeatedly, focusing on timing and finger placement; they isolate challenging sections, practice at a slower tempo, and gradually increase the speed until mastery;

• Athletics: a sprinter records themselves and analyzes the footage to refine their starting technique; they work on their form and mechanics with a coach, targeting incremental gains;

• Writing: an author revises their drafts multiple times, concentrating on different aspects like dialogue, logical sequence, and pace; they seek critique from beta readers and editors and iterate based on the feedback as well;

• Public speaking: a public speaker practices delivering speeches in front of smaller audiences to refine their tone, script, and clarity; they also record themselves speaking, analyze the playback, and make prompt adjustments to improve delivery;

• Programming: a coder repeatedly solves algorithms or debugging challenges to engage their problem-solving skill; they may participate in coding competitions and pair programming to further hone their knowledge;

• Entrepreneurship: a business owner analyzes failed marketing strategies and iterates their advertising approach; they conduct scrupulous testing for campaigns thereafter and refine based on objective performance metrics;

• Education: a student uses flashcards to focus on weak topics and quizzes themselves repeatedly; they break subjects into smaller chunks, concentrate on lagging areas, and assess improvement by testing.

How you might employ deliberate practice as a thinking tool: (1) identify your weaknesses, pinpointing specific areas that require improvement rather than practicing what is already comfortable; (2) set a specific metric or objective you want to reach; (3) incorporate real-time feedback from mentors, teachers, coaches, guides, or tools like performance tracking apps and recordings; (4) concentrate on intensity, not duration, as a short and focused practice session outweighs a long and distracted one; (5) track progress in a journal or log to document headway you are making towards the specific metric or objective; (6) reassess regularly, adjusting your objectives when needed according to progress and changing needs.

Thought-provoking insights. “Excellence is not a singular act but a habit. You are what you repeatedly do.” grandpa Aristotle highlights the role of consistent practice for mastery. “The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.” is Jimmy Johnson reinforcing the power of deliberate practice beyond casual, mindless repetition. “Don’t practice until you get it right. Practice until you cannot get it wrong.” and “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” emphasize the importance of thorough, thoughtful repetition for expert-level performance and eventual mastery. While it demands effort and patience, the transformative power of deliberate practice is unparalleled. Apply it where you want to improve or where you have hit a plateau. Don’t forget: extraordinary outcomes require extraordinary actions.