The Value of Deliberate Practice
At one point in my life, I dabbled in pottery making. I fell in love with pottery making before I even knew how to do it and decided that this was going to be my craft. So I bought a book on pottery making. But there, in the chapter on throwing pots, the author said something about needing to throw a hundred pots before you can even master the first shape (the cylinder). A hundred pots just to master one shape? This clearly didn’t apply to me.
So I learned how to throw the clay onto the wheel and form a cylinder. It was hard and messy and the results were predictably amateurish: a bowl that I made had a thicker wall on one side and a thinner wall on the other; the teapot that I made out of coils of clay was lopsided and reminded me of a gnome’s hat for some reason (not an effect I was going for). So I dropped pottery making and moved on to yet another hobby that would surely be easier to master.
I used to believe that if you have talent, then it’s easy to create the piece of art you envision. If I could only find the perfect medium — clay or watercolors or stained glass or whatever — I would create the beautiful pieces of artwork I saw in my mind. But every medium that I tried proved to be horribly flawed: Clay was messy, stained glass was brittle and unforgiving, watercolor was… well, watery. Twenty years and twenty abandoned hobbies later, I’ve begun to realize that my premise was not true. Mastering a craft or a hobby is anything but easy and talent plays but a small part in the process.
So, what is the key to a perfectly thrown pot with even walls? Or a perfect golf swing? Or becoming a world chess champion? Not surprisingly, it’s practice. But not just any kind of practice. Ericsson calls it “deliberate practice.” Just practicing for many years and gaining experience doesn’t guarantee a better performance. There are plenty of people with decades of experience in their fields who don’t outperform novices.
Deliberate practice involves specifically practicing the hardest skills in a structured manner meant to stretch you beyond your current abilities. For athletes or musicians, the coach might set lessons that get progressively harder. The figure skater must practice the same jump 200 times until it is flawless; the pianist must practice each piece until the nuances of the music are just right.
It’s always tempting to practice what you’re already good at but experts resist doing that. Instead, they practice the skills that will push them to the next level of performance. What separates the experts from the amateurs is the way in which they practice. Amateurs either don’t practice in a way that would constantly push their skills further and further or they focus on perfecting that which they are already good at. Experts, on the other hand, practice the most difficult skill over and over again, each time pushing the practice further. Ericsson says that the practice should never get easier; if it does, it means the person is coasting, not improving.
Why don’t more people do this kind of deliberate practice? Because it’s hard. It’s the kind of practice that requires a lot of exertion, leads to repeated failure and the reward is perhaps a 1% improvement. A lot of people don’t want to work for a 1% improvement. But it’s that 1% improvement - a tenth of a second faster for a swimmer or an extra jump for the figure skater — that will separate the gold medalist from the silver medalist.
What hobby or craft or sport are you trying to master? Realize that it’s not talent that will get you to the top. Instead, it’s practice… deliberate practice.
