Take time to recover when you learn using deliberate practice

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Because deliberate practice requires your full attention, with maximal mental and/or physical effort, it can only be sustained for a short period of time. Laboratory studies of extended practice have capped the optimal time at one hour per day, three to five days a week, and real-life studies have seen reduced benefits when practice sessions exceed two hours.

This level of intensity and concentration makes recovery time important. Whatever type of leisure activity or relaxation you choose, it’s important to offset the intense effort of deliberate practice to avoid mental or physical fatigue.

Be consistent and persistent to build expertise

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A prolonged effort, while learning, will be frustrating and uncomfortable at times. But pushing through those tough spots often leads to significant improvement. One of the foundational aspects of deliberate practice — what makes it so effective — is its regularity.

In the research paper “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Ericsson and his colleagues share their discovery that top performers, no matter their area of expertise, kept a similar practice regimen: a brief (but intense), daily or semi-weekly solo practice sessions.

One of Ericsson’s studies tracked adult violinists studying at elite music academies and found that the musicians averaged one to one-and-a-half hours a day of high-intensity solo practice. The study found that the accumulated amount of this regular, focused practice had a direct impact on the musicians’ level of performance.

These consistent, intense bursts of effort are key to maintaining momentum in building expertise.

Are you breaking out of your comfort zone?

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“This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.”

― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

For goals to spur improvement, they need to constantly challenge your current abilities. Simply repeating skills you already know how to do — an unproductive cycle that’s easy to get stuck in with traditional approaches to practice — won’t actually enhance your skill level or improve performance.

Stretching yourself is the key to growth. When it comes to skills development, breaking out of your comfort zone isn’t about “trying harder,” but about “trying differently.” Your goals should teeter on the edge of what you are and aren’t capable of doing. If you can’t move forward with one technique or approach, try another and keep experimenting until you break through the barrier that’s blocking your path to improvement.

Set specific, realistic goals is crucial in deliberate practice

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The deliberate practice relies on small, achievable, well-defined steps that help you work your way toward meaningful improvement. These steps should take into account your current knowledge and skill level and push those boundaries little by little, consistently expanding your abilities.

With deliberate practice, goal-setting isn’t like making a New Year’s resolution and hoping you’ll stick with it. It involves thoughtful planning, identifying areas for improvement, and creating a specific game plan for building on top of your current abilities.

The first step in deliberate practice: get motivated

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Like most worthwhile pursuits, developing proficiency in any skill — whether sewing, software design, or surfing — isn’t easy. If you want to push past the hard parts of skills growth — the frustration, the failures, the periods of slow progress — you’re going to need to be motivated.

Without the motivation to push past obstacles, when improvement stalls, the natural inclination will be to give up. So if you’re picking a skill to improve with deliberate practice, make sure it’s something you care about and are willing to devote considerable time and effort to.

Why deliberate Practice?

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Deliberate practice refers to a special type of practice that is purposeful and systematic. While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.

The greatest challenge of deliberate practice is to remain focused. In the beginning, showing up and putting in your reps is the most important thing. But after a while, we begin to carelessly overlook small errors and miss daily opportunities for improvement.

This is because the natural tendency of the human brain is to transform repeated behaviors into automatic habits. The more we repeat a task the more mindless it becomes.

Mindless activity is the enemy of deliberate practice. The danger of practicing the same thing, again and again, is that progress becomes assumed. Too often, we assume we are getting better simply because we are gaining experience. In reality, we are merely reinforcing our current habits—not improving them.

The problem with traditional practice

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We’ve all had to practice a skill at some point — piano lessons, school sports teams, or on-the-job training. You might associate the word “practice” with rote, never-ending repetition — piano scales, sports drills — and the frustration of not making much progress. There’s a reason so many people give up on learning a new skill or only reach a middling level of competence: inevitably, improvement stalls.

You see, just repeating a skill or task, even over a period of many years, doesn’t build expertise. That’s because once you reach a reasonable level of competence and are able to do what you need to do, the skill becomes automatic. At best, you’re maintaining your abilities, but not improving them.

For many day-to-day tasks — driving, typing, cooking — this baseline, “good enough to get by” level of skill is fine. But if there’s something you really want to excel at, you have to push past that comfortable stage and challenge yourself.

Evolution

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The classic conception of human nature is captured in the name we gave ourselves as a species, Homo sapiens. Our distant ancestors included Homo erectus, or “upright man,” because the species could walk upright, and Homo habilis, the “handyman,” so named because the species was at one time thought to be the earliest humans to have made and used stone tools. We call ourselves “knowing man” because we see ourselves as distinguished from our ancestors by our vast amount of knowledge. But perhaps a better way to see ourselves would be as Homo exercens, or “practicing man,” the species that takes control of its life through practice and makes of itself what it will.

We humans are most human when we’re improving ourselves. We, unlike any other animal, can consciously change ourselves, to improve ourselves in ways we choose. This distinguishes us from every other species alive today and, as far as we know, from every other species that has ever lived.

Deliberate practice

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You wish to climb a mountain. You’re not sure how high you want to go — that peak looks an awfully long way off — but you know you want to get higher than you currently are.

You could simply take off on whichever path looks promising and hope for the best, but you’re probably not going to get very far.

Or you could rely on a guide who has been to the peak and knows the best way there. That will guarantee that no matter how high you decide to climb, you are doing it in the most efficient, effective way.

That best way is “deliberate practice”.

It will show you the path to the peak; how far you travel along that path is up to you.