“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Passion is the easiest. It is the enthusiasm or excitement we have for something or the act of doing something. It is our primary instinct that we love a particular activity, and although it can be fueled by others, it has to arise out of our own inner desires.
Skill is something you earn. Skill is the physical execution or performance of a task. Skill can come more naturally to some than others, but is only developed and refined through repetition (practice).
Passion does not equate to skill or talent. The simple fact that we are passionate about something does not mean we can succeed at it.
Skill is required regardless of passion. It does not matter how much we love something, there are no shortcuts. It is always required to put in our time and earn the skills for whatever endeavor we are pursuing.
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.
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