The original post was written by Shane Parrish. You can read it on Farnam Street.
In the text below, you’ll learn what deliberate practice means and why it matters. The original text was written by Shane Parrish and is available on Farnam Street. Note: I took the liberty of adding a few notes throughout the text to put it in the context of Brazilian reality. Here is the text.
You have probably been doing the same job for quite some time. If you’re like most people, your performance has plateaued. Simply put, you’ve stopped getting better at what you do.
Despite all the repetition, most people do not become experts at what they do, no matter how many years of experience they have. Experience is not the same as competence.
Across many fields, people with a great deal of experience were no better at their jobs than those with less experience when it came to the most important skills—for example, brokers recommending stocks, parole officers predicting recidivism, or judges evaluating candidates in college admissions tests.
Society has always recognized extraordinary individuals whose performance is genuinely superior in a given field. If I asked you why some people stand out while others do not, you would probably say it is because of talent and hard work. Those answers are either wrong, in the case of talent, or misleading, in the case of hard work.
Conveniently, claiming that talent is the basis of success lets us absolve ourselves of responsibility for our own performance—or lack of it. Despite its popularity, the talent argument is wrong. Research tells a very different story about how people become experts.
Research concludes that we need deliberate practice to improve performance. Unfortunately, deliberate practice is something most of us neither understand nor engage in every day. That helps explain why we can spend decades working at something without actually improving our performance.
Deliberate practice is difficult and painful. But it works. Putting it on your schedule will lead to better performance, and practicing it intensely will lead to excellent performance.
Most of what we consider practice is just recreation—we stay in our comfort zone.
When you go out to a golf course to hit a dozen balls, what you’re really doing is having fun. You’re not getting better. Understanding the difference between recreation and deliberate practice is the key to improving performance.
Deliberate practice has several characteristics, each of which should be considered carefully. It is an activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with the help of a teacher; it must be repeated many times; feedback on results must be available continuously; it requires intense mental effort if the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business, or intense physical effort, as in sports; and it is not much fun.
Let’s look at each of these points to better understand what I mean.
It must be designed specifically to improve performance
The key word is designed. Practice that is not deliberately designed and enjoyable is recreation; it does not lead to improvement.
“In some fields, especially intellectual ones such as the arts, sciences, and business, people may eventually become skilled enough to design their own practice. But anyone who thinks they have outgrown the benefits of a teacher should at least question that view. There is a reason the best golfers in the world still seek out their teachers.”
That reason is more than just the teachers’ knowledge. It is their ability to see you in ways you cannot see yourself.
“A chess teacher is looking at the same board and sequence of moves as the student, but can see that the student is consistently overlooking an important threat. A business consultant is looking at the same situations as the manager, but may see, for example, that the manager is not communicating their intentions clearly.”
In theory, with the right motivation and some experience, you can design a practice routine for yourself. But it is likely that you won’t know where to start or how to structure the activities.
The formula for becoming an expert is to move from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence, then to conscious competence, and finally to unconscious competence.
Teachers or coaches see what you are missing and make you aware of what you need to improve.
With or without a teacher, great performers break what they do into smaller parts that they can practice. They improve at one aspect and then move on to the next.
Noel Tichy, a professor at the University of Michigan’s business school and former head of General Electric’s well-known management development center in Crotonville, divides practice into three zones: the comfort zone, the learning zone, and the panic zone.
Most of the time when we think we’re practicing, we’re actually doing activities in our comfort zone. This does not help us improve because we can already do these activities easily. By contrast, working in the panic zone leaves us paralyzed because the activities are too difficult and we don’t know where to begin. The only way to make progress is to work in the learning zone: activities beyond your current ability, but achievable with a certain amount of effort.
Consider a chess tournament:
Skill improvement is likely to be limited when you face opponents who are substantially weaker, because they won’t challenge you to exert yourself fully, or even close to fully, in tactical decision-making. As a result, your problems and weaknesses will not be exposed. At the same time, the opportunity to learn is also reduced when playing against much stronger opponents, because no amount of effort or concentration is likely to produce a positive result.
It must be repeated many times
Repetition in the comfort zone is not the same as practice. Deliberate practice requires you to work in the learning zone, repeat the activity many times, and compare your performance with feedback so that you don’t repeat mistakes or bad habits.
Let’s briefly illustrate the difference between work and deliberate practice. During a three-hour baseball game, a batter may try to hit only 5 to 15 pitches (perhaps one or two that matter), whereas during an ideal practice session of the same length, the batter works with a dedicated pitcher and gets hundreds of chances to hit, allowing weaknesses to be systematically exposed.
It is no coincidence that Ted Williams, the greatest baseball hitter, literally practiced hitting until his hands bled.
Valério’s note: Many MMA fighters in Brazil put in a similar effort. It is because of their exhausting daily training that they stand out so much, and many of them are among the best in the world.
Feedback on results must be available continuously
Practicing something without knowing whether you are getting better is pointless. And yet that is what most of us do every day without thinking about it.
Valério’s note: Practicing something without knowing whether you are improving is just a hobby—be aware of that. Separate the things you do for fun from the things you do to improve.
“You can work with whatever technique you want, but if you can’t see the effects, two things will happen: you won’t get better, and you’ll stop caring.”
Feedback becomes complicated when someone has to interpret the results subjectively.
“These are situations in which a teacher, coach, or mentor is essential to provide feedback.”
It requires intense mental effort
Doing things we already know how to do is fun and requires little effort. Deliberate practice, however, is not fun. Breaking a task you want to master into its component parts and then systematically working on those areas requires a great deal of effort.
“The work is so great that it seems no one could sustain it for very long. One finding that is remarkably consistent across disciplines is that four or five hours a day seems to be the ideal limit for deliberate practice, and this practice is often done in sessions lasting no more than one hour to 90 minutes.”
Ben Franklin: an interesting example
Ben Franklin intuitively understood the concept of deliberate practice. As a teenager, Ben received a letter from his father saying that his writing was inferior “in elegance of expression, in method, and in clarity, which he convinced me of by showing several examples,” as Franklin recalled.
“Ben responded to his father’s observations in several ways. First, he found examples of prose clearly superior to anything he could produce in a bound volume of The Spectator, the great English journal written by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Any of us could have done something similar. But Franklin then embarked on a remarkable program that few of us would ever have thought of.”
It began with reading an article in The Spectator and making brief notes about the meaning of each sentence. A few days later, he would take the notes and try to express the meaning of each sentence in his own words. When he finished, he compared his essay with the original, “discovered some of the defects, and corrected them.”
One of the flaws he noticed was his poor vocabulary. What could he do about it? He realized that writing poetry required an extensive “stock of words,” because he had to express the same meaning in many different ways depending on the demands of rhyme or meter. So he rewrote the essays in verse.
Franklin also realized that a key element of good writing is organization, so he developed a way to work on that. He began making brief notes about each sentence in an essay again, but wrote each note on a separate piece of paper. He then shuffled the notes and set them aside for weeks, until he had forgotten the essay. At that point he tried to put the notes in the right order, attempted to write the essay, and then compared it with the original; once again, he “discovered many faults and amended them.”
Even without a teacher, Ben Franklin learned to practice deliberately.
Solitude
In her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts, Susan Cain says:
Deliberate practice is best done alone for several reasons. It requires intense concentration, and other people can be a distraction. It takes deep motivation, often generated by oneself. But most importantly, it involves working on a task that is personally challenging for you.
Only when you’re alone, Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to something that is a challenge for you. If you want to improve what you’re doing, you have to be the one who takes the initiative and pushes harder. That isn’t possible in a group, because in a group you can take the initiative only a small percentage of the time.”
Valério’s note: If experience is not the same as competence, how do you hire competent people?
The answer is quite simple: analyze the person’s day-to-day results, using the essence of each activity as your standard.
To hire a programmer — The essence of the job is writing code fluently that works and solves everyday problems. So you can check the quality of their code on platforms such as github.com, then hire them for a trial period (an internship) so they can get used to the pace. You can then observe whether their pace and outlook fit the company’s.
To hire a teacher — The essence of a teacher’s work is the ability to turn pupils into students. You can offer a trial contract and determine whether the teacher can actually turn pupils into students during the trial period.
Use this standard for any other field of work.