Cedric Chin changed my mind on deliberate practice. Or maybe he pointed out the obvious to anyone who has tried to apply it to a mushy domain. DP is premised upon having a teacher and pedological method that you can hit hard.
Otherwise, you have to do something not quite DP. But that's ok, because in a mushy domain just acquiring the tacit knowledge that the experts have will put your far ahead ( because the pedological method and real coaches don't exist yet).
But yeah, it's not deliberate practice and reading books on deliberate practice might not help you much.
Cedric Chin is massively underrated on the topic of Deliberate Practice. He literally has a whole bunch of a gem of articles on the topic of Expertise, which Deliberate Practice falls under.
As someone who’s mid career trying to navigate corporate life and understand the hidden whys in business, I think so. I think of it like a Patreon or Substack. The blog has changed my mental model for the better on quite a few subjects and has changed how I view the world. I think it’s worth the spare change that I have.
Whoa how cool to spot you in the wild on HN!
I listen to your podcast, thank you for the awesome content.
When I was younger and more idealistic I took a chance and got a bachelor's in music. It didn't work out, but when I later became a programmer, one of things I took with me was this idea of "total immersion" - e.g. just hanging around and listening/watching the more experienced people do their thing.
Yeah, I think immersion works, but I'm not sure how to make it not a huge time sink. It feels like its a slow path as measured by hours invested, but sometimes It's the only way.
Yeah the huge time sink aspect is definitely real. It gets much harder to justify when you already working 40+ hrs a week or have kids or whatever.
Going back to the earlier analogy, music has the same problem as programming in that the stuff you do for money doesn't necessarily translate to making you better at your craft. You end up being a factory that just produces the same thing over and over instead of growing in your craft.
I see this a lot at my job currently (I'm guilty of it as well) - speed is usually prioritized over anything else, and so bad patterns end up getting copied and "lifted and shifted" everywhere.
Discord has communities for everything. In the last couple years I've recently taken up learning French and have found that Discord provides conversation on the topic at the same time as practicing the topic. There are servers for everything!
Side note: also a degree in music turned programmer, hi!
Exactly. It’s easier to deliberately practice skills in closed domains or with an established pedagogy like piano where there are clear feedback loops. It’s harder to deliberately practice an open domain like doing business. That’s where you have not only to learn from experience but learn the right things from experience in the context of that experience.
Just because something worked doesn’t mean it will work all the time. You also have to learn the context it worked in and reason analogically. Cedric calls this concept instantiation and there’s more to it than that but it’s been a useful corrective to my previous adulation of first principles only thinking (which also only works in some circumstances and not others)
Feels like there should be a dedicated role for this at tech companies, like instead of it being an undefined thing that senior engineers have to do to mentor juniors but isn't really rewarded in most cases when it comes to promotions because it isn't visibly "high impact" to management.
so instead split it off into a specific role that selects for people who enjoy teaching. I think it would appeal to people looking for lower stress for maybe a slight pay decrease compared to a standard engineering role
Interesting to compare with how the UK army approaches training. Simplifying somewhat, it has dedicated schools that do trade-training for specific categories of soldiers (e.g. infantry, armour, artillery, etc). Soldiers go to these after basic training (how to be a generic soldier) when they have chosen their military specialisation. They then return as they go through career progression to do trade-specific professional development (e.g. going from tank driver, to gunner, to commander, etc).
Crucially, as soldiers (non-commissioned) go up through their rank structure (corporal, sergeant, etc) they can take instructor courses back at the schools that qualify them to do on-the-job training back in their parent units (and which increase their pay). The best of these instructors may be invited to undergo additional training that qualifies them to become an instructor at one of the schools. So some responsibility for training is fundamentally baked in to career development.
I think a lot of it is that, in a modern world where we don't have kids out in the fields or milking the cows, we want something for them to do before sending them off to college (for which they need prep but probably not 12-13 years of it). And, on the other side, companies aren't really incentivized to do a lot of training of employees who will probably be gone in 3 years anyway. And the employees are often not really rewarded for doing training rather than their day job.
The military example is probably instructive because that's a case where a long-term career in a given military is relatively common.
> The military example is probably instructive because that's a case where a long-term career in a given military is relatively common.
Figures from the last decade [0] show that half of all British Army recruits will have left after four-to-five years service, and only 23% make it to ten years.
One reason (not the only one) for the military emphasis on training is they can't fully utilise their skills in peacetime, unlike most other professions.
Fair enough though I'm guessing those are still fairly high numbers compared to industry in general. People with over ten years are probably something of an outlier at most companies these days so 23% still seems like quite a few.
>One reason (not the only one) for the military emphasis on training is they can't fully utilise their skills in peacetime, unlike most other professions.
That makes sense. I attend conferences and the like which is training to some degree. But training in the sense of actual courses of some sort wouldn't be a lot of use to me at this point in general.
Anders Ericsson, in his book Peak, states that having a coach is not optional. It's a core piece of the puzzle and people will plateau fairly quickly without one. It's a very interesting problem for software engineering since it's not typically an area I see a lot of coaching in.
PhD training teaches people how to not plateau, as (1) it teaches one how to focus on the unknowns (in that context, in the entire field, so one can dig into them; more easily applicable to one’s own knowledge) and (2) teaches one how to learn without professors / classes, which mostly consists of evaluating the quality of textbooks and/ or research papers in a field, and also how to skim at just the right level so as to learn what one needs to know.
That depends on the domain. For technical skills where rapid feedback is required during performance, coaching is critical and even reviewing video of yourself immediately after the fact is much worse. For non-technical things where skill involves knowing the correct combination of simpler actions to take to achieve a complex objective, coaching is helpful but not required.
Nobody is going to succeed at gymnastics without a coach, but you can totally reach a high level in a game like chess just by reviewing your games afterwards, reading theory and studying the games of past masters.
Lots of mushy domains still have aspects of their foundations that are amenable to deliberate practice.
For software engineers, problem solving with math and leetcode style questions can be trained in a deliberate practice style, as well as (for example) learning the ins and outs of the most import parts of your language's standard library or the most used core unix utils, or how to construct various SQL queries.
Getting those out of the way means you can focus more on the fuzzy aspects.
So I'd say there's still a role for deliberate practice in broadening and deepening your foundations.
According to Ericsson, violin performance is relatively "objective": most professionals agree on what's bad and what's good, even in a blind test environment. It's the opposite of what general people believe: that music comes down to "individual's taste". It might be true for pop, but not for classical violinists.
I really don't believe coding works like that. If it does, there won't be so many "consider harmful..." memes. You can delibrately practice leetcode, but I doubt if you can delibrately practice coding in the general sense.
In the meantime I opened multiple tabs to skim through and also thought "hmm, small repetitive tasks you practice again and again to perform them perfectly... not applicable to every field then ?".
Yes, having a teacher and method matters. As a cautionary tale, I tried to teach myself touch-typing years ago without either, and it was a disaster. I invented my own 'hover' method using the wrong fingers for the keys, practiced extensively, and as a result ended up having to unlearn bad muscle memory which is much harder than learning the right muscle memory from the beginning. This is apparently also a common problem for people who try to teach themselves the violin.
Unfortunately even finding a teacher doesn't necessarily solve the problem, as a fair amount of teachers end up passing on bad habits they themselves learned and adopted. However, if a teacher can clearly explain the rationale for taking a certain approach if a student asks about it (without getting upset about having their authority/method questioned), that's a good sign.
I don't get it. I learned "touch typing" after playing a lot of games and frustrated unable to type quickly to reply to teammates or argue with opponents... forced to use Vim and SSH in college and ended up getting pretty good with "just keyboard." It's probably just an environment problem sometimes. I guess my method is to learn angrily, rage against dying of light.
Are you touch typing correctly though. I assume not based on the quotes. My younger brother did the same thing you did. He’s very very fast, but he doesn’t use all his fingers and many of his movements are inefficient. He’d be even faster if he was using the correct technique.
This is a great list. Some of my all time favorite hackers in there such as Casey Muratori and Andreas Kling.
Something that I have realized as I have gotten more experienced, is that things take time. I tried to shortcut my learning through every trick in the book and while I did manage to get pretty good in the first few years of hacking, only after I was close to 10 years of programming did I start noticing patterns and have an instinctive understanding of what to avoid and what to do.
In other words taste formation is a function of building hard things over a period of a very long time. There is simply no way of short circuiting that.
Your overall goal is to improve your ability to do some larger task. Larger tasks tend to be able to be broken down into smaller tasks. Improving your ability on smaller task tends to make you better at the larger task.
So what you do is find a way to:
- somewhat isolate a smaller task
- then focus on doing that smaller task with ONE particular focus or improvement in mind
- have feedback on how it went
When feedback is present and you are paying attention, you will tend to fairly naturally improve.
Repetion is good, but repetition in different circumstances is much better for learning.
Deliberate practice is practice + an evaluation feedback loop. If you aren't analyzing how you are doing and using that to feed back into your practice you are just practicing. The use of a coach\teacher\oracle as the evaluator is important because of the DK effect, higher skill people generally are better at evaluating a performance making the feedback loop better.
So in general: practice activity, evaluate performance, come up with drill to improve weaknesses identified during evaluation, do drill, repeat.
Only things I’ve done “it” for were matters of physical exercise - first indoor rowing utilising an actual coach and a progressively overloading program, and now for running utilising ChatGPT as my coach, as sort of an experiment.
I suppose the “how” is really boring, and that’s why none of the resources talking about deliberate practice really seem to dive too deep into it. For my rowing practice it was simply getting feedback from the coach constantly regarding form and doing checkups for my pacing and current condition. I’m more interested in this running practice with ChatGPT, where I aim to keep it updated on my current progress on the program we came up with together, and ask for advice on possible adjustments.
After all the difference between deliberate practice and any old practice seems to be the progression and constant feedback from someone who knows what they’re doing.
Love doing something so much that noticing what you are bad at and putting attention into picking up your performance in that area comes naturally (inspired practice is more effective than 'deliberate'). Along with the intelligence to solve those issues effectively and the wisdom to ignore what's not so important. Rinse and repeat for x units of attention.
Source/flex: that's what got me into the top .01% of multiple pursuits, or into a decent percentile with not that much time invested.
Peaks: Speedcubing (top 10), classical guitar (comp level in my youth), couple of major games (top .01% recently in one, top .1% a while ago).
I wish that I had learned to love programming in my teens, these things have made me happy but certainly not rich, haha. I like it but don't love it - I'm just okay at it.
Or just some guides for some topics, even a few examples of how deliberate practice for X might look like is already much better information to start your own practice than these aloof principles. It's great to know the principles if you're also aware on how to apply them, if there's no path to application it becomes mostly noise...
Write down the definitions of words with citations into a kind of personal glossary, drilling down until I have a concrete understanding. I typically put the definitions into a spreadsheet, one column being a direct quote from the reference and another being my own definition - this is typically more like color commentary and connects to other concepts or even just journals my own journey of exploration.
I check it first for word (or acronym) definitions and it reinforces the whole thing.
I have found it effective for doing deep dives into academic topics (so many medical research papers) and tech.
Actually no, as it turns out, I don't have 'the good ones' anymore - or at least not conveniently searchable in some cloud storage and instead on some specific machine somewhere. But a sample row of an older version is
APDU Application Layer Protocol Data Units, the actual packet on the network. Max size specified by device Max_APDU_Length_Accepted parameter, one of two alternatives to NSDU
later versions would simply have copy and pasted the relevant text from the source into a different column and the URL into another column - I would still use zotero as a citation manager it was simply convenient if I needed to go back to the source to review context. The core features are present here though: a definition some context that I thought was important, how I understood the thing itself.
Spaced repetition is useful, there's a level of nuance beyond that with interleaving and variation that hasn't really hit the mainstream of podcasters trying to hype research yet. https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/research/ has some good nuggets.
The article was so long, if someone here read it top to bottom I would be very impressed.
The "how" is taught in a lot of places without those people knowing what they're referring to; immediate feedback. In golf this takes the form of a launch monitor of some kind. You have to know when you do it wrong, and the faster you know the easier it is to correct.
Sorry for kinda hijacking this, but it is the main reason I am building trydeepwork.com, to actually put deep work or deliberate practice into actual "practice".
Do you think of deep work (as described by Cal Newport) and deliberate practice as being similar or connected? I could see deliberate practice being deep work, but deep work doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with deliberate practice.
I think the key here is that you only deliberately practice things that you really, really want. Things that you want so bad that you obsess over them and you wake up realizing you've been dreaming about them. I quit a comfortable software job to take about 9 months off to devote to piano recently. Every free moment I get, I'm throwing myself in the waters. It's really hard to push through the painful points of learning stuff if you're not obsessed.
I deliberately practice a lot of things that I'm not obsessed with, it's really useful when I'm overwhelmed with a new field (e.g. learning a new framework), to isolate a small bit I want to master and try several different ways of doing it, and document my findings.
That allows me to not see what I'm trying to learn as an obstacle to what I'm trying to achieve. It removes a lot of frustration, since that shifts my view of the task from being an obstacle to being the goal itself.
I'm not sure I would say that I focus on deliberately practicing the same few skills as often as the author of the article does, though. Usually, even for the few skills that I have deliberately practiced for a long time, my focus has been on exploring variations or adaptation to new context. That is because I aim for adaptability rather than having muscle memory of a skill.
I think the real key to top performance is to learn to get over the aches of practicing and training yourself to get engrossed in a range of subjects. Piano is good practice but I usually recommend something more dopamine efficient.
For those interested in an alternative view, check out Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
> Plenty of experts argue that anyone who wants to develop a skill, play an instrument, or lead their field should start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. If you dabble or delay, you’ll never catch up to the people who got a head start. But a closer look at research on the world’s top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule.
>But a closer look at research on the world’s top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule.
As another commenter has pointed out, this is a more comforting and maybe also more realistic stance when it comes to professional/scientific achievement. Unfortunately, however, early specialisation is definitely the rule nowadays in professional football ("soccer"). I'm assuming it's the same for Basketball/Football/Baseball/... in the US and elsewhere.
Pretty much every player who's playing in the top leagues now grew up in an academy, where their education and social lives revolved around their football practice routine, not the other way around. That is not only the top leagues like Premier League or La Liga, but also the leagues that come below it. Players like Brinkmann, Scholl, Bernd Schneider, ... are celebrated as the exception to the rule.
I used to "play" in the fifth league in Germany (Oberliga BaWü) for 2 seasons (barely got any time on the pitch) and even there, almost every player was in some sort of specialised training since they were 5 or 6, either in the youth programmes of local clubs or private academies their parents paid a lot of money for. Everyone is dreaming of playing in the Bundesliga and the academy owners know that. Players coming from a different sport later in their childhood were the exception.
> He discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel.
As for sports, he argues that individual sports like golf can be mastered through deliberate practice (ex. Tiger Woods), because there are a minimal, defined set of actions that need to happen. So you should go hit your 9-iron 10k times to get better.
However, with complex team sports like soccer, it’s a mix. For set plays and fitness you should use deliberate practice. But for the rest of the game you need creativity because the number of combinations of player sizes, speed and positioning quickly approaches infinity. And creativity can come from similar sports like basketball, or by playing full games against a wider variety of opponents.
And it seems akin to linguistics where the breakthroughs came not by breaking language down into discreet rules but by broadening the knowledge base.
You see this in MMA too where fighters will use deliberate practice for a specific punch or submission, but then will dramatically alter their training camps (often learning new techniques for the first time) depending on their opponent.
I wonder what the quality would be if football was not the hoover of European childhood athletic talent it currently is. Plenty of sportsmen in other fields played football as children and went onto success in other sports. Maybe if basketball was the predominant sport of young boys would we still have Messi and Ronaldo?
The opposite is true in the US. Parents treat soccer as a youth pastime and funnel kids towards basketball, football and baseball for high school and college.
Then the question becomes: Would LeBron or Patrick Mahomes be elite soccer players if they were raised in Europe?
My guess is yes. Their body composition would be different by following different fitness goals but I think there’s a combination of strength, balance, vision, endurance, leadership, decision making and determination that is highly translatable across team sports.
From the anecdata of professional athletes I'm aware of (NBA/NFL) there isn't really an "academy". And these folks weren't specialized at 5-6 years of age. They were extremely athletic and invested a lot of time in the teenage years when they showed promise.
Pro football/basketball are more about raw athleticism than technical ability. The guy who is super technically gifted and who has been training his entire life but not super athletic will either get bent in half by much larger, stronger players and have to retire due to injuries, or just be shut down by a genetic freak who took up the sport in high school
If you are further interested, check out the difference in player development in basketball between Europe and US. In EU there is much more focus on the systems and team play from the early age, whereas in US, as soon as someone shows promise, everything starts to revolve around them.
> Pretty much every player who's playing in the top leagues now grew up in an academy, where their education and social lives revolved around their football practice routine
The argument would only apply to star soccer players. Sure, lots of parents are talked into signing their kids up for pricey training when they're as young as 6. But if you check out big names like Messi, Iniesta, and Cristiano Ronaldo, they didn't hit the academy scene until they were almost teens, right before getting picked for major under-15 club teams. It looks more like you've got to go to an academy to get noticed, not that spending more time in one boosts your chances of making it big.
> The argument would only apply to star soccer players.
What do you mean by star players? If you're talking Big Five + MLS players, then you pretty much either need to be an academy or high level club (ECNL in USA for example) at a young age to have a chance.
Iniesta was part of La Masia, the youth academy for FC Barcelona. Messi/CR7 both played for the youth clubs of professional teams.
It could just be me self-soothing, but as a verified ADHDer who switches hobbies like I switch clothes, this book helped me feel less… bad? I guess? About my lack of specialization. But it’s fun that I have enough knowledge on lots of subjects to speak competently on them. The ones that surprise folks the most are usually photography and audio engineering/production, which I dabbled in for a long time.
He’s responding to the theory that some parents/teachers believe that if you can’t do X by age Y you’ll never be a top performer.
He’s saying you can still train but you don’t need to hit 10k hours in a specific skill to excel, especially in complex fields like team sports or creative thinking.
Having had a few years of intensive, classical-trained piano lessons at a young age, the notion of "deliberate practice" has also just meant "practice" to me: break down what you're learning into its separate parts, figure out which part you're weakest at, try to further isolate that specific thing into its own exercise, then do it slowly, gradually increase the pace, gradually re-incorporate the aspects you removed, play that part with the preceding music, play that part with the postceding music, play it without the sheet music, etc. Each step should feel uncomfortable at first, and once you get comfortable with it you move on to the next step until you can play it perfectly without any thought.
Kahneman has already touched on this, but obviously not all skills are predisposed to this type of practice. IIRC, this method of learning is useful for skills with shorter feedback loops (e.g. music, dance, gymnastics, some aspects of sports, etc.) and neutral to practically useless for skills with longer feedback loops or that can't be clearly broken down into its constituent parts (e.g. investing, science, entrepreneurship & innovation, etc.)
I wish all skills could be learned this way—it's the method of learning I'm most comfortable with. But of course, life is not always so easy.
For deliberately practising programming problems, I keep a spreadsheet and a journal. The spreadsheet tracks the problem, the difficulty level, the time it took me to solve it, the algorithm I used to solve it, and notes. I use the journal to dive in deep by explaining my solutions to someone who has never encountered the problem before. I'll often re-test on problems I've solved before and see if I can get a better time, use a different algorithm, or something else.
I also use flash cards where I put the problem description on the card and the algorithm to solve it on the back. This is to train me to read through lengthy, puffy, problem descriptions and get straight to the point.
... but I usually only do this when I'm preparing for interviews or feel like I need to sharpen up. Deliberate practice is one of those things where you can turn up the heat for a while but you'll need to take a break at some point and let it sink in to your subconscious.
> I also use flash cards where I put the problem description on the card and the algorithm to solve it on the back.
Have you used space repetition software (SRS) before? You’re 90%+ there already. You build up a deck of cards with a “memory prompt” on the front and the “memory” on the back.
The software tests you on the deck and passes your results through an SRS algorithm that estimates your “forgetting curve” that predicts when you’ll forget a memory.
Then, right before you forget, it’ll reprompt you to refresh the memory.
I didn't go through the article completely, but I know it's seriously underrated. One of the things the article probably didn't mention is it's ability to reduce stress. Quite often I've noticed that i get stressed as I make no progress on my goals. With deliberate practice / deep work, i see myself making progress on a daily basis. Slowly, but definitely.
There is reassurance in knowing you did what you could in a day, especially when you give yourself boundries to make sure it's sustainable. Such boundries should make sure you have space to do the work, but also that you are happy and not wearing yourself down, have good balance on other things in life. Long term goals take time, burning yourself out is pretty rapid.
I’m sorry to be a spoilsport, but is there any evidence that deliberate practice rather than ordinary practice is any good? I happily believe that one can easily convince how good you are doing—really killing that practicing—-but how do I know it is any better than dumb practise. It all sounds like a cargo cult to me. What is really happening is that some people have talent, but rather than accepting that genetic reality we are telling ourselves this fairy tale that they must do something different.
I just saw the schwarzenegger documentary on netflix. n-time world champion in body building. Do you want to know his secret? 3 sets per day, of 7 hours total, for years on end. Nothing deliberate about it.
It's great to apply "deliberate practice" "10,000 hours" and what else into domains that are strongly stable across time like mathematics, music, some foreign NATURAL language. You get to use the skill in which you invested so much of your time.
It sucks to apply even the least of effort into vaporware fashions like programming languages, tools and techniques. You don't even get to complete half of the 10,000 hours of effort to acquire the skill that the whole thing is already antiquated and thrown into the garbage can of history. You wasted a vast amount of time for next to nothing.
I feel you. That's why I try to limit my learnings as much as possible to "foundational" subjects. You can't go wrong by learning SQL in depth for example.
I just read the first paragraphs, and added it to my reading list!
I heard about deliberate practice for the first time in Cal Newport’s “Deep Work”. I’m a developer and coding is a perfect discipline where deliberate practice can apply.
I agree coding is a great discipline for both deep work and deliberate practice.
I would draw a distinction between the two. Deep work is about achieving the focus and attention to do serious work. Deliberate practice is about the motivation and effort to focus on improving your skill set.
You probably know this from Cal Newport’s excellent book, but for others. Two great but distinct mental tools to add to your kit.
I wonder how one would apply this to programming, I'd like to continuously improve my programming but not sure how to apply the ideas from this to it. I could see it being a thing for something very measurable like competitive programming, yet if I wanted to deliberately practice different aspects of software engineering is there anything specific to do besides building larger and more ambitious projects?
Perhaps purposefully creating small toy projects with "harder" aspects like concurrency, graphics, compilers etc... would help?
I was always intrigued about this concept, but when I wanted to try it in some specific area, let's say programming in specific language, or writing blog posts, I couldn't find more specific info how exactly would the training performed. Is there some template, which I can use to design deliberate practice training for X?
You want a all-knowing, well, relatively all-knowing, body, the master, to design what to be practiced. It is sometimes in direct conflict with another management fad - let people do their stuff. It is not specifically related to DP, but training in general. Just wanted to point it out
It's so strange that there's this whole realm of technical terms and scientism for what amounts to something so simple: In order to get good at some thing, you need to do that thing.
>Ah, yes, but Deliberate Practice aims to scientifically deconstruct each skill into some identifiable set of particular components
Yeah, whatever. Most knowledge is tacit, but go ahead and try to impose reductionism onto everything. If all you have is a hammer...
>Do you have a citation for most knowledge being tacit?
Nope, I'm just a skilled fool. Probably learned my skill in the most inefficient way possible - by just diving in and doing it. Go ahead and keep appealing to Dr. Doctorson. Amongst all his academizing, I'm sure he's formulated the most scientifically sound way to acquire a skill. Trust the science.
> In order to get good at some thing, you need to do that thing.
Professional musician here. Practice for one person is not the same as practice for another; and the resulting outcomes are different. There’s reductionism that serves and there’s fussy, pedantic reductionism. I’m not saying the latter doesn’t creep into this field (as in any) but by and large the distinction between just doing the thing and deliberate practice is significant. I’ve seen countless students just repeat repeat repeat their repertoire; and I’ve seen students employ principles of deliberate practice - highly focused, super-specific, acutely aware. The results are strikingly different. So I don’t think it’s excessively reductionist to account for those differences.
When I was a kid, I had a coach that would always say "Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent." I feel like that captures the difference here pretty well. If you practice something 10,000 times poorly, you're just going to engrain that poor performance to "expert" level. You can't magically get better at something just because you do it over and over, there has to be some evaluative component that shifts your actions over time.
Likewise. Had I taken it seriously at 16 when I started I'd be a significantly better guitarist. Instead of noodling actually practicing important concepts in a fundamental way that matters to improving. Music theory like keys and chord progressions, triads, scales (to some extent), timing and rhythm, etc.
You can certainly "practice" this stuff, but if you sit down, even for 10 minutes with a real deliberate intention it'll matter way more than noodling. Present me is kicking myself for being stupid when I was younger.
Really empathize with you! It does seem like you really want it, in that case, allow me to encourage you to start now. Literally 10-20 minutes of actual practice every day. You'll quickly improve.
Trying! I've been taking lessons for about 8 months. Unfortunately, due to work, my practice routine has been very hit and miss. I'm starting to try to find ways to work it in during breaks for work, using flash cards and such to just take a minute or two to review the knowledge specific bits. Then I have a plan for ways to utilize some of that knowledge and applying it on the guitar when I sit down.
Slowly but surely, I just need to really get a routine going. Thanks for the encouragement!
I've found Rocksmith to be great help for practice. Lots of drills to run, and instant feedback on performance. Fantastic for working on chord transitions and timing. Not a replacement for professional instruction, but a useful tool. Very easy way to take a 15 minute practice break, all you need is a laptop, guitar, interface cable, and headphones.
> Nope, I'm just a skilled fool. Probably learned my skill in the most inefficient way possible
You're saying it yourself right here. Just going out and "doing the thing" is not a time-effective way to learn. Nor, on average, is it going to get you to
the top of whatever discipline you are pursing (with the known caveat that certain disciplines do not lend themselves to deliberate practice).
> Why do people reference the ‘10,000 hour’? It instantly reduces your credibility because that number was made up.
It's just short-hand so we're on the same page and we all know that we're talking about the same thing. Shared knowledge is an important place to start from in order to communicate.
As for the exact number? Who cares? The number itself is irrelevant. Whatever the number is or what it might actually be (as if there could ever be one single number for it), it doesn't invalidate the ideas that it's associated with. This tired criticism is tired.
The article even addresses the number directly:
> Although the backlash against Gladwell’s calculation has arguably been exaggerated, it’s important to stress that research into deliberate practice emphasizes quality of practice, not quantity. It’s all too possible to spend 10,000 hours engaging in a skill without serious improvements. For example, most of us spend hours per day typing, yet we don’t see continuous improvements in speed and quality because we’re not using deliberate practice.
> The useful takeaway from the “10,000 hours rule” is simply that it takes a lot of work to become the best. There’s no magic number of practice sessions, and everyone’s path will look different. Just because successful people in a given field have spent around 10,000 hours practicing their key skill, that doesn’t mean every person who practices that skill for 10,000 hours will become successful.
But you probably didn't even read it before coming here to complain, did you?
A lot of frustration around the vagueness of online guides to DP. Here are the chapter headings from the Practiceopedia, an out of print guide to using deliberate practice principles in music training, with much broader applicability for most of them. This should give some idea of the detailed resolution you're looking for with DP.
Chapter guide
Beginners:
curing your addiction to the start of your peace
Blinkers:
shutting out the things you shouldn't be working on
Boot camp:
where you need to send passages that won't behave
Breakthroughs diary:
keeping track of your progress
Bridging:
smoothing the bumps between sections
Bug spotting:
because you can't fix what you don't know about
Campaigns:
connecting your daily practice to the big picture
Cementing:
locking in the version you want to keep
Chaining:
getting to full speed one segment at a time
Clearing obstacles:
finding what causes tricky bits to be tricky
Clock Watchers:
curing the unhealthy obsession with time
Closure:
knowing when you can safely stop practicing something
Color coding:
a whole new dimension to marking your score
Otherwise, you have to do something not quite DP. But that's ok, because in a mushy domain just acquiring the tacit knowledge that the experts have will put your far ahead ( because the pedological method and real coaches don't exist yet).
But yeah, it's not deliberate practice and reading books on deliberate practice might not help you much.
https://commoncog.com/tacit-knowledge-is-a-real-thing/
Here is my random programming take on it:
https://earthly.dev/blog/golang-streamers/