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This is a very good article, and I have translated it here. Through it, we can try to become a better version of ourselves, enjoy ❤️💛💚!

Deliberate practice is the best way to achieve professional performance in various fields (including writing, teaching, sports, programming, music, medicine, therapy, chess, and business). But deliberate practice is far more than just 10,000 hours. Read this article to learn how to accelerate your learning, overcome the "OK" plateau, convert experience into expertise, and enhance your focus.

What is Deliberate Practice?#

“By engaging in the creative process, we feel more alive than ever because we are creating something, not just consuming; we are the masters of our little reality. In doing this work, we are actually creating ourselves.” — Robert Greene, Mastery

Deliberate practice is the reason amateurs become professionals. In every field, deliberate practice is the reason for creating top performers and the means they use to stay ahead. It is absolutely essential for expert-level performance.

As a general concept, “practice” means preparation. It is the act of repeatedly performing certain activities to improve specific relevant skills. We rehearse what to do in low-pressure situations so that when we use those skills in situations where things are truly at stake (like in competitions or workplaces), we perform better. While this definition may seem obvious, it is crucial to distinguish between doing something and practicing it, as they are not always synonymous.

The main difference between doing and practicing is that we are only practicing something when we do it in a way that makes us better at it—or at least with that intention.

Deliberate practice means having a clear understanding of the specific components of the skill we want to improve and how to improve them while practicing. Unlike regular practice, where we repeat a skill over and over until it becomes almost unconscious, deliberate practice is a focused activity. It requires us to steadfastly pay attention to what we are doing at any given moment and whether it is an improvement.

Geoff Colvin summarizes deliberate practice in Talent Is Overrated:

Deliberate practice has several elements, each of which is worth studying. It is an activity specifically designed to improve performance, often requiring the help of a teacher; it can be repeated many times; it continuously provides feedback on results; whether it is purely intellectual activities like chess or business-related activities, or physically demanding activities like sports, it is mentally demanding; and it is not very enjoyable.

The extraordinary power of deliberate practice lies in its aim for continuous improvement. Practitioners are not satisfied with repeating a skill at the same level. They have metrics to measure performance. They are eager to see those metrics continually improve.

In deliberate practice, we are always looking for mistakes or weaknesses. Once we identify one, we create a plan to improve it. If one method doesn’t work, we continually try new methods until we find one that does.

Through deliberate practice, we can overcome many limitations we think are fixed. When we start, we can go further than we imagine. Deliberate practice can create new physical and mental capabilities—it is not just about leveraging existing abilities.

The more we engage in deliberate practice, the greater our abilities become. Our minds and bodies are more malleable than we usually realize.

Deliberate practice is a universal technique that you can apply to anything you want to excel at (or just get a little better at). It is easiest to apply in competitive fields with clear measurements and standards, including music, dance, soccer/football, cricket, hockey, basketball, golf, horseback riding, swimming, and chess.

But deliberate practice is also incredibly valuable for improving performance in fields like teaching, nursing, surgery, therapy, programming, trading, and investing. It can even accelerate your progress in broadly applicable skills like writing, decision-making, leadership, learning, and verbal communication.

The key in any field is to identify objective standards of performance, study the best performers, and then design practice activities that reflect what they do. In recent decades, there have been tremendous leaps in ability across many fields. The explanation for this is that we are better understanding and applying the principles of deliberate practice. As a field progresses, people can learn from the best knowledge of those who came before them. The result is that ordinary high school students achieve athletic feats, and children's musical talents reach levels that seemed unimaginable a century ago. There is little evidence to suggest that we have reached the limits of physical or mental ability in any field.

Many of us spend a lot of time practicing different skills in our lives and work each week. But we do not automatically get better just by repeating the same actions and behaviors, even if we spend hours doing so every day. Research shows that people with years of experience in fields like medicine are often not better than novices and may even be worse.

If we want to improve a skill, we need to know exactly what needs to change and what can help us do that. Otherwise, we will stagnate.

Some people will tell you that anyone can only improve at anything through deliberate practice, and any other form of practice is a waste of time. This is an exaggeration. In reality, regular practice helps reinforce and maintain skills. It can also help us improve skills, especially in the early stages of learning. However, deliberate practice is the only way to:

1. Achieve expert-level performance and enjoy competitive success

2. Overcome plateaus in our skill levels

3. Improve skills faster than through regular practice

If you are doing something just for fun and do not care about continuous improvement, then you do not need deliberate practice. For example, maybe you enjoy walking to the local park in the afternoon to clear your mind. Even though you are practicing this walking technique each time, you may not care about improving your walking speed every day. Repeating it further solidifies the habit and helps maintain a certain level of physical fitness. Not everything in life is competitive! However, if you want to get better at something quickly or reach an expert level, then deliberate practice is essential.

Another important point to note is that deliberate practice is not just an appealing name we came up with out of thin air. The term is largely credited to K. Anders Ericsson, one of the most influential figures in the field of performance psychology. Many scientists have studied it for decades. Everything we are discussing here is backed by a wealth of academic research, particularly Ericsson's work.

We will also debunk many myths surrounding deliberate practice as a concept and reveal some of its significant limitations. So if you are looking for quick tricks to achieve overnight fame, you might want to look elsewhere. If you want a practical roadmap to improve your performance, keep reading.

Elements of Deliberate Practice#

“Life is not always a good hand of cards; sometimes, you have to play a bad hand well.” — Jack London

In this section, we will break down the fundamental elements of deliberate practice and how to incorporate them into your practice routine. As Ericsson wrote in Peak, “The most effective way to improve performance in any field is to follow a set of principles.” We will explain why each component is crucial and how they apply to different fields, and we will introduce various ways to achieve them based on your goals.

Deliberate Practice is Structured and Organized#

“Everyone has talent. Rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places it leads.” — Erica Jong

As humans, we always want to do the simplest thing to save energy. Simply put, laziness is in our nature. When we practice something frequently, we develop habits that can be formed with almost no effort. While this benefits many aspects of our lives (and helps us survive), we must overcome it to engage in deliberate practice. If we keep repeating elements of skills we already know how to do easily, we cannot expect to improve continuously. If we just want to have fun or strengthen our habits, that is enough.

The structure of deliberate practice is to improve specific elements of skills through defined techniques. Practitioners first focus on what they cannot do. They look for areas of weakness that affect their overall performance and target those areas. At each stage, they set tailored, measurable goals to assess whether their practice is effectively pushing them forward. Numbers are the best friends of deliberate practitioners.

If you want to achieve expert-level performance, you need to consider a plan when you start practicing. You need to know what you are doing, why, and how you intend to improve it. You also need a way to judge whether your improvement efforts are ineffective and whether you need to try new strategies. Once you reach the goals for specific components of that skill, it is time to identify a new area of weakness for the next step.

Having many small, realistic goals and a game plan to achieve them makes deliberate practice more motivating. There is a sense of continuous movement, but the next step is always a realistic stretch. Day after day, the gains from deliberate practice may seem insignificant. However, when we look back over a longer period, small improvements can turn into significant leaps.

How to achieve this: Take the skill you want to improve and break it down into the smallest possible components. Create a plan to complete them in logical order, starting with the basics and building upon them. Decide which parts you want to master in the next month. Schedule your practice sessions in your calendar, and plan precisely which skill components you will practice in each session.

Do not expect your plan to be perfect. You may need to revise it continually as you discover new elements or unexpected weaknesses. The most important thing is to always have a plan for what you are working on and how. Knowing what you are going to do next is the best way to stay on track and avoid wasting time aimlessly. This means continually identifying the reasons that differentiate you from higher levels of performance so that you can focus on them.

Deliberate Practice is Challenging and Uncomfortable#

“A person must cultivate an instinct for goals that can only be achieved through their utmost effort.” — Albert Einstein (signed)

Imagine the world from the perspective of a baby learning to walk for the first time. It is often not a simple process. They need to develop many new skills and abilities. They need to build enough muscle strength to stand upright without support. They need to learn how to coordinate their limbs well to move around. In the process, babies need to develop many sub-skills, such as how to grasp something to pull themselves up. Mastering walking may require thousands of attempts, along with countless falls, bumps, and other accidents. As adults, we may not remember this process, but a baby learning to walk spends a lot of time challenging themselves and gradually stepping out of their comfort zone.

If we want to use deliberate practice, we can learn a thing or two from babies. Deliberate practice is not always fun. In fact, most of the time, it is a process of repeated frustration and failure. We fall dozens of times for every step we take. That is the point.

The idea that deliberate practice requires us to constantly target our weakest areas means spending time doing things we are not good at. At the moment, this can feel very painful. But the fastest path to improvement is to step out of our comfort zone.

People who have spent decades doing something are not necessarily better than novices because they can easily become complacent and stop pushing themselves. We need to keep trying to do things that currently feel out of reach.

In his research on elite violinists, Ericsson asked them to rate different practice activities based on how enjoyable they were and how much they contributed to improving their performance. There is always an inverse relationship between the usefulness of an activity and its enjoyment. As Ericsson states in Peak:

The reason most people do not have these extraordinary physical abilities is not that they lack ability, but because they are satisfied living in a comfortable bodily equilibrium, never doing the necessary work to break free from it. They live in a world of “good enough.” The same is true for all the mental activities we engage in.

Elsewhere in the book, he writes, “This is the fundamental truth of any form of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.” The interesting part is that the more time you spend in deliberate practice, the more comfortable you become with discomfort.

Daniel Coyle writes in The Little Book of Talent:

There is a place, right at the edge of your ability, where you learn best and fastest. This is called the sweet spot... The basic pattern is the same: look for ways to stretch yourself. Push the edge of your ability. As Albert Einstein said, “A person must cultivate an instinct for goals that can only be achieved through their utmost effort.”

The key word is “utmost.”

A quick way to assess whether you are engaging in deliberate practice or just regular rote memorization is to ask yourself if you feel bored or distracted during practice. If the answer is yes, then you are likely not practicing deliberately.

Deliberate practice is not boring. Frustrating, yes. Infuriating, yes. Annoying, even. But never dull. Once practicing a skill becomes comfortable, it is time to raise the stakes. Challenging yourself is not just about working hard—it means doing new things.

Pushing ourselves beyond our limits is uncomfortable, but it is the way we do our best work—in fact, it may be the source of some of our most fulfilling moments. According to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, we often experience joy by entering a state of “flow”, which occurs when we are highly focused on a challenging but achievable activity. In moments of flow, we become so immersed in the activity that we lose any sense of time or self-awareness.

Noel Tichy, a professor at the University of Michigan Business School and former head of General Electric's renowned Crotonville Management Development Center, divides the concept of practice into three zones: Comfort Zone, Learning Zone, and Panic Zone.

Most of the time, when we practice, we are actually operating within our comfort zone. This does not help us improve because we can already do these activities easily. On the other hand, operating in the panic zone paralyzes us because the activities are too difficult, and we do not know where to start. The only way to make progress is to operate in the learning zone, where the activities are just out of reach.

Repetition within the comfort zone does not equal deliberate practice. Deliberate practice requires you to operate in the learning zone, and you can repeat that activity multiple times with feedback.

How to implement: Each time you practice a component of a skill, aim to make it 10% harder than you feel comfortable with.

Once a month, conduct a practice session where you set an ambitious stretch goal for yourself—not impossible, just far above your current level. Challenge yourself and see how close you can get. You might surprise yourself and find that you perform much better than expected.

A common mistake in deliberate practice is planning a long practice session and then adjusting the intensity of the practice to keep you engaged in one skill. Engaging in “sprints” is much more effective. Practice with the most concentrated attention you can manage for a short period, then take a break. You learn the most when you push beyond your current abilities, so shorter, more challenging practice times are the way to go.

Deliberate Practice Requires Rest and Recovery Time#

“There is a time for talking, and a time for sleeping.” — Homer, The Odyssey

Given how challenging deliberate practice is, it is impossible to do it all day long. In various fields, top practitioners rarely spend more than three to five hours on high-end deliberate practice. They may work more hours than that each day, but very few can sustain the mental energy required for eight hours of deliberate practice in a day. Extra time often leads to diminishing returns, meaning more practice can make performance worse because it leads to burnout. Geoff Colvin writes:

The work is so great that it seems no one can sustain it for long. A consistently observed finding across disciplines is that four to five hours a day seems to be the upper limit for deliberate practice, and it is usually done in sessions lasting no more than one hour to ninety minutes.

Ericsson's research on elite violinists found that they often took naps, averaging eight hours of sleep per night, far more than the average person. They were very aware of the importance of sleep.

Even spending just one hour a day on deliberate practice can provide enough time for substantial improvement, especially when we commit to it over the long term. Continuous investment in the long game pays off in the long run.

Most deliberate practitioners do not spend all day on it; they also spend a lot of time resting and recovering. They sleep as much as possible. If necessary, they take naps. They often take breaks to refresh themselves. Most of us understand the need for rest after physical exercise. But we can also underestimate its importance after mental activity. Deliberate practice needs to be sustainable over the long term. The time it takes for someone to master a skill is often far more important than how much time they spend on it each day.

When you engage in deliberate practice, truly practice. When you are resting, truly relax. No one can spend every waking hour engaged in deliberate practice.

Sleep is a crucial component of deliberate practice. Sleeping does not mean you are not improving your skills. We consolidate memories at night, transferring them from short-term memory to long-term memory. If we do not remember what we learned each time, we cannot fully benefit from deliberate practice. Moreover, lack of sleep can lead to excessive negative cognitive effects that impact performance. If we are sleep-deprived, we are likely to forget more of what we learned in deliberate practice, reducing its usefulness.

When you are not engaging in deliberate practice, your brain is still working. During deliberate practice, we are in focused mode. When we let our minds wander during rest, we are in diffuse mode. Although that time may feel less productive, it is when we make connections and think carefully about problems. Both modes of thinking are equally valuable, but it is important to have harmony between them. We cannot maintain focused mode efforts for long periods. At some point, we need to relax and enter diffuse mode. Learning a complex skill—language, instrument, chess, mental models—requires both modes to work together. We master the details in focused mode and then understand how everything fits together in diffuse mode. It is about combining creativity with execution.

How to implement: List activities you can do without much conscious thought to allow yourself to daydream while doing them. Common examples include walking, washing dishes, showering, free writing in a journal, playing with Lego or other toys, driving familiar routes, gardening, cooking, listening to music, or just staring out the window. When you feel tired or hit a barrier in deliberate practice, do not push too hard. You want to stretch yourself, not exhaust yourself. Instead, switch to one of these easier activities for at least five minutes. You are likely to return to practice with new connections or ultimately feel refreshed.

Deliberate Practice Involves Continuous Feedback and Measurement#

“Deliberate practice is hard. It hurts. But it works. More means better performance, and a lot means outstanding performance.” — Geoff Colvin, Talent Is Overrated

Practicing something without knowing if you are getting better at it is pointless. However, this is what most of us do every day without thinking.

As we have seen, deliberate practice involves continually stretching ourselves to improve weak areas of skills. To do this, practitioners need constant feedback on their current performance levels so they can determine what can make it better.

What gets measured gets managed. To engage in deliberate practice, you need a way to measure the most enlightening metrics related to your performance. Understanding how these metrics change is the only way to know if your practice is effective. High performers in various fields often take the time to carefully review their past performances to identify areas for improvement. For example, a tennis player might film themselves playing a match so they can review it frame by frame afterward. This provides valuable feedback as they can identify what might be hindering their progress during weaker moments.

In fields like sports and chess, measuring performance is often straightforward. In other areas like business, measurement can be more challenging, and there may not be definitive markers of success. The influence of random factors may also be stronger, making it less clear whether technical changes truly have an impact. When you engage in deliberate practice, it is always important to understand how strongly correlated your practice and your performance may be.

When measuring your performance, be wary of vanity metrics. These numbers are easy to calculate and feel good. But they do not actually drive real performance improvement or help you achieve your goals. For example, suppose you are using deliberate practice to improve your email marketing skills, which is part of a broader goal of attracting more customers to your business. The number of email subscribers is a vanity metric; the number of paying customers is a useful metric. It is entirely possible to increase the former without a corresponding increase in the latter.

How to implement: Identify the most important metrics related to your skill performance and record them each time you practice. It is easy to fool yourself if you do not clearly document your actions. You may want to break the skill down into several different parts to measure it, but make sure you are not focusing on vanity metrics.

Deliberate Practice is Most Effective with the Help of a Coach or Teacher#

“The best teacher is not the one with the most knowledge, but the one who can simplify that knowledge into obvious and beautiful compounds.” — H.L. Mencken (signed)

Deliberate practice is most effective when done with a coach who can provide feedback, point out mistakes, suggest improvements, and provide essential motivation. While mastering any skill requires a lot of time spent practicing alone, it is extremely valuable to work with a coach at least some of the time. In fields like sports and music, it is common for coaches to be present. But most top performers benefit from a combination of coaching and solo practice.

When we examine the lives of those who achieve great things, we often find that those who excel at a young age or in a shorter time frame benefited from having excellent teachers. For example, physicist Werner Heisenberg had a breakthrough just five years after he began studying physics seriously, leading to the formation of matrix mechanics. But he undoubtedly benefited from the guidance of two of the most important physicists of the time, Niels Bohr and Max Born.

Even the highest performers across fields can benefit from expert guidance. Doing something and teaching that thing are independent skills. The best practitioners are not always the best teachers because teaching itself is a skill.

Ericsson explains, “The best way to overcome any obstacle is to start from different directions, which is also one of the reasons working with a teacher or coach is useful.” We often make the same mistakes over and over because we are not aware of what we are doing. Our performance gets stuck, and we cannot figure out why we keep encountering the same issues.

A coach can see your performance from the outside without being influenced by overconfidence and other biases. They can identify your blind spots. They can help you interpret key metrics and feedback.

Ericsson continues, “Even the most motivated and intelligent students struggle to know the best order to learn things, understand and demonstrate the correct way to execute various skills, provide useful feedback, and design practice activities aimed at overcoming specific weaknesses.” An experienced coach will have worked with many people using the same skills, so they will be able to offer advice on the best ways to structure practice. When you are just repeating things you find easy, they will know, and they will be able to push you to a new level.

A teacher or coach will see what you are missing and make you aware of your shortcomings. Geoff Colvin writes:

In certain fields, especially in intellectual domains like art, science, and business, people may eventually become proficient enough to design their own practice. But anyone who thinks they have outgrown the benefits of teacher assistance should at least question that view. The best golfers in the world still seek help from teachers for a reason.

But what if you do not have access to a coach? What if you cannot hire one or one is not applicable to your specific skill? In that case, you can still apply the same principles that make coaching useful to yourself. Top performers across fields develop metacognitive skills that essentially allow them to self-guide. Colvin explains:

The best performers closely observe themselves. They can actually step outside themselves, monitor what is happening in their minds, and ask how things are going. Researchers call this metacognition—knowledge about your own knowledge, thinking about your own thoughts. The best performers do this more systematically than others; it is a regular part of their daily work.

… A key part of self-assessment is identifying the causes of those mistakes. Average performers tend to think their mistakes are caused by factors beyond their control: My opponent was lucky; the task was too hard; I just don’t have the natural ability. In contrast, the best performers believe they are responsible for their mistakes. Note that this is not just a difference in personality or attitude. Recall that the best performers have set very specific, technically based goals and strategies for themselves; they have thought carefully about how they intend to achieve what they want. Therefore, when something does not work, they can connect the failure to specific elements of performance that might have failed.

How to implement: Do not expect the same teacher to be right for you forever. As our skill levels improve, we often need different teachers because we have outgrown them. One characteristic of a good teacher is that they know when to tell students to move on. When we reach expert-level performance, we need teachers who are experts themselves. If they are always a step ahead, we can learn from their mistakes rather than making them ourselves.

If you show that you are open to constructive criticism, even if it feels uncomfortable, you will get the best results from working with a coach. If you react poorly, you will suppress what they tell you is most useful. The best performers know that the goal is to get better, not just to hear that you are already great.

Deliberate Practice Requires Intrinsic Motivation#

Despite the inherent difficulties and discomfort, sticking with deliberate practice requires a lot of motivation. But this motivation must be intrinsic, meaning it comes from within us because we find the activity itself enjoyable. This stands in stark contrast to extrinsic motivation, where we engage in an activity to gain external rewards or avoid negative consequences. Rest is another reason why deliberate practice is important, as it helps maintain motivation.

While deliberate practice can bring external rewards for using a skill (like winning a competition or getting a promotion), this should not be the only reason to practice it. Extrinsic motivation is unlikely to be sufficient to get us through the long struggle required to master a skill. Mastering anything means spending time repeatedly failing, during which there are almost no external rewards. However, if we enjoy getting better for our own sake, we are more likely to stick with it until our practice starts to pay off. We can push through obstacles because we want to see where the road might take us—obstacles are not roadblocks.

If you want to master a skill through deliberate practice, you need to be willing to keep practicing regardless. While brute force and rewarding yourself may work in the short term, they will not be effective forever. If you intend to engage in deliberate practice to achieve expert-level performance, make sure it is a prospect that excites you, even if it is not always fun.

However, extrinsic motivation is not always ineffective. Those who engage in consistent, sustainable deliberate practice often know when and how to use external incentives. It is important to reward yourself when you make progress in practice and reflect on how far you have come, not just how far you have left to go.

The need for intrinsic motivation is one reason why children who are pushed by their parents to develop skills from a young age do not always end up performing at high levels and often drop out quickly.

How to implement this: List the reasons you want to learn a skill and the benefits that improving that skill might bring. Before you start deep practice, reread the list to remind yourself why you are focusing all your attention on the difficult things. You can also list some benefits you have gained in the past or include quotes from the top performers in fields you find inspiring. It may feel cheesy, but it can provide a powerful boost during particularly challenging practice moments. Try to focus on intrinsic reasons and benefits, such as feeling fulfilled.

Keep a “motivation journal” for a week (or longer if possible). Try to set an alarm during each practice session that goes off every fifteen minutes. When the alarm goes off, rate your motivation on a scale of 10 (or any scale you prefer). At the end of the week, review your notes for any patterns. For example, you might find that you start to feel frustrated after practicing for over an hour, or that you feel more motivated in the morning, or some other pattern. This information can be enlightening for planning future deliberate practice sessions, even if it may disrupt your focus at the time. Another approach is to simply take notes daily, recording your motivation levels while learning the chosen skill. Pay attention to any recurring influences. For example,

An effective option for maintaining motivation is to find someone who can be your reliable cheerleader. In an Ask Me Anything session for Farnam Street members, Tesla co-founder Marc Tarpenning explained that having a co-founder is crucial for entrepreneurs because working with others helps maintain motivation. It is rare for both founders to feel low morale on the same day. Therefore, if one person is struggling, the other can provide the encouragement needed to stay resilient. Having someone provide extrinsic motivation when you need it can help you stick with deliberate practice. Your cheerleader does not necessarily need to be learning the same skill themselves. They just need to understand your reasons and be willing to remind you when you start to doubt whether the effort is worth it.

Deliberate Practice Takes Time and Can Be a Lifelong Process#

While deliberate practice often leads to faster progress than normal practice, truly mastering a skill is a lifelong process. Reaching the peak of a field can take years or even decades, depending on its competitiveness. As the standards for success in many fields continue to rise, more deliberate practice is needed to stand out.

When we applaud the top talent in any field, we often do not realize that their success almost always comes after years of deliberate practice, which Robert Greene refers to in Mastery as “a sustained period of self-directed apprenticeship lasting about five to ten years” [and] “rarely receives attention because it does not contain the stories of great achievements or discoveries.” They may ultimately benefit from a lucky break, but their extensive preparation means they are ready. Great achievements often appear later in life or even at the end of a career. Those who achieve success at a young age are very young.

In decades of research, Ericsson looked for examples of true prodigies: individuals born with extraordinary talent. He never found a verified example. Instead, he found that those labeled as prodigies always engaged in a significant amount of deliberate practice—they just often deliberately obscured it or started at a young age.

While innate differences are important when starting to learn something (those who start with advantages may find it easier to persist), in the long run, deliberate practice always prevails.

David Shenk writes in The Genius in All of Us: “Short bursts of intensity cannot replace long-term commitment. Many significant changes occur over long periods. Physiologically, it is impossible to become great overnight.”

According to psychologist John Hayes, creative genius often emerges after ten years of learning relevant knowledge and developing skills. Hayes refers to this as “a decade of silence.” In a study of 76 composers with sufficient biographical data listed in The Lives of Great Composers, Hayes found that they almost always created their first famous work (defined as a work with at least five different recordings at the time) at least ten years after they began serious music study. Of the 500 works included in Hayes' sample, only three were created after less than ten years of preparation—and those were completed in eight or nine years. In other studies, Hayes found similar patterns for painters and poets.

Subsequent research has reinforced Hayes' findings; any casual survey of the lives of those widely regarded as geniuses tends to show similar patterns. Breakthroughs take time. When someone seems to achieve fame overnight, there is almost always a long period of silent deliberate practice behind it. Talent is just a starting point. If we want to master a skill, we need to invest a long period of time learning it, and it is likely that there will be little return for a while. While there is no guarantee that struggle will yield rewards, without it, the odds are lower.

Not only do world-class performers spend a long time improving their core skills, but those in creative fields often produce a significant amount of work before gaining recognition. For every piece of work we are familiar with, there may be dozens or even hundreds of others that few remember or have seen.

For example, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is renowned for his exceptional public speaking. One of his most famous speeches, “We shall fight on the beaches,” delivered in June 1940, showcased his mastery of oratory and helped bolster morale at the time. But however much Churchill's prolificacy as a speaker is exaggerated, it is estimated that he delivered [3,000 speeches](https://richardlangworth.com/words#:~:text=To be precise you’d,at a guess%2C 2500 speeches.) during his political career. For each speech—from 1900 to 1955, averaging once a week—he prepared through deliberate practice. He rehearsed intensively in front of a mirror, taking notes and notifying revisions. Churchill also went to great lengths to plan his pauses and gestures in advance. In addition to designing his techniques to enhance impact, he memorized some of the most inspiring speeches in history.

While it is undeniable that he had some talent from the start (his father, Randolph Churchill, was also a respected speaker), Churchill clearly engaged in extensive deliberate practice on that foundation. While this impressive resume and history solidified his place atop the pantheon of great speakers, it is worth noting that he was not a “natural speaker”—in fact, he made many mistakes. He learned from them. If you want to create a masterpiece, you need to first accept that you will produce many less-than-stellar works.

Deliberate Practice Requires Intense Focus#

“You rarely make significant progress if you do not complete tasks with full concentration.” — K. Anders Ericsson

The more focused we are in deliberate practice, the more we can gain from it. Intense focus allows us to improve skills and break through plateaus. Developing your attention span can have a huge impact on your life. When asked about his success, Charlie Munger said, “I succeeded because my attention is long.”

The Game Before the Game author writes: “If you can only focus for five minutes during practice, then take a break every five minutes. If you can only pay attention to twenty balls, do not hit fifty. To be able to practice longer and maintain the quality of practice, train yourself to focus longer... Effective practice is about how you can maintain your intent and measure it by the quality of the experience, not the amount of time spent.”

One benefit of receiving continuous feedback is that it can show you what drives performance improvement and what is working. Some practice activities can feel good without any impact. The best performers prioritize knowing what to focus on. They always start with the most important tasks because anything else is a distraction.

Intense focus is a multiplier for everything else. Paying close attention to key metrics allows top performers to identify and systematically eliminate distractions in their lives. To perform at your best, you need to focus on both the micro and macro levels. You need to be fully engaged in what you are doing in the current practice, and you need to know how it fits into the bigger picture of the trajectory you want. Deliberate practice is part of the exploration phase of opportunity selection.

As the authors of [The Handbook of International Professional and Practice-Based Learning] write, “Practicing the right things is at the core of the theory of deliberate practice.”

How to implement: Put the big rocks in first. You can do anything, but you cannot do everything. Figure out which practice activities have the most significant impact on your performance and plan to engage in those activities first before considering those that offer marginal returns.

Deliberate Practice Utilizes the Spacing Effect#

One reason consistent deliberate practice sessions over the years are more effective than long sessions in a short time relates to the spacing effect. We cannot learn skills through deliberate practice in the same way we learn for exams in school. If we better understand how our minds work, we can use them optimally for learning. By leveraging the spacing effect, we can encode valuable knowledge related to our specific life skills during practice.

Mastery of memory comes from repeated exposure to the same material. The spacing effect refers to how we better recall information and concepts if we learn them over multiple sessions with increasing intervals between them. The most effective way to learn new information is through spaced repetition. It can be used to learn almost anything, and research provides compelling evidence that it works for people of all ages, even for animals.

Spaced repetition is also satisfying because it keeps us at the edge of our abilities (as we saw earlier, this is a core element of deliberate practice). Spaced training allows us to spend less total time memorizing, while reading the same material over and over in one session can feel boring. Of course, when we feel bored, we pay less attention. The author of Focused Determination states:

When revisiting material in a short time, the way it is presented to the brain has minimal variation. This often reduces our learning. In contrast, when repeated learning occurs over a longer period, the material is more likely to be presented in different ways. We must retrieve previously learned information from memory, thereby reinforcing it. All of this makes us more interested in the content, making it easier to absorb the learning.

We cannot practice once and expect it to stick.

By regularly engaging in deliberate practice, even if each session is short, we can harness the power of the spacing effect. Once we have learned something through spaced repetition, it will actually stay with us. At some point, we may only need to revisit it every few years to keep our knowledge fresh. Even if we seem to forget some things between repetitions, it later proves easier to relearn.

How to implement: Forget cramming. Each time you learn a new component of a skill, create a schedule for review. A typical system includes checking the information after one hour, then one day, then every other day, then weekly, then every two weeks, then monthly, then every six months, and finally yearly. If you guess correctly, the information moves up a level and is reviewed less frequently. If you guess incorrectly, it drops a level and is reviewed more frequently.

The History of Deliberate Practice#

K. Anders Ericsson: The Expert on Expertise#

“Learning is not a way to unleash potential; it is a way to develop potential.” — K. Anders Ericsson, Peak

The concept of deliberate practice is credited to K. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist at Florida State University, who conducted groundbreaking research in the field of expert performance with his collaborators. Ericsson spent decades trying to answer how to truly excel at difficult tasks. His research often focused on medicine, music, and sports.

Ericsson's interest in expert performance began in the late 1970s when he started collaborating with psychologist Bill Chase at Carnegie Mellon University to study short-term memory. Together, they began a series of experiments to see how many random digits could be remembered after hearing them once. Ericsson and Chase used an undergraduate named Steve Faloon as their subject. For several hours each week, they read digits, and Faloon repeated as many as he could.

While this experiment may sound tedious, they discovered something interesting. In a 1982 paper titled “Exceptional Memory,” Ericsson and Chase summarized their findings. Previously, researchers believed that the average person's short-term memory could only hold 7 random digits. However, after careful practice, Faloon began to remember more and more digits. At his peak, after 200 hours of practice, he could recall 82 digits. To assess whether this was a fluke, Ericsson conducted the same experiment with his friend Dario Donatelli. Five years later, Donatelli could recall 113 digits. Both he and Faloon far exceeded what seemed to be the unshakeable limits of human performance and broke existing world records.

Seeing two individuals starting from ordinary memory improve their abilities so dramatically inspired Ericsson to further study the impact of practice on skills. Did extraordinary abilities come from extraordinary practice rather than just innate talent?

Through studying expert performers in a variety of fields, Ericsson concluded that the way they practiced skills was entirely different from that of amateurs. Ericsson described this practice as “thoughtful” because it is organized and highly conscious. He believed that experts become experts largely due to the way they practice. They may benefit from innate advantages, but their talent itself is not innate.

Ericsson also believed that if practitioners adopted the principles of deliberate practice, standards in many other fields could be raised far above current levels. In fact, over time, the high-performance standards in many fields have significantly improved. Today, high school students complete athletic feats that were once Olympic-level, and children play music that was once considered world-class. This is possible because of better training and a better understanding of how to become the best. The more we improve our training methods, the more we can expand the range of possible performance.

In 2016, Ericsson published Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, a popular science book that distilled thirty years of his research experience. He also co-edited the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance published in 2006.

Malcolm Gladwell: The 10,000-Hour Rule#

Ericsson's work became widely known outside of the scientific community in part due to Malcolm Gladwell's 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success. In the book, Gladwell attributes extraordinary success in various fields to a combination of lucky factors (such as when or where a person is born) and approximately 10,000 hours of practice. He derived this number from studies, including Ericsson's, which showed that top-performing companies often invest about this amount of time before reaching peak performance.

Gladwell demonstrated that the success of figures like Bill Gates and the Beatles had less to do with their character and more to do with where they came from. “The people who stand in front of kings may look like they did it on their own,” Gladwell wrote. “But in fact, they have always benefited from hidden advantages, extraordinary opportunities, and cultural legacies that have allowed them to learn and work hard and understand the world in ways others cannot.”

The so-called “10,000-Hour Rule” gained popularity. It is an appealing idea, leading many to believe that anyone can master anything as long as they put in the time. Ericsson himself disputed Gladwell's interpretation of his research, which led to the widespread belief that the time a person spends practicing predicts their success, without emphasizing the quality of their practice.

While the strong opposition to Gladwell's calculation may be exaggerated, it is important to emphasize that research on deliberate practice highlights the quality of practice rather than the quantity. It is quite possible to spend 10,000 hours on a skill without making significant improvements. For example, most of us spend hours typing every day, but we do not see sustained improvements in speed and quality because we are not using deliberate practice.

The useful takeaway from the “10,000-Hour Rule” is that becoming the best requires a lot of effort. There is no magical number of practice sessions, and everyone's path will look different. Just because successful people in a field have spent about 10,000 hours practicing their key skills does not mean that everyone who practices that skill for 10,000 hours will succeed.

Limitations and Drawbacks of Deliberate Practice#

Part of us wants to believe that expert performance is innate and magical so that we can avoid our own hard work. Another part of us wants to believe that it is earned through blood, sweat, and tears—if only we could fully commit to something, we too could achieve remarkable results.

In reality, deliberate practice is far more complex and nuanced than many would have you believe. It is not a panacea and cannot solve all your work and artistic-related problems. Let’s take a look at some limitations of deliberate practice.

First, deliberate practice is a necessary but not sufficient part of becoming a world-class performer. Without it, you cannot reach the peak. But it is not enough to be the absolute best in any field. Once your skill reaches a higher level, everyone is engaging in a significant amount of deliberate practice.

If your goal is expertise or just very good performance, then deliberate practice is likely to get you there. However, the higher you rise, the more luck and randomness matter. No matter how much deliberate practice you engage in, you cannot control the random events (good or bad) that determine a large part of life.

When we examine the lives of top performers, we often find that, in addition to engaging in deliberate practice, they typically benefit from specific backgrounds or opportunities. For example, if you want to become a chess champion, having a mother who is a chess champion would be a significant boost. You would not only have potential genetic advantages but also likely have been exposed to chess growing up, encouraged to practice it from a young age, and have someone to seek advice from.

Given the need for years of sustained deliberate practice to master a skill, those who start early have an advantage over those who start later. This does not mean you cannot become exceptional at something discovered in adulthood (just look at Julia Child or refer to Guitar Zero). But it does mean that those who start practicing deliberately from a young age are more likely to enjoy success, which may help them continue to persist. If you have to juggle unrelated work, care for your family, and deal with the countless responsibilities of adult life while trying to master a skill, you may have less space than a ten-year-old child.

Those who discover they want to master a skill early in life or are encouraged to do so by others have an advantage. Once the opportunity for practice is in place, the prospects for high achievement take off. If practice is denied or reduced, no amount of talent can get you there.

Aside from lucky circumstances, high performers also benefit from a combination of deliberate practice and talent or physical advantages. No matter how much you practice, certain physical limitations cannot be overcome. For example, if you are 165 cm tall, you are unlikely to become a professional basketball player. Some physical abilities, like special flexibility, can only be developed when a person's skeletal structure is still forming at a young age. It is important to remain realistic about your starting point and be aware of any limitations. But that does not mean you cannot develop workarounds or even leverage them to your advantage.

Another drawback of deliberate practice is that the level of focus it requires may mean that practitioners miss out on other aspects of life. Top performers often spend nearly every waking hour engaged in practice, recovery from practice, and supporting activities. For example, a professional dancer may spend several hours each day in deliberate practice, with the rest of their time devoted to sleep, low-intensity exercise, stretching, preparing nutritious meals, icing their feet, and so on. The flow state generated by deliberate practice can bring immense satisfaction, but practitioners will undoubtedly miss out on other sources of joy, such as spending time with friends.

Deliberate practice is part of the exploration phase of new opportunities. However, sometimes we end up having too much grit. We can continue to stick with the skill we are currently practicing, maintaining excessive enthusiasm, beyond the point where it serves us. When it is no longer worth practicing a skill, we may become exhausted, injured, or fail to realize it. For example, a new technique may mean that our skills are no longer valuable. If we continue to engage in deliberate practice due to sunk costs, we are unlikely to see much long-term benefit from it. A key skill in life is knowing when to adjust. Being overly focused on our goals can blind us to risks.

In some fields, expertise is difficult to quantify or measure, making it less clear how to organize practice. There may not be a single goal to achieve, nor universal rules to improve performance.

The last limitation to keep in mind is that, as Ericsson explains, “The cognitive and physical changes induced by training require maintenance. Stop training, and they will fade away.” If someone cannot practice for a period of time, such as due to injury or childbirth, they are likely to see the skills they developed through deliberate practice regress.

Summary#

Deliberate practice is not a cure-all, but if you want to continually improve at a skill or overcome plateaus, you will benefit from combining the principles mentioned in this article. Here’s a recap:

• Deliberate practice means having a clear understanding of the specific components of the skill we want to improve and how to improve them while practicing.

• The more we engage in deliberate practice, the greater our abilities become.

• Our minds and bodies are more malleable than we usually realize.

• Deliberate practice is structured and organized.

• Deliberate practice is challenging because it requires continually pushing yourself out of your comfort zone.

• Deliberate practice requires continuous feedback and measurement of information metrics—not vanity metrics.

• Deliberate practice is most effective with the help of a teacher or coach.

• Sustained deliberate practice requires a lot of intrinsic motivation.

• Deliberate practice requires sustained, intense focus.

• Deliberate practice utilizes the spacing effect—this means consistent commitment over time is crucial.

• If you are satisfied with your current skill level or are doing something just for fun, you do not necessarily need to engage in deliberate practice.

• Deliberate practice is best suited for actively pursuing high-level performance or breaking through some assumed limitations.

Hopefully, we can all continue to learn, refine ourselves, and grow together throughout our lives.

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