Tldr summary: deliberate practice for expert performance | Hacker News Reader

Tldr summary: deliberate practice for expert performance

blog.vivekhaldar.com

84 pointsgandalfgeek13 comments

The summary is missing a couple very important points

1. There a ramp up of deliberate practice time in all experts developments starting from 20-30m a day to the noted 4 hours a day.

2. There is a ramp up in skill level of the teachers of experts starting from parents, to local experts, to recognized experts, to the tops of whatever field you're trying to master.

You can't just increase your skill, you need a better coach.

These points are not made clearly in Ericssons paper. Please check out (http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...) for a more complete and useful overview of the topic.

More interesting by far than hacking yourself is investigating the neural basis for why this method of learning works. Expertise is not special, but a special case of normal learning. It's noticing what you could be learning rather than what you need to get by. Once this is accepted you can recognize the common thread of skill, information and descriminatory ability aquisition throughout the animal kingdom. Heck you can train Aplysia to be an expert! It's all based on fundamental properties of neuronal systems and that, frankly, is amazingly cool.

This is really a helpful summary. Most citations I've seen of that article mention only the ten-year rule. I had never read before about the importance of rest or support structures.

Thanks for sharing.

Super great. I really like WikiSummaries for non-fiction books. It's a great way to see if you want to commit to the whole book or not. (Eg: http://www.wikisummaries.org/Getting_Things_Done:_The_Art_of...) Perhaps they could expand to influential papers as well?

Lots (if not all) points in the blog post are covered in the book "Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else" http://www.amazon.com/Talent-Overrated-Separates-World-Class...

The Talent Code...even better. The author finds places around the world that produce a lot of top talent and tells how they do it. http://www.amazon.com/Talent-Code-Greatness-Born-Grown/dp/05...

So, help me understand this please.

Two hours of practice a day is optimal. And a 35-40 hour workweek for information workers is optimal (from other sources, not the Ericsson study.)

I assume that if one deliberately practices, there is less willpower left to work, reducing the effective workweek by about 10 hours to 25-30. That is not sustainable for a normal person. The exception would be if the skill practiced used different parts of the body and mind than the work. For example, practicing basketball while working a programming job.

Do I have that right?

I wonder if the trade-off of devoting those 10 hours to deliberate practice results in much better use of the other 25-30.

I wonder too. It would be really nice, and I should try it. But, I do remember Jason Fried telling me that their four day week didn't work out because it effectively became a 3.5 day week, and that simply was not enough time to run the business. 3.5 days is 28 hours in a 40 hour week. And the 37signals employees seem to do a lot of deliberate practice on their own time.

So here is a question for my fellow programmers -- how do you practice writing better code deliberately?

TRY to write better code, even when it takes you more time that hacking something together. Build stuff for fun sometimes because play is important. Realize that building stuff you already know how to do is not really "practice".

I used to benefit from a compulsion to come back to my programs repeatedly, asking "How can this be better?" -- taking it a long way past the point that made sense for that program in isolation. Trying never to be satisfied with an ugly program. Picking projects with something to teach me. It can particularly help to pick a problem that a master has tackled, and wait till you've written your own before analyzing their solution.

I'd like to get better at deciding what to write, now.

Tldr of the tldr: practice does NOT make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.

"Practice makes permanent."

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