The Deliberate Practice Guide (2021)
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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:
When they say deliberate practice, they just mean practice. Or practice with focus at most.
Deliberate practice isn't just practicing extra hard. Remember the original research is about violinists.
So, what's missing ?
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 ?".
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.
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.
See: https://commoncog.com/expertise/
I wished more people knew about his writings – so much to benefit from!
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
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 don't think that model specifically can be adapted, but yes, it is a real problem and people should be thinking about ways to solve it.
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.
[0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
>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.
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.
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)
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.
Nice to see that I'm not alone in this idea!
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.
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.
It's hard to find the balance.
Side note: also a degree in music turned programmer, hi!
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.
Dan Luu has written about similar things: https://danluu.com/p95-skill/
The final 20% is just do spaced repetition and something about 10,000 hours by Gladwell.
There doesn’t seem to be anything of value here that hasn’t already been said.
I was waiting for the “how” the whole time.
So, dear reader, how do you do deliberate practice?
I do not doubt this author's words, but they did not provide much "concreteness" here.
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.
The things you suck the most at are usually painfully obvious.
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.
So in general: practice activity, evaluate performance, come up with drill to improve weaknesses identified during evaluation, do drill, repeat.
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.
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.
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.
Remember when they were writing constant articles about mental models... that didn't contain a single mental model?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
but specialization later in life is still specialization? This sounds like goalpost moving.
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.
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.
curl -s 'https://fs.blog/deliberate-practice-guide/' | \
strip-tags -m | \
llm --system 'Turn into a step by step guide' \
-m gpt-3.5-turbo-16k
More on the tools I used here:
- https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/larger-context-openai-mod...
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.
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 use Anki off-and-on and love it.
To be an expert, you need 4 things:
1. A suitable environment
2. Lots of iterations (which is what I think the parent post is about, but it isn't the 100% story)
3. Timely feedback
4. Always being just at the edge of your comfort zone, "the goldilocks zone" of comfort
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 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 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 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.
Code review gives some commentary on result, but process wise it’s a solitary activity.
Perhaps this was some of the benefit of the mostly abandoned practice of pair programming?
Perhaps purposefully creating small toy projects with "harder" aspects like concurrency, graphics, compilers etc... would help?
>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.
The point is that you can get much more out of every hour of practice if that practice is deliberate.
If you’re paying attention to what you are doing and you are checking yourself.
Doing the thing is not enough to get good at it
I’ve played guitar for 25 years and I’m shit at it, because I thought “just doing the thing” was enough
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.
Slowly but surely, I just need to really get a routine going. Thanks for the encouragement!
Stop doing that please, it only spoils your mood.
Your old self did the best it could. Acceptance and Kindness towards yourself will feel better and and better uses of your mind.
What keeps you from deliberately practicing now that you know better?
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.
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).
"If we want to improve a skill, we need to know what exactly has to change and what might get us there."
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?
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
Coral reef mistakes: detecting invisible trouble spots
Cosmetics: minimizing the impact of weak capacities on concert day
Countdown charts: factoring your deadlines into your practice
Designer scales: choosing technical work to support your pieces
Details trawl: ensuring you know what's really in the score
Dress rehearsals: setting up your own concert simulator
Engaging autopilot: the dangers of practicing without thinking
Exaggerating: overstating key ideas to embed them
Excuses and ruses: why you'll never really fool your teacher if you haven't practiced
Experimenting: testing different interpretation options
Fire drills: training to cope gracefully with onstage mistakes
Fitness training: behind the scenes practice to help all your pieces
Fresh photocopies: creating your own custom scores tailored for practicing
Horizontal versus vertical: knowing when to change your practice Direction
Isolating: stopping problems from interfering with each other
Lesson agenda: setting aside issues to raise at your next lesson
Lesson pre-flight check: finding out if you're on track for next lesson
Lesson review: ensuring last lesson is fresh in your mind while you work
Level system: the astonishing power of Tiny Steps
Marathon week: pushing yourself to find out what's really possible
Metronome method: sneaking up on full tempo
Not wanting to practice: how to manage the biggest practice crisis of all
One Way doors: eliminating the need for constant revision
Openings and endings: VIP attention for the most important parts of any performance
Painting the scene: giving your performances a cinematic Edge
Practice Buddies: using the power of competition and cooperation
Practice traps: bad habits that waste your time and wreck your playing
Pressure testing: ensuring you can produce your best playing when it counts most
Randomizing: the ultimate way to end the practice ho hums
Prototypes: building a model of the ideal performance
Recording yourself: finding out and responding to what you really sound like
Recordings: using existing performances to supercharge your preparation
Reflecting: why the best practice sometimes makes no sound at all
Restoration: relearning old pieces without regressing
Rogue cells: when the smallest unit of practice goes bad
Scouting: getting to know your new piece before you start practicing it
Session agenda: creating and working with daily practice to do lists
Shooting the movies: a smarter way to work out what's next
Speeding: the hidden damage caused by practicing too fast
Stalling: what to do when a piece gets stuck
Thematic practice: a powerful alternative to practicing in sections
Tightening: making the leap from good enough to excellent
Triage: when there's too much to do and not enough time to do it
Triggers: setting up cues that get you practicing in the first place
Turn around time: mastering new pieces in weeks instead of months
Varying your diet: freeing yourself from dull repetitive practice
Visualizing: the most important practice you'll ever do
Your practice sweet spot: setting up the ultimate practice space
No, charging money is what turns amateurs into professionals.
Amateurs do a thing because they love it, professionals do it to get paid. In my experience, amateurs are often more capable than professionals.
(I read it and yes, the "title gut feeling" is spot on)