The Ultimate Deliberate Practice Guide: How to Be the Best

Everything You Need to Know to Improve Your Performance at Anything-For Beginners and ExpertsDeliberate practice is the best technique for achieving expert performance in every field-including writing, teaching, sports, programming, music, medicine, therapy, chess, and business. But there’s much more to deliberate practice than 10,000 hours.

Deliberate practice takes time and can be a lifelong process

If we want to master a skill, we need to commit to working on it for a lengthy period of time, likely with few rewards.

Making a breakthrough takes time. When it seems like someone was an overnight success, there’s almost always a long period of silent deliberate practice preceding it.
In the long run, deliberate practice always wins out.

Challenges and Uncomfortable

Deliberate practice is challenging and uncomfortable

The quickest route to improvement involves stepping outside of our comfort zones
As soon as practicing a skill gets comfortable, it’s time to up the stakes
Challenging yourself is about more than trying to work harder-it means doing new things
Pushing ourselves just beyond the limits of our abilities is uncomfortable, yet it’s how we do our best-and indeed, it can be the source of some of our greatest moments of satisfaction

Deliberate practice means practicing with a clear awareness of the specific components of a skill we’re aiming to improve and exactly how to improve them

The more we engage in deliberate practice, the greater our capabilities become

Deliberately practice is structured and methodical
Requires constant feedback and measurement of informative metrics
Continuously pushing yourself out of your comfort zone
Leverages the spacing effect
Best suited to pursuits where you’re aiming for a high level of performance or to break beyond some kind of supposed limit

The limitations and downsides of deliberate practice

Deliberate practice is a necessary but insufficient part of becoming a world-class performer.

It’s not enough on its own to be the absolute best in any field. Once you reach higher echelons for any skill, everyone engages in deliberate practice. But the higher you rise, the more luck and randomness end up mattering. The more you practice the more you can’t control the chance events that dictate a great deal of life.

Deliberate practice requires rest and recovery time

Even fitting in a single hour per day of deliberate practice is ample time to make substantial improvements, especially when we’re consistent with committing to it over the long haul.

Sleep and rest are crucial, as is a good night’s sleep
When you’re not practicing, your brain is still at work, in focused mode. During deliberate practice, your mind is in diffuse mode, where it forms connections and mulls over problems. Both modes of thinking are equally valuable, but the harmony between them matters.

Most effective with the help of a coach or teacher

Deliberate practice is most effective when conducted with some kind of coach who can give feedback, point out errors, suggest techniques for improvement, and provide vital motivation.

The best performers observe themselves closely and are able to develop metacognition, which is the skill of thinking about your own thinking.

What is deliberate practice?

Deliberate practice means practicing with a clear awareness of the specific components of a skill we’re aiming to improve and exactly how to improve them.

Unlike regular practice, in which we work on a skill by repeating it again and again until it becomes almost mindless, deliberate practice is a laser-focused activity. It requires us to pay unwavering attention to what we’re doing at any given moment and whether it’s an improvement or not.

Books about deliberate practice

“A world in which deliberate practice is a normal part of life would be one in which people had more volition and satisfaction.” -Karl Anders Ericsson, Peak

Want to learn more about the art and science of deliberate practice? Check out any of these books: Talent Is Overrated, Geoff Colvin, The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle, Mastery, Robert Greene, Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success, Matthew Syed, The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Deliberate practice is structured and methodical

If you want to reach an expert level of performance, you need to know what you’re working on, why, and how you intend to improve it.

Practitioners focus above all on what they can’t do. They seek out areas of weaknesses impacting their overall performance, then target those.

Deliberate practice requires intense focus

You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention

The deeper we focus during deliberate practice sessions, the more we get out of them
Intense focus allows us to increase skills and break through plateaus
Keeping an eye on key metrics enables top performers to identify and systematically remove distractions from their lives

Deliberate practice leverages the spacing effect

Consistent deliberate practice sessions over the course of years are more effective than longer sessions for a shorter period of time

The spacing effect refers to how we are better able to recall information and concepts if we learn them in multiple sessions with increasingly large intervals between them
Spaced repetition is also satisfying because it keeps us on the edge of our abilities
Once we learn something through spaced repetition, it actually sticks with us
Implement this: Each time you’re learning a new component of a skill, make a schedule for when you’ll review it

Deliberate practice requires intrinsic motivation

Persisting with deliberate practice despite its innate difficulty and discomfort requires a lot of motivation.

The need for intrinsic motivation is one reason why children who are pushed to develop a skill from a young age by their parents don’t always reach a high level of performance and often quit as soon as they can.

Deliberate practice involves constant feedback and measurement

To engage in deliberate practice, you need a way of measuring the most instructive metrics related to your performance

Seeing how those metrics change is the sole way to know if practice is working or not
Be aware of how strongly correlated your practice and your performance are likely to be
Beware of vanity metrics

Karl Anders Ericsson: The expert on expertise

Karl and his collaborators performed pioneering research in the field of expert performance

Experts become experts largely as a result of the way they practice
They may benefit from innate advantages, but their talents themselves are not innate
The more we improve how we train, the more we expand our range of possible performance

Malcolm Gladwell: The 10,000 hour rule

Gladwell attributed unusual success in different fields to a mixture of luck and practice

“The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves,” Gladwell writes, “But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.”
The so-called “10,000 hours rule” caught on, and many people took it to mean anyone can master anything if they just put the time in
It’s important to stress that research into deliberate practice emphasizes quality of practice, not quantity
There’s no magic number of practice sessions, and everyone’s path will look different