Just Start: The Problem With (Deliberate) Practice
It's not actually a problem.
If you’ve tried hard to get good at something over the last decade or so, you’ve probably heard of deliberate practice.
In case you haven’t, or you’re vaguely aware of it and need a refresher: social scientist K. Anders Ericsson spent a long time studying chess and music students (among other people) and found that, among ‘expert’ performers, deliberate practice was a huge component of future success. Malcolm Gladwell then wrote Outliers, in which he talked a lot about deliberate practice and the 10,000 hour ‘rule’, based on Ericsson’s research and some speculation about how much time Bill Gates and The Beatles put into their fields before becoming successful. Outliers was a huge hit, and 17 years later we’re still seeing posts like this (don’t worry, I’m going to get through all the nested bits):
Let’s tackle this in order.
First of all, yes, deliberate practice is not inherently enjoyable. It involves concentrating hard and working right at the limits of your ability, and you can only really ‘enjoy’ it if you can shift your mindset into one where you enjoy the sense of improving at the thing, rather than the practice itself.
Second of all, though, a lot of what people consider deliberate practice is not deliberate practice, in the sense that Ericsson defines it (and so the sense he’s talking about in the two lines above). Ericsson has written a whole book of his own — it’s well worth reading — and in it, he notes that:
In the most highly developed fields — the ones that have benefited from many decades or even centuries of steady improvement, with each generation passing on the lessons and skills it has learned to the next — the approach to individualized practice is amazingly uniform. No matter where you look — musical performance, ballet, or sports such as figure skating or gymnastics — you will find that training follows a very similar set of principles.
[Deliberate practice] requires a field that is already reasonably well developed — that is, a field in which the best performers have attained a level of performance that clearly sets them apart from people who are just entering the field. We’re referring to activities like musical performance (obviously), ballet and other sorts of dance, chess, and many individual and team sports, particularly the sports in which athletes are scored for their individual performance, such as gymnastics, figure skating, or diving. What areas don’t qualify? Pretty much anything in which there is little or no direct competition, such as gardening and other hobbies, for instance, and many of the jobs in today’s workplace — business manager, teacher, electrician, engineer, consultant, and so on. These are not areas where you’re likely to find accumulated knowledge about deliberate practice, simply because there are no objective criteria for superior performance.
Second, deliberate practice requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve his or her performance. Of course, before there can be such teachers there must be individuals who have achieved a certain level of performance with practice methods that can be passed on to others.
Deliberate practice develops skills that other people have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have been established.
So to start with, if you start practising something on your own, however hard you try, you aren’t doing deliberate practice: you’re doing what Ericsson calls purposeful practice, which is still very helpful but not quite as good.
You also aren’t doing deliberate practice if you’re trying to get good at something where the norms of practice aren’t well established: I do a lot of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, for instance, and there’s no strong agreement on the best way to learn it. It’s probably not coincidental that the places where deliberate practice seems best correlated with high performance are music with a demanding technical repertoire (piano and violin), sports where you don’t interact with another person (so that you don’t have to respond to changing conditions) or games with no element of chance that have existed for a very long time (chess).
What about maths? Well, it depends on what and who you’re trying to teach. Maths has been around for a long time: if you want to compete in the International Mathematical Olympiad, there’s probably enough data around to design a well-structured practice programme that help your chances of winning. If you want people who can make strides into unexplored areas of maths — like Andrew Wiles, who combined insights from modular and elliptical theory to establish a proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem, it’s less clear that deliberate practice is helpful.
In the excellent Range, David Epstein contrasts the worlds of chess and piano with the "wicked world" of reality — a rapidly changing environment where people constantly need to deal with new situations — and then spends most of the book pointing to people who’ve spent their lives sampling different experiences, giving them a range of proficiencies to draw from when they encounter new problems. Roger Federer sampled a wide variety of sports before starting to seriously concentrate on tennis in his teens — a fact that might help to explain why he’s capable of athletic feats that leaves other players shaking their heads. “Nationally recognized scientists are much more likely than other scientists to be musicians, sculptors, painters, printmakers, woodworkers, mechanics, electronics tinkerers, glassblowers, poets, or writers, of both fiction and nonfiction,” Epstein points out. “Nobel laureates are far more likely still.” Some of the greatest leaps of insight in science and medicine have come from people who dabbled in other disciplines — not people who bore down and spent ten thousand hours grinding out reps in one area.
Yes, but what about maths? Can’t we simply cram children’s heads full of maths using the principles of deliberate practice: just force them to learn, and remind the whiners that it’s for their own good? That it will set their learning capacity to maximum?
Well, no. Obviously not. A lot of kids are learning a lot of stuff under duress already, and deliberate practice is hard to maintain even for people who love the thing they do and have what’s sometimes known as the “rage to master.” If you think you can get a classroom full of children to work on the bleeding edge of their ability for hours and days on end, good luck: just don’t try it with my kid. Yes, children (and adults) will be motivated by the feeling of improving at a thing, but — again — it’s far from clear that deliberate practice is the best way to improve at most things, and it’s certainly not the only way. Nothing is fun all the time, but deliberate practice is explicitly not fun, and I doubt that Ericsson would seriously recommend it as a way of teaching people to do something they aren’t heavily invested in doing.
What is fun? Lots of things. Here’s a non-exhaustive list:
Studying in new environments, in different ways, to build different context cues (and also using spaced repetition, interleaving, regular low-stakes testing and other science-backed stuff to learn faster while somewhat enjoying the process).
Jumping straight into your own projects, making mistakes, and learning to enjoy making mistakes.
Going straight into playing little games, with rules (or constraints) designed to develop key skills. This is sometimes called ecological dynamics is about: there are some very academic books about this, and it’s currently being used with varying degrees of success in a bunch of sports.
The sort of performance-based practice that encourages flow states, where everything feels natural and effortless, and not like work at all.
I’ve learned this through books and experience. For a couple of years, I was the Good Will Hunting frat guy, telling everyone that deliberate practice was the way to go and that they should forget fun if they really want to improve. Then I read a bunch of other stuff and I changed my mind. If the evidence changes, I’ll probably change my mind again.
So what’s the problem with deliberate practice? There isn’t one. If you want to get to the elite tier at a skill with well-established end goals and teaching traditions, it seems to work very well. If you don’t, there are probably more fun ways to learn. Maybe try some of them.
Have a great weekend!
Joel x
Stuff I like
📖 Book - Yellowface by R. F. Kuang
My wife told me to read this earlier in the week, and it’s so readable that I blasted through it reading on my phone in every spare moment I had — on buses, waiting in coffee queues, walking in boring spots. It’s great.
📝 Article - We all benefit when youthful genius blooms (Paywall)
I loved this piece from James Marriott on the benefits of bringing youthful energy and inspiration to projects, and the way it benefited everyone from Bob Dylan to Niels Bohr. Obviously, there are things that you do better with experience (Marriott notes that novelists often produce their best stuff in middle age), but it’s a strong argument for giving young people more space to do their best stuff.
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