Few ideas have shaped my thinking about learning more than Anders Ericsson’s [1] work on deliberate practice. He argued persuasively that quantity of practice goes a long way in explaining performance differences in fields like chess, music and athletics and, further, that certain types of practice are far more effective than others for learning.
I’ve been working hard on making new video essays, so I decided to make one about some of the research that has inspired so much of my thinking:
The Two Problems with Deliberate Practice
While Ericsson’s influence on my work has been deep, some of his ideas have faced pushback in recent years.
The first problem is Ericsson’s insistence that practice explains all (or most) of the difference between elite performers, which seems to me to be overstated.
The research showing the relatively long periods of time required to achieve eminence in various fields along with the evidence for the role of extensive knowledge bases among experts do lend credence to the idea that excellence is cultivated, not innate.
Even so, I expect that talent and intelligence do play a role. Practice may be required, but who benefits most from practice may depend on fixed traits that go beyond what Ericsson was willing to admit.
To me, this doesn’t undermine the more basic claims that a large quantity of practice is important for learning and that certain kinds of effortful/guided practice may be much more effective than simply spending hours performing the skill. I believe these claims are on fairly solid ground, even if Ericsson’s argument that deliberate practice could largely explain away talent seems to be a stretch.
The second problem with deliberate practice is more practical. In domains like chess, music and athletics, the objectives are clear, and training is straightforward. This doesn’t make deliberate practice easy, but it does make it relatively workable.
In contrast, what “improvement” means for most of the skills we actually want to get good at is much less clear. How do you get better at writing essays when every essay is on a different topic? How do you become a better programmer, architect or entrepreneur when the skills that drive performance in the real world are often ill-defined?
This question has dominated my thinking for years. Ten years ago, Cal Newport and I worked to create a course to answer this question. Top Performer [2] has since had over five thousand students, and working with so many people has taught us a lot about how real-world career skills differ from the precision of chess and music.
Three Lessons for Applying Deliberate Practice to Your Career
To summarize what I’ve learned from ten years of working with students on this topic:
1. Knowing what to learn is just as important as how to learn it.
Time is short, and practice takes a long time (even if you do it efficiently). Thus, the question of what you ought to be practicing dominates most real-life considerations about how well you’re learning it. This is particularly true in career contexts, where skills are merely instruments to make a greater impact in your work, not simply learned for their own sake.
The starting point for any career-development project has to be understanding the career landscape: What sorts of skills are truly valuable? What’s the pathway for applying them?
2. Showing you have a skill can be just as tricky as learning it.
Ericsson focused his research on domains with objective performance measures, where true experts could be clearly separated from mere high-status pretenders. For a scientific study, this restriction is important. If expertise isn’t defined in terms of repeatable, superior performance according to an unbiased standard, then the study shifts from cognitive development to sociology.
However, real-world skills often lack that very objectivity Ericsson required. This, in turn, pushes us back into the importance of social factors. There are certainly cases where social factors trump raw ability—nepotism and networks mattering more than meritocratic ability. (See my book review of Pedigree [3] if you want to learn more about that.)
But, I think a mixture of both is the more typical case. Those who rise to the top are, generally, talented. But, since skill is difficult to assess, success is a mixture of not just skills but career assets that signal a person has those hard-to-assess skills. This includes obvious things like credentials, but also less obvious things like a track record of successful projects or good relationships with other people who can vouch for you.
Deliberate practice thus plays a critical role in acquiring some of the basic competencies, but it needs to be paired with an awareness of how you demonstrate those skills. We don’t end up with the full-blown sociological critique that success is “just” who you know or whether you rowed crew for the right school, but it’s also not the complete meritocracy of excellence imagined in domains like chess or athletics.
3. Real-world skills require real-world practice.
Ericsson made a big deal of the distinction between performance and practice. Performance was doing a job. Practice was getting better at it.
In areas like chess and music, this distinction is clear. Chess grandmasters play games, of course, but the bulk of their improvement comes from study. Simply playing a lot of games is inefficient for learning since the aim when playing is to win, not to acquire knowledge. Similarly, a musician may play in recitals, but the real skill isn’t built on the stage; it’s built in the practice room, playing tricky sections over and over again until they are flawless.
Something like this must be true of jobs as well, because the cognitive explanations for the efficacy of deliberate practice apply equally to professional skills. But real-world skills are often impossible to practice without some integration with a real context. What on earth would it mean to get really good at project management without managing a real project?
Even skills which can, in principle, be isolated from their professional context (like programming or writing) often require a degree of real-world engagement in order to make practice effective. Competing in programming competitions probably does help real-world coding, but most programming jobs are heavily weighted toward working with large, legacy codebases and understanding what other team members have done. That, in turn, can only be practiced effectively in a real context.
This suggests that the right way to practice in your field isn’t to divorce practice from performance, rather it’s to try to augment real-world performance so it functions more like practice. Choose projects that will stretch your abilities, and apply constraints so that more learning occurs.
These topics have been on my mind a lot lately as my team and I venture more into video. I’m working on deliberate practice focused on my ability to convey ideas in an audiovisual format. Hopefully I’ll be able to share some of what has been working for me in terms of practicing that skill deliberately as well.