{"id":6861,"date":"2017-05-12T13:46:02","date_gmt":"2017-05-12T20:46:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?page_id=6861"},"modified":"2017-05-12T13:46:02","modified_gmt":"2017-05-12T20:46:02","slug":"lesson-3-how-do-you-deliberately-practice-your-job-223","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/lesson-3-how-do-you-deliberately-practice-your-job-223\/","title":{"rendered":"Lesson 3: How Do You “Deliberately Practice” Your Job?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the first two lessons in this series, Cal and I discussed why you need to develop meta-knowledge of how your career works, and which skills are worth investing in. However, assuming you can get over that obstacle, the next challenge *actually getting good at the skills in question* can often be difficult.<\/p>\n

Practicing a well-defined skill with a clear learning path like chess or music is one thing. But how do you deliberately practice an office job?<\/p>\n

In this lesson, Cal will share some of his insights in applying deliberate practice outside the original areas it was first developed in.<\/p>\n

Before we start, here’s lessons’ one and two, in case you missed them:
\nLesson One: Meta-knowledge in your career<\/a>
\nLesson Two: Four principles to decode your career<\/a><\/p>\n

Now, I’ll turn things to Cal with today’s lesson:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This article is the third in the short series Scott and I are writing this week about lessons learned so far from our\u00c2\u00a0Top Performer\u00c2\u00a0course. In it, I want to tackle the provocative question that kicked off our collaboration: How can you apply the principles of deliberate practice to your career? <\/em><\/p>\n

As longtime readers of my blog know, I’m a fan of deliberate practice<\/em> — a well-validated theory, developed by Anders Ericsson, that explains how people master complex skills.* At the core of this complicated framework\u00c2\u00a0is a simple idea: to master something hard, it’s not enough to simply do the activity a lot, or study the activity in\u00c2\u00a0detail;\u00c2\u00a0you must instead\u00c2\u00a0design practice activities that deliberately stretch you past your comfort zone and offer feedback on how you are doing.<\/p>\n

Applying this style of skill development is obvious in fields with well-defined competitive structures like professional sports, music or chess. If you’re an aspiring chess grandmaster, for example, the theory clearly tells you that you can’t just play lots of matches or read lots of chess books –\u00c2\u00a0you need a teacher to design exercises to systematically improve your skills where weak. (Indeed, research on this topic<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0published in the Journal of Applied Psychology\u00c2\u00a0found that chess grandmasters engaged in\u00c2\u00a0five times\u00c2\u00a0more of this “serious study” than players with similar overall training hours but much lower standing.)<\/p>\n

What is less obvious is how to apply this practice approach to your job.<\/em><\/p>\n

Though I’ve been writing about this topic for a long time (c.f., this 2010 blog post<\/a> or my 2012 book on career satisfaction<\/a>), one of the great side benefits of our\u00c2\u00a0Top Performer<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0course\u00c2\u00a0is that it exposed me to many more case studies of people actually succeeding in this effort in their real world professions.<\/p>\n

Scott and I thought it would be useful to share with you three\u00c2\u00a0key ideas we learned from these case studies about effectively integrating deliberate practice into the workplace:<\/p>\n