Integrate Deliberate Practice within your Personal Practice Environments

I’ve been thinking about Personal Practice Environments lately,?here’s?where I started to think why all learning requires practice environments and?here?I discuss how I built my own practice environment. There are a few ideas that personal practice environments are built on. One of the pillar ideas of a personal practice environment is Deliberate Practice.

James Clear?defines it as follows , ‘Deliberate practice refers to a special type of practice that is purposeful and systematic. While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.’

One of the central ideas to deliberate practice is that, If you reach a skill level that feels “satisfactory” to you, you stop improving, and even get worse with time. The more automated your performance, the lesser you learn. In order to keep learning more, you have to do the following things:

1. Define and set a clear goal for practice
2. Practice with intense focus and always stay out of comfort zones
3. Get a coach / Develop a mean feedback system for practice
4. Get adequate rest, recovery and physical/mental conditioning between practice sessions
5. Keep intrinsic motivators high at all time

These five steps more or less cover what goes on when you want to improve yourself with the help of deliberate practice.

Deliberate Practice has helped improve the skill levels of many over the past years, some notably known and some known through anectodes. Here’s a list of few who swore by the idea of deliberate practice.

1. Kobe Bryant used to train from 4 am till 11 am, between gyms and drills and had a?target of getting 800 jump shots everyday, from 4 till 11.
2. Mozart kept producing music for 10 years?before his composition became famous
3. Benjamin Franklin used?an hour everyday for five days?a week to focus and learn
4. Elon Musk?reads a couple of books?everyday and while doing that gets deep into the first principles of it
5. Ben Hogan’s?nine golf championships?can be attributed to him breaking down each phase of hitting the golf ball into smaller chunks and then practicing them individually to reach perfection
6. Joe DiMaggio, a three time Major League MVP would?callout every ball pitched to him and adjust his stance before hitting it,?a practice that he perfected
7. Yuri Vardanyan, the greatest olympic weightlifter,?valued perfection achieved by repetition?than intensity of training
8. Most famous writers have a daily writing habit that they cultivate over time, from Jerry Seinfeld to Maya Angelou, they all write everyday.

There are many examples of many famous individuals attaining deep expertise, and most of it is because of deliberate practice. The focus and the patience that deliberate practice demands has something in it that accelerates improvement.

So, when you’re designing your personal practice environment, ensure that the design of it has the elements of deliberate practice woven into it.

To learn more about deliberate practice, I’d recommend for everyone to go straight to the source, that is Anders Ericsson - Peak and The Cambridge handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.