Deliberate Practice

Welcome back.

This is an important one and a topic that is a must for anybody that’s looking to become a master.

And that is deliberate practice and deliberate practice as we’re going to discover is going to teach

us that the learning process should be tough.

Temporary frustrations when learning is a good thing.

Now we finally get to talk about Anders Ericsson which I’ve mentioned a few times already.

He wrote a book called Peak which is one of the most important books when it comes to learning.

And in his book this idea of deliberate practice gets mentioned quite often.

Now Anders mentions that rock climbers chess players and all of these masters can usually visualize

things visualize all their moves ahead of time.

They’re able to create experiences in their mind to make accurate predictions and keep a lot of information

in their mind the way they’re able to do such things isn’t just natural talent but it’s deliberate practice.

So what is deliberate practice.

Well deliberate practice usually happens like this.

You start to learn a topic and initially you have rapid progress.

That is things are good at first you’re learning so much at the beginning that you see yourself progressing

more and more each day but then eventually we always had what we call a perceived limit where we start

to plateau and because we don’t get that immediate progress that we saw in the past when we’re just

beginners we start to get a little bit of frustration where we don’t see ourselves improving.

We’ve plateaued.

This is where deliberate practice comes in.

We want to be just in this area this area where we’re finding a bit of frustration.

And for us to improve we need to have deliberate practice that is we’re right on the edge of our limits

and we’re trying to push through to suddenly get a breakthrough and go back to that rapid progress and

then repeat that cycle where we hit a limit a flat area and then we practice practice at this edge at

this uncomfortable edge of our limits and then move past that.

Now in order to have deliberate practice we need according to Anders Ericsson we need specific goals.

We need intense focus.

We need immediate feedback and we need that frequent discomfort by being at the edge of our abilities

and this idea of deliberate practice goes hand in hand with idea of passive and active learning.

It refers to the specific type of practice that is actually what we call purposeful while regular practice

might include things like mindless repetition deliberate practice actually requires us to be focused

getting that immediate feedback and having that specific goal to know where we want to be as Anders

Ericsson describes it.

Deliberate practice takes place outside one’s comfort zone and requires a student to constantly try

things that are just beyond his or her current abilities.

Thus it demands near maximal effort which is generally not enjoyable.

That’s right.

Unfortunately deliberate practice is not meant to be fun.

It’s that practice that is a struggle.

It’s that area where you feel like you’re not good enough.

It’s pushing yourself to your limits.

So how do we get to this state of deliberate practice.

Well one we need to make sure that we have periods of on distracted focus.

We need that focus mode of thinking for deliberate practice Next we need to push ourselves to the edge

of your ability.

You want to make sure that you’re cycling between comfort and discomfort where you’re trying something

and learning something and pushing your limits where you find a task too difficult too hard for you

to do next to seek immediate feedback and mentorship so get help from somebody.

Let’s say you’re learning how to code.

Well try to build your own project and find that it’s super difficult.

Then you start reaching out to your peers to your mentor or to your teacher and seeing if they can help

you out with your problem.

At the end of the day there’s a reason that you have people that you admire famous people like Evel

Musk or Jeff Bezos Roger Federer or any type of master all of them do deliberate practice and deliberate

practice is uncomfortable.

If you want to achieve great things in your life this is simply something you need to do.

You can’t just achieve things by luck by not trying.

The good news is that the better you get at something the more enjoyable it becomes.

Now I want us to remember the dip here because we talked about this idea of obstacles but also this

idea of dip where we encounter sometimes things that might not help us toward our future goal.

Maybe we have unrealistic goals where we actually should turn around and not pursue to become that professional

basketball player.

Now there are genetics all influences when it comes to performance.

Yes some people are born with better genes than others.

Yes some people have better opportunities than others.

Sometimes you’re dealt a hand of cards and that’s what you have to play with.

But each of us have our own deck of cards.

Each one has a hand that has been dealt but deliberate practice can actually help us maximize our potential.

Each of us have different potentials but by doing deliberate practice you maximize your hand you maximize

the cards that have been dealt to you.

It turns our potential into our reality.

Now to end this video you might be wondering what is this image of.

This is Kendo or the way of the sword.

It’s a Japanese martial art and it has an interesting lesson to teach us about deliberate practice.

For that I’ll see you in the next lecture.