How to master a skill in a fraction of 10,000 hours?
By using deliberate practice
Why the ‘10,000 Hour Rule’ is wrong
How many hours does it take to master a skill? Well, Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book Outliers suggests that it takes us 10,000 hours to achieve greatness and be an expert in a particular skill/ field. However, research has shown that the ‘10,000 hour rule’ is wrong.
Practice is great, sure, but practice alone won’t make you an expert. There are many other factors such as personality, genetics, talent, the age you started, intelligence, quality of the practice, or something else entirely. Hence, for any skill you’re trying to master, it’s very likely that you can become extremely proficient in much lesser time than the suggested 10,000 hours.
In essence, mastering a skill is not just about how much you practice; it’s more about how you practice and the quality of the practice.
“[We] assume that someone who has been driving for 20 years must be a better driver than someone who has been driving for five… But no.”
- Anders Ericsson
Research found that once we reach a level of “acceptable” and automatic performance, additional years of “practice” don’t lead to improvement. In fact, the person who has done the same thing over and over for 20 years is more likely to be worse due to a gradual deterioration.
Therefore, deliberate practice is extremely important in order to break through the plateau.
What is deliberate practice
Deliberate Practice is seen by some as one of the most efficient ways to learn. According to Anders Ericsson, author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, deliberate practice is the process of working in a specific, purposeful, and strategic way to improve any skill. It is about taking a systematic and specific approach to improvement that builds over time, rather than simply doing the same thing over and over again.
The difference between meaningless repetitive practice and the more purposeful deliberate practice comes down to knowing where you need improvement and focusing intensely on getting better in that area. That is, to focus very deliberately on the narrow sub-skills needed to make up an overall skill.
So how do you engage in deliberate practice?
How to use deliberate practice
Know your why and find your motivation
Firstly and most importantly, you have to be genuinely interested and passionate about the skills you want to learn or improve in. It’s pretty much impossible to improve a skill if you’re not interested in it.
When facing a plateau in your skills, you will have to constantly circle back to why it is important for you to continue to put in work and why you want to be the top 1%.
Start with a clear goal
You have to set a SMART goal about what it is exactly that you want to accomplish. SMART goal refers to Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time based.
For example, ‘learn programming’ and ‘learn Korean’ is way too broad, so you have to make it as SMART as possible. ‘Being able to create my own functional Android application in Python by March 2020’ and ‘being able to read a Korean comic book and have basic small talk with a stranger in Korean within 3 months’ is much better.
Deconstruct the skill and focus on one sub-skill at a time
Now, you need to break down the goal you want to achieve for that particular skill into small, actionable steps. Every skill is comprised of a series of small sub-skills that are built on one another. So instead of focusing on all of them at once, you need to identify what are the sub-skills that are important. Note that you don’t have to learn every single sub-skill, but only those that are important to help you master the overall skill (think 80/20 principle). Hence, it’s better to spend a few sessions to solely focus on one sub-skill, work at it until it becomes second nature, and then keep repeating this process for every sub-skill.
You can start by researching and finding (Google is our best friend) the top resources rather than reading everything you can get your hands on, and identify the important ones.
For example, let’s say that your want to learn playing guitar. After doing some research and consulting your friends who play guitar, you figure out that you can break guitar-playing down into these distinct sub-skills:
- Strumming Patterns
- Finger-Picking
- Chord Shapes
- Scales
- Reading Standard Notation
- Reading Tabs
You don’t have to list out everything and come up with the perfect list, the point is to make the broad goal of ‘learning to play guitar’ into bite-sized sub-skills that you can learn and practice. You can always fill in missing skills later. Your objective here is to learn enough about each sub-skill, not everything.
Also, you have to prioritize properly as it will help you avoid wasting time on something that’s unhelpful for your ultimate goal. For instance, if you plan to play only Metallica on guitar, it’s probably a waste of your time to learn how to read standard notation, tabs would be far more useful. On the other hand, if you specifically want to play classical guitar pieces, then standard notation is something you would absolutely want to learn.
For example, Kobe Bryant would spend hours upon hours deliberately practicing 800 jump shots rather than practicing the ‘whole game’. He recognized that mastering the sub-skill of jump shots would propel him into master-status far more efficiently than any other skill. He had laser-focus on the specific sub-skill that he understood to have the most upside.
Practice deliberately and complete numerous repetition
After identifying the sub-skills to focus on, now is the time to start practicing. Keep in mind that you have to deliberate practice, instead of just ‘doing the skill’ .You may be ‘practicing’ in the sense of ‘performing the activity’, but you’re not getting any better. In extreme cases, this kind of practice may even be making you worse, especially if it’s reinforcing bad habits or poor technique.
Examples of deliberate practice:
- Playing the Grade 4 scale on piano 10 times in a row without making a mistake
- Doing 5 sketches of a still life over the course of an hour while focusing on your line work
- Writing a program that incorporates a new algorithm you just learned
Examples of undeliberate practice:
- Playing “River Flows In You” on piano for the billionth time, the same exact way
- Doodling random things which doesn’t make you any better at drawing
- Messing around with the same few snippets of code
Deliberate practice is one of the toughest parts of learning a new skill, but it’s also the area that, if you stick with it, will lead to large and rapid gains in your ability.
Furthermore, you will need to repeat practicing the sub-skill until it becomes second nature. What you’re trying to do here is create that long-term muscle memory where you don’t think about the process — your body automatically does it.
Odds are you’ve probably mastered many skills through muscle memory. If you can drive a car, touch-type, or play an instrument, then you probably do them without a lot of brainpower. Your body automatically acts because it has performed this process countless times.
You do not need to spend a lot of time practicing, you just have to commit 1 hour a day for intense practice, i.e practice with 100% concentration. Most studies suggest that the success of deliberate practice comes down to intensity rather than duration. Try to find your ‘peak period’ where your energy levels are the highest to engage in deliberate practice. Doing it first thing in the morning after your morning routine is a good way to start your day.
Learn from the experts
You should not waste your time with trial and error. Instead, find out how the winners (experts) in your field do it and learn from them. The best way to accelerate your initial progress is to find a mentor, hire a coach, or paying to take a course. If you do not have much money to spare, there are many free resources out there as well. Read books, listen to podcasts, watch videos, reading blogs, or listening to others who know how to do it.
You do not necessarily have to copy them 100%, but you need to learn to ‘borrow’ ideas from other people who are already successful, run them through your own filter, then make them your own.
“Imitate, assimilate, innovate.”
- Clark Terry
Create a feedback loop and track your progress
In addition to practicing the right things, it’s equally important to get feedback from others as often as possible. By creating a feedback loop, you’re creating a way to more accurately spot what you’re doing correctly and incorrectly, fix the errors as soon as possible, as well as to identify potential improvements to your learning routine. It’s about finding out exactly what you need to change to reach your goal more quickly.
For instance, if you spend a whole day on a baseball-throwing drill, but you do it incorrectly, then you’ve only reinforced a bad habit. However, if you get immediate feedback on your technique, then you learn how to deliberately practice the correct technique.
Reinforcing the previous point about learning from the experts, the best way to get feedback is to work with a coach or mentor, joining a mastermind group helps too. They are people who have already achieved expert status in their field, so it’s worth paying for their time because it will skyrocket your success and help you avoid the rookie mistakes that many people make.
For example, if you’re learning to improve your public speaking skills, a possible method includes recording clips of yourself speaking to a fictional room of people. Then replay these videos and make comparison to a public speaker you admire (highly recommend TED talks). Find out what did you do well, What can you improve on, what are the mistakes you make etc. If possible, send the video to someone you consider a professional, and ask them for honest, critical feedback.
If you’re learning to program WordPress themes, save each theme you try out so you can visually see the progress you’re making. If you’re a musician, record yourself playing each week. If you’re an author, keep what you’ve written in a folder on your desktop. Go over your work frequently, compare what you’ve done in the past to what you’re doing now. If there is no improvement, you might be doing something wrong.
“There are many ways of going forward, but only one way of standing still.”
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
Recovery
After you’ve finished your period of practice, it’s time for some self-care. Avoid straining yourself mentally for too long. Reward yourself. Take a break, play a computer game, watch a film, go for a walk. Do something that doesn’t require much mental energy and willpower.
Some tips about deliberate practice
Removing friction
Friction consists of the steps that stand between you and practicing the skill. For instance, if your current focus is to learn to play the guitar, friction exists in the form of having to take the guitar out of its case, find your pick and music, and finally settling down to practice.
With all these steps, it can be easy not to practice because you ‘don’t feel like’ going through all those steps. Removing the friction might mean keeping the guitar on a stand with the pick tucked under the string, ready to go for your daily practice session. This way, you have far fewer excuses.
Take risk, and do not be afraid of making mistakes
The real reason most people will never become a master at any skill is that they won’t take a risk, they won’t leave their comfort zone. If you want to become great at something you have to put yourself out there. You may very well fail. But you can only succeed because of your failures.
We have been taught that mistakes are bad things. But in fact, mistakes are the only way to truly learn a valuable lesson. They provide feedback on what doesn’t work for your skill development.
“I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.”
- Thomas Edison
For instance, let’s say you’d like to learn a new programming language. The simplest way to master it is to identify one drill or challenge, play around with it for a few practice sessions, and make a lot of mistakes along the way. Repeat this process every day until you’ve mastered that component, then move on to the next one.
Furthermore, you have to step out of your comfort zone by doing something that is beyond your current skillset. For example:
- Find someone who is slightly better than you and compete against them (if you’re trying to improve your basketball game, have a free throw shooting contest).
- Combine two skills you’ve mastered (if you’re learning baseball, practice catching a short hop infield hit and then throwing it to first base).
- Perform a skill in unexpected, adverse conditions (if you’re working on your public speaking skills, practice what you’ll do if your slides aren’t working).
- Put yourself in a “high-stakes” environment (if you’re learning a language, book a trip to a country where most people don’t speak English and force yourself to converse only in the native language).
This is a scenario where the “penalty” of messing up is higher, but the payoff in terms of skill development is higher as well. Remember, the value of these repetitions is that you can deliberately practice in an environment where it’s okay to make mistakes. This will give you the best education for what needs to be improved. Plus, it will prepare you for the times when you must perform the skill because it really counts.
Avoid distractions during practice
Deliberate practice can sometimes be very tedious and you will soon be mentally drained. It’s all too easy to get distracted by talking to your friends, using Instagram, or tweeting about how hard your practice was. However, you have to push yourself to eliminate these distractions as much as possible. Turn off your phone, disconnect from the Internet, block your access to specific time-wasting sites, ask your family not to interrupt you for the next couple of hours, etc.
In deliberate practice, you need to be fully tuned in to learning the skill you are working on, because focusing intently takes so much energy, you can really only sustain that level of practice for 60 to 90 minutes at a time, perhaps two hours at most.
Become a teacher
Lastly, you can reinforce your learning and knowledge by teaching others. The National Training Laboratories release The Learning Pyramid. This is a simple diagram showing the rough retention rates to be expected through various forms of teaching.
As seen from the pyramid, passive learning approaches offer relatively low levels of retention. Unfortunately, this is what we often rely on when picking up a new skill, especially as adults.
Participatory methods offer much more promise. ‘Group discussions’ could be fostered through mastermind groups or online critiques. ‘Practice by doing’ is where deliberate practice comes in. But with “teaching others” reportedly offering a 90% retention rate, we simply cannot ignore this strategy.
“If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”
- Einstein
Whether you’re already proficient, or a complete novice here isn’t important. If you’re an expert looking to improve, you have a lot to teach. If you’re a novice, you can document and explain what you’re learning to others.
Deciding to become a teacher means thoroughly understanding a very specific area of study before being able pass on that knowledge others. This gives you the motivation and responsibility to really get to grips with a topic. You can learn more about teaching others here.
Conclusion
In sum, regardless of the subject, area or field in question, deliberate practice is one of the best tactics to level up faster. It’s certainly not easy (what is?) but there’s no denying that it produces results. Results that’re usually better than blind repetition. Committing yourself to practice and giving it your all, pushing your boundaries, and extending your comfort zone, is what will dramatically help you to get where you want to be.
