Deliberate practice

Angela Duckworth through her book GRIT introduced me to the concept-Deliberate Practice.
The word was coined by a cognitive psychologist Anders Ericsson.
Ericsson has studied the worlds best experts on how they acquire world-class skills. Angela says Ericsson is the world expert on world experts.
When you read a book, a lot of times the moot points miss their target. But if you have a context and background, all the information inside the pages starts hitting each neuron inside your head.
An 8 hour trip with a bus full of fellow runners, 100s of running tips, sub-2 21K performers, and my average performance on the pursuit of winning the hills. This was exactly what was required to allow GRIT to hit me hard in the head and bring the meaning of Deliberate practice to reality.
Many a times I put myself under the lens of Susan Cain and her book Quiet and find myself being identified as an Introvert. So when I landed inside this extra extrovert group of not-ordinary runners and their way of handling difficult runs, I ended up learning a lot.
I could see what different things they are doing to achieve those sub-2 results. I could feel the seriousness in each of the advice. I could see the sourness below those barefoot runs and then suddenly those pages inside GRIT started making sense. I had a context, a baseline and something to compare myself with.
Start slow, drink enough water, stretch well before and after runs, eat good, don’t target time, increase your mileage, take good rest. There is so much to hear and grasp from this wonderful group of runners.
GRIT named all of this together as Deliberate Practice.
The concept explains what experts do. What different things they do. How they do things differently.
- Experts stretch their goals
- Experts improve specific weaknesses
- Experts hungrily seek feedback
Deliberate practice ends up in improving your skill. You analyze everything you do during this phase. You get feedback mainly on what you are doing incorrectly. And finally, you make adjustments and try again and repeat the process.
The running group helped me think beyond the targets I ever set. Few conversations went for Iron-man or the Boston Marathon or even Comrades. These words never had a place inside my head but now, they became an option! Targets are stretched, mind blocks are fading and from mere hobby, running is now moving towards passion!
Deliberate practice is going to give you clear goals to work upon. Be it running or a new project or a new hobby, deliberate practice slowly takes you to the best results.
- Make specific goals (for runners, target specific distance, specific pace, a specific race and so on)
- Monitor your progress
- Take feedback
- Improve
- Repeat
Though the steps seem to be “I know all of this”, step one is what I identified as most critical. The concept made me realize that merely waking up early and going for a run is not good enough, its way too simple!
Defining specific goals is critical. Model of Deliberate practice is critical.
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