Musings on Deliberate Practice and Why it’s Critical for Those of Us with No Defined Retirement Age
We are all firmly in the midst of an ever-accelerating information age and it’s somewhat of a double-edged sword. While we have an unprecedented amount of information at our fingertips and it is usually possible to find useful and relevant information via a simple google search, there is a corresponding exponential increase in the amount and type of information that us knowledge workers need to stay abreast and informed of in order to maintain our relevancy and mastery of our chosen fields. Similarly, on the personal front, we have opportunities to positively impact our lives through better technologies and the freely available information about how to maintain or improve our mental, physical, emotional, financial, and sexual health.
How do we stay abreast of all this information that is flying at us? Aytekin Tank recently wrote an article on deliberate practice, in which he shared author and entrepreneur Michael Simmons’ ‘five-hour rule’: spend one hour, each weekday, devoted to highly-concentrated learning. While the context of the five-hour rule within Tank’s article is more around achieving mastery, in practice for most of us it’s more about an efficient, doable, and sustainable way to stay relevant and to build on our knowledge and skills. Do a quick google search on ‘five-hour rule’ and you’ll see many articles about how some of the most successful people we all know are using this technique.

In my current role as Agile Coach within a 16,000+ employee company, it is imperative for me to stay current with the latest trends, empirical findings, tools, etc. around Agile, Lean, and DevOps. Doing so requires the discipline to carve out time most every day that is dedicated to reading and blogging. Fortunately, I have a manager who is like-minded, both practicing the five-hour rule concept himself, and supporting it with our team of agilists, even though to-date we haven’t specifically referred to it by name.
The most successful companies and the ones that will be relevant ten years from now and beyond are those that build continuous learning into their culture. They recognize that the corporate Learning & Development organization can only provide a small fraction of the learning through their formal training offerings. Per Manette Chadwick, who heads up Global Learning at SAP:
Industry leaders agree that creating a strong learning culture is essential in creating a workforce that is “all-in.” According to Josh Bersin, Bersin by Deloitte, “The single biggest driver of business impact is the strength of an organization’s learning culture.” And fostering a strong learning culture must focus on continuous learning.
However, not everyone works in an environment where continuous learning is valued to the extent that management supports something like the five-hour rule. How then can these workers be continuous learners in their profession without taking up precious personal time to do so, thereby reducing the available time for continuous learning on the personal front? To some extent it’s a Catch-22 situation for these workers. If they apply the five-hour rule totally on their own time, they negatively impact their work-life balance. Conversely, if they don’t use personal time for continuous learning, they risk being left behind, with a growing skills and knowledge gap, from those in their company and the broader workforce who have taken the time.
These workers appear to have two clear choices. The first is to look for new employment at a company where continuous learning is valued. Be careful though, some companies and managers will give lip service to continuous learning but aren’t really supportive when it comes to day-to-day work schedules. I’d recommend asking a closed question such as “How many hours a week do you allow your employees to focus on gaining new knowledge or building new skills?” during an interview. Notice I didn’t add “on average” to the question as it makes it too squishy.
The other option for workers at a company without a continuous learning culture is to spend some deliberate practice time during personal hours and then to apply the learnings in a way that makes them more efficient or otherwise demonstrates the value their new knowledge or skills bring to the organization. While this won’t likely be enough to change the entire company culture, it may be possible to make micro-culture changes within their teams, which in turn may lead their managers to change their mindset on the investment in continuous learning. For this option it’s critical that workers deliberately practice (pun intended) having explicit conversations about the cause and effect of their efforts and the results, if their managers don’t get it without these conversations. Some managers won’t ever get it and, drawing from the Agile mindset for a moment, consider this to be a positive because we’ve now got more information to make an informed choice about our career options and we may choose to look elsewhere within the company or outside of the company for a new opportunity.
I am a member of the baby boomer generation, yet I’m not on the downward side of my career as are many of my generation. I do not have a target retirement age due to many factors including multiple marriages, spending way too many years escaping the “real world” in academia, and not treating retirement savings plans as untouchable. Instead of choosing to be bitter over the choices I’ve made, I choose to be grateful for excellent health, a wonderful relationship with my wife Paula who has enriched my life in countless ways, and a career direction as an Agile Coach that is as fulfilling as it is varied with the aforementioned opportunities for deliberate practice during working hours.
For the growing population of workers like myself without a defined retirement age, deliberate practice needs to be a life-long discipline in as many areas of life as possible. I’ve already covered why it’s critical for knowledge workers in their chosen professions. Even more important is deliberate practice for one’s physical health. As many wise people have stated, our health (physical, mental, etc.) is most fundamental to leading a fulfilling and meaningful life.
“When you have your health, you have everything. When you do not have your health, nothing else matters at all.” — Augusten Burroughs
I have a friend who is over ten years younger than I, and about once a month, if not more often, he complains of lower back pain. Sometimes this results in him needing to take a day off work. While there can be deeper medical reasons for lower back issues, commonly it’s due to a sedentary lifestyle that starts with too much sitting in a desk job. I’ve told my friend that just a couple of hours a week of focused workouts (deliberate practice) in the gym, including specific core exercises, could very likely reduce and/or eliminate his symptoms. His response was “I’m not really a gym rat. I don’t like hanging out in gyms.” I told him I’m no more of a gym rat than he, and I don’t spend any more time there than necessary. However, when I was a tall (6’2”, 1.88m) slender guy in my early 20s, I sometimes experienced lower back pain when I was not active enough. For this reason and to avoid loss of muscle mass that occurs naturally as we age, I now do a full-body weight training workout twice a week. In addition to avoiding any aches or pains from a sedentary day job, I have actually built significant muscle mass and recover very quickly after hikes that are a regular weekend activity for many of us, including my wife and I, who are fortunate enough to live in the state of Colorado in the USA.
We should strive to carve out time each day or a few times a week for deliberate practice in order to gain new skills and knowledge, so we may stay relevant and/or advance in our careers. It may require putting in some personal time until it’s possible to convince our managers that investing regularly in continuous learning has a measurable payback, or until we determine it’s time to move onto another opportunity. Equally, if not more important than investing in our careers, we should invest in our wellbeing and overall health through deliberate, mindful practice. Most of us don’t need to get to the level of mastery to make lasting differences that will enrich or transform how we feel about ourselves and our ability to live the life we dream of living.
