Deliberate Practise: The key to continuous learning even if you’re always busy
You’ve probably heard business owners always complaining about how busy they are. And it’s understandable! As a business owner you’ll be wearing many hats that will you keep you eternally busy.
And that was definitely the case for me. I felt productive, I felt like I was moving 1 step closer towards my goal of creating a million-dollar business.
But looking back on the past 6 months, I haven’t learnt anything!
Although my business has more revenue, as a founder I haven’t learnt much about how to run or grow a business. And this is a scary feeling!!
And this happens to the majority of us. When we’re so focused on getting things done, we stop taking the time to learn how to do things better — we perform skills on auto-pilot that saves us time but results in very little improvement.
Reading blog articles, books or even analysing on how you could improve, mostly stop as a result.
Driving is a perfect example of what I mean. When you’re learning how to drive, there is so much growth in the first few months!
But once you’re comfortable on the road, everything becomes automatic and you stop pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone.
Ultimately you’re left with years of experience but the same amount of skills as you had when you first started out.
Anders Ericsson, who is an internationally recognised researcher in human performance, also states that once a person reaches a level of “acceptable” performance and then performs those activities on auto-pilot, additional years of “practise” does not lead to improvement.
A great quote in his book, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise states that
The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else
The idea is that when running your business or performing any skill on auto-pilot, you’re not learning anything. Even if you’re getting a lot done! You become better at doing that particular activity but not at the skills itself.
Malcom Gladwell and his 10,000 hour rule
A popular idea by Malcom Gladwell states that you need 10000 hours to become a master at any skill.
But this creates a false notion that as long as you show up for 10000 hours doing the skill, you’ll become a master.
If you were to spend an additional 10000 hours driving on the road, you won’t magically become a master. In fact you’ll mostly likely stagnate or decline.
Instead, if you were to constantly identify your weakness and then actively try to improve them for those 100000 hours, then you will become a master at driving.
This applies to all skills from engineering to entrepreneurship —you can’t just show up, you have to do more than that!
This also moves us quite nicely on to how we can ensure we’re constantly improving and never stagnating.
Here’s how you can continue to grow with deliberate practise
Deliberate practise is where you set a defined goal of what you need to improve on. Then you practise that area with focus and effort for a short period of time e.g. 1- 2 hours.
The difference between deliberate and ordinary practise, is that you’re actively trying to push yourself outside of your comfort zone rather than doing things on auto-pilot.
Characteristics of deliberate practise include the following:
- Well-defined specific goals — you must know what you’re focusing on in your practising sessions. What are you improving?
- Focused — You should be pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone. If you’re brain isn’t hurting by the end of your practise, you’re doing it wrong.
- Feedback — In order to know what you need to improve on, you need feedback. Setting up the right feedback systems is important, be it from a coach or from your own knowledge of what’s right.
There’s a reason why there a very few experts, it’s hard!
Deliberate practise is hard! You should feel uncomfortable each time trying to push the boundaries of your knowledge and skills.
When you’re learning it’s easy to just consume content by watching a youtube video or a course.
But studies have shown that active learning e.g. interactive workshops/doing what is taught, yields much better results than just passively learning!
Anders Ericson also studied 30 professional violinists and found they all agreed that solitary deliberate practise was the most important factor in improving. This practise was seen as labour-intensive and not much fun.
Becoming better at anything requires long hours, constant analysis on how you could improve and a lot of deliberate practise. No shortcuts, just hard work!
Game Plan
I always like to end an article with a game plan on how you can take this information and apply to your life. Below I’ve included a possible routine that I’ll be implementing into my life and maybe one you could utilise also!
- Set aside at least 1 hour each working day with the sole purpose to learn!
- At the start of that hour, set an explicit goal identifying what you’ll be aiming to improve on. The clearer and more well defined the goal, the better! A good template of questions to use is the following:
- What skill will I be improving on today e.g. Cold email marketing
- What will I be focusing on improving in particular? Be as explicit as possible e.g. learning how to clearly identify my target audience to better improve my conversion rates
- What is my goal for the next hour? e.g. Come up with at least 1 profile of an ideal target audience using industry-standard techniques
3. Once I’ve completed my deliberate practise for the day, I’ll then continue with any urgent work to be done e.g. emails or fires to put out
I’ve found this was the best way to get a balance between learning and actually getting things done.
And on that note, I’ll end this post with an awesome quote!
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young
— Henry Ford
I release new articles every 2 weeks with the sole purpose of helping others learn something new, understand it and then apply it to their lives — consider subscribing to my bi-weekly newsletter!
– Andy Dao is an entrepreneur and is an avid reader and writer. He’s currently the founder at Pixel True.
