Are You Practicing Wrong? Here’s How to Maximize Your Time Spent Improving Skills.
The following is adapted from Learn, Improve, Master, by Nick Velasquez.
Imagine, we’ve been on the tennis court practicing serves for hours, but despite the sweat covering our faces and the calluses forming on our palms, we don’t seem to be getting any better. We might begin to think practicing is a waste of time — but it’s not.
Practice is a necessary part of mastering any skill. It’s the essence of learning any craft, and despite some people’s negative feelings toward it, it can be the most exciting and rewarding part of learning. However, when learning a new skill, a lot of people focus on the amount of practice, and not on the quality.
If we’re practicing the wrong way, we’re only ingraining bad habits that will be difficult to unlearn later.
So, what makes good practice? And how can we maximize the results we get from the time and effort we put into it? That’s what we’ll look at in this article.
Practice, Not Repetition, Leads to Improvement
Many people, if asked about the difference between practice and repetition, might say the two are interchangeable, but for the purposes of mastery, there’s an important distinction.
When we practice a new skill, we generally have two goals: increase our current level and solidify what we already learned.
Repetition only helps us with the latter — solidifying our abilities — but it’s not a way to expand them. Think of how long we’ve been brushing our teeth or walking. That’s years of repetition without getting better. All the repetition we’ve done since then only reinforced the way we brush our teeth and walk, not improved it.
Repetition can be good or bad, depending on what we repeat. For example, people can be poor drivers their whole lives because all they do is reinforce mistakes and bad habits. The main role of repetition is reinforcement, so, for it to be useful, we need to repeat the right things. That means building our abilities correctly in the first place.
For improvement, we turn to a different process: deliberate practice.
Deliberate Practice as a Path to Mastery
Deliberate practice is, according to the renowned expert in expertise, Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, “purposeful practice that knows where it is going and how to get there.” Let’s take a look at what satisfies those conditions.
First, deliberate practice has well-defined goals for the practice session. Practice should always have an aim, and it can’t be as vague as “to get better.” We need to know exactly what we want to work on and then design a session for it. The goal could be to improve a specific part of the skill, fix a mistake or bad habit, or refine a difficult technique. What’s important is to know what we want to achieve and then go after it.
Next, deliberate practice needs to be, as the name suggests, deliberate. We have to give practice our undivided attention, not just our time. If our mind is wandering and we are cruising through a practice session, we’ll fall into mindless repetition. Deliberate practice demands all our energy; it’s exhausting, but the payoff is worth it. One hour of deliberate practice will yield more results than several hours of mindless practice. Think quality over quantity.
Lastly, deliberate practice requires guidance and proven training techniques to be most effective. Each generation stands on the shoulders of the one before, and we should take advantage of that collective knowledge. A coach or teacher can guide us through the learning process, teach us proven training techniques, and challenge us to be better. Additionally, they’ll give us feedback so we can know where improvement is most needed.
Find the Practice Sweet Spot
So how can we make the most of our deliberate practice sessions and ensure we’re using our time efficiently?
We must find the practice “sweet spot,” a point where our abilities are challenged enough to keep us engaged but not too much that it overwhelms us. Practice shouldn’t necessarily be fun or enjoyable. In fact, Dr. Ericsson considers struggle the defining emotion of deep practice.
Challenging ourselves is desirable, but we must be careful not to push too hard too soon because pressure disrupts learning and makes it inflexible. The key to getting the most out of our training sessions is to find the balanced sweet spot between challenging and enjoyable, deliberately seek improvement, and follow the guidance of masters.
If we’re intentional and driven in our practice, whether on the tennis court, in the kitchen, leading the orchestra, or anywhere else, we’ll make every hour count.
For more advice on maximizing your learning capacity, you can find Learn, Improve, Master on Amazon.
Nick Velasquez is a passionate learner and devoted student of mastery. He’s the author of the popular blog UnlimitedMastery.com, where he writes about learning science, peak performance, creativity, and mastering skills. His writing has been featured in outlets such as TIME and Thought Catalogue. Nick speaks multiple languages and spends his time between Tokyo and Montréal.
