Improve your performance with deliberate practice series — part 2
A series about experts, learning, performance, and concrete steps to go from 0 to hero in your domain. Starts with Part 1, goes on with Part 2, and ends with Part 3.
In the first article of the series, we took a journey into science and psychology. We found out what happens in our brain when we learn. We learned what myelin is and how neither talent, nor time are actually leading factors in the way we perform.
Now we’re going to talk about another opposite of deliberate practice.
We will call it normal practice.
Normal practice
To have a clear image about what normal practice means, let’s go back down memory lane. Imagine the time when we were in school.
We invest 12–18 years of our life in school. We actually love some subjects, but we have no long term return of investment.
In a determined time frame, we took a series of classes and our teachers exposed us to a bunch of information. After the series ended, to measure how much of it did we get, we took tests. That’s when all hell would break loose.
We would engage in countless repetition of the same lessons, word by word. Did the same mathematical equations. Or repeated in our head the most important years of the history.
We took the test and yes, maybe we got a great grade. What happened when 2–3 months later someone would have asked us what do we remember from what we learned? We realized we’re back to square one most of the time.
For those subjects we weren’t interested in, that worked quite well. But what about the ones we liked and thought about choosing as a future path?
Not fun, right? We invest 12–18 years of our life in school. We actually love some subjects, but we have no long term return of investment.
Let’s not get sad. Most of us didn’t have the same information access as we have right now. Since we can’t change the past, let’s learn from a top baseball player how to grow our skills from now on.
Joe DiMaggio. A story.
Joe DiMaggio was an American baseball player for the New York Yankees. In 1941 he set a record of 56-game hitting streak. A record that still stands. No surprise that he had a lot of journalists on his back praising him and saying he’s such a “natural hitter”.
“Don’t you ever tell me I’m a natural hitter again”
One day, when a reporter was at his house saying the exact same phrase, he got a big surprise. With no words, DiMaggio took him by the hand and dragged him to the basement. In the darkness of the room, he picked up a bat. He began repeating a series of practice swings, screaming particular pitches. “Fastball, low and away” or “slider, inside”. While he was practicing we adjust his approach accordingly.
After he finished the routine, DiMaggio left his baseball bat down. He picked up a chalk and scratched a mark on the wall. When he flicked on the lights, he revealed thousands of marks like the one he had just made.
Supposedly, his next line was “Don’t you ever tell me I’m a natural hitter again”.
What Joe DiMaggio did differently from what we did in school was being aware of every step of his practice. He carefully planned what he wanted to improve and made sure he had a way to track his progress.
And that’s exactly what we’re going to approach in the next article. What are the steps you should take to engage in deliberate practice and make the best out of it.
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Lavinia Mehedințu is a self directed learner, always trying to get the best out of her learning process. She dreams to change mindsets and educational systems through her work.
