The Elements of Deliberate Practice

This summary is adapted from Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated

1. It’s designed specifically to improve performance Key: Designed.
   • Full-time teachers/coaches generally have this knowledge to assist you in the beginning.
   • You may eventually become skilled enough to design your own practice.
   • This step is important to get experts’ feedback
   • Without a clear, unbiased view of your performance, choosing the best practice activity will be (virtually) impossible
2. It pushes you just beyond, but not way beyond, your current abilities
   • Central principle: Forcing you to do what you can’t quite do
   • Deliberate practice requires you to identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that needs to be improved, and then work intently on performing them at a higher level
3. It can be repeated a lot
   • High repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice of a task and performing the task for real, when it counts.
   • a) Choosing your weak areas to practice repetitively is important
   • b) The amount of practice is also extremely high
4. Feedback on results is continuously available
   • A teacher, coach, or mentor is vital for providing critical feedback
5. It’s highly demanding mentally
   • Continually seeking exactly those elements of performance that are unsatisfactory and then trying one’s hardest to make them better places enormous strains on anyone’s mental abilities
   • 4 or 5 hours a day seems to be the upper limit of deliberate practice, and this is frequently accomplished in sessions lasting no more than an hour to 90 minutes
6. It isn’t much fun
   • You insistently seek out what you’re not good at
   • Identify the painful, difficult activities that will make you better and do those things over and over
   • After each repetition, force yourself to see—or get others to tell you—exactly what still isn’t right so we can repeat the most painful and difficult parts of what you’ve just done
   • You continue the process until you’re mentally exhausted

Summary: Activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help. It pushes the practitioner forward just beyond, but not all the beyond, his or her current limits. It can repeated a lot. Feedback on results is continuously available. Highly demanding mentally or physically and isn’t much fun.