Most of us have heard the adage: How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.
The sentiment is simple: to get good at something, one needs to practice.
It's not that this idea is wrong (it's not) - but as I've listened to more interviews with people who study performance, and read books like Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers", it's clear that not all methods of practice are equal.
Let's look at an example of gaining a skill that most people are familiar with - learning a new language.
The traditional method of teaching a new language (to someone who already speaks a native tongue) involves a lot of rote memorization. Memorizing new nouns and verbs, followed by memorizing forms of conjugation. Then, some writing or reading. After a year of Spanish in high school, all I can remember at this point is 'Me llamo es Ryan, y tu?' - and I'm not even sure that is correct.
The point is - memorization isn't a great way to get good at something.
Now, contrast this with how a toddler learns to speak. Do parents teach their kids how to speak by drilling new words, and teaching the forms of verb conjugation? No. Kids learn because everyone around them is speaking the language, the same books are being read to them over and over, and eventually the pattern recognition abilities of the child's brain picks up that every time a picture of this big yellow truck appears, the words 'dump truck' are uttered.
This is obviously the basis for practicing via immersion. And many people do cite this as being an excellent way to learn a language - it's worked for every human being that has ever spoken, so it has quite the track record of success.
However, psychology and neuroscience has further defined a method of practice that can yield faster results, and in some ways more applicable to other skills. That method of practice is called Deliberate Practice.
Deliberate Practice involves the following:
- Establishing the performance metric to be assessed
- Identifying objectives just beyond the current level of ability
- Engaging in exercises specifically designed to reach the new level of performance
- Ongoing corrective feedback
- Successive refinement over time through repetition
So, whats the difference between immersion and deliberate practice? For starters, immersion doesn't necessarily take into account your existing skill level, so objectives just beyond your current ability can be few and far between. If I want to learn Spanish, I could go to Spain and speak only Spanish, and I could become fluent (enough) in a few months - but I'd probably find that for the first few weeks, I'd be lonely because I can't hold a conversation, I'd be limited in my food options because I don't know what anything is, and it'd just be a really taxing and exhausting exercise.
Switching gears to another example - if I wanted to learn how to get good at chess, I could play against the computer at a hard level, but I'd get my rear end wiped across the board in only a few moves every time, such that just lasting 10 moves would be dramatic improvement.
So, what do we instinctively do in that chess scenario? We set the difficulty to something that challenges us, but doesn't overwhelm us. Something where we win maybe half the time, and we are able to see different strategies and tactics play out. If we do it right, it's a much more effective, satisfying, and faster way to learn.
Going back to the language scenario - think again to how toddlers learn to speak, and what is actually going on there. As parents, we know that the child doesn't have the vocabulary we do, so we don't expect them to say complicated words like 'excavator' right away. We start them off with simple, single syllable words, like 'dump truck' (which, given they are also learning phonetics, they are just as likely to pronounce it as 'dumb f*ck' - but I digress). We lower the bar to be just beyond their ability, and over time we raise that bar as their skills improve. We actually provide them with all the ingredients of deliberate practice, and we do it rather intuitively.
Yet, somehow, as adults, we tend to forget the elements of deliberate practice as we get older and try to learn new skills ourselves. We may try the full-on immersion method (ever started a job and been told it's 'sink or swim, buddy'?), but don't go through the mental exercise of determining our current skill level, what the metrics for improvement are, and how we are going to get there. Then, when we plateau after the first major bout of improvement (because going from zero skill to some skill is rather easy), we get frustrated at the failure and give up.
It's not that as adults we can't learn new skills - it's that a lot of the time, we take an approach that does not set us up for the greatest chance of success, and when we have other demands on our time, it's easy to drop the pursuit of the new skill.
The other thing that I find interesting about deliberate practice is that there are a lot of parallels with a topic I've posted about previously, which is Objectives & Key Results. The OKR model may have been created to increase productivity within an organization, but it's a model that works at the individual level as well.
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