Do Lots of Deliberate Practice

You do deliberate practice to improve your ability to perform a task. It’s about skill and technique. Deliberate practice means repetition. It means performing the task with the aim of increasing your mastery of one or more aspects of the task. It means repeating the repetition. Slowly, over and over again. Until you achieve your desired level of mastery. You do deliberate practice to master the task not to complete the task.

How much deliberate practice does it take to acquire expertise?

Peter Norvig writes that “It may be that 10,000 hours […] is the magic number.”

Mary: “There is broad consensus among researchers of expert performance that inborn talent does not account for much more than a threshold; you have to have a minimum amount of natural ability to get started in a sport or profession. After that, the people who excel are the ones who work the hardest.”

There is little point deliberately practicing something you are already an expert at. Deliberate practice means practicing something you are not good at.

Mary: “Deliberate practice does not mean doing what you are good at; it means challenging yourself, doing what you are not good at. So it’s not necessarily fun.”