What is the instant way to become an expert at something after learning about it?

Practicing it! Much to the chagrin of children sitting angrily at their pianos across the world, practice is indeed the only way you will improve and rise to a level of expertise, even if you have the innate talent of Mozart.

However, just like learning, taking notes, and reading (most of what we have discussed in this book thus far), there are ways we think are beneficial and successful, and there are ways that actually are. In other words, we are most likely not practicing the best way we can, and if we are, we may not be doing it for the correct reasons.

Practice can sometimes be hard to quantify, because we generally think it refers to just repeating an action or doing something over and over until we feel better about it. While this is true, it’s overly vague and doesn’t lead to significant expertise because there’s no purpose or system behind it 먹튀검증커뮤니티.

Before getting to the finer points of practice, deliberate practice, and what really moves the needle in your practice sessions, I want to touch upon some more foundational practice tips you may already be familiar with. Throughout this chapter, I want to use the example of becoming better at playing an instrument: the violin.

The first step is commitment. Not just the commitment to practicing, but the commitment to not simply breeze through it and passively participate and go through the motions. Commit to 100% focus every time you practice. Commit to the knowledge it will be tiring and exhausting, and there is no easy way to actually practice. Getting better at something involves straying outside of your comfort zone. It will involve no small amount of struggle. You will feel uncomfortable and lacking in your abilities when you attempt to climb higher and higher. So, commit to all of this. Violinists must commit to their fingers hurting and being sore, their arms cramping, their eyes hurting from reading notes, and overall frustration from their fingers not doing what they want.

Set the expectation of commitment and that it will be a challenge for you to overcome, not to be discouraged by.

The second step is similar. You must practice to the edge of your capacities. This means that there is an optimal level of practice difficulty you should aim for. Aiming too high will discourage you, and aiming too low will bore you and not lead to any improvement. You want to find the sweet spot that pushes you to the edge of your current abilities because you will feel encouraging triumph and accomplishment. For the budding violinist, this means to attempt to play and practice pieces that are slightly more difficult than you think you’d be able to play, or even a piece that has some very difficult parts, but is otherwise average in difficulty. Improvement typically doesn’t happen in huge leaps (unless you are a beginner) ? it happens in small increments. You should tailor your practice to this pattern and keep yourself motivated and realistic.

Third, it’s important to keep giving yourself positive feedback surrounding your practice sessions. The nature of practice is naturally depressing since it involves no small amount of failure. When you have too many failures consecutively, you might eventually start to believe that you completely lack the ability and talent for whatever you are practicing.

Focus on what you’ve achieved and not what you failed at. Focus on where you started and where you currently are. Review and tally up how many hours you spend weekly or monthly so you can visually understand how much work you put in, and not feel like you’re not working at all.

The budding violinist might record themselves on a monthly basis so they can see their improvement, or when they first start to learn a piece versus the point of mastery over it. Sometimes it’s only when we see big contrasts do we feel satisfied with the work we put in.

Realize that improvement is never 100% linear, and you won’t feel like you clearly improve every session. Sometimes it might feel like you’re taking a step back, but in reality, no one can perform 100% of the time. Just imagine how the stock market chart looks. There’s a large upward trend, but there might be dips every once in a while.

Fourth, in addition to positive feedback from yourself, seek immediate feedback from others, negative or positive. This is so you don’t build bad habits, or build upon incorrect assumptions and actions. You need to be able to correct your course, and addressing the flaw as quickly as possible is what makes the biggest impact before you internalize it. This allows practice to continue correctly into the future.

In fact, spend most of your time on negative feedback. You likely already know what you’re good at. The negative feedback will uncover any blind spots you may possess and fix the weakest link of your chain. If you don’t correct yourself, you are teaching yourself to do something wrong. It’s a good idea to attempt to solicit feedback from someone who is (1) not naturally talented, and (2) close to your level of expertise because they will be able to give you highly relevant and articulate feedback, because they understand exactly what you are asking and doing.

We started the chapter with general guidelines for better practice, and now it’s time to dive deeper into one of the finer points: deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice was a term coined by John Hayes of Carnegie Mellon University. In short, it describes the best way to practice is to break your main goal down into numerous sub-skills that contribute to the goal. Then, instead of rehearsing the main goal, focus on each sub-skill and bring them to the point of proficiency, one at a time.

For example, there are many sub-skills involved if you wish to perform a violin piece at expert proficiency. You must work on finger strength, finger speed, musical emotion and dynamics, performance skills, stage presence, memorization, and watching the conductor, just to name a few. Deliberate practice would be isolating each of those sub-skills and working on them individually for hours until they become a relative strength. When you are able to do this for each sub-skill, it can be said that you have fewer weaknesses, and your overall performance level will rise substantially.

Deliberate practice is the art of mastering smaller skills that contribute to your overall goal. A skill is only as strong as it’s weakest link, and you are making sure that you have none. Can a racecar win races if it has a top of the line body and wheels, but engine of a 1980 Honda Civic? There’s no hope without paying attention to each contributing component.

The practice of deliberate practice also teaches you to analyze the goal you are working towards, and what is involved in reaching it. You objectively assess what is and is not working and you can more accurately pinpoint your weaknesses and strengths. This is a valuable skill to learn in and of itself, because you are learning to break problems down and solve them.

Here’s what deliberate practice looks like in gaining a new skill versus tuning up an existing skill: let’s suppose that you want to learn how to lift weights in the gym.

Think about the sub-skills that are involved in lifting weights, then start attacking them one at a time.

You’d start by learning safety rules for each exercise you want to learn. If you wanted to learn fifteen exercises, this could take a while.

Next, you would learn how to do each exercise to get the most out of it. You’d learn proper form and what to look out for in each of the fifteen exercises. Learning techniques would be a specific sub-skill in itself for each lift.

Then, you would learn how each exercise contributes to your body and how to construct a workout that gives you a balanced physique. People respond differently, so this could take a few sessions in itself.

The contrast is going to a gym and essentially winging it by jumping under a bar and lifting without a clear purpose or understanding of what you’re doing. You might even spend hours a week doing this, but unless you understand the proper safety, form, and technique, you won’t be fulfilling your gym potential.

Many people think sheer hard work is what will propel them to the top. It’s certainly a component, but most people who are working hard are merely developing the skill of hard work, not necessarily playing violin or lifting weights. Deliberate practice is the differentiating factor.

One final wrinkle in the argument for deliberate practice comes in the form of a study from Robert Duke at the University of Texas at Austin, who had pianists learn a complex passage of music, and noted the learning habits of those who performed best at the study’s end.

The top strategies became clear.

Identification of problem areas, and subsequent emphasis and focus until the problem was nonexistent. The key for the best pianists was how they handled their problems and weaknesses. They weren’t innately better or made fewer mistakes at the outset, they analyzed what they needed to focus on and rehearsed those specifics spots until they were no longer weaknesses. They made sure they didn’t continue to make mistakes and learn incorrectly, and correctly identified what needed to happen to improve the piece as a whole.

It sounds remarkably similar to what occurs in deliberate practice.