Practice More Efficiently | Deliberate Practice & Skill Improvement

To get better at something, we practice, right? So what happens when we don't seem to be getting any better? Fundamentally, there's two explanations: you are actually getting better (but it just doesn't feel like it) or you're practicing incorrectly. The first has to do with the typical trajectory of skill acquisition and our performance measures. The second has to do with deliberate practice. Join my online learning community: https://www.benjaminkeep.com/community 00:00 Introduction 00:24 Linear change is not a good model 01:14 Performance plateaus 01:57 Sometimes it's hard to measure skills 03:00 Deliberate practice 03:07 Identify expert skills 04:23 Challenging practice 05:13 Self-evaluation 06:08 Feedback 07:25 Repeat the steps (especially steps 2-4) If anyone wants some one-on-one laundry basketball action, I'm game. References: For a general guide to deliberate practice, check out my article, here: https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/d... The classic study is: Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological review, 100(3), 363. (currently at https://mrbartonmaths.com/resourcesne...) The idea of deliberate practice has been applied to a lot of different domains. Chess: de Bruin, A. B., Smits, N., Rikers, R. M., & Schmidt, H. G. (2008). Deliberate practice predicts performance over time in adolescent chess players and drop‐outs: A linear mixed models analysis. British Journal of Psychology, 99(4), 473-497. (currently at https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wile...) Typing: Keith, N., & Ericsson, K. A. (2007). A deliberate practice account of typing proficiency in everyday typists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 13(3), 135. (currently at https://clinica.ispa.pt/ficheiros/are...) Ballet: Ureña, C. A. (2004). Skill acquisition in ballet dancers: The relationship between deliberate practice and expertise (Doctoral dissertation, The Florida State University). (currently at https://fsu.digital.flvc.org/islandor...) For some solid criticism of the concept, see: Hambrick, D. Z., Oswald, F. L., Altmann, E. M., Meinz, E. J., Gobet, F., & Campitelli, G. (2014). Deliberate practice: Is that all it takes to become an expert?. Intelligence, 45, 34-45. (currently at https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk...) Note that Hambrick and his colleagues still think that deliberate practice is critical for developing expertise. But they do differ with Ericsson over the relative importance of some other factors. There’s also some important points made by Ericsson on how they’re measuring deliberate practice, although I tend to think this is a problem endemic to the deliberate practice literature. Many researchers will just log practice hours (or “time spent working alone”) as deliberate practice when the concept is considerably more nuanced. The piece below also digs into some of these inconsistencies in the definition of deliberate practice: Macnamara, B. N., & Maitra, M. (2019). The role of deliberate practice in expert performance: revisiting Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer (1993). Royal Society open science, 6(8), 190327. (currently at https://royalsocietypublishing.org/do...) Chess image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay.