There was a HN discussion some time ago about choosing a textbook that is optimal for oneself (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41016650), and this passage from the answer about deliberate practice stuck out to me:
In the field of talent development, there is absolutely no debate about the most superior form of training. It's deliberate practice: mindful repetition on performance tasks just beyond the edge of one's capabilities.
Deliberate practice is about making performance-improving adjustments on every single repetition. Any individual adjustment is small and yields a small improvement in performance – but when you compound these small changes over a massive number of action-feedback-adjustment cycles, you end up with massive changes and massive gains in performance.
Deliberate practice is superior to all other forms of training. That is a "solved problem" in the academic field of talent development. It might as well be a law of physics. There is a mountain of research supporting the conclusion that the volume of accumulated deliberate practice is the single biggest factor responsible for individual differences in performance among elite performers across a wide variety of talent domains. (The next biggest factor is genetics, and the relative contributions of deliberate practice vs genetics can vary significantly across talent domains.)
I think it depends where you’re at in the progression curve. I’ve always thought that most people can reach the top 1% of just about anything with hard work. Beyond that, it comes down to other factors: genetics, environment, luck, etc.
I ran track in college and reached roughly the top percentile of my age and gender (i.e., the level of a typical D1 athlete), but there is absolutely no way I would ever have come remotely close to a 12:37 5k. You could have started the training from birth under a team of experts, and it simply just would not have happened.
In basically any other field of endeavor, this is fine though, most things people do aren’t judged as though there can only be one best person in the world at it.
That has to be misphrased. If we take "beyond the edge of one's capabilities" literally, that means you can't do it. You can't practice what you can't do. But even just hitting the edge of your capabilities is something athletes almost never do. Practice is certainly still deliberate. It's planned. Every workout has a purpose. But lifters don't hit a one-rep max every single day. Runners don't run a race every single day. The overwhelming majority of practice is intentionally submaximal because the stress of trying to max out every time you do something is too much to recover from and limits your ability to accumulate large volumes of practice over time. "Performance-improving adjustments on every single repetition" is almost incomprehensible in some realms of performance. I'm not some high level athlete or anything, but I ran 9 miles this morning with 5 of them slightly below lactate threshold and that took a bit fewer than 13,000 steps. Do we really expect each of those steps to involve feedback and improvement? Fatigue is a thing. Nobody gets better with every step. You get better very, very slowly, often after very long cycles of functional overreach and recovery in which you first get worse before you get better.
I agree with other posters that this is overly nitpicky.
Take as an example playing a musical instrument. Perhaps you play cello in a community orchestra, and you're presented with a piece that has a passage that you can't reliably or consistently play at performance tempo - maybe it has an awkward fingering or shift, or maybe requires a bow technique that you struggle with. But, maybe if you reduce the tempo to 80% of performance speed, you can hit it more-or-less consistently.
The recommendation that is ingrained with all classical musicians in this scenario is to practice the challenging passage at this comfortable tempo with utter dedication to precision and execution. And when you can reliably and consistently execute at this tempo, notch up the speed a tiny bit - as little as 4 beats per minute. Repeat until you hit the consistency milestone, ad nauseam until you get to performance tempo (and then a bit on top for good measure).
Per the article and per the top comment - there's a reason this is SOP for musicians. Deliberate practice right at the frontier of your capabilities expands that frontier, and lets you push further.
By the way, "consistency" here might be, "play 100 times in a row without a single mistake." I've absolutely had lessons where we do this exercise with a gnarly passage, and when I make a mistake at repetition 79, we start the counter back at 0. It's tedious, laborious, and exhausting - but it works.
I dunno, ask my wife and she'll tell you the songs I'm usually practicing are beyond the edge of my capabilities.
In seriousness, I don't think that statement is meant for lifting/running or anything that's bounded by your physical fitness. Because you're right, the human body doesn't work like that.
Music is probably a better example. I push myself by learning songs that are beyond what I can do now. I practice them and make a bunch of mistakes. And as I keep practicing, the mistakes go away. And at some point, the song I couldn't play becomes a song I can play. Then I find new even harder songs to focus my practice on.
>If we take "beyond the edge of one's capabilities" literally, that means you can't do it.
I think you're being a little nitpicky, people often say to practice at the 'edge of your ability' for this reason. You should push a little at the boundary and eventually you grow to be successful at that edge and then can push a little further.
"Beyond the edge of one's capabilities" means that you're working on things outside of your current repertoire. This could mean any of a number of things, e.g.:
1) Maybe you can do it with scaffolding, but you are unable to do it without scaffolding.
For instance, a musician might not be capable of playing a difficult section of a musical piece at full speed. So they might practice it while playing slowly (a type of scaffolding), and then gradually ramp up the speed while maintaining accuracy.
2) Maybe you can do it sometimes, but not consistently/accurately.
For instance, a gymnast might not be capable of landing a particular flip consistently with proper form. But maybe they can land it 50% of the time with shaky form. So they might practice improving their consistency and form on this skill.
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Working on things outside of one's repertoire, is a core aspect of deliberate practice. Non-experts are often misled to practice within their level of comfort. This tends to be more effortful and less enjoyable, which can mislead non-experts to practice within their level of comfort.
For instance, Coughlan et al. (2014) observed this as a factor differentiating intermediate and expert Gaeilic football players:
"Expert and intermediate level Gaelic football players executed two types of kicks during an acquisition phase and pre-, post-, and retention tests. During acquisition, participants self-selected how they practiced and rated the characteristics of deliberate practice for effort and enjoyment.
The expert group predominantly practiced the skill they were weaker at and improved its performance across pre-, post- and retention tests. Participants in the expert group also rated their practice as more effortful and less enjoyable compared to those in the intermediate group.
In contrast, participants in the intermediate group predominantly practiced the skill they were stronger at and improved their performance from pretest to posttest but not on the retention test."
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The idea of practicing outside of one's repertoire can be generalized to the idea of engaging in a cycle of strain and adaptation. This is done in, e.g., Ericsson (2006). Here's a snippet:
"When the human body is put under exceptional strain, a range of dormant genes in the DNA are expressed and extraordinary physiological processes are activated. Over time the cells of the body, including the brain (see Hill & Schneider, Chapter 37) will reorganize in response to the induced metabolic demands of the activity by, for example, increases in the number of capillaries supplying blood to muscles and changes in metabolism of the muscle fibers themselves.
These adaptations will eventually allow the individual to execute the given level of activity without greatly straining the physiological systems. To gain further beneficial increases in adaptation, the athletes need to increase or change their weekly training activities to induce new and perhaps different types of strain on the key physiological systems."
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In general, in the phrase "deliberate practice," the word "deliberate" is not just an adjective. "Deliberate practice" has a very specific meaning in the research literature.
The way you describe it -- "Practice is certainly still deliberate. It's planned. Every workout has a purpose." -- is not as strict as the meaning in the research literature.
For something closer to a proper definition, I'll quote (Ericsson, 2006):
"The core assumption of deliberate practice (Ericsson, 1996, 2002, 2004; Ericsson et al., 1993) is that expert performance is acquired gradually and that effective improvement of performance requires the opportunity to find suitable training tasks that the performer can master sequentially -- typically the design of training tasks and monitoring of the attained performance is done by a teacher or a coach.
Deliberate practice presents performers with tasks that are initially outside their current realm of reliable performance, yet can be mastered within hours of practice by concentrating on critical aspects and by gradually refining performance through repetitions after feedback.
Hence, the requirement for concentration sets deliberate practice apart from both mindless, routine performance and playful engagement, as the latter two types of activities would, if anything, merely strengthen the current mediating cognitive mechanisms rather than modify them to allow increases in the level of performance."
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I don't know much about serious running, but based on how things work in other domains: if "performance-improving adjustments on every single repetition" is incomprehensible at the level you're looking, then it's an indication you need to zoom out a bit.
The same confusion can happen in, e.g., deliberate practice in math, if you zoom in too much. When a student solves a math problem, do we really expect every single pen stroke to involve feedback and improvement? No. You have to zoom out to the level of the problem.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would expect that in running, the appropriate level to view these deliberate practice cycles is not the level of a single step, but rather, a cohesive group of a taxing "deliberate practice" runs and easier "recovery" runs. At this level, it looks more like that cycle of strain/adaptation that is characteristic of deliberate practice.
(And that level seems to align with what's discussed in the literature -- for instance, I was just skimming Casado et al, 2020, Deliberate Practice in Training Differentiates the Best Kenyan and Spanish Long-Distance Runners, which mentioned that "systematic training ... included high-intensity training sessions considered deliberate practice (DP) and easy runs.")
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References
Casado, A., Hanley, B., and Ruiz-Pérez, L.M. (2020). Deliberate Practice in Training Differentiates the Best Kenyan and Spanish Long-Distance Runners. European Journal of Sport Science, 20 (7). pp. 887-895.
Coughlan, E. K., Williams, A. M., McRobert, A. P., & Ford, P. R. (2014). How experts practice: A novel test of deliberate practice theory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(2), 449.
Ericsson, K. A. (2006). The influence of experience and deliberate practice on the development of superior expert performance. The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance, 38(685-705), 2-2.
Beyond the edge of your capability to do perfectly is what is meant, because there's little point to practicing something you can do perfectly (other than to warm up for other practice for example).
These are good points. The devil is in the details for how to implement stuff like this, and there are a host of other tradeoffs, e.g., seemingly optimal regimens that people despise and that are de-motivating are, in practice, far worse than theoretically less-good training that people will actually do.
If it was as straightforward as some of the "expertise" research suggests, the world would be teeming with super-beings. That it isn't should give one pause about the relative leverage of constructing the problem this way.
I don't believe this stuff at all. Your average AP student has better study habits than Evariste Galois, and about a 0% chance of understanding Galois theory by the age that he invented it (19).
That sort of place is totally abhorrent - not something I would ever use.
However, I have a friend who is wondering if there is a better way to access content on AA than having to futz around with Onion, MySQL and ratarmount? He’d prefer not to code something up himself for what is presumably a fairly common use-case.
I've heard that there is Library Genesis extension on Google Chrome that allows you to search catalog right from the browser window. It has everything SciHub has to offer. Article from the post was found without any issue.
Rumors are that extension was working just fine for the past year+ so it is quite reliable.
"Peak", from the same author, is probably the book I've read that has had the biggest influence on my life.
The most important idea I got from it is something like: You gotta practice to get good at things. People that are better than you at things very likely practiced _more_ and/or _better_ than you. Other factors matter very little in comparison.
The book goes deeper into what "more" and the "better" mean here.
You may think this takeaway is obvious, but the extent of it certainly wasn't for me, and I can tell it isn't for a lot of the people I talk to.
Studies are easiest to perform on topics with easy to measure results.
But in most any field, if you’re genuinely interested in the field, you will be aware of people who you consider to be better than you. Even if it’s a highly subjective field, as you learn your taste/appreciation grows and you get a clearer picture of what you consider “better”. Those are your potential pool of coaches/mentors. You don’t have to pick just one, either.
One example I like because it's so telling: driving. Over the course of their live, people drive a really long time. But after 10k hours, are they racing pilots? (Some drivers can't even park properly...)
Literally the point of Ericsson. The "D" in "DP" is not just there for decoration.
Examples like driving or touch typing are among the most-mentioned examples in the literature for skills where people just go to "good enough" and then plateau, because they don't deliberately aim for improvement.
This misses the point because people are not doing 'deliberate practice' while driving. If they spent their time actively trying to get better each time they drove things might be very different.
Atomic habits is great on the operational side for systematically allocating time toward your goals. Establishing reliable and sustainable time-on-task.
Peak is great for having a critical framework for how, specifically, you use that allocated time. Optimizing effectiveness-of-practice.
It's always chess or music, sometimes basketball. But how does one become say, a first class lawyer, or a teacher, or any of the 99% of human skills that do not have easy performance metrics?
This is a really good question and I’m not qualified to answer it, other than to say “it can be done!” Alan Kay is an example of someone who has a great intuition for answering this kind of question.
My general opinion is that a great coach/mentor can “see” your errors and doesn’t just know what you’re doing wrong but what the best next step is from where you are, to learn the thing that is holding you back.
Deliberate practice never feels easy. You’re always pushing the boundary of what you’re capable of. And you keep going back for more.
Where there are a lot of different styles of doing a thing “well” (e.g. first class lawyer, teaching, writing, 99% of things ) you’ll need to progress through a wider series of different mentors/coaches, sort of “earning” the mentorship of a “better” coach is a good goal in any field.
In fields like you describe it’s not a simple ladder, more like a branching tree of ladders. You’re goal is not just higher and higher but learning (by climbing) where and who is a mentor for you.
I agree with you but then I don't think you can call this deliberate practice, deliberate practice is not just sitting down and pushing boundaries, it's also having a clear path. In programming (since you said Alan Kay) sitting down and knowing precisely what you need to do in order to get good is very rare. Here everything is displaced - once you know what is good, everything is downhill. The problem is always overcoming X - that place where you don't know where you are, you don't know where you are going and you somehow need to get to your destination.
>But how does one become say, a first class lawyer, or a teacher, or any of the 99% of human skills that do not have easy performance metrics?
Presumably you break the job down into the various parts and then focus on training those parts. Like lawyering and teaching involve a lot of public speaking, which can be practiced and improved.
This is one of those cases where finding someone that already _is_ what you're looking for and get (meaningful) mentorship from them can shortcut your progress.
You can most definitely figure out the path yourself, find out what practice exercises and knowledge are required and then go for it and adjust as necessary. However this is much more labor and time intensive than having someone highly skilled, that has essentially already been there, point out your weak points.
Music as you mention is very stereotypical in this, where a good instructor can quickly point out the exercises you need for your specific style and instrument, however very rarely does this apply to full professions and careers, where you know from the get go what you want to be a Lawyer specializing in mergers and acquisitions of overseas companies in the chip manufacturing industry.
> This is one of those cases where finding someone that already _is_ what you're looking for and get (meaningful) mentorship from them can shortcut your progress.
And at that point deliberate practice isn't really the focus anymore, but identifying and acquiring tacit knowledge. Which is fiendishly hard to do in practice.
Chess and music are the gold standard for deliberate practice because they have been around for hundreds of years and have been studied long enough to have clear paths, techniques, and metrics to getting to certain levels of skill.
That said, even something like being a “first class lawyer” can be broken down into a collection of very specific skills that can be learned and practiced deliberately to improve one’s performance. And the early stages of learning in any field likely have many of these specific sub-skills that are obvious and not particularly difficult to learn.
For example, if you’re an aspiring trial lawyer, one very specific sub-skill to learn and practice deliberately is vocal intonation and projection in a courtroom environment. This is a basic, fundamental skill for that goal, and getting good at it by practicing deliberately will move you towards that goal.
Another, totally different, specific sub-skill to develop towards that goal might be learning and practicing how specifically to organize your reference material in such a way that you can access it within, say 10 seconds in front of the judge and jury. Another might be writing effective briefs and/or motions.
Even these examples can be broken down further into very specific sub-skills that can be deliberately practiced. After many, many years, you could have a collection of skills that make you a “first class trial lawyer”, similar to how had to learn and practice very specific sub-skills such as openings, end games, and effective use of each specific chess piece.
At the end of the day, each field consists of a large number of specific sub-skills that each contribute to the overall performance level of the individual.
> or example, if you’re an aspiring trial lawyer, one very specific sub-skill to learn and practice deliberately is vocal intonation and projection in a courtroom environment.
Which, if true, on itself says something very bad about how trials are run and how unfair they likely are.
You have a very valid point; chess or music benefit from structured/known/repetitive learning and those techniques don't work as well on more chaotic environments.
Chess and music are the gold standard for deliberate practice because they have been around for hundreds of years and have been studied long enough to have clear paths, techniques, and metrics to getting to certain levels of skill.
That said, even something like being a “first class lawyer” can be broken down into a collection of very specific skills that can be learned and practiced deliberately to improve one’s performance. And the early stages of learning in any field likely have many of these specific sub-skills that are obvious and not particularly difficult to learn.
For example, if you’re an aspiring trial lawyer, one very specific sub-skill to learn and practice deliberately is vocal intonation and projection in a courtroom environment. This is a basic, fundamental skill for that goal, and getting good at it by practicing deliberately will move you towards that goal.
Another, totally different, specific sub-skill to develop towards that goal might be learning and practicing how specifically to organize your reference material in such a way that you can access it within, say 10 seconds in front of the judge and jury. Another might be writing effective briefs and/or motions.
Even these examples can be broken down further into very specific sub-skills that can be deliberately practiced.
After many, many years, you could have a collection of skills that make you a “first class trial lawyer”, similar to how had to learn and practice very specific sub-skills such as openings, end games, and effective use of each specific chess piece.
At the end of the day, each field consists of a large number of specific sub-skills that each contribute to the overall performance level of the individual.
I play electric guitar at a decent speed but want to get very fast, say ~600 notes per minute (npm). I had two guitar teachers who gave me conflicting advice:
1) Practice doesn't make perfect, only "perfect practice makes perfect". Use a metronome, start with a speed I'm 100% comfortable with, and slowly build up my speed at 5 npm intervals. When I start making even minor mistakes, stop, go back 10 rpm, and hold my practice there for 5-10 minutes. Keep to this technique and I will get faster over time.
2. Don’t aim for perfection. Get comfortable with the concept of fast playing in my mind, and my fingers will follow. Warm up a little, but after that, jump to playing at my target speed, even if it sounds sloppy. Repeat this enough number of times and I will get faster over months and years.
I’ve tried both techniques over the last 3 years and have gotten considerably faster. But I'm not sure which of these techniques has worked more than the other.
My own take is that it takes time, and staying on the edge of what I’m capable of doing is important. No rules beyond that, really.
Question for this audience, especially for musicians and guitarists: how do you structure your practice to become great?
Not a guitarist (take my comments with a pinch of salt).
Your teachers are both right: Either advices (1) or (2) works as long as the practice is hard.
That said, while (2) may sound easier because the approach pursues "comfort in the mind" over perfection... this is still hard because because by definition: you still need to get from uncomfortable to comfortable!
A similar example in bodybuilding: muscle confusion [1]. To build better squats, one requires both compound(2) and isolation (1) exercises
Yes, DP breeds expertise. But I don't think you can just decide to do DP.
An expert craftsman/woman does that craft everyday because they LIKE doing it, expertise might not even be the goal. Think of Nobel Prize winners, is the core thing that they did DP, or is it they were having enough fun (loose definition) that DP is how they wanted to spend their time.
I think the lesson for a young person is still find what you love. But with this you can say: find what you love, then sacrifice yourself to it.
I disagree, lots of craftsmen do deliberate practice to improve their skills, even when it's not necessarily enjoyable. Hobbyists probably don't so much, but people who do a specific craft for a living do. Granted sometimes this ends up being 2nd or 3rd level fun, where it's not fun while you're doing it but looking back gives you a sense of accomplishment and enjoyment later.
I remember taking a ceramics class in high school and they showed us a video called 'the potters way' or something similar and the trick to getting good at making simple pinch pots is to make thousands of them until you essentially have the muscle memory to do it. There are probably moments of zen while spacing out and making them, but I can guarantee that no one would find that enjoyable enough to just crank them out for hours at a time if they weren't trying to improve their skills.
I get your point, but many people find what they love and throw themselves into it without the intention or discipline to keep progressing.
Millions of amateur artists and musicians spend hours daily working on their craft without ever noticeably improving past an intermediate learner's level.
So what? Why bother? Why would anyone bother becoming an expert? Nobody is going to pay attention to you. You're not going to get any more pay or respect or authority than people who are just good at bullshitting. You're not going to have an outsized influence on the world. So why bother?
Say, for sake of argument, that I'm in the top 0.1% of software engineers. Maybe the top 0.01%; say I'm utterly phenomenal. What the hell am I supposed to do about it? My choices are:
1. Work for a FAANG or adtech for 70 hours per week with a toxic manager on optimizing the psychological weapons and dark patterns they use to keep their users in a negative feedback cycle of dependence on their increasingly shitty and hostile products
2. Work for a bank or fintech as a middleman trying to get that extra 0.01% rent on other people's labor
3. Work in a niche industry or a consulting firm doing interesting and important work, but always for one client at a time, having an extremely limited impact (and limited pay to match), or
4. Start my own business and work 90 hour weeks spending 95% of my time on organizational business things that I'm bad at, leaving virtually no hours for the thing I'm a phenomenal super-expert at.
I've chosen #3, but I'm honestly sick of just continuing to just get better and better at software engineering and having it mean absolutely fuck-all. What's the point? Why would you ever bother becoming an expert?
If your goal is to make a lot of money and to influence a lot of people — you are guaranteed to be unhappy. If you make a lot more money than others, you’ll still make a lot less than some. No amount can fulfil that “goal” because it’s not a goal it’s a direction, like “head west, and keep heading west” … you can’t reach “west”.
Different point of view —
If there are people that you care about and your goal is to help those people - you can be happy and you can succeed. If you only help a few, it’s still worth it, because you care about them. If you help a few more, even better.
If you’re hoping to get rich by helping people who you don’t care about, give it up, stop wasting time. Step back and think about it.
I'm surprised that your takeaway from my venting was that I want to be rich. There are much easier ways to get rich than becoming an expert at something. Out of the four options, I've chosen the one that makes the least money (#4 arguable I suppose).
The reason I became an expert was to do useful things in the world. It does not feel like that's possible beyond a tiny hour-by-hour contribution to a single client at a time.
Totally agree. Although if you happen to have the skillset to make lots of money you can use that to help more people. That gives a reason to tolerate bullshit jobs too.
IT isn't music. IT isn't chess. IT isn't writing or typing.
IT is a moving target. IT is a relentless grind.
So be gentle to yourself, and don't feel pressured. The article is not really about achieving expert performance, it's about improving your craft (in a way that may lead to expert performance).
Improving is growth. Now with IT, I think it's important to separate the temptation to learn whatever shiney Serverless-AI-Rust-Crypto thing that's trendy this quarter from learning fundamentals, things that don't change.
I've read that "learning LISP will make you a better programmer". I don't know, because I've never tried, but it feels like something with some truth. Perhaps the thing you need isn't LISP, but colour-space algorithms, or design patterns, or technical writing, or public-speaking, or good old SED and AWK.
But there's something out there that will help you grow, and give you heightened confidence and some lateral skills or fundamental skills to not only solve today's normal problems, but be able to solve tomorrow's off-the-wall problems as well.
But as to why? It's my experience that if I'm not learning something, or deepening my knowledge of something, then I don't really feel happy, or satisfied. But if I'm learning, even if I'm not in a good job, I still feel it's worthwhile because I'm largely doing it for myself.
Take the above with a grain of salt. It may not chime with you, or it may not apply to your circumstances. But if nothing else, be kind to yourself.
There is an inherent pleasure in becoming competent, and if you become competent in a profitable skill, practice, or discipline, you can make a lot of money and use it to have additional fun and pleasure. This is an important point, but it is not a cure for the chronically depressed or angry person who sees the display of tantrums as a demonstration of depth and intelligence.
The whole point of education, being good at something or maybe even expert is not that it guarantees you something. There is always order of magnitude more musicians, actors, scientists, engineers, writers and software developers than the ones "with outsized influence on the world". Being good at something gives you just better chances to use opportunities life might give you at some point. That's all. These opportunities may not even come and that's OK.
Why are you assuming that all people try to become experts in order to impress, make an impact, earn money? Frequently top performers that commit themselves to these things are only partially motivated by them. Take for example e-sport youngsters, these people don't even have these things in sight but they still commit themselves fully into whatever they are doing.
I don't disagree with your overall point, but for me the payoff of being a good engineer is working less.
I'm salaried and work for a big oldtech shop writing mostly glue code and fixing god-damn dependency issues. When I get more productive I turn that into less time spent at my desk or thinking about my job.
>1. Work for a FAANG or adtech for 70 hours per week with a toxic manager on optimizing the psychological weapons and dark patterns they use to keep their users in a negative feedback cycle of dependence on their increasingly shitty and hostile products
Say what you want about the morality of working for them, but almost no one is working 70 hours there and the true .1% engineers are making multiple $M per year so the tradeoff may be worth it.
>3. Work in a niche industry or a consulting firm doing interesting and important work, but always for one client at a time, having an extremely limited impact (and limited pay to match)
If you are just selling your labor as a butt in a seat then yes this is true. I know solo tech consultants making 200k/mo because they moved up in the meta chain and sell strategy to CTOs.
>4. Start my own business and work 90 hour weeks spending 95% of my time on organizational business things that I'm bad at, leaving virtually no hours for the thing I'm a phenomenal super-expert at.
This is just fantasy.
>'ve chosen #3, but I'm honestly sick of just continuing to just get better and better at software engineering and having it mean absolutely fuck-all. What's the point? Why would you ever bother becoming an expert?
I think you have a warped view of reality and frankly of the value of expertise. There are world class engineers all over the place making 7 figures a year very easily. They aren't working 80 hours a week, they aren't working for soul sucking corps on boring problems, etc. I suspect you also aren't accurately measuring your own skill relative to these people. At the minimum they aren't as cynical and defeatist as you and know how to market their abilities.
Are you saying starting your own business is an unrealistic fantasy? (On HN?) Or which part of it is fantasy? If starting a company is fantasy, it strengthens my point.
> here are world class engineers all over the place making 7 figures a year very easily. They aren't working 80 hours a week, they aren't working for soul sucking corps on boring problems, etc.
They're not "all over the place", they're in Silicon Valley. No software engineers outside of the valley make 7 figures as an employee. Maybe in New York at the Staff level. Maybe.
And if they're not working for soul sucking corps on boring problems, what are they doing? Where are the fruits of their labor? Because the majority of the software coming out of these companies gets used by approximately nobody and then thrown away, and the majority of the rest is user-hostile trash.
> I suspect you also aren't accurately measuring your own skill relative to these people.
"You're not accomplishing things because you're bad" -- maybe. That'd certainly be an easy resolution to this paradox. As an internet stranger you have no reason to believe that I'm as good as I say. But you should realize that this is completely circular logic: you're assuming that everyone who is poor is dumb and everyone who has not found fulfillment in life is bad; everyone who is successful is skilled. That doesn't match reality. Like, at all.
Some people's goal in life is to make money so that they can do nothing. Other people get pleasure from accomplishing things. I can't imagine doing something and not wanting to get better at it. What's the point? What's the point to life if you just earn money eat and drink? Seems shallow and useless.
> Other people get pleasure from accomplishing things
Accomplishing what!? More fucking clicks for their shitty boss's worthless website? More rent for the rent-seekers? More dark patterns? More Facebooks for Dogs? More trying to surf waves of buzzword hype on a Venture Capitalist Surfboard and hoping to exit before you wipe out? Accomplishing what!? Nobody is doing anything!
I work on software that I'm actually proud of. And then approximately five people use it for a few years and it dies a slow death. Because it's a shitty consulting business model for a single client at a time. We could actually sell the software to potentially thousands of clients, but the company is run by parasitic accountants playing some bullshit short-term capitalism game and it doesn't suit their needs. Nobody gives a shit about profit, they care about their game of Business Checkers they're playing against other members of the Corporate Caste. This kind of bullshit is rampant throughout all public companies.
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In the field of talent development, there is absolutely no debate about the most superior form of training. It's deliberate practice: mindful repetition on performance tasks just beyond the edge of one's capabilities.
Deliberate practice is about making performance-improving adjustments on every single repetition. Any individual adjustment is small and yields a small improvement in performance – but when you compound these small changes over a massive number of action-feedback-adjustment cycles, you end up with massive changes and massive gains in performance.
Deliberate practice is superior to all other forms of training. That is a "solved problem" in the academic field of talent development. It might as well be a law of physics. There is a mountain of research supporting the conclusion that the volume of accumulated deliberate practice is the single biggest factor responsible for individual differences in performance among elite performers across a wide variety of talent domains. (The next biggest factor is genetics, and the relative contributions of deliberate practice vs genetics can vary significantly across talent domains.)
I think it depends where you’re at in the progression curve. I’ve always thought that most people can reach the top 1% of just about anything with hard work. Beyond that, it comes down to other factors: genetics, environment, luck, etc.
I ran track in college and reached roughly the top percentile of my age and gender (i.e., the level of a typical D1 athlete), but there is absolutely no way I would ever have come remotely close to a 12:37 5k. You could have started the training from birth under a team of experts, and it simply just would not have happened.
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Take as an example playing a musical instrument. Perhaps you play cello in a community orchestra, and you're presented with a piece that has a passage that you can't reliably or consistently play at performance tempo - maybe it has an awkward fingering or shift, or maybe requires a bow technique that you struggle with. But, maybe if you reduce the tempo to 80% of performance speed, you can hit it more-or-less consistently.
The recommendation that is ingrained with all classical musicians in this scenario is to practice the challenging passage at this comfortable tempo with utter dedication to precision and execution. And when you can reliably and consistently execute at this tempo, notch up the speed a tiny bit - as little as 4 beats per minute. Repeat until you hit the consistency milestone, ad nauseam until you get to performance tempo (and then a bit on top for good measure).
Per the article and per the top comment - there's a reason this is SOP for musicians. Deliberate practice right at the frontier of your capabilities expands that frontier, and lets you push further.
By the way, "consistency" here might be, "play 100 times in a row without a single mistake." I've absolutely had lessons where we do this exercise with a gnarly passage, and when I make a mistake at repetition 79, we start the counter back at 0. It's tedious, laborious, and exhausting - but it works.
In seriousness, I don't think that statement is meant for lifting/running or anything that's bounded by your physical fitness. Because you're right, the human body doesn't work like that.
Music is probably a better example. I push myself by learning songs that are beyond what I can do now. I practice them and make a bunch of mistakes. And as I keep practicing, the mistakes go away. And at some point, the song I couldn't play becomes a song I can play. Then I find new even harder songs to focus my practice on.
I think you're being a little nitpicky, people often say to practice at the 'edge of your ability' for this reason. You should push a little at the boundary and eventually you grow to be successful at that edge and then can push a little further.
1) Maybe you can do it with scaffolding, but you are unable to do it without scaffolding.
For instance, a musician might not be capable of playing a difficult section of a musical piece at full speed. So they might practice it while playing slowly (a type of scaffolding), and then gradually ramp up the speed while maintaining accuracy.
2) Maybe you can do it sometimes, but not consistently/accurately.
For instance, a gymnast might not be capable of landing a particular flip consistently with proper form. But maybe they can land it 50% of the time with shaky form. So they might practice improving their consistency and form on this skill.
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Working on things outside of one's repertoire, is a core aspect of deliberate practice. Non-experts are often misled to practice within their level of comfort. This tends to be more effortful and less enjoyable, which can mislead non-experts to practice within their level of comfort.
For instance, Coughlan et al. (2014) observed this as a factor differentiating intermediate and expert Gaeilic football players:
"Expert and intermediate level Gaelic football players executed two types of kicks during an acquisition phase and pre-, post-, and retention tests. During acquisition, participants self-selected how they practiced and rated the characteristics of deliberate practice for effort and enjoyment.
The expert group predominantly practiced the skill they were weaker at and improved its performance across pre-, post- and retention tests. Participants in the expert group also rated their practice as more effortful and less enjoyable compared to those in the intermediate group.
In contrast, participants in the intermediate group predominantly practiced the skill they were stronger at and improved their performance from pretest to posttest but not on the retention test."
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The idea of practicing outside of one's repertoire can be generalized to the idea of engaging in a cycle of strain and adaptation. This is done in, e.g., Ericsson (2006). Here's a snippet:
"When the human body is put under exceptional strain, a range of dormant genes in the DNA are expressed and extraordinary physiological processes are activated. Over time the cells of the body, including the brain (see Hill & Schneider, Chapter 37) will reorganize in response to the induced metabolic demands of the activity by, for example, increases in the number of capillaries supplying blood to muscles and changes in metabolism of the muscle fibers themselves.
These adaptations will eventually allow the individual to execute the given level of activity without greatly straining the physiological systems. To gain further beneficial increases in adaptation, the athletes need to increase or change their weekly training activities to induce new and perhaps different types of strain on the key physiological systems."
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In general, in the phrase "deliberate practice," the word "deliberate" is not just an adjective. "Deliberate practice" has a very specific meaning in the research literature.
The way you describe it -- "Practice is certainly still deliberate. It's planned. Every workout has a purpose." -- is not as strict as the meaning in the research literature.
For something closer to a proper definition, I'll quote (Ericsson, 2006):
"The core assumption of deliberate practice (Ericsson, 1996, 2002, 2004; Ericsson et al., 1993) is that expert performance is acquired gradually and that effective improvement of performance requires the opportunity to find suitable training tasks that the performer can master sequentially -- typically the design of training tasks and monitoring of the attained performance is done by a teacher or a coach.
Deliberate practice presents performers with tasks that are initially outside their current realm of reliable performance, yet can be mastered within hours of practice by concentrating on critical aspects and by gradually refining performance through repetitions after feedback.
Hence, the requirement for concentration sets deliberate practice apart from both mindless, routine performance and playful engagement, as the latter two types of activities would, if anything, merely strengthen the current mediating cognitive mechanisms rather than modify them to allow increases in the level of performance."
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I don't know much about serious running, but based on how things work in other domains: if "performance-improving adjustments on every single repetition" is incomprehensible at the level you're looking, then it's an indication you need to zoom out a bit.
The same confusion can happen in, e.g., deliberate practice in math, if you zoom in too much. When a student solves a math problem, do we really expect every single pen stroke to involve feedback and improvement? No. You have to zoom out to the level of the problem.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would expect that in running, the appropriate level to view these deliberate practice cycles is not the level of a single step, but rather, a cohesive group of a taxing "deliberate practice" runs and easier "recovery" runs. At this level, it looks more like that cycle of strain/adaptation that is characteristic of deliberate practice.
(And that level seems to align with what's discussed in the literature -- for instance, I was just skimming Casado et al, 2020, Deliberate Practice in Training Differentiates the Best Kenyan and Spanish Long-Distance Runners, which mentioned that "systematic training ... included high-intensity training sessions considered deliberate practice (DP) and easy runs.")
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References
Casado, A., Hanley, B., and Ruiz-Pérez, L.M. (2020). Deliberate Practice in Training Differentiates the Best Kenyan and Spanish Long-Distance Runners. European Journal of Sport Science, 20 (7). pp. 887-895.
Coughlan, E. K., Williams, A. M., McRobert, A. P., & Ford, P. R. (2014). How experts practice: A novel test of deliberate practice theory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(2), 449.
Ericsson, K. A. (2006). The influence of experience and deliberate practice on the development of superior expert performance. The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance, 38(685-705), 2-2.
If it was as straightforward as some of the "expertise" research suggests, the world would be teeming with super-beings. That it isn't should give one pause about the relative leverage of constructing the problem this way.
The entire article is available on Anna’s Archive, which I do not condone using. Under no circumstances should you download it from this link:
https://wbsg8v.xyz/d3/x/1724737279/100/i/scimag/09800000/098...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1553-2712...
However, I have a friend who is wondering if there is a better way to access content on AA than having to futz around with Onion, MySQL and ratarmount? He’d prefer not to code something up himself for what is presumably a fairly common use-case.
Rumors are that extension was working just fine for the past year+ so it is quite reliable.
The most important idea I got from it is something like: You gotta practice to get good at things. People that are better than you at things very likely practiced _more_ and/or _better_ than you. Other factors matter very little in comparison.
The book goes deeper into what "more" and the "better" mean here.
You may think this takeaway is obvious, but the extent of it certainly wasn't for me, and I can tell it isn't for a lot of the people I talk to.
This is the whole point of "deliberate practice".
The problem is defining what is "deliberate" for tasks where there is not necessarily an "objectively correct" result.
But in most any field, if you’re genuinely interested in the field, you will be aware of people who you consider to be better than you. Even if it’s a highly subjective field, as you learn your taste/appreciation grows and you get a clearer picture of what you consider “better”. Those are your potential pool of coaches/mentors. You don’t have to pick just one, either.
Examples like driving or touch typing are among the most-mentioned examples in the literature for skills where people just go to "good enough" and then plateau, because they don't deliberately aim for improvement.
Have you also read "Atomic habits" by James Clear ?
improvemnt ~= time-on-task * effectiveness-of-practice
Atomic habits is great on the operational side for systematically allocating time toward your goals. Establishing reliable and sustainable time-on-task.
Peak is great for having a critical framework for how, specifically, you use that allocated time. Optimizing effectiveness-of-practice.
My general opinion is that a great coach/mentor can “see” your errors and doesn’t just know what you’re doing wrong but what the best next step is from where you are, to learn the thing that is holding you back.
Deliberate practice never feels easy. You’re always pushing the boundary of what you’re capable of. And you keep going back for more.
Where there are a lot of different styles of doing a thing “well” (e.g. first class lawyer, teaching, writing, 99% of things ) you’ll need to progress through a wider series of different mentors/coaches, sort of “earning” the mentorship of a “better” coach is a good goal in any field.
In fields like you describe it’s not a simple ladder, more like a branching tree of ladders. You’re goal is not just higher and higher but learning (by climbing) where and who is a mentor for you.
Presumably you break the job down into the various parts and then focus on training those parts. Like lawyering and teaching involve a lot of public speaking, which can be practiced and improved.
You can most definitely figure out the path yourself, find out what practice exercises and knowledge are required and then go for it and adjust as necessary. However this is much more labor and time intensive than having someone highly skilled, that has essentially already been there, point out your weak points.
Music as you mention is very stereotypical in this, where a good instructor can quickly point out the exercises you need for your specific style and instrument, however very rarely does this apply to full professions and careers, where you know from the get go what you want to be a Lawyer specializing in mergers and acquisitions of overseas companies in the chip manufacturing industry.
And at that point deliberate practice isn't really the focus anymore, but identifying and acquiring tacit knowledge. Which is fiendishly hard to do in practice.
That said, even something like being a “first class lawyer” can be broken down into a collection of very specific skills that can be learned and practiced deliberately to improve one’s performance. And the early stages of learning in any field likely have many of these specific sub-skills that are obvious and not particularly difficult to learn.
For example, if you’re an aspiring trial lawyer, one very specific sub-skill to learn and practice deliberately is vocal intonation and projection in a courtroom environment. This is a basic, fundamental skill for that goal, and getting good at it by practicing deliberately will move you towards that goal.
Another, totally different, specific sub-skill to develop towards that goal might be learning and practicing how specifically to organize your reference material in such a way that you can access it within, say 10 seconds in front of the judge and jury. Another might be writing effective briefs and/or motions.
Even these examples can be broken down further into very specific sub-skills that can be deliberately practiced. After many, many years, you could have a collection of skills that make you a “first class trial lawyer”, similar to how had to learn and practice very specific sub-skills such as openings, end games, and effective use of each specific chess piece.
At the end of the day, each field consists of a large number of specific sub-skills that each contribute to the overall performance level of the individual.
Which, if true, on itself says something very bad about how trials are run and how unfair they likely are.
That said, even something like being a “first class lawyer” can be broken down into a collection of very specific skills that can be learned and practiced deliberately to improve one’s performance. And the early stages of learning in any field likely have many of these specific sub-skills that are obvious and not particularly difficult to learn.
For example, if you’re an aspiring trial lawyer, one very specific sub-skill to learn and practice deliberately is vocal intonation and projection in a courtroom environment. This is a basic, fundamental skill for that goal, and getting good at it by practicing deliberately will move you towards that goal.
Another, totally different, specific sub-skill to develop towards that goal might be learning and practicing how specifically to organize your reference material in such a way that you can access it within, say 10 seconds in front of the judge and jury. Another might be writing effective briefs and/or motions.
Even these examples can be broken down further into very specific sub-skills that can be deliberately practiced. After many, many years, you could have a collection of skills that make you a “first class trial lawyer”, similar to how had to learn and practice very specific sub-skills such as openings, end games, and effective use of each specific chess piece.
At the end of the day, each field consists of a large number of specific sub-skills that each contribute to the overall performance level of the individual.
1) Practice doesn't make perfect, only "perfect practice makes perfect". Use a metronome, start with a speed I'm 100% comfortable with, and slowly build up my speed at 5 npm intervals. When I start making even minor mistakes, stop, go back 10 rpm, and hold my practice there for 5-10 minutes. Keep to this technique and I will get faster over time.
2. Don’t aim for perfection. Get comfortable with the concept of fast playing in my mind, and my fingers will follow. Warm up a little, but after that, jump to playing at my target speed, even if it sounds sloppy. Repeat this enough number of times and I will get faster over months and years.
I’ve tried both techniques over the last 3 years and have gotten considerably faster. But I'm not sure which of these techniques has worked more than the other.
My own take is that it takes time, and staying on the edge of what I’m capable of doing is important. No rules beyond that, really.
Question for this audience, especially for musicians and guitarists: how do you structure your practice to become great?
Your teachers are both right: Either advices (1) or (2) works as long as the practice is hard.
That said, while (2) may sound easier because the approach pursues "comfort in the mind" over perfection... this is still hard because because by definition: you still need to get from uncomfortable to comfortable!
A similar example in bodybuilding: muscle confusion [1]. To build better squats, one requires both compound(2) and isolation (1) exercises
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/well/move/muscle-confusio...
(Huge Caveat: this only applies to physical deliberate practice!)
Yes, DP breeds expertise. But I don't think you can just decide to do DP.
An expert craftsman/woman does that craft everyday because they LIKE doing it, expertise might not even be the goal. Think of Nobel Prize winners, is the core thing that they did DP, or is it they were having enough fun (loose definition) that DP is how they wanted to spend their time.
I think the lesson for a young person is still find what you love. But with this you can say: find what you love, then sacrifice yourself to it.
I disagree, lots of craftsmen do deliberate practice to improve their skills, even when it's not necessarily enjoyable. Hobbyists probably don't so much, but people who do a specific craft for a living do. Granted sometimes this ends up being 2nd or 3rd level fun, where it's not fun while you're doing it but looking back gives you a sense of accomplishment and enjoyment later.
I remember taking a ceramics class in high school and they showed us a video called 'the potters way' or something similar and the trick to getting good at making simple pinch pots is to make thousands of them until you essentially have the muscle memory to do it. There are probably moments of zen while spacing out and making them, but I can guarantee that no one would find that enjoyable enough to just crank them out for hours at a time if they weren't trying to improve their skills.
And on your ceramics point. That sounds like hell to me too. But maybe that's why neither of us make pots.
Millions of amateur artists and musicians spend hours daily working on their craft without ever noticeably improving past an intermediate learner's level.
Say, for sake of argument, that I'm in the top 0.1% of software engineers. Maybe the top 0.01%; say I'm utterly phenomenal. What the hell am I supposed to do about it? My choices are:
1. Work for a FAANG or adtech for 70 hours per week with a toxic manager on optimizing the psychological weapons and dark patterns they use to keep their users in a negative feedback cycle of dependence on their increasingly shitty and hostile products
2. Work for a bank or fintech as a middleman trying to get that extra 0.01% rent on other people's labor
3. Work in a niche industry or a consulting firm doing interesting and important work, but always for one client at a time, having an extremely limited impact (and limited pay to match), or
4. Start my own business and work 90 hour weeks spending 95% of my time on organizational business things that I'm bad at, leaving virtually no hours for the thing I'm a phenomenal super-expert at.
I've chosen #3, but I'm honestly sick of just continuing to just get better and better at software engineering and having it mean absolutely fuck-all. What's the point? Why would you ever bother becoming an expert?
Different point of view —
If there are people that you care about and your goal is to help those people - you can be happy and you can succeed. If you only help a few, it’s still worth it, because you care about them. If you help a few more, even better.
If you’re hoping to get rich by helping people who you don’t care about, give it up, stop wasting time. Step back and think about it.
The reason I became an expert was to do useful things in the world. It does not feel like that's possible beyond a tiny hour-by-hour contribution to a single client at a time.
IT is a moving target. IT is a relentless grind.
So be gentle to yourself, and don't feel pressured. The article is not really about achieving expert performance, it's about improving your craft (in a way that may lead to expert performance).
Improving is growth. Now with IT, I think it's important to separate the temptation to learn whatever shiney Serverless-AI-Rust-Crypto thing that's trendy this quarter from learning fundamentals, things that don't change.
I've read that "learning LISP will make you a better programmer". I don't know, because I've never tried, but it feels like something with some truth. Perhaps the thing you need isn't LISP, but colour-space algorithms, or design patterns, or technical writing, or public-speaking, or good old SED and AWK.
But there's something out there that will help you grow, and give you heightened confidence and some lateral skills or fundamental skills to not only solve today's normal problems, but be able to solve tomorrow's off-the-wall problems as well.
But as to why? It's my experience that if I'm not learning something, or deepening my knowledge of something, then I don't really feel happy, or satisfied. But if I'm learning, even if I'm not in a good job, I still feel it's worthwhile because I'm largely doing it for myself.
Take the above with a grain of salt. It may not chime with you, or it may not apply to your circumstances. But if nothing else, be kind to yourself.
I don't disagree with your overall point, but for me the payoff of being a good engineer is working less.
I'm salaried and work for a big oldtech shop writing mostly glue code and fixing god-damn dependency issues. When I get more productive I turn that into less time spent at my desk or thinking about my job.
I'd literally rather kill myself.
> When I get more productive I turn that into less time spent at my desk or thinking about my job.
So your advice is: check out of your job. Quiet quit. Get into knitting. Honestly? Probably the best advice I'm going to get.
Nobody said this is some kind of hack for dollars and bling.
Say what you want about the morality of working for them, but almost no one is working 70 hours there and the true .1% engineers are making multiple $M per year so the tradeoff may be worth it.
>3. Work in a niche industry or a consulting firm doing interesting and important work, but always for one client at a time, having an extremely limited impact (and limited pay to match)
If you are just selling your labor as a butt in a seat then yes this is true. I know solo tech consultants making 200k/mo because they moved up in the meta chain and sell strategy to CTOs.
>4. Start my own business and work 90 hour weeks spending 95% of my time on organizational business things that I'm bad at, leaving virtually no hours for the thing I'm a phenomenal super-expert at.
This is just fantasy.
>'ve chosen #3, but I'm honestly sick of just continuing to just get better and better at software engineering and having it mean absolutely fuck-all. What's the point? Why would you ever bother becoming an expert?
I think you have a warped view of reality and frankly of the value of expertise. There are world class engineers all over the place making 7 figures a year very easily. They aren't working 80 hours a week, they aren't working for soul sucking corps on boring problems, etc. I suspect you also aren't accurately measuring your own skill relative to these people. At the minimum they aren't as cynical and defeatist as you and know how to market their abilities.
> This is just fantasy.
Are you saying starting your own business is an unrealistic fantasy? (On HN?) Or which part of it is fantasy? If starting a company is fantasy, it strengthens my point.
> here are world class engineers all over the place making 7 figures a year very easily. They aren't working 80 hours a week, they aren't working for soul sucking corps on boring problems, etc.
They're not "all over the place", they're in Silicon Valley. No software engineers outside of the valley make 7 figures as an employee. Maybe in New York at the Staff level. Maybe.
And if they're not working for soul sucking corps on boring problems, what are they doing? Where are the fruits of their labor? Because the majority of the software coming out of these companies gets used by approximately nobody and then thrown away, and the majority of the rest is user-hostile trash.
> I suspect you also aren't accurately measuring your own skill relative to these people.
"You're not accomplishing things because you're bad" -- maybe. That'd certainly be an easy resolution to this paradox. As an internet stranger you have no reason to believe that I'm as good as I say. But you should realize that this is completely circular logic: you're assuming that everyone who is poor is dumb and everyone who has not found fulfillment in life is bad; everyone who is successful is skilled. That doesn't match reality. Like, at all.
Accomplishing what!? More fucking clicks for their shitty boss's worthless website? More rent for the rent-seekers? More dark patterns? More Facebooks for Dogs? More trying to surf waves of buzzword hype on a Venture Capitalist Surfboard and hoping to exit before you wipe out? Accomplishing what!? Nobody is doing anything!
I work on software that I'm actually proud of. And then approximately five people use it for a few years and it dies a slow death. Because it's a shitty consulting business model for a single client at a time. We could actually sell the software to potentially thousands of clients, but the company is run by parasitic accountants playing some bullshit short-term capitalism game and it doesn't suit their needs. Nobody gives a shit about profit, they care about their game of Business Checkers they're playing against other members of the Corporate Caste. This kind of bullshit is rampant throughout all public companies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41282574