We brush our teeth and breathe for a lifetime, but we can not become experts in brushing our teeth or breathing.
The reason why we can not become an expert in what we do for a lifetime is that we lack motivation for the work and feedback on the action.
To become an expert in something, you need to have a motivation to improve your skills in the area you want to become an expert in, and you need to receive specific feedback at the right time on your skill improvement activities and repeat them consistently.
Deliberate practice is a way to improve your skills by enhancing your expertise through motivation and feedback.
Validity and feedback
For expertise to be formed, validity is required in addition to motivation and feedback. Validity means that there is causality and regularity in a task and predictability of the results.
In areas where validity is high, you can see the results of your actions, which is feedback on the work.
In the environment where there is validity and feedback, you can know the results of your actions and have the opportunity to learn from them.
Airport security checkpoint inspectors do not know how many mistakes they made today. They can find out how many knives or liquid substances in the bag, but they can not know how many they missed.
Inspectors at airport security checkpoints can not become experts because the environment lacks validity and feedback. In such an environment that lacks feedback, you can not become an expert no matter how long you work.
In some jobs, there are tasks that form expertise and tasks that are difficult to form expertise.
Doctors can not know if they made a wrong diagnosis when diagnosing a patient. Therefore, it is difficult to improve expertise in this task. However, when performing surgery, the doctor can determine if the surgery was successful by observing the patient’s condition after surgery, so expertise can be improved through surgery.
If you are in an industry where there is a lack of validity and feedback, you should not give up becoming an expert. By changing the way you work to increase validity and feedback, you can become an expert.
To increase validity, you need to set variables in your work and experiment by modifying those variables to find regularity and causality.
To increase feedback, you need to make an effort to receive feedback directly from colleagues, bosses, customers, or from the work you are doing. If you are a developer like me, you can receive feedback through code reviews from colleagues or bosses, or through static analysis tools or test code.
Difficulty
To improve your skills, deliberate practice is essential. Many people emphasize the quantitative part of practice, such as the 10,000-hour rule, but few emphasize the qualitative part.
One of the essential conditions for deliberate practice is the appropriate difficulty. To be deliberate practice, your skill level and the difficulty of the task should be similar. This is consistent with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory.
The horizontal axis represents your self-perceived skill level for the task, and the vertical axis represents the difficulty you feel for the task.
The Boredom area is an area where your skill level is higher than the difficulty of the task. When you do this work, you think it’s too good to handle easy work at first, but after a while, you feel boredom about the work.
The Anxiety area is an area where the difficulty of the task is higher than your skill level. In this area, you feel anxiety or fear that you don’t know much about the task and can’t solve it with your skills.
The Apathy-Flow area is an area where the difficulty and skill level are similar. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says that this is where humans experience immersion. When humans are in a state of immersion, they show the highest level of concentration, and their performance or learning ability can be maximized. And at that time, they experience the highest level of happiness.
Stephen Krashen, a linguist, Input hypothesis says that language skills develop significantly only when the input is given at a level of i+1, where i is the language level of the learner.
Educational psychology has a theory called Cognitive load theory. This theory states that it is difficult to learn anything properly if unnecessary cognitive burdens are given during learning. For example, suppose you learn difficult concepts like calculus in a language you don’t know well, such as German. In that case, you will have difficulty learning calculus because you will be distracted by other things. On the other hand, there is research that says that if you memorize English words by covering the vowels, it can be remembered longer because it is more difficult.
One important fact that can be learned through such research results is that the appropriate difficulty is necessary to improve skills.
If you feel anxious or bored during business hours, it means that you are not in an environment where you can improve your skills. The problem is that when you get used to such an environment and your behavior becomes a habit, you don’t perceive this environment well.
The results of the study An examination of the practice environments in figure skating and volleyball: A search for deliberate practice show this.
We compared two groups of athletes: regional competition-level athletes and world competition-level athletes. After finishing practice for the day, we asked them a simple survey. One of the questions was how many triple axels they remembered doing during practice today. There was no significant difference in the responses of the two groups. However, when we recorded and analyzed the actual practice scenes of the two groups, we found that world competition-level athletes practiced more triple axels than regional competition-level athletes. Regional competition-level athletes spent more time practicing things they were already familiar with and confident in, such as ‘artistic expression.’ Then they mistakenly thought they had practiced triple axels a lot.
This research shows that humans get used to their environment and lose their self-perception in a familiar environment.
Deliberate practice
We can practice deliberately based on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory.
As shown in the figure, we can practice deliberately in four ways.
A1: Lower your skillsA2: Increase the difficultyB1: Lower the difficultyB2: Improve your skills
This deliberate practice is essential to improve your skills. Without it, you will not only fail to improve your skills, but you may also fall into the illusion that your skills are improving, as in the results of the study on figure skating.
A1: Lower your skills
This is a deliberate practice method that lowers your skills without changing the difficulty of the task. For example, when training your physical strength, you can lower your skills by exercising with sandbags attached to your arms and legs.
If you are a developer like me, you can deliberately practice by not using tools to develop more efficiently or more conveniently. For example, you can deliberately practice by not using static code analyzers like ESLint or Prettier in real-time, using tools other than your favorite IDE or text editor, developing only with the keyboard if you often use the mouse, or developing without using a debugger. By not using tools for the convenience or efficiency of development, you can deliberately practice by lowering your skills. By solving what the tools always did on your own, you can think more than before and increase your concentration.
A2: Increase the difficulty
This is a deliberate practice method that increases the difficulty of the task while keeping your skills the same.
The duel in San Francisco in 1965 was the beginning of Bruce Lee’s weight training. At that time, Bruce Lee started teaching Kung Fu to people. One of the traditional martial artists heard that Bruce Lee was teaching Westerners and came to challenge him. Bruce Lee’s wife, Linda Lee, witnessed the scene. “It lasted about three minutes. Bruce knocked him down and said, ‘Will you give up?’ then he said, ‘I give up.’ Then they went back to San Francisco. But Bruce was very angry. He couldn’t knock him down before three minutes. That’s when it started. Bruce began to doubt his physical health and martial arts style.” - How Bruce Lee Changed the World, Discovery Channel, 2009.
If someone is too good at martial arts like Bruce Lee, the fight with the opponent can be easy. In this case, you can increase the difficulty of the task by adding your own constraints, such as ‘win within three minutes,’ to increase the difficulty of the task.
Outstanding programmers often use this method. For example, they think about how to complete the task given in a day in an hour, refactor the program to make the UI respond faster, find two bugs or problems a day instead of one, or code in an unfamiliar language. By doing this, you can perform deliberate practice.
Another way is to add tasks that are not officially required by your own will. For example, you can refactor your work to improve it, add automated tests, or develop your own tools (methods) to improve your work.
Making your own tools and methods is especially important in A2. One of the techniques in cognitive psychology to quickly identify the expertise of others is to ask if there are ‘tools or methods that you make and use yourself to do things more efficiently and effectively than others’. You need to frequently identify and analyze recurring patterns and take time to create tools. By creating tools like this, the difficulty becomes higher than the existing difficulty, and your skills improve. Not only that, but the tools you create make your work more efficient and effective, helping to increase your expertise.
B1: Lower the difficulty
This is a deliberate practice method that lowers the difficulty of the task when the difficulty is higher than your skills. It is a method of developing a high-difficulty task as an alternative function that can be made with one’s own ability or dividing it into smaller tasks that are easier to handle.
There is a caveat in using this method. The skill level and difficulty change frequently. The problem you were struggling with yesterday suddenly became easy to solve today, or the difficulty increased dramatically because the easy task you thought was a bug occurred. Or the method you tried was wrong, and the difficulty increased too much.
Therefore, this method should be used flexibly. If you feel bored because each task is too easy after dividing the difficult task into the less difficult tasks, you should increase the difficulty again or lower your skills. If your skills have improved while working and the difficulty has become easier, you should adjust it again accordingly.
B2: Improve your skills
This is a deliberate practice method that increases your skills when the difficulty is higher than your skills.
To improve your skills, you can try the following methods.
- Books
- Study groups
- Education
However, this method is a long-term method to improve your skills. The current difficulty is higher than your skills, so it takes too long to improve your skills. So what are the short-term methods to improve your skills?
To improve your skills in the short term, you can use social, tool, and internal approaches.
The social approach is to seek help from experts better than you. This includes suggesting pair programming to better members, searching the Internet, posting on the community for help, referring to official documents, etc.
The tool approach is to use tools to help you. This includes using a better debugger, automatic integration tools, code analysis tools, open-source use, etc.
The internal approach is to use your internal resources. This includes using your experience, intuition, and internal knowledge to solve problems.
What leaders can do
As a leader, you should give your team members the appropriate task that suits their skills, understand their status, and help them use the aforementioned deliberate practice methods appropriately. However, this is an ideal state, and it is very difficult to do so.
Therefore, it is important for leaders to create an environment and ability for each individual to practice these intentional training methods.
Deliberate practice in daily life
Deliberate practice is not only applicable to work but also to daily life. Applying the lessons in one area to another like this is called the learning transfer in psychology.
Please try to practice deliberately in your work and daily life to become an expert in your work and life.
Was my blog helpful? Please leave a comment at the bottom. it will be a great help to me!
App promotion
Deku.Deku created the applications with Flutter.If you have interested, please try to download them for free.
