[Essay] Deliberate Practice

2024-08-08 hit count image

Just spending 10,000 hours on the same thing doesn't improve your skills or make you an expert. You need to engage in deliberate practice to improve your skills and become an expert.

We brush our teeth for a lifetime, but we get cavities, and we breathe for a lifetime, but we don’t breathe efficiently and use less energy. Just spending time doesn’t make you an expert. Even if you’ve been doing your job for a long time, your skills don’t automatically improve or make you an expert in that field.

The 10,000-hour rule doesn’t mean that you become an expert just by doing the same thing for 10,000 hours. The 10,000-hour rule means that you need to engage in deliberate practice, repetitive training to improve your skills for the purpose of improving your skills, rather than just gaining experience. Here, deliberate practice refers to training that aims to improve your skills by making an effort to improve your weaknesses.

The simplest way to utilize deliberate practice is to use feedback.

In Skinner’s box, there is a mouse and a lever that dispenses food. When the mouse press the lever, food comes out, but at first the mouse doesn’t understand the relationship. After accidentally bumping into it and receiving food several times, it learns to press the lever itself to get food when it’s hungry. That’s learning. However, you can make learning impossible forever. By gradually increasing the time interval between pressing the lever and the food coming out, you can find the point at which the mouse can no longer learn. In this condition, the mouse’s nerve cells cannot learn. The same is true for humans. If the feedback cycle is too long, learning doesn’t go well. Imagine practicing golf putting and getting the results a year later. “Last year at this time, you hit it at 1:25 and it went in.” Will you be able to learn? - 함께 자라기 애자일로 가는 길, 김창준

If you can get accurate and quick feedback on your actions, you can learn about those actions and through that learning, you can engage in deliberate practice.

Even during work, deliberate practice is possible through feedback. By getting accurate feedback on what you’ve done and shortening the feedback cycle, you can engage in deliberate learning.

A diagnostic specialist sees a patient once or twice, makes an evaluation to resolve quite puzzling symptoms, and moves on to the next patient. That doctor may never see the patient again. I recently interviewed a highly successful diagnostic specialist, and he worked quite differently. He spent a considerable amount of time confirming his patients, making many notes on what he thought during the diagnosis, and later checking how accurate he was. The supplementary steps he created differentiate him from his colleagues. This allows him to know when and how he is improving. People who perform at the highest level generally use special techniques, which are not widely known and not actually practiced by many people. - Ericsson’s interview

Like this interview, by actively using feedback in your work, you can engage in deliberate practice, improve your skills, and become an expert.

How much time you spend improving your skills during work is related to performance. Therefore, companies need to consider not only how to recruit talent people but also how to help employees improve their skills during work. In other words, organizations need to provide maximum support to individuals to develop and manage their expertise.

It is important to educate and promote growth after hiring talent people, but more importantly, it is the system. Even ordinary people can achieve better performance with good culture and good systems.

We all spend the same amount of time. Time is fair to everyone. Depending on how you spend this fairly given time, you can become an expert or not. How do you want to spend this time?

Was my blog helpful? Please leave a comment at the bottom. it will be a great help to me!

App promotion

You can use the applications that are created by this blog writer Deku.
Deku created the applications with Flutter.

If you have interested, please try to download them for free.

Posts