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More than just trying something over and over until you get it, deliberate practice is a systematic approach to practice that leads to the quickest and most significant improvements in a skill. The theory has been popularized by the work of Anders Ericsson and summarized in his book Peak: Secrets from the new Science of Expertise. Deliberate practice involves:
- well-defined, specific, ambitious goals: to improve a skill you have to have to know what better looks like and make steady, measurable progress to get there. Big goals should be broken down as into the smallest steps possible.
- focus: the best practice is cognitively demanding, pushing your brain to make new connections, and so requires your full, focused attention
- feedback, the more immediate the better: quickly detecting and fixing mistakes allows your brain to learn the right action instead of the wrong one.
- getting out of one’s comfort zone: Ericsson calls this the most important aspect of purposeful practice. Skill growth comes from practicing just past the edge of your current abilities, slowly pushing that boundary forward.
In Peak, Ericsson highlights the importance of a social environment to maintaining motivation:
One of the best ways to create and sustain social motivation is to surround yourself with people who will encourage and support and challenge you in your endeavors. Not only did the Berlin violin students spend most of their time with other music students, but they also tended to date music students or at least others who would appreciate their passion for music and understand their need to prioritize and practice.
And the importance of breaking down large goals into small units of visible improvement:
One of the best bits of advice is to set things up so that you are constantly seeing concrete signs of improvement, even if it is not always major improvement. …Piano teachers know, for example, that it is best to break down long-term targets for a young piano student into a series of levels. By doing this, the student gets a sense of achievement each time a new level is attained, and that sense of achievement will both add to his or her motivation and make it less likely that the student will become discouraged by a seeming lack of progress.