Deliberate Practice

“Practice makes perfect” is wrong. Practice makes permanent.

If you practice poorly, you get really good at being bad. Hours of guitar with sloppy technique just locks in sloppy technique. You’re not building toward mastery-you’re locking in average.

What separates elite performers isn’t just more practice-it’s a different kind of practice. Anders Ericsson spent his career studying this and called it deliberate practice. The distinction matters more than almost anything else in skill development.

The 10,000 Hour Myth

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that 10,000 hours of practice produces expertise. This is a misrepresentation of Ericsson’s research, and Ericsson himself spent years trying to correct it.

What the research actually shows:

  • Elite performers in many fields have accumulated around 10,000 hours of deliberate practice by age 20
  • But total hours alone predict nothing
  • The quality of practice matters enormously
  • Plenty of people practice for 10,000+ hours and remain mediocre

You’ve probably met weekend golfers who’ve played for 30 years and are still bad. They’re not doing deliberate practice. They’re just playing the same comfortable game over and over, making the same mistakes, never getting better.

What Deliberate Practice Is

Deliberate practice has specific characteristics:

1. Designed to Improve Performance

Not playing for fun. Not going through the motions. Specifically targeting weaknesses with exercises designed to fix them.

Not deliberate: Playing complete songs on guitar Deliberate: Isolating the chord transition you keep messing up and drilling it

2. Focused on Specific Components

Breaking skills into sub-skills and working on each one separately.

Not deliberate: “Practicing basketball” Deliberate: Practicing free throws, then crossover dribbles, then defensive footwork

3. At the Edge of Current Ability

The task should be just beyond what you can currently do. Easy practice builds no new capability. Impossible tasks build frustration.

Too easy: A chess master playing against a beginner Too hard: A beginner attempting to solve grandmaster-level puzzles Right difficulty: Puzzles rated slightly above your current level

4. Immediate, Informative Feedback

You need to know immediately what you did wrong. Without feedback, you can’t correct errors.

Poor feedback: Writing an essay and getting a grade two weeks later Good feedback: Using software that highlights grammatical errors as you type

5. High Repetition

Doing something once isn’t practice. Deliberate practice involves many repetitions of the target skill or component.

6. Mentally Demanding

Deliberate practice requires concentration. It’s exhausting. If you’re practicing on autopilot, it’s not deliberate.

Elite practitioners typically max out at 4-5 hours of deliberate practice per day. More than that degrades quality.

Deliberate Practice vs. Naive Practice

Naive practice (what most people do):

  1. Learn basics
  2. Practice until acceptable
  3. Reach “good enough” level
  4. Put on autopilot
  5. Plateau forever
  6. Assume they’ve reached their natural limit

Deliberate practice:

  1. Identify specific weakness
  2. Design exercise to target it
  3. Practice with full concentration
  4. Get immediate feedback
  5. Adjust and repeat
  6. Move to next weakness

Basic practice leads to doing things on autopilot. You get comfortable and stop getting better. Deliberate practice forces you to keep growing-and keep feeling uncomfortable. The discomfort tells you that learning is happening.

How to Apply Deliberate Practice

Step 1: Identify Sub-Skills

Break your target skill into components. For programming:

  • Reading code
  • Debugging
  • Data structures
  • Algorithm design
  • System design
  • Testing
  • Documentation

Each of these can be broken down further. “Debugging” becomes: reproducing bugs, isolating causes, forming hypotheses, using debugger tools, reading stack traces, etc.

Step 2: Assess Current Weaknesses

Where do you struggle? What feedback are you getting? What components need work?

Methods:

  • Self-assessment (what feels hard?)
  • External feedback (what do others say?)
  • Objective metrics (where do you score poorly?)
  • Video review (record yourself and watch)

Step 3: Find or Create Exercises

You need drills that target the specific weakness.

Resources:

  • Textbooks often have targeted exercises
  • Online platforms (LeetCode for algorithms, Exercism for language practice)
  • Past exam problems
  • Create your own variations
  • Work with a teacher or coach who can design exercises

Step 4: Ensure Immediate Feedback

How will you know if you did it right?

  • Compare to model solutions
  • Use automated testing
  • Work with a teacher who watches
  • Record and review yourself
  • Use tools that give immediate feedback

Step 5: Repeat Deliberately

  • Focus fully during practice
  • Work at the edge of ability
  • Keep sessions short enough to maintain quality
  • Track your progress over time

Domain-Specific Examples

Programming

Naive practice: Building projects you’re comfortable with Deliberate practice:

  • Solve algorithm problems at difficulty level that makes you struggle
  • Read code from expert programmers and try to understand every line
  • Debug intentionally broken code
  • Implement data structures from scratch
  • Time yourself and try to beat your records
  • Code review sessions with more experienced developers

Music

Naive practice: Playing through pieces you already know Deliberate practice:

  • Isolate difficult passages and drill them slowly
  • Use metronome at gradually increasing tempo
  • Record and listen critically
  • Practice sight-reading unfamiliar music
  • Work with a teacher who corrects technique immediately

Writing

Naive practice: Writing whatever you feel like Deliberate practice:

  • Copy passages from writers you admire (by hand)
  • Analyze sentence structure in great writing
  • Write with constraints (word limits, specific structures)
  • Get immediate editing feedback
  • Rewrite the same piece multiple times

Sports

Naive practice: Playing games Deliberate practice:

  • Drill specific techniques in isolation
  • Video review of your performance
  • Work with coaches who give immediate correction
  • Practice scenarios that give you trouble
  • Condition for specific physical demands

The Role of Teachers and Coaches

Elite performers almost always have teachers. Why?

  1. Diagnosis: Expert eyes spot problems you can’t see yourself
  2. Exercise design: They know which drills address which problems
  3. Immediate feedback: They correct in real-time
  4. Motivation: External accountability helps you do hard work

If you can access good instruction, use it. If not, you can still do deliberate practice-it’s just harder to design and harder to get feedback.

How Experts See Things

Experts don’t just know more-they see their field differently.

A chess master doesn’t see 32 pieces on squares. They see patterns, threats, and possible moves. Their mental picture captures meaning that beginners can’t see.

Deliberate practice builds these mental pictures. You start seeing patterns where you once saw chaos.

This is why experts can:

  • Recognize situations instantly
  • Chunk complex information
  • Predict outcomes
  • Notice anomalies

Maintaining Motivation

Deliberate practice is hard. It’s not fun the way casual practice can be. You’re always at the edge of failing, always uncomfortable, always seeing your weak spots.

Strategies:

  • Connect practice to meaningful goals-why are you doing this?
  • Track progress-visible improvement motivates when daily practice feels pointless
  • Find practice partners who take it seriously
  • Celebrate small wins
  • Remember that difficulty means growth-the struggle is the point
  • Take breaks before burnout, not after

The goal isn’t to enjoy deliberate practice. It’s to achieve what deliberate practice produces. Enjoy the results, tolerate the process.

Putting It Together

The minimum viable approach:

  1. Identify one specific sub-skill that needs work
  2. Find or create an exercise that targets it
  3. Practice for 25 minutes with full focus
  4. Get feedback (even self-feedback by comparing to a model)
  5. Repeat tomorrow, adjusting based on what you learned

That’s it. Do this consistently and you’ll improve faster than people who practice for hours without deliberate structure.

The Hard Truth

Most people stop at “good enough.” They reach a level where they can get by and stop getting better. Then they think they’ve hit their natural limit.

They haven’t. They’ve hit the limit of basic practice.

Deliberate practice is how you keep growing. It’s uncomfortable, it’s demanding, and it requires giving up the pleasure of easy, comfortable practice.

But it’s also the only way to reach high levels of skill. If you want to be good-really good-this is the path. There isn’t another one.

What’s Next

Part 6 covers sleep optimization-because all that deliberate practice won’t consolidate properly if you’re not sleeping well. You’ll learn how sleep cycles work, how to time your sleep for maximum learning benefit, and practical tips for waking up refreshed instead of wanting to die.

Enjoyed This?

If this helped something click, subscribe to my YouTube channel. More content like this, same approach - making things stick without insulting your intelligence. It’s free, it helps more people find this stuff, and it tells me what’s worth making more of.