7 Steps To Go From Beginner To Competent
Ever since the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell came out, the 10,000-hour rule has become a part of the common parlance. If you want to be world-class at something, you have to put in your 10,000 hours, right?
But what if you don’t want to be world-class? What if you only want to be functionally good at something. You aren’t trying to top the charts, you aren’t even trying to get on the charts. You just want to be able to accomplish the skill without screwing it up when it counts.
To do that, you are going to have to practice (I know, I know. I can’t wait for Matrix-style downloads either). In this post, we will explore the art of deliberate practice. How do you practice so that you can make big gains and get over the learning curve quickly so that you can start to enjoy your new skill?
Three Key Distinctions
Before we get started, let’s make a few distinctions so that we can set proper expectations.
#1 Performance is not practice.
If actors went on stage before they had learned their lines, or developed their characters, the horrible reviews would ensure that all of their plays died in the cradle. That’s because there is a difference between practicing a skill and performing it.
Let’s say that the skill you want to learn is golf. It can be tempting to start scheduling tee times to get your “practice.” While playing the game of golf can be fun no matter what your skill level (if you have the proper mindset), this is not the way to develop the skill quickly.
Performance-As-Practice can even be counter-productive for two reasons.
First, you might be accidentally ingraining bad habits and second, unsuccessful performance can be disheartening and lead you to a loss of enjoyment for the skill before you have given it a fair chance.
#2 Information is not practice
In school, most of us are taught that becoming educated is a process of gaining information. While the acquisition of knowledge is a valuable endeavor, practice is how we develop skills.
While some research is vital to designing the most effective practice sessions, there is no substitute for repetitive practice. It is fundamentally impossible to develop a skill by learning. You MUST practice.
Keep that in mind as we go through this process. Don’t fall into the information trap. It all comes down to practice.
#3 All practice is not created equal
In his book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise Anders Ericsson (who actually did the research that Gladwell’s book was based on) describes 3 different kinds of practice: naive, purposeful, and deliberate.
Naive practice is blind repetition. It is repeatedly performing a skill with little understanding of the underlying principles governing the activity. It is, quite frankly, a waste of time.
Purposeful practice is guided by clear goals, pushes the limits of skill, uses full attention, and creates clear internal feedback.
Deliberate practice is Purposeful practice that is also well-informed, which means it is guided by a teacher familiar with not just the skill, but the development of that skill.
If you DO want to be world-class at something, Deliberate practice is the way to get there. However, deliberate practice is also the quickest way to develop a skill to the level of competency. While having a teacher is a tremendous resource for learning, for most skills we practice, you can find teachers in books, podcasts, and videos.
With these key distinctions out of the way, we can move on to structuring our deliberate practice for maximum return on time investment.
A Practical Formula for Practice
Each new skill you develop will have periods of clumsiness and inarticulate fumbling. To a beginner, these “learning wobbles” can be very discouraging. In addition to reading this post on the mindset for failure, there are a few things that you can do to ensure you minimize discomfort in your practice.
Follow this process to optimize your practice for the fastest results.
1) Begin with the end in mind
As with all things, I recommend understanding your desired outcome before you even get started. By starting with your why, you will be able to keep yourself focused, motivated, and making progress toward your outcome.
With the skill that you want to learn, set a concrete level of skill that you want to reach. Do you want to play the guitar for fireside gatherings? Give an awesome speech to your networking group? Become an interesting conversationalist?
Take a minute to reflect on why you want to learn this skill in the first place, then determine how you will know when you’ve gotten there. This will guide and focus your practice as well as set a natural stopping/re-evaluating point.
Consider writing this outcome in a journal or document dedicated to the development of this skill. This will be a useful resource in the following steps.
2) Learn your practical principles
In order to get the most out of your practice it will be important to understand what you are practicing, specifically. This means identifying the necessary sub-skills and the principles of successful practice.
Sub-skill means the smallest functional unit of the skill. If you are learning golf, the sub-skills include putting, chipping, driving, fairway irons, club selection, shot shaping, recovery, and rules.
Principles of successful practice are the guidelines for practicing well and giving yourself feedback. In the golf example, these govern stance, posture, swing-mechanics, ball-striking, pre-shot routine, etc.
One mistake a lot of smart people make is that they try to figure all of these out on their own. This is a waste of time. If you want to ride a bike, you don’t start by inventing the wheel. It’s already been done.
Seek out others who have already developed this skill — how did they do it? Whatever skill you want to learn, chances are there is a book, a website, a youtube channel, etc. dedicated to its development. Engage with several of the experts and find out what they have to say in common. It’s a safe bet that those are reliable sub-skills and principles.
Enumerate the principles of the skill, make a list, write them down in your skill journal. As you develop the skill, return frequently to the principles until they are second-nature. Use the sub-skills to design your individual practice sessions.
3) Plan for obstacles and challenges
Some skills have actual physical risks involved, while others have social or emotional risks. Any of these risks can be potential barriers to practice. Use the worst-case scenario as a guide (this app has a pretty cool version of this kind of fear/challenge mitigation). Ask yourself what could go wrong, so you can develop a plan to prepare for it.
This can help you reduce the emotional and psychological barriers to practice. The more power you can take away from “what could go wrong,” the easier it will be to do your practice. Use these risks to design practice sessions.
To continue with our golf example, the risks could be landing in a hazard, having a bad hole, having a bad round in front of friends, losing your ball, etc. By recognizing each of these possibilities, you can create a plan to deal with them, physically or mentally, in the moment.
4) Make an environment conducive to learning
The final step of preparation is to prepare a space in which to practice. By space, I mean not just the physical space, but the mental space (a time, free from distraction) in which you can deliberately practice your fledgling skill.
Make the practice easy on yourself and remove distractions. By turning your cell phone on airplane mode (or off if you don’t need it to practice your skill), you reduce the need for willpower to stop checking your texts.
The practice environment also includes a plan for what you will practice. Using your list of sub-skills or worst-case-scenarios plan your practice session, review your principles, but most importantly, remind yourself of what’s important to practice today.
Now for the best part!
5) Practice in short, but REGULAR intervals
Here is where the skill development actually happens.
Once you have selected your focus for the practice session, it’s time to do the repetitions. Keep your principles in mind (maybe even post them in front of you or play a recording of them, if that’s helpful to remember them).
The key words are short and regular. This is important because you are building neural networks, which is a fundamentally physical process. That means that you can’t trick your body with an all-night cram session. One weekly 140 minute practice session is NOT equal to 7 20 minute practice sessions. The latter has a far bigger impact on results. This can’t be overemphasized.
The key here is to give your body repetitions. Practice as much as you can, as quickly as possible. your brain will be building neural networks, but no amount of “understanding the concept” will do this work, it takes raw data, and that means repetitions.
Bonus tip: practice before sleep and just after waking to see the most substantial gains in your skill development. This is due to the way that our brains consolidate and integrate experience while we sleep. If you don’t have time before bed or in the morning, not to worry! You can develop your skill at any time of the day, these times just have the greatest benefit.
6) Reflect on your practice session.
A big part of the preparation work that we did on the skill in the first few steps was to enable us to get feedback on our new skill as quickly and accurately as possible. The more ingrained your principles become, the more quickly you are able to course-correct.
Set yourself up for success, by maximizing your opportunities for feedback and reflection. You can record your practice sessions, practice in front of a mirror, solicit feedback from others, or even hire someone to help. Whatever tools you use for feedback, be sure to review, understand, and integrate the feedback in your practice.
7) Rest.
This is an incredibly important part that wasn’t really emphasized in Gladwell’s book. While those masters did do an average of 10,000 hours of practice they also did an average of 12,500 hours of deliberate rest. They also typically worked in sessions no longer than 4 hours.
All sorts of integration happens when you stop practicing and do deliberate rest. Go for a walk, do something creative, or even just sleep. This will allow your brain to synthesize all of the practice you are doing and “passively” develop the skill.
Skill development is an incredibly rewarding part of human life. The fact that we are set up to be able to acquire new abilities from zero is an amazing feature of human biology. We all contain within us the seed of greatness; practice is the sunlight that causes that seed to grow.
If you’d like some help to develop your own strategy for greatness, schedule a powerful conversation with a coach here.
Additional Reading:
The Art of Learning — Josh Waizkin
The First 20 Hours — Josh Kaufman
Peak — Anders Ericsson
Outliers — Malcolm Gladwell
