What People Get Wrong About Deliberate Practice

[@mastershooter64]

"The expert has failed more times than the novice has even tried" I agree it's about cycles of practice and feedback

[@patrickgoetz]

Here's a concrete example of deliberate practice that neatly illustrates the idea. Beginning instrument students will practice by spending 20-30 minutes playing through a piece from beginning to end 2 or 3 times. A far more effective way to practice is to just focus on those sections of the music which are difficult for them to play, and practice those over and over again, skipping the parts of the piece which are easy to play. This is an example of deliberate practice. Great videos, btw!

[@juniperstardust5549]

Yes, this, I've been doing these recently with my piano lessons, I repeat the parts that are complicated and once I'm comfortable I play the whole piece along with the easiest parts

[@Heyu7her3]

​@@juniperstardust5549 I was going to comment that you've gotta do BOTH

[@joshhigh5538]

Works for me

[@MyShyCats]

And when playing th whole piece - one must be listening and analyzing in a way you might not when performing. Asking yourself how did each difficult section go, was tempo consistent, was phrasing right, dynamics, tone, etc.

[@chrisschack9716]

@@MyShyCatsalso, be careful to tie the parts you practiced till you managed to get them back into the piece. It doesn't help if you can manage a difficult passage, if you can't start it.

[@amandamate9117]

Actionable Summary: 1.Disregard the 10,000-Hour Rule: It's a misleading metric. Focus on the quality of your practice instead. 2.Identify Expert Skills: Before diving into practice, take time to identify the skills that differentiate experts from novices in your field. 3.Engage in Practice-Feedback Cycles: Find a way to practice that challenges you and seek expert feedback. Use this cycle to continually refine your skills. BONUS: Practice-Feedback Cycle: Challenging Practice → Expert Feedback → Further Practice → Opportunities → Repeat

[@MohamedAnasMalek]

isnt the deliberate practice cycle = challenging practice + self evaluation + feedback. where did you get opportunities from?

[@Mark4Jesus]

Thank you!

[@dr9205]

Thanks

[@saqibshafin]

Yes, I looked at your playlists. Indeed you are geeky, and if the profile pic is real, beautiful. I'm (not) sorry for saying it out loud.

[@parthshah3800]

Thank you! you saved me 9 mins of my life!

[@matiasgaudenzi8694]

This is something I feel does get overlooked a lot- especially with the whole "hustle culture" that is so common today. You cannot have 18 hours of "deliberate practice" a day- quite simply because if you're doing it right it's uncomfortable and tires you out. After a while, it's not that the work you're doing is challenging- you're just tired.

[@tylerbruce5731]

18 hour "hustle culture" doesnt really exist except on social media feeds. In my experience in the corporate world a lot of "work" done by C suiters for example isnt really what we call work and a lot of them are really good at the "marketing"of themselves as hard workers. Sorta like the whole CEO "reading" 52 books a year thing.

[@cdancecoaching]

Yes on your idea of the “hustle culture”, which was here before social media.

[@manan-543]

18 hours a day is overkill tbh. But that doesn't disregard the whole idea of hustle culture. U should still be putting in the hours to be an expert. Assuming u got 8 hours of good sleep and 30 mins of exercise, you should be fit enough to try out and practice whatever u want. Since we're humans and we have a lot of distractions we can use the pomodoro technique to get some quality work done.

[@matiasgaudenzi8694]

@@manan-543 I went to a school (engineering, very competitive) where I had about 12 hours of lectures a day (mon-thurs) and then 6hrs on fridays. I've done it both ways. I only started getting "really good" when I dropped those hours considerably to about ~4 hours of deliberate practice maximum in a day and then another 4 hours of comparatively light/easy work. I made breaks, rest periods and workouts a priority. My point was more along the lines of "I don't believe people who say they can work 16 hour days for years"- I've done it and it'll work SHORT TERM (less than a month). This is sort of like training for an ironman vs actually competing, no pro ironman runner runs a full ironman during training, they save it for their "peak" in the cycle.

[@tylerbruce5731]

@@matiasgaudenzi8694 sure. I think most ppl have had experiences where they spent "18 hours" doing something. And yes its not sustainable. As for education "highly competitive", long hour evironments are not better. We now know learning is not a rote "puttin' in thr hours" type of thing. Theres a lot of assumptions and mythologizing about performance and the role "hard work" plays in it.

[@manishm9478]

I work as a software engineer, and have recently found developers that are good at debugging are great at adopting an exploratory, detective style approach. This was not obvious to me until i paired with them to solve some really challenging issues. A good example of how expert practice is not clear, and takes effort to identify.

[@Don_XII]

Could you elaborate more what they do different than the ordinary? I’m interested.

[@aymiraydinli5655]

Yeah I am curious too

[@bushek502]

@@Don_XII You think of debugging as divide and conquer, but to be good at it you must know how the language works and (more) your tools. You use the compilers error as the starting point and narrow down the problem by imagining the code as a sort of a network of nodes (not explicitly), change where you think the issue is and if it isn't gone - repeat. IDE's and languages may make this harder or easier, for example if you don't have an almighty IDE you are going to struggle with debugging C a lot, but if you, for example, use Common Lisp it's going to be easier because you can isolate and test little bits of code in the REPL (which makes it way way easier). So debugging isnt mainly about the code itself but more about the tools.

[@BinxyBrown]

Not op but, There are two types of software developers I've worked with, there are some that just seem like they know everything and they just see the problem and go oh it's probably here and they fix it. This happens with extreme familiarity of the specific code base and the language. If you don't just know because you've fixed it before then you basically start where the bug is occuring, identify what it is then you dig for it in a systematic way. This object isn't showing, when does it show? It shows when x is true, when is x false, okay I know that now, where does x come from, ok this piece of data from a connected system is coming back empty and it's defaulting x to false. Is that normal, if not then you fix the bug there, if it can be empty then maybe there is a logic issue for x under certain conditions where we want it to be true.

[@diogofelix8626]

My opinion on debugging regarding exploration: Programming is basically transforming data, some data goes in, some data goes out, the code is just half of the picture because we're missing the data, debugging is basically feeding some data (can be test data our real world data) in the code and study how it handles, depending on the language we have tools for that, debuggers, where you can inspect the values and how the code are changing them, it's really akin to an detective approach really. We have unit tests as well that do exactly that, we call the code with some data and we can see the values it returns and compare that against some expectations. Debugging is an invaluable skill, especially when you're are working in a new codebase that you don't quite grasp how it handles the data that goes in, it helps you a lot in forming a mental model (understanding) of how the code works.

[@Simeulf]

An example of your first point: I played chess for countless of hours from ages 13-18 barely improving my rating at all (regular practice), then I bought a couple chess books and started to stud various skills (deliberate practice). After a year my rating improved about five hundred points. Suddenly, the games had a lot more depth, and I started to notice more of the patterns that expert chess players have built into their intuition. Really interesting video. Before watching I have always believed in the 10,000 hour rule. Weird how such concepts can become so widely acknowledged within a given culture.

[@byronperez9199]

Very true. I think that without elaboration, many people can become very misguided. Thankfully, we have videos like these to clarify matters up.

[@durschfalltv7505]

Between 13-18 how many of the games you played sid you win? Did you win at all?

[@RobBCactive]

​@@durschfalltv7505if he wasn't winning about 50% of a point in each game his rating would have plummeted. He may have been improving just not as fast as other players who used their time better.

[@randomcosmos3600]

one thing he did not mention was that the 10,000 hours was an average of the experts. The range was from 5,000 hours to 20,000 hours for some. There is also a genetic component, not just deliberate practice alone.

[@mrlaser7580]

@@randomcosmos3600 Yeah but even still, there’s a major difference between someone who’s studied for 5000 hours and someone who’s studied 20000 hours. There’s no overcoming the hurdles of time invested simply because your a genius.

[@jeremyshull8850]

This video really resonated with me. I'm a software engineer, and I became better faster than any time before at a job where all the code I wrote was heavily reviewed by really good programmers. It was tough, but worth it.

[@neutrino109]

Unfortunately, I feel like mine was the opposite. I started an internship which became I job. No real help, the senior dev even once said, "I'll defer on the Javascript to you, you're the expert." In what universe am I an expert? Haha. I guess the benefit was learning to lean on my autodidactic skills. Get it across the finish line somehow!

[@wiczus6102]

@@neutrino109 "You're the expert" wasn't an observation. It was a nomination.

[@MrAntice]

@@neutrino109 This is the conundrum all self taught developers face at one point or another. We have to find creative ways to get feedback on our work without the benefit of having an assigned senior to guide us. Some people turn to professional coachers to get the needed feedback, but this runs the risk of ending up with a bad coach. change your coach regularly if going this route. Others like me turn to reading up on the various concepts and schools of thought you find in the field. Deliberate study of various programming concepts/paradigms and how they inform how code is structured is a big topic for me right now.

[@lazygardens]

My HUGE improvement as a technical writer came when I had an extremely nit-picking engineer as a reviewer. Because if all you get is praise you don't know where your weak points are.

[@MrAntice]

@@lazygardens There is a difference between feedback and nit picking. Feedback is when you are questioned on your choices, and have bad practices and anti patterns pointed out. nitpicking is giving you shit for not using the "correct" variable name. One of these is useful, one is just meant to put you down.

[@Alex-js5lg]

You nailed it with this. It's exactly why promoting someone based primarily on the amount of time they have in an organization is a mistake. Time in is irrelevant if you've been closed off to new experiences during that period.

[@migueldemaria3830]

In some fields, practitioners are systematically worse in some respects the longer they've been out of school!

[@sheilawilliam441]

I totally believe in the concept of the number of feedback cycles. I teach ADVANCED AUDIT in a professional accountancy program. And creating exercises for my students so that they can have FEEDBACK CYCLES has increased the pass rate for this exam significantly

[@benjaminkeep]

Interesting - thanks for the example!

[@sarahyip2825]

Never forget- good teachers are our very first feedback loop together with conscientious parents!

[@ndub4014]

@@sarahyip2825 True! We just need to have a growth mindset and consistently put in focused work on the appropriate skills........

[@HariPrasad-iq9ks]

I teach Accountancy, can you kindly explain how you have created the exercise for the students

[@xCheddarB0b42x]

I used this on myself to complete an important professional certification exam.

[@lucthelazysquid20]

Since you asked, yes, this video was very useful to me. 1. It gives a reframing on the path of mastery that is not focused on time, and for me that's very reassuring, cause I've heard many teachers saying again and again, "practice this a thousand times", "after 50k repetitions you'll get good don't worry". It's not that it won't take a long time to develop the skills, or improve beyond certain plateaus, but that I don't have to repeat something mindlessly a bazillion times just to reach a quota, to get better. 2. The importance of the practice-feedback cycle, and being aware of it even before starting a practice session. For example, I'm learning to draw on my own, so if I want to practice a skill without having to reach a teacher to get feedback (which for some I should and I will), I'll need some kind of ruleset or reference to compare my drawing to, so I can have feedback to see how correct I am, and in subsequent tries if I'm improving or not. I believe that is in part why drawing from live models is such a good practice to improve figure drawing and it's subset of skills. 3. The importance of identifying the expert skills before starting a practice session. That's surprisingly difficult, but I'll try to make a habit of it. So thank you very much for the video.

[@jobaecker9752]

As a musician, you've provided some interesting new ways to look at this. I, like some other musicians, tend to start "noodling off" into other distractions as we practice, and I realize that I'd be better off having a very clear concept of the outcome of my practice AHEAD of time, rather than just "well, hopefully I'll improve a little."

[@LuKiSCraft]

I work in a customer-facing technical software sales role. This advice most certainly applies there. Instead of just watching a bunch of endless training videos, reading documentation, etc, I cooked up my own Azure AKS cluster and started installing & configuring the software. I am speeding ahead of most people who have been at the company 2X as long as me. In order to sell the software, you have to understand intimately how it works. The only way to understand it intimately is to get hands-on and be willing to fail / get stuck for hours.

[@57thorns]

Sounds reasonable, another thing I learned at some point was toner sales. (It was en example, I am _not_ a sales person.) If a salesman in a suit asks you to buy extra toner with your printer, you go "nah, not going to need it, we do not print those volumes, but we need a printer". But if the service tech says "you might want some spare toner", chances are you trust them. By showing that you know the software, you become the trusted engineer, not the distrusted sales person.

[@matthewalan59]

The importance of the 10,000 hour idea is simply that many people do not know that expertise comes as a result of lots of hard work. I spent a dozen years as a math teacher and was surprised at the number of students who seemed to think that math skills came from some magical process that was invoked by people who were "good at math." Even with the best coaching and highest quality practice, you still need to put in the work. Many people go through life without ever becoming good at any challenging skill. I think this is unfortunate.

[@piccalillipit9211]

*I STILL THINK YOU END UP DOING 10K HOURS TO GET WORLD CLASS* I started learning to tailor bespoke men's historical Savile row standard suits 4 years ago. I am at about 5,000 of practice and I would say I am about halfway to being truly professional. All this was followed and I am a quick learner, I am used to learning new skills. I was shocked when I worked out I was at the 5k hours point. The thing is, its the law of diminishing returns with anything. Getting competent takes 1k hours. Getting good takes 2.5k hours. Getting excellent takes 5k and getting world-class takes 10k, but most people would struggle to tel the difference between good and world-class... Im at the point now on that Dunning Kruger graph where I KNOW how much work is required to get that last bit of perfection. And its huge.

[@Fritztafer]

the missing ingredient is passion

[@Randorandom232]

Sometimes it does come naturally to some ppl.

[@jan-lukas]

The thing about maths is that if you're good at it, math lessons are probably enough to keep you good at it.

[@dangallagher6176]

​@@Randorandom232 the issue is, what does 'coming naturally to someone' mean? Is it really a genetic aptitude, or is it because they concentrate more? Or because they get better sleep? People forget that these are absolute core components of learning that vary wildly, yet so often are all chucked into the 'natural ability' bucket

[@vijaygopal9557]

I have never written comments for KZbin videos, but I am making an exception with your video. And that is because of your third point: the right metric to use is the number of feedback cycles and not the time put in. I have read a lot about DP but this one point blew me away. I can now see where I was going wrong. I am going to drastically change how I have been going about my DP. Thank you Ben - this was a crisp and value adding video.

[@benjaminkeep]

Really glad it was helpful! Good luck with your DP!

[@borianspassov6648]

Еее😊😊😊

[@amandamate9117]

Actionable Summary: 1.Disregard the 10,000-Hour Rule: It's a misleading metric. Focus on the quality of your practice instead. 2.Identify Expert Skills: Before diving into practice, take time to identify the skills that differentiate experts from novices in your field. 3.Engage in Practice-Feedback Cycles: Find a way to practice that challenges you and seek expert feedback. Use this cycle to continually refine your skills. BONUS: Practice-Feedback Cycle: Challenging Practice → Expert Feedback → Further Practice → Opportunities → Repeat

[@kylelind6239]

I think you've already caught this but... the key to improvement is to have an effective feedback loop which informs you, quickly and effectively, of when you are performing a task well, or poorly. Without that feedback, improvement is impossible. The more swiftly you can complete a task AND be informed of the quality of your work, the more quickly you can improve. ALSO, the clearer the information provided to you in that feedback, easier it is to make the correct adjustments, rather than blindly experimenting.

[@yoidkldk]

If you want to be an expert the first step is developing a strong foundation. That's what labs teach. Even in getting improper results, it becomes important to understand why.

[@someanimatordude2925]

Two years later and you're still empowering people. I have lived a life where small things have tuckered me out and anything I wasn't good at on the spot destroyed my sense of self worth. And when i put in the time, the marathon of useless practice wore me down and discouraged me. Identifying expert skills sounds simple. But to me there's a gap in the implicit and explicit identification. Implicit breeds a passive mindset. A field of "I wish i could do that. Look at how well they can do that." Explicit breeds an active mindset. "This person moved their knife through the onion with the tip on the board and the heel angled up. This resulted in the onion staying together while being sliced, allowing it to be easily picked up and moved to the pot." I'm rambling. Point is, thank you for sharing. I find this perspective most helpful indeed.

[@wesselcusters1308]

I found it very enlightening to hear you talk about misconceptions 2 and 3! (The first I was already aware of ;)). Asking yourself what makes an expert, is something that I should really do more often. And I noticed that focussing on time can result in a lot of pressure and disappointment which inhibits your learning and your fun while learning something. Thanks for making this video! :)

[@benjaminkeep]

My pleasure - glad it offered some value to you!

[@bobsmithy3103]

My Notes: When you learn a skill you should: 1) Identify the expert skills. These are the sub-skills which contribute significantly to the output of the skill. 2) Create tight feedback loops of: learning aspects of sub-skill -> applying sub-skill to test limits of knowledge -> getting expert feedback -> repeat Here is a concrete example for learning character illustration: 1) Expert skills: perspective, anatomy, forms, gesture, shapes, color, lighting & shadow 2) Feedback loop for one sub-skill: learn about 1, 2 and 3 point perspective -> Draw simple forms in 1, 2 and 3 point perspective -> Get expert feedback on WHAT went wrong, WHY what you did was wrong and HOW you can improve. Additionally get the expert to redline WHAT the correct answer should be. Here a routine someone could use to study illustration that using the above ideas (i'm open to feedback if anyone has a better routine): 1) Pick a sub-skill of the skill you want to focus on for the next week (eg: 1, 2 and 3 point perspective) 2) Allocate a period of time to develop said skill everyday (eg: 23:00->24:00) 3) Before studying get rid of distractions (eg: clean physical environment, clean digital environment like tabs/applications, block websites/ips, set phone to silent mode) 4) Join a physical or virtual study group if you want to increase friction of not studying and for accountability 5) Set a session goal before starting. This anchors yourself and serves as a measure to check if you made progress by the end of the session (eg: Goal: Can draw a cube from 1, 2 and 3 point perspective from various angles while keeping all unrelated variables constant) 6) Briefly review past notes on subject if you have any 7) Start going through resources while noting down questions and contradictions, also try to compare and contrast the information to your existing knowledge. Try applying the knowledge and see if there are any gaps in your understanding. 8) Every 5 minutes or summarize your learnings purely from recall. Only refer to the resource until after you think you've recalled all the knowledge you can. Especially note learnings you notice that are relevant to your goal. 9) After completing the resource or a certain allocated time, summarize all you learnings. 10) Apply and test your learnings by doing exercises. Then get feedback from an expert. You want to get the expert to give you the correct solution as well as feedback on WHAT went wrong, WHY what you did was wrong and HOW you can improve. 11) Summarize learnings. Also consolidate and organize your knowledge into a single source of truth like a document containing everything you know about the skill, serving as a cache so you don't need to refer to the original resource or get feedback as much

[@gambledw]

Vince Lombardi quote : "Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice make perfect"

[@1eV]

are you kidding me? These videos are insanely thought provoking and terribly helpful. keep making them please.

[@mhreinhardt]

There is a pretty famous study done in a photography class where in one group the professor said the students would be graded on a single photo they present at the end of class. The other group were solely graded on the number of photos they took, but still had the opportunity to select the best of the bunch to present in the final class. The result? The group that was told they'd be graded solely on quantity produced objectively better final photos than the class that was told they'd be graded on just the final photo. I'm not refuting this video, as I don't think any of the students were "experts" in photography by the end of class. However, I do think quantity of practice is more important than quality when moving up from beginner level because you don't even know enough about the subject yet to define what to be deliberate about to improve until you gain enough experience. In any case, thanks for the insights in the video!

[@Saurygiel]

Personally I like to see that example as a reason against perfectionism, which can slow development in anything a lot. Quantity like that can be important if you need more experience in the form of data to know where to focus your deliberate practice towards. Assuming you've identified expert skills like he talked about in this video this might not be as necessary since that in and of itself gives you data. If are new to the subject of photography and have zero context on how to do anything or what you need to get better at and how to improve on them, or even knowing what's important to be aware of at all, then of course the quantity can be helpful to map out your limitations and what variables are most relevant (imagine if you were trying to use a lidar scanner to map out an object with 500 dots instead of a few slightly larger ones). However I think that understanding expert information can also give you that data and better direction. Either way though, practice is practice, and it's better than nothing so there's nothing wrong with trying to feel your way through something when you need to.

[@munendrasharma8028]

But it is only for beginners. After a certain you have to change your approach where your weakest areas needs to be worked on

[@Heyu7her3]

I'm actually surprised by that because we tend to want to get that 1 thing "right" and will produce many to make that 1. We also don't know how many "duds" they produced.

[@PatternShift]

@@munendrasharma8028 nails it -- what a beginner needs is fluency and familiarity. Quantity wins out there. What an intermediate needs is to quit falling into comfortable patterns and to do things they can't yet do -- stretching to reach new objectives. That's where quality of practice really comes in. What an expert needs is even more extreme -- to be able to have new insight into the core components of their field of practice, so they can reconstruct those core components into something new.

[@HishighnessMrL]

I've reached expert level in two sports running and field hockey and I can say without a doubt that deliberate practice is important but only once you've reached the intermediate to advanced stage before that it's better to just go through the motions a million times and focus on the numbers and repetition simply because it's easier to reach a higher level this way than by doing deliberate practice which is more mentally tough and frustrating as you still won't see the results for months until your mind and body has developed to a point to being able to accomplish the skill you're practicing. It's also more fun to challenge yourself when you're at a higher level than when you're at a lower level and in fact I've found that doing hard things at the beginning was more prone to making me want to quit than pursuing the expert level in any field. Another thing to note is that progress in the beginning is almost exponential whereas the higher up you go in a discipline the more incremental and slow progress becomes and taking this into consideration a person who starts out as a beginner could catch up to any expert within say a 5 year period whereas in those same 5 years the expert could only improve by so much.

[@TheGamingDandy]

One thing experts consistently say in every single field is firstly to: Always master the basics. If you move on too quickly because your want to get to the "fun stuff" you're going to be standing on weak foundation. Without becoming an absolute master at the simple basics of whatever thing you're training in, you'll never actually become an expert. You'll only become pretty good. Which for some things is fine. I'm a pretty good swimmer. I'm a pretty good Halo player. But if you're truly passionate about something, don't ignore the basics. Build a strong foundation.

[@SoloRenegade]

"Perfect Practice makes Perfect"

[@Khyrid]

When I was in art school I remember my professor explaining how we often spend massive amounts of time practicing drawing wrong, making the same mistakes over and over when what we should have been doing is having an aspect of critique and refinement to these muscle memory habits.

[@Action.by.Action]

Sounds like my martial arts instructor. Spending years doing it wrong, then more years "unlearning" to get it right. Improvement takes time. But just going through the motions isn't going to get you there.

[@jlofi000]

As a college student taking physics I agree, I would love to have designed a lab to measure the acceleration of gravity rather than follow instructions after learning about it in lecture

[@Globiworld2000]

And also 90% of fields ( from building sites to medicine) once you are builder,doctor,etc to not discover anything but made things identical over and over and get paid for it- which loook like is not the case of “physist”- which look in his case as a scientist who is tasked to discover new things. perhaps approach with self discovering is in certain area correct - but do you as somebody to invent again how to make fire with two sticks or you teach them by example and ask to repeat?

[@kenroberts5768]

The takeaway I got from your video was the phrase “Learning is reorganizing your brain 🧠 ”. I’m recovering from a stroke, and it was nice to have that label for the reorganizing my brain has been doing. 🙏

[@Rafael_Oiticica]

Every time I see someone saying things like "I've spent 40 hours doing this work" (it can be a article that was written, or a work of art...), I remember this thing you said in the point 3. "Hours" doesn't mean anything if you aren't receiving quality feedback from yourself or from the tutor (expert). I loved the video, as many others from you! As a psychology that works in higher education, this video means a lot for me. Thanks! :D

[@MikeyAntonakakis]

Awesome advice! I played football in high school and specialized in punting. I was fortunate enough on a few occasions to get nearly one-on-one coaching by Ray Guy (arguable the best punter of all time, and an all-around exceptional athlete in multiple sports). More than any of the mechanics of punting a ball, his key focus was on learning how to coach yourself - how to build that feedback loop between your senses and your self-analysis (not easy to find a punting coach). He summarized it as "practice doesn't make perfect - perfect practice makes perfect." His point was that every good repetition during practice reinforced the skill, of course - but conversely, every poor repetition built bad habits, poor skill, etc., so the focus should be on both getting it right and as quickly as possible not getting it wrong! Punting a football seems like a pretty straightforward thing, but the details of the mechanics are fairly complicated and happen very quickly. A punter has 1.2-1.3 seconds from the time the ball hits their hands till it hits their foot if they don't want a blocked kick, and there are a several motions that have to take place simultaneously in that timespan. Those motions all have to happen with precise placement/movement (+/- a few millimeters) and precise timing to ensure a good kick - not to mention adapting to things like a bad snap, rain, wind, one of the linemen forgetting to block, etc. Practice usually involves focusing on one of those motions/timings for several repetitions, and due to the singular focus on one parameter it's really easy to let the others degrade during those repetitions, like herding cats in your own brain/body.

[@tomdebevoise]

Studied guitar for 30 years, and I got to a certain level of proficiency. I had some excellent teachers and we had a saying: practice makes permanent. Mastery comes from realizing what you are doing wrong and adjusting your practice. This is why some of the very best musicians still have teachers or coaches; they are able to discern tiny, subtle issues with their students playing.

[@tomlewis4748]

It was helpful. Keep doing it. There are other ways to look at this that might make more sense to me, even if not to anyone else. Malcolm Gladwell was assuming that his readers were savvy enough to realize without being told that quality is more important than quantity. It went without saying. And the thing is, if you are motivated to put in 10,000 hours, then you are likely to concentrate on quality and ignore quantity. That makes reducing it to a large number much more significant. If you are not motivated, then it might not be the case that you are concentrating on quality. So it's much more complicated than just the concept of quantity, OR the concept of quality. It also depends on not only how much there is to learn, but whether it is something that can be learned in the domain of the conscious mind, like carpentry, or something that is actually in the domain of the unconscious mind, like art. Learning to be a master carpenter is learning skill and technique and craft, and it's done primarily in the domain of the conscious mind. We learn what we think about directly, explicitly, about how to do it. It takes a long time to get good at it. There is some art involved, but not that much. 'Science education' very likely falls into a similar category, yet that is less about skill and technique and craft, and more about explicit conscious knowledge. Learning to write fiction well also takes a long time, but only maybe 40% of that is skill and technique and craft. Those things are learned explicitly, like carpentry, automotive mechanics, plumbing, HVAC, etc. But in art, the other 60% comes from implicit learning, and that is not something you can approach consciously and decide to learn 'these three things on Tuesday', for instance, bc it's not easy to just decide to wrap your conscious mind around something that is only in the domain of the unconscious mind. Of course we who write would love to be able to sit down and 'identify the expert skills'. We try to do that. That is one good approach to technique and craft. But the fact is many of the core things that make an artist a good artist are not something we can simply identify in our conscious mind, so we can't just know consciously what they are and write them down, consciously. The 'First Step', when learning art, is obvious, but it's in many ways not all that accessible. It's ineffable. So, 'good luck with that'. This is why art can;'t be taught. There is no language in the unconscious mind. Even a MFA in literature can't teach you the first thing about how to create art. It can only teach skill and technique and craft. Art must be self-taught. Since they can't teach that, their weak substitute for that is telling you to go read other authors, and maybe, just maybe, something will rub off by osmosis. IOW, the task of teaching becomes something the student needs to do for themselves. And it is based on what you refer to as 'feedback cycles'. Write, evaluate, revise. IOW, learning from trial and error. Make mistakes, fail, and learn from that how to move forward and succeed by not making mistakes. This is why in 'science education' you have lectures and labs. The lectures (hopefully) aid the accumulation of conscious knowledge. Labs do that, too, but they also allow implicit, unconscious learning. It's like the difference between someone instructing you how to ride a bike as opposed to getting on and riding it, which is how you actually learn (the riding part (unconscious) is what works, the instructing (conscious) is essentially ineffective). And of course 'labs' for an MFA in literature are useless, unless it's based on students actually doing the deliberate practice of writing, which is a solitary, internal pursuit, not suited for 'labs'. To learn art, it's quite often not about consciously trying to learn facts. That doesn't even work. It takes enough deliberate practice for it to just soak in naturally. And guess what-10,000 hours will certainly get you at least part of the way there if you are motivated to focus on the quality of your learning process. But for the most part it happens in the background, and not from trying to make sense of it consciously. I probably have over twice that amount of effort invested, virtually all of it focused on quality, and I still learn more every single day, every single time I put in the deliberate practice. I don't set out to learn this and that. What I learn is typically a surprise-something I wasn't even expecting. 'And when you get to 10,000 hours, what you realize is you have much more to learn than you ever would have dreamed. So you can't simply underthink the concept of 10,000 hours and consider it bogus, unless you are looking for ways to boost your ego comparatively with everyone else, which is a pretty stupid goal, and sadly, way too common. Any way you look at it, having the motivation to do the hard work and do it for that long and with an eye on quality is a good idea, meaning the concept of 10,000 hours holds a great deal of value for those willing to put those hours in, and maybe no value at all for those not willing, and for those who want to underthink it and are instead looking for shortcuts, which is typically the case. It can't be summed up in one word like 'nope'. Doing that implies underthinking it. But I agree-thinking of it as a number goal is not the best approach. Once you reach 10K hours you know the insignificance of the number, and hopefully, you realize this going in, bc it's not about the number. It's about the due diligence of doing the work. To get good at anything means to realize that there really are no shortcuts. You must put in the effort.

[@Hwkman4]

While on the outside it appears not overtly helpful you have absolutely nailed it. As a physician. The difference between a good physician and a mediocre one is almost down to algorithms. A good physician has built out algorithms to simply common difficult issues so that they can spend more time on parts that are yet to be placed in the algorithm. This allows for them to not only notice abnormal findings, but realize when a normal finding is contextually abnormal. An example. I saw a patient with a wound on their leg. Which is common. The nature of the wound was a pressure wound " bed sore" (contextually uncommon). I sent for a test for his arteries and a hemoglobin level. He had severe arterial disease only in 1 branch of an artery and was anemic. His primary Physician Assistant said oh the anemia is not too bad. But in context he already had poor flow to the area (low oxygen) and has low oxygen capacity. He was someone who needed a blood transfursion despite 99% of people with his lab values being ok.

[@Artful.Guitarist]

I'm really enjoying your lines of reasoning. The quantity vs quality argument reminds me of a Buddhist saying; "If only the length of time one sat in meditation was important, then chickens would be enlightened."

[@rickyp9803]

Yes, it's been quite helpful, and I even watched it twice. It helped me confirm that I'm already on the right track. I'm currently learning JavaScript through Udemy courses, and it made me realize that dedicating 10,000 hours to mastering the language may not be enough; it's likely to take about a year or a bit longer. Consulting with experts is essential, but it's equally important to ensure that they possess not only deep knowledge of the subject but also the ability to teach it effectively. One great advantage of these online courses is that you can always 24/7 reach out to the instructor for guidance and feedback. I'm fortunate to have found an excellent instructor who has made the learning process incredibly enjoyable. Thanks to his engaging teaching style, the hours of lectures and practice don't feel burdensome at all.

[@apharos]

let me try changing the physicist example into a software engineer: 1. converting written specification into "clean" code 2. able to learn and apply new technology / tools quickly 3. soft skills / interpersonal skills how might one practice these skills? 1. go into an open source project, and work on issues / feature requests 2. When you are starting a new project or have the freedom to choose new tools, avoid your comfort zone and reach for the "newer" toys and try make it work 3. work collaboratively on bigger projects that require frequent communication and where you have defined responsibilities and duties. Some bigger open-source projects would fit this requirement

[@LisaGelhaus]

Another important element of expert feedback is POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT. Find a mentor who not only points out your mistakes, but helps you see what you’re doing RIGHT. Practice them both. Deliberately. Iteration of good or bad emphasizes synaptic connection. Which means don’t repeat doing-things-wrong (that’s me: singing the wrong notes in the shower over and over again) or that’s what will come out in performance! This has been a useful realization for me on the mentoring end as a public speaking trainer and on the receiving end as a learning musician.

[@pat-enz]

Agree with everything. I studied and study about how to study, and the matter of studying itself is something like a lifelong process to me. Progressive evolutionary awareness through self-evaluation and understanding your leaning type with evolving stages of your development in your discipline.

[@hedaros17]

I have been following Ericsson's studies and I am very proficient at his theory. In regards to point one. There is nothing special about 10,000 hours as you mentioned it but not for the reasons you mentioned though, it IS about the quantity and quality of the practice, the amount of hours was taken from his first study in 1993 with violin students, he was introduced (without knowing yet) to deliberate practice, thus every violin student had access to deliberate solitary practice, and the difference was NOT in the quality of practice alone what set them appart but instead in the amount of solitary practice, the very best performers had approximately gathered a total of 10,000 hours at age 20, but they focused on the age 18 in the study, which was 7400 hours for the best performers, as mentioned in the study. So you must informed your purposeful practice (deliberate practice) (the quality) and later focus on the hours (the quantity) when wanting to improve at every field.

[@dsterry74]

This was a good video. This was a good reminder of what deliberate practice really is. A nice follow up would be how to identify the skills of experts so that you can begin formulating a plan for deliberate practice.

[@neilifill4819]

Helpful. I’m a learning professional and I can’t tell you how many times people say things about the 10,000 hour fallacy that they swear is true.

[@actuallyasriel]

As someone currently going through with learning new skills they've been sleeping on, it's often disheartening to stare down the barrel of putting in the hours. Nothing is worse to my brain than a grind. Reframing my practice in this way has made it much more enjoyable and edifying, such that the time simply disappears. That's kinda the whole point, really. Practicing in a way that gets your reward system going and encourages you to push forth such that you're not really thinking about it.

[@MIchaelSybi]

Learning in groups is always less effective than an individual tutor. But, at the beginning, group training is cheaper and fun, because your level anyway is 0, so getting foundations is good and cheap in a group. One must evaluate when a group training becomes ineffective in terms of time vs outcome. An individual tutor is more expensive, but way more effective once you are past the beginner stage I've witnessed numerous examples whnen people go to groups, but later discover years pass, and they are still behind those, who spent a similiar amount of time and years, but with a tutor. It's a different approach, and a different goal for teachers, so one should not be mistaken: groups are about fun and general knowledge, but never about becoming an expert or really good

[@Adam-ui3yn]

I really liked the physics lab example because it highlights the blaring disconnect between education and real world application. The analogy I like to use is being a framer to build a house. Education would be like mastering your ability to hammer in nails and hyperfocusing on joining wood together. When you get asked if you can frame a house you go "No, but if you tell me what wood we need, provide me with the nails, and tell me exactly where they need to go I'm really good at hammering them in" Essentially you hyper focused on a minute aspect of framing and you can't do much except follow instructions. You don't know how to source your wood, how to acquire contracts, how to efficiently frame multiple houses at once, how to seamlessly integrate your scheduling with the other trades, or how to lay the foundation you need to start. It becomes painfully clear how unprepared you are to frame a house by yourself. I'm certain you could learn more in 1 year with a framing production manager than you would 2 years in school. Most of the information of which is not relevant to you anyways.

[@tonbonthemon]

I had been practicing Tai Chi for about 7 years and wasn't really getting any where, even though I had teachers with fairly decent skill. I was often craving feedback and clarity on methods, and I wasn't quite getting it. Over 7 years my skills had barely improved. Then I found a slightly different lineage known for its clearer instruction, and I began taking private lessons as opposed to weekend public group classes, and occasionally a "public" class where personal feedback was pretty much a standard feature. It's only been a year but I think my tai chi has improved immensely because of this change, which facillitated better SOLO practice. Every time I practice on my own, I do aim for around an hour or so, however that's more of a way to avoid going easy with superficial practice sessions, and my sessions naturally end up being that long because I know what things I need to work on based on what my teachers have told me, I know where I want to get to, and I know HOW to do that based on the instruction I receive. I also have models to look up to; I hear about how other accomplished practitioners structured their practice, etc. I know a number of different ways to approach a session based on what I think is necessary.

[@Zupecki27]

My term for this has always been ‘practice with purpose’, but I also like ‘deliberate practice’… it has huge benefits over just sheer brute force repetition!

[@JeppeBeier]

When I went to university, lab work wasn't just about getting something we already knew. It was mostly project oriented work where we were given a goal and some tools. How we got to the goal and which tools we used to get there was up to us. We had to experiment, iterate, try, fail, find new solutions and so on.

[@57thorns]

In computer science, the important part was the prep work the night before the lab. That was when we designed the micro code for the controller. In the lab, we transcribed the code from paper to machine, and ran it to see if it did what it was supposed to do. Luckily it mostly did, and we could go home early.

[@alant779]

The 10000 hrs idea is a great motivational tool for me. If I suck at something, I am reminded I haven't actually practiced that much at it. Or if I feel like I'm really good at something, I am reminded I can be even better if I put in even more time into it. But taking it as dogma? That's the opposite of learning.

[@agesileus]

Excellent video. My definition of deliberate practice is working on weaknesses with complete concentration and expert feedback with repetition until mastery. It’s very difficult to do this without a coach because the learner doesn’t have the mental model to give themselves quality feedback or to know what they need to improve. Very few people have ever really done much deliberate practice. I can only do about 2-4 hours per day myself. I think Erickson found a similar range in his research.

[@GeniusUnleashed]

Makes sense. A kid who practices an instrument or 10,000 will never be as good as a kid that practices with a coach for 10,000 hours. In acting we have to drive home to actors that they can't see or hear themselves when on stage. That's why it's so imperative to have a director and a vocal coach.

[@lshwadchuck5643]

So true! I'm an elderly piano beginner with a world class coach. He has concluded that the reason I have the patience to practise determinedly to achieve foundational musical fluency is my lifetime of professional drawing. Professionalism is the operative quality. I'm less than four years in and have no illusions about when I will arrive. The better I get, the higher the bar moves.

[@paulmarshall9189]

My experience with developing high proficiency at physical skills is that the understanding of where the key issues are develops as proficiency progresses. In the beginning, you may be focused primarily on an overall performance outcome, because you don't have enough understanding to focus in more detail. But as you progress, it becomes increasingly clear where to put your focus, and that the outcome is collateral to adherence to effective process. So in the early stages your practice may be a lot like just putting in time. And quality of practice overtakes quantity as you learn what quality actually is.

[@davidchilds9590]

In my experience, there are two aspects to learning: knowing facts and following a process/procedure/technique faultlessly. Remembering facts requires repetition; some need more practice than others. Technique is similart. You learn stuff; you move on and learn more/different/more difficult stuff; repeat. The difference is that facts are facts, they can be defined and don't change. Learning to play the piano, or to lay bricks, is different. To progress in learning the piano (or in laying bricks, or design of experiments), I have to first practice the basics. I need to develop the 'muscle memory' to do the simple things consistently right, so that I have a solid foundation when I move onto the next stage. Repetition builds facility. It also provides experience. But it needs to be the right sort of practice. People who do self-guided physical development can easily waste time and effort running miles of lifting weights that do more to damage their body than improve their fitness. The key (as you say) is doing the right sort of practice for our present stage of development (which is why undergrad scientists and engineers do simplistic labs!).

[@larrysankey6976]

This video is helpful because when it's spelled out the way you did, it makes perfect sense and you completely understand why 10000 hours doesn't really work for explaining becoming an expert. The explanation you gave doesn't seem abstract at all. It seems concrete and practical.

[@crafteariee]

Oh woah, thank you for this video! I've been reflecting on some insights that I've taken note from all sorts of professionals from different fields I respect who have put these principles, especially quality skills identification, proper feedback cycles and practice into their own craft that reaffirms the value of deliberate practice with both their careers and other aspects of life. It's given me a greater sense of respect for the hard work and thoughtful attention they put into at their own time that I hope to continue to learn from too.

[@lauritzdavidjr3454]

Very good video. It helped me to learn and understand a lot of the key concepts when it comes to learning and I'm getting new skills so I can be more effective and productive. Perhaps a follow-up video that goes into detail of specific techniques and effective practices for the learning cycle would be a good addition to this series.

[@jimmyvo1667]

i just discovered your channel recently and love your videos. I'm always trying to improve my study strategies and your videos definitely confirmed a lot of my experience.

[@jzero4813]

2:27 - It ALSO depends on the individual. Some people learn incredibly quickly. Others learn incredibly slowly. The great irony is that learning is also a skill that is improved with deliberate practice, so people who have spent more time practising how to learn and how to teach themselves will be naturally much faster at learning anything new than people who have not. The method you're proposing is suitable really only for people who require guidance and assistance to learn new things. Autodidacts are perfectly capable of learning and becoming experts in new skills without requiring an expert for feedback. In some ways, the method you propose can lock people into learned helplessness - NEEDING an expert to validate their efforts. The end goal should always be to be able to learn a new skill without requiring an expert. Only then can a learner be considered truly independent.

[@MikeDial]

This is an insightful video. In my career as an intelligence analyst, it was indeed helpful to learn foreign languages and analytic techniques. Becoming an analyst, however, involved learning how to ask the best questions and figuring out the best way to answer them. I had to learn it mostly on my own and I discovered that many are not interested in learning how to do it. Now that I'm retired and trying to become a better musician, I find that, while I am practicing, I'm probably not asking he right questions.

[@thegzak]

I do also think skills develop asymptotically for people, ie diminishing returns after a certain point, and what makes everyone unique is the shape of the curve - some people are just natural, others have to work really hard. It’s therefore important to be efficient with time and set realistic goals.

[@user-jn4sw3iw4h]

3:15 (my shot from memory) - identify a decent means of feedback (primary, to spot which areas need work. secondary to map improvement) - identify barriers from the practice, get rid of those. Referring both to 'doing the thing' and to 'measuring/improving the thing (mentioned above)' - commit 'a reasonable amount of time' (the 'it's not the 10.000 hours, it's the 20 hours'), to overcome the initial 'Well, I've figured out enough to know I really suck at this, why bother improving' initial hurdle The one thing for which 'focus on time' is really relevant is initial filtering: 'It takes roughly 10.000 hours to become a world-championship competitor in a highly competitive field.' -> 'Are you willing to make it a 5 year long full time job, to get a seat at that Fide world cup table?' -> if no find something else to do (or switch the goal to casual, same question, but for 20 hours), if yes: good now throw out 'the 10.000 hours crap' and identify some meaningful skills and metrics.

[@PaperTigerProductions]

That first step of identifying the expert skill/s is SO important - would love to see you do a whole video in that vein. There's so much wrong with the current education system which keeps on churning out graduates that aren't really equipped for success. Also, that example you gave about physics is the literal reason why I decided I was NOT going to pursue a career in science. I remember spending two weeks at an international science camp with about 100 other bright minds all psyched up about learning cool science. One of the session activities we were herded into was trying to get us to reconstruct the experiments that were done to prove the Earth is round (though they were a little smarter than that and set the whole case study on an Earth like planet). All 30 of us in that workshop twigged about two minutes in after reading the first couple of clues and my group dutifully completed the tasks, feeling kinda patronized. Despite the threat of a class presentation at the end, one group spent the entire workshop constructing ridiculous superstitious theories to justify how the "evidence" we gathered proved the existence of a perfectly flat plane created by God and that the day/night cycle was due to the eternal Fast and Furious celestial chariot race between God and Anti-God. Needless to say, that particular presentation was the absolute highlight of the workshop.

[@benjaminkeep]

Haha - sounds like at least it was entertaining! Yeah, maybe you could tell from the video, but the mismatch between what science and math students do vs what scientists and mathematicians do is something that really bugs me. And, I think, results in cases like yours: people turning away from the disciplines (or believing that they "just aren't a math person"). I was involved in some research in this area and was really shocked at how much good small tweaks to science labs can do: how much more sense-making and argument and creativity more realistic labs can generate. I also think it's creates widespread misperceptions about how science works which contribute to science illiteracy. Anyhow. I'll put a video on identifying the expert practice in the docket. Mostly need to figure out a title and thumbnail. : )

[@amandamate9117]

Actionable Summary: 1.Disregard the 10,000-Hour Rule: It's a misleading metric. Focus on the quality of your practice instead. 2.Identify Expert Skills: Before diving into practice, take time to identify the skills that differentiate experts from novices in your field. 3.Engage in Practice-Feedback Cycles: Find a way to practice that challenges you and seek expert feedback. Use this cycle to continually refine your skills. BONUS: Practice-Feedback Cycle: Challenging Practice → Expert Feedback → Further Practice → Opportunities → Repeat

[@cryora]

My experience in graduate school is that physics is less about physics as much as it is about dealing with your advisor's personal quirks and really the quirks of everyone you rely on so that they can help you graduate. Physicists are also known to be the most difficult people to work with. My advisor and this machinist one time were trying to one up one another about who is more difficult to work with, physicists or machinists, as though they were proud of it. It's not necessary the case everywhere, but the university I attended, most of the staff have this sort of ego that they would accept no less than bootlicking in order for them to be willing to offer you their help. It ended up getting to the point where the only reason anyone would help me was because I was associated with and in a way asking on behalf of my advisor, who was the program director.

[@the_dancing_carnivore]

One of the most important parts of deliberate practise is to continually focusing on upgrading the quality of your attention to detail and avoiding those times when you just zone out and repeat "mistakes". There's a lot of crossover to mindfulness here.

[@ShahZ]

Had to listen twice because my brain wasn't deliberately listening, so making it do deliberate practice is unimaginable. But good effort Ben in explaining the myth surrounding 10k hours.

[@FeralMina]

I would love to see you make a video about how these principles could most effectively be applied in second language acquisition, specifically. In any case, thanks for making such high-quality, instructive content!

[@bogdiworksV2]

Identify why you want to learn the language - day to day convo, school or university studies, understanding films, media, going on holiday. Learn the vocab that applies. Read papers etc to improve your vocab. Rely on similar languages you already know. Try to find native speakers and talk and listen to them for practice. Listening is just as important as speaking, because you need to familiarise your ear with how that language sounds as spoken by natives. Learn writing last, unless you need it for school or uni. No matter what anyone tells you, it takes time to get fluent.

[@FeralMina]

@@bogdiworksV2 For myself, I choose a different path. I believe in delayed language output, which means I believe in getting hundreds of hours (or even thousands, depending on how different that language is from our other language(s)) of input (preferably audio input) before even attempting to output. To my mind, one should try to develop a crystal-clear perception of what success actually looks like before attempting to achieve it. If we don’t know exactly what we’re aiming for, or can’t yet accurately perceive what we’re aiming for, how can we ever hope to achieve it, after all? In language learning, it can take thousands of hours of input to be able to develop the ability to even accurately perceive the phonemes, tones, and prosody much less the syntax, grammar constructions, and so forth. Frustratingly, we certainly think we’re perceiving things like phonemes and tones 100% accurately (because thanks, Dunning-Krueger Effect!). But we can’t possibly have an accurate perception of anything that we’re hearing that doesn’t exist in the same form in our native language(s), at least not for quite a long while. We can’t know what we don’t know! Our brains were long ago optimized to out native language(s) and now filter out sounds, tones, constructions, etc. that are unfamiliar to us. So it takes us hundreds or even thousands of hours of input before we can break down that automatic filter in order to even perceive things accurately, much less acquire them, much less be able to output them with any accuracy. I think about the well-known phenomenon of native Japanese speakers who are learning English being unable to differentiate between /l/ and /r/ sounds. It takes thousands of hours of input and conscious effort for them to be able to accurately perceive and distinguish those sounds, and even more training to accurately produce those sounds. And people who attempt outputing those sounds before they can accurately perceive them find that their inability to perceive them results in an inability to produce them, and then regularity outputting them fossilizes their production at that level. As such, they typically never develop the ability to perceive or produce those sounds. But since they can’t accurately perceive the sounds in the first place, they probably end up thinking they sound just fine when they talk, even though people who are native English speakers might think they have a thick accent. I can see this play out in my own language learning journey. At every stage, I would have sworn I was able to accurately perceive the phonemes and tones of language, but nope! And I only realize that inability in hindsight. Damn Dunning-Krueger! 😅 So I wait. Until I’ve developed a crystal-clear perception of what success actually is, and have fully acquired that crustal-clear perception, I do not attempt output. After all, if my concept of success is flawed and/or incomplete, then my attempts at replicating it will inevitably be flawed. I believe that’s how people end up with thick accents and fossilized grammar mistakes, they start outputting while their concept of success is not yet fully accurate. So yeah, just my two cents on my own language journey. But I’d like to hear from a learning scientist what the current science has to say about it.

[@jkucharewicz]

@@bogdiworksV2are you French?

[@rephaelreyes8552]

Hi Benjamin! I just want you to know that you have a great underrated channel.

[@benjaminkeep]

Thanks!

[@boringlyfactual6368]

Not too abstract, nor was it trivial. Excellent. Clear message well expressed.

[@frousteleous1285]

My dad used to say "Practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect." In effect: if you practice something incorrectly for a long time, you are just as likely to ingrain into yourself the incorrect way of doing things. This is not to say that failure is not acceptable, but the repetition of getting something correct better ensures your mastery of getting things correct, not the simple doing of the thing by itself.

[@mconio]

Abstract is good, altho I wouldn't say this is all that abstract - I'd have been curious to hear more of your thoughts about the mindset it takes to stay in what you call "challenging practice". I find a lot of times (e.g. when learning music) it's easy for me to "practice" what I already know and difficult and "unnatural" to push into the discomfort of learning something new, even if it's adjacent to what I already know, so I get stuck in polishing a beginner concept rather than advancing. Studying math in school, the opposite sometimes happened to me - I'd skip homework, study the night before to do well on a test and move on to more advanced topics (or classes) and then need to go back to get a deeper understanding of the parts I had hurried through before. How can one learn to make more "natural" the pushing against that boundary to keep practicing new things but not so fast that you miss the deep understanding of the parts that you've previously practiced. For example, is spaced repetition a as helpful in domains outside of learning languages or more advanced skills like those that make a good physicist? Also, have you ever deliberately practiced Nathan Fillion impersonation?

[@mathewkloepfer664]

I believe the trick is to slowly add complexity to an existing skill. If you're learning music and pick a piece with all brand-new concepts (inverted chords, key changes, octaves, arpeggios, or even just forte) then it's going to be overwhelming. But if you find a piece that introduces just one of these concepts and is not present all throughout then it's a great introduction to the challenge. You'll feel comfortable with most of your existing skill and will focus on a single area to improve as that's all there is in that piece. It's easier to take the 10th step when you're already done with the first 9.

[@LordAus123]

The video was helpful because it reinforced my understanding that practice is not about time but about iterations of trying, failing, and noticing new things to try again differently. It also has opened my mind to the fact that what makes an expert expert is not necessarily obvious and I need to actually study and observe and think about what makes experts expert.

[@aljonserna5598]

It's true, I did practiced sword martial arts alone for quite some time and I learned a lot but still noticed I'm lacking something and it's the quality of practice, especially from a teacher and groups. EDIT: This video is helpful since not all of these are easily obvious, especially another comparison would be lifting weights on your own for a long time vs. being taught by a gym/instructors or from military--this is the same premise why reading books written by experts or people who really experienced things out are very important but still having a physical mentor and constant feedback is what will make you learn drastically.

[@robertjones1730]

I learned to play Banjo in one year and played in a local band after. My method of learning so fast was akin to learning to swim by jumping in the deep end. I picked the hardest songs and tried to learn to play them without looking down at the strings at all, forcing myself to not only learn it, but to learn the FEEL of it, where the notes were for both hands. It was slow at first but linking the sense of touch with sound proved stronger than sight with sound, after all, I'm training motor skills

[@WillN2Go1]

As a teacher what always struck me is what I had no clue about when I was in college. How to break down whatever it is you are trying to learn into its components. Learning a component teaches us how to learn better, but also how to break everything into components. The most critical aspect of a successful learning method is the positive feedback loop. Once started it builds and builds. Yet in education I see adults insisting on inadequate and incompetent methodology and students insisting on doing as little as possible. And both being angry and generally hostile to anyone who is succeeding. "Nerd!" Warning shaggy dog story to follow. I just saw a video on sailors, better than me, trying to tie the bowline knot with their eyes closed. They were struggling. This is a small thing, but it is one key component of being a competent, safe, sailor. So I think the first step of 10,000 hours is how to learn. Dunning Kruger, which is just used to beat up on people actually tells us that when we start we can never see the full picture. (I've written things that auto read back to me sound just like an audio book, but six months later I cringe, now able to see what it lacks. I learn a couple of things. First, some of the audiobooks I've listened to and enjoyed are not very well written. That's okay. But second, that when I thought that was 'good' I was unable to see its inadequacies, that I now can see; but also I'm probably still inadequate in ways I'm not yet able to see. The only solution is relax and accept, or plow ahead.) Me as a rookie sailor? I practiced the bowline and searched for the best sources of knot tying steps. (Animated Knots). I found a KZbin video where a sailor showed how to quickly 'set up' the bowline, run the bitter end through and then 'roll it' into the bowline. This made me look for or come up with a similar methods to apply for other knots. One thing I noticed about myself (and many other sailors) is that I wasn't consistent tying fender lines to the cable life line, and my cleat hitch was also inconsistent, and so not dependable. This is the second part. The first is: what's the best way to learn this component? The second is identifying my mistakes. I hadn't deliberately practiced these two hitches because they each needed something to tie to and that wasn't handy in my house. More importantly, after three months of daily sailing, because I was still inconsistent at the two hitches, I realized that just repeatedly doing something wasn't necessarily learning it. So I got a cleat, screwed it to a board practiced it at home. A matter of days, full competency. Now imagine me after ten thousand hours doing this and someone just 'doing it' for ten thousand hours. Imagine 500 hours. First of all, unless I do go after the America's Cup, I'll be a very highly competent sailor in less than 10,000 hours. People think I'm either a nerd, a snob, good at everything, a complete hopeless joke. Epictetus said "You can continue to improve so long as you get used to being thought foolish and stupid." So I learned early in life to break it down, learn the components, look for the mistakes, figure out the steps. And I've done at a professional level many different things. "Oh she's just smart." That works until you are about 11 years old, after that it is all deliberate practice and how good at it you are. Any person who's aced a standardized test has noticed, there are a lot of highly skilled experts who are only good at one thing. Usually they have little or no insight outside this single domain. That's valuable information. No one ever said, "Mozart? Music sure, but he knew nothing about carpentry or bookkeeping." Physics? Teaching it to secondary students doesn't take a lot of expertise. It should however require a lot of competence. And it's fun when you can look at any aspect closer. For instance. Shooting video in order to time the dropping of an object revealed something interesting to me. In the first couple of frames it was often impossible to tell when the object started dropping. Maybe gravity doesn't matter in the first .05 seconds? Also coming to physics after working with a lot of carpenters I realized all those guys were really great mechanical physicists. I imagined college professors hanging out with carpenters. I think both groups would have a lot of fun. Back to sailing, all of this from both sides of course applies. One guy on a boat insisted that if you clip in to that flat line and then slide four feet mostly horizontally you'll have so much momentum the safety webbing will snap. He not only didn't get it, he refused when I offered to show him the numbers. I watched the MIT physics course on YTube, "Gyroscopic precession is perhaps the most difficult concept in physics. More so than Quantum Mechanics." I still don't get QM, but I figured out the gyroscope, using the breakdown method. And its other component: sheer bloody mindedness. Never giving up. Then in Japan watching a karate demonstration I noticed someone at the end of a move starting to fall forward, fanning his arms and sticking out a foot...planting it a little to his left and standing upright. That was gyroscopic precession. Which I think underscores your point about 10,000 hours. It's not that you still won't become Yo Yo Ma, but that if you just learn and apply the first part you will be better at everything you do, you will be able to do more and you'll have a lot more fun. The video? Good. I think the underlying problem with KZbin is the effort required to make a quality video will almost never generate enough gain to make it worth doing. The way I would approach this is: Get the first version done, whether that's a script or just working from notes and recording. Then take it apart. Do it again. Repeat. What are the examples of amazing videos that are your examples? (back to knots. 90% of the knot tying videos are utterly worthless.) Too many KZbin videos just copy other videos. If you copy Mark Rober, realizing "I'm not as charming as Mark Rober:" but this should be really interesting. Go for it. Path to success. They revert to talking heads, clips, bad royalty free music. (Music is hard. Hollywood had to hire world class composers to get competent music. American films are mostly acted in by amateurs. That's how difficult it is to get music right.) What I've noticed is that if the first one takes three hundred hours, then the next one will only take 100, then 50 then 50 again and you'll never make any money at KZbin. The really successful automobile, the Model T, took hundreds of cars around the world, thousands of people, millions of dollars, and then about an hour on the assembly line each for 20 million. You mentioned feed back loop. Good but overly general. This is worthy of a video. It's a positive feedback loop where the phenomenal power of feedback works. I once rented a huge RV in narrow road Scotland and started slamming the side mirror into things. All while freaking out my son in the passenger seat. I gave up, so he had to drive. Yep, sitting in the passenger seat was frightening. But I thought, why not apply good teacher practice. I could see the line on the side of the road in the mirror, so I decided that I was only going to give him positive feedback. When he was a few inches from that line I was going to say, "That's good." Within 45 minutes it was like he was on rails. Later in France we rented a car that had been in an accident, pulled hard to the right. I wanted to drive and rubberneck Mont San Michel. So he applied the same method. Worked brilliantly. Works on everybody, dogs, crows, probably even cats. Would work on teachers and middle schoolers if they'd let it. Sorry to go on so much. Maybe video on procrastination.....

[@hulkmahmut]

It was helpful. Like you said, I couldn't figure out the first step, and I think the first step is the most important one. Identifying the experts' practice is the key, I guess.

[@philippwaag2173]

bro this video was really really good. no superficial no sense but deep and simple and powerful.

[@fuzexi]

When I was young I wanted to be a musician, I took up the piano and the cello and practiced and practiced, I made a lot of progress in the holidays when there was no teacher around but as soon as I had a teacher whenever they listened to me play I would mess up. So I practiced more and the same thing happened. In the end I was practicing maybe 6 hours a day and didn’t move off the same pieces. I tried taping the pieces so I could show her, but whenever I pressed record the same thing would happen. In retrospect I think I put so much pressure on myself to succeed that it got in the way of the actual playing. After about a year of this going on I quit and started doing art, which I was much better at. I still remember the moment I decided to take up art instead; I was waiting for a tram on my way back from the music school in Potsdam, Germany. It felt like a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. So as regards this video it’s definitely not the hours, and there is an ‘inner game’ that needs to be addressed as well. Someone wrote a book about “The Inner Game of Tennis” which seems to be relevant here.

[@rolandfisher]

I haven't done an exhaustive search, but I've been exposed to dozens of university's teaching curricula, and I have yet to see one that teaches what the professional does.

[@thelovacluka]

It goes the same for playing an instrument, playing sports or learning at the speech therapists. The smarter you use the time, the better and faster you will learn. The more knowledge you have about what exactly you must do, practice, in what kind of intervals, which movements, how to make variations of the movements , the faster you will make the brain and muscles, the nervous system adapt and basically learn.

[@shimadabr]

There is a book that reiterates many times about this point you're making: In the process of learning, you have to struggle (the name of the book is "Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning"). If the students already know the right answer or have a pretty straightforward "template" to reach the answer, they will not learn. They need to struggle and think about the answer. The teacher needs to give the bare minimum necessary for them to reach the answer. Because as they think and experiment hypothesis they will solidify the process and the knowledge they are trying to retrieve. At the end they will better retain what they learn. Of course that's easier said than done. They need to have some base to operate (previous knowledge) or they will operate on the dark. Also, if the institution is too grade-focused, the fact they have something to lose if they make mistakes will be a frustrating experience and create the inverse effect of making them averse to learning.

[@tangobayus]

For guitar pieces, I find the hard parts and practice them multiple times slowly- getting the muscle memory into place. This helps me avoid practicing my mistakes.

[@DudeWatIsThis]

My way to practice: 1. Get a metronome and start practicing the song/piece at a half tempo, focusing especially on the harder parts (doing them 4-5 times each). 2. Increase the metronome speed by 10. Repeat step 1. 3. If I reach a tempo at which there are imperfections, go back to previous tempo again, and stay there for the rest of the day's practice. Tomorrow it will improve. 4. Realize that music is a pointless waste of one's time, that you'll never be a rockstar, and that you'll be constantly struggling financially while teaching idiotic kids and playing in shitty local acts as a mercenary. So you thank God for having a plan B with that software engineering degree you spent 10 years on. Start over, and live a decent life working at an office and playing at small clubs for free once every 2-3 months. Phew, close call!

[@bruce-le-smith]

i've found that seeking expert feedback that challenges me is very essential. glad you raised that point. a critical review process by trusted and kind peers and mentors is essential. i suspect violinists get so much unsolicited feedback, in addition to solicited expert feedback, that they forget it's even happening. everyone hears a wrong note on a violin!

[@scientious]

Imagine if: A surgeon required 10,000 hours of practice before they could operate. An airline pilot required 10,000 hours of flight training before they could fly. An author required 10,000 hours of practice writing before they could write a book. A student required 10,000 hours of classes and study to get a Bachelors degree + 10,000 more for a PhD. A parent required 10,000 hours of childcare studies before they could take care of a baby. A couple required 10,000 hours of dating before they could get married.

[@eeengineer8851]

When I was in engineering college, the key to retain memory of numerous math and engineering formulas for exams was to write down everything I may need to recall at a moments notice on a sheet of paper. Then, write it down again on another blank sheet. Repeat perhaps dozens of times until I could have muscle memory able to do it w/o looking at the master list. Would perhaps be like a musician able to play a piece w/o sheet music. When sitting for the exam, when I got the papers, I would immediately flip them over and write out all the memorized material on the back before even looking at the exam. It was then easy to flip over and find the relevant material for use on the problems and not panic for trying to recall it in the stress at the moment.

[@ram_sankar]

Feedback is an incredibly effective things while learning and I suggest you try it. When I Was I was trying to speak english, I was magically speaking english in just 2-3 days. What I did differently was that 1)Recorded my audio in another phone during each talk session with strangers 2)Heard what my sound was like 3)wrote down the good things on permenant column and bad things on 'change in the next few sessions'. 4)Attempt the next call with these few points in mind to see how well I repeat my good things and how I prevented my bad things I was doing this 10 hours a day for that week. Many people was surprised to hear that I was only in for a week, but they don't see my audio recorder, pen and paper.

[@mila9162]

While it would be for a very niche audience, I’d love a video on rhythm games and how deliberate practice allows players to develop skills us mere mortals can never begin to comprehend. This is especially seen in a game called osu. The premise is simple - the user clicks circles to the rhythm of a song. However, through feedback on their timing, players eventually improve until they can hit insane patterns. There are very straightforward measurements for improvement (such as difficulty and “performance points”), so it could be fascinating to research.

[@benjaminkeep]

Interesting - thanks for suggesting. I have never heard of Osu. I'll check it out!

[@UdochiOkeke]

I understood your point in this video. It was clear. And I intend to try to identify the expert skills to focus my intentional practice on in my areas of intended mastery. Thank you for the insight.

[@bazil9060]

Answering your final question, sir: this video really was helpful for me. Though it wasn't a ready 1-2-3 "to-do" list, it did make me meditate and reconsider some of my attitudes for work and learning. And that was even more valuable! Thanks for that! 🙂

[@PaulStadig]

I hear what you're saying and it makes sense and is backed by research. I've also heard "quantity leads to quality" and it makes sense and is backed by research (I think? or a least lots of experience reports which I guess aren't the best verification). I've seen several people reference the book Art & Fear and the example of the ceramics class where two groups were told to either produce a lot of work or produce one work, and the group that produced a lot of work also produced the best work. (There are other examples, but they would stretch the limits of a KZbin comment.) I'm not sure how to resolve these two, I have a couple of guesses, but would be interested in your perspective, Benjamin. My thoughts are: 1. Skill progression isn't linear. Going from novice to good can happen quickly by cranking up the quantity, but going from good to expert is a quality game. 2. Some skills (creative skills like music and art) are better approached with quantity, especially because there is fear and a psychological game. 3. It's not really about quantity, but about shortening the feedback loop. If the feedback loop is a few hours you can learn something a lot faster than a feedback loop of days or weeks.

[@ostensibly531]

I found 2 out of 9 minutes of this video helpful. I would've preferred for "quality practice" to be explained systematically. It's just my personal preference. Thanks for making it anyways.

[@AIVERSE694]

Me too!

[@ZimZam131]

2 out of 9 is better than most videos

[@MePeterNicholls]

I *think* it means self critical feedback loop, reflective and adjusting. Being totally aware of what you’re doing, not just doing it as it your going through the motion.

[@Yupppi]

It took like 30 years for me to learn how to REALLY learn. And how to do the school work. I was good at school and math and such, but it took me long until I became really effective at processing the information I was looking at. And became good at finding the information. And to begin with: to even come up with things I wanted to know and how to seek for that material. Now for the first time I'm getting school work done way before deadlines, enjoying the stuff and doing hobby projects with that information and getting ideas. I feel like that indeed took time. Not time in the sense of endlessly repeating practice, but time to be leisure and let the thougths work things out, to become interested and have the freedom to critically think what I'm doing and why - to understand what I'm supposed to learn, what kind of lesson does the material give me, instead of just learning what's in front of me. And somehow I also became more effective at figuring out answers when I felt like I had no idea where to even start. I couldn't explain how it happened. Similarly I learned to practice an instrument better and had some of the very productive times fixing decades of mistakes and progressing when I was playing very little, but might've thought about playing multiple times a day, even thinking about how fingers would go on a song I was listening to. And sleeping a lot. Now it feels like I reach things that feel like impossible initially, much faster than anticipated, sometimes even during the same day.

[@bryanhaycock672]

Very little discussion of aptitude and/or talent. In the end, the people we see doing things well enough to be shown to the public, have a talent for that thing that others don’t. This is not said to discourage, only to manage expectations.

[@feistyburrito1]

This video has some insightful tips. I’ll go and implement this for my Korean/Japanese language study. I’m planning to go to Korea and Japan in 5 months. I’ll come back and update after my trip in May 2024. Wish me luck 🍀

[@bryanstrom812]

Spot on. This should help some people know they should dismiss certain "innocent" myths, that lead to unrealistic goals. For example, if somebody really struggles with math, and you tell them that there's 10,000 more hours of struggle ahead.... ! Thanks for explaining the near complete fallacy of the 10,000 hour rule (and more!)

[@AssasinZorro]

This video might be abstract, but I feel like you've made your point clearly. What I carried away from this video is that the key idea of 10000 hours of deliberate practice has a focal point in "deliberate practice" and that this deliberate practice consists of 1. Identifying expert skills; 2. Finding activities that both develop the expert skills and have the shortest feedback loop; 3. Engaging in the activities while focusing heavily on the quality instead of quantity

[@edwardroneill]

I like the way this is more about the teacher's POV, and the other video addresses the solitary learner. (I'm thinking there's a lot of those on KZbin!)

[@benjaminkeep]

Thanks - there are indeed!

[@clintonrice525]

I largely agree with the premise, that practice-feedback cycles are the key, but find that there are a few permutations even to that concise statement: - feedback can be external (from a coach) or internal (introspection about what new questions emerge from the findings) - I agree that rote lab work is not going to turn anyone into an expert physicist, but if done deliberately, it could turn someone into an expert lab worker, which could facilitate becoming an expert physicist. I remember one of my first labs in high school, where I performed the steps of an experiment and calculated a pulley system operating in excess of 100% efficiency; clearly that wasn’t the right answer, but I got my grade, we moved on and I never really got the chance to figure out what I did wrong. In that situation it wasn’t a huge issue, but had I truly been researching unknown phenomena, my own lack of trust in my lab techniques would have been a significant impediment to overcome. - personal aptitude must also be considered; I am really good with logical transformation of mathematical expressions, and can study scenario analysis to figure out when to invoke a particular technique, but have to practice over and over to instill muscle memory, so I can get really strong at science or even playing the violin by executing the right practice regimen, but there will likely be an upper limit for my potential in two-sided sports where I have to react in real time to someone else’s choices.

[@the_furf_of_july4652]

I enjoyed this video a lot. Even without any goal I’m working towards it makes me feel a lot better about what I used to perceive as failures.

[@LioKaufman]

The video was very useful in terms of information it provided. However, also lots that could be improved. 1. It felt like there was a lot of repetitions, i.e.: The same terms being used, rather than finding different ways of expressing the same idea. 2. It also came across as confused, or trying to find the words to express the idea. This gave the impression that the video was longer than it needed to be and that it lacked structure or forethought. 3. Regarding examples: People tend to bring one example - that's ok - but 2 or 3 are better, because we need that data for the extrapolation of the principle. Generally, some points that might be useful: If you have a lot of data or a complex idea that you are trying to express, you can imagine explaining this idea if you had all the time in the world, covering every single aspect of the topic, then identify and distil into a summary of only the information your audience *needs* to know in order to understand what you are trying to express in the time you have available. Your time subconsciously acts as an identifier of priority and importance. Spend more time on something, and people will think it has more value, even if that is only stumbling over your own words. So any additional information detracts from the main point and can confuse the issue. Maybe write out in advance what you want to say, to help you focus on the concept. Anyway, thanks for the video and your work. I hope any of these tips helped. The video is over 2 years old, so i have no idea how much further you have come since then. Best of luck.

[@TheSalMaris]

Not at all too abstract. And Helpful in the sense of focusing on possible end product or goal. This is useful in any field of endeavor. I've always viewed that 10,000 hour "rule" with skepticism. Thank you for this.

[@geebs76]

As someone considered an expert in a few fields, I found the biggest difference was successful engineers and scientists paid attention to everything they did and always wanted to know why. In other words, they really cared about what they were learning and doing. They were constantly noticing how a subject applied to physical things instead of merely trying to learn the subject. Keep this in the forefront of your mind during your deliberate practice and it will be more effective. Ask why did that taste better, work better, or sound better.

[@mr.pavone9719]

My drill sergeant said it best: "Practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect Practice makes perfect." Lazarus Long from Heinlein's Time Enough For Love also said something to the same effect. In regards to his preference to training men with no experience vs those with a lot of experience. He said "The good thing about the men with no experience is they haven't practiced their mistakes."

[@assimilater-quicktips]

My orchestra director used to say: practice does not make perfect, *perfect* practice makes perfect

[@trualchemi]

Great point made that the TYPE of practice is more important than the length of TIME invested.

[@MusicLoverGurl]

This was a helpful video, but mostly because I was thinking about fields where I'm learning or want to learn stuff. I majored in Japanese Language and Literature in college, got a degree and all, but I'm not as fluent in the language as I am in English, my native tongue. I've been trying to continue my learning, but it's been a decade. I still retain about as much fluency as I had at the end of my degree, which is pretty good, especially considering that I haven't been to Japan or anything, but I also haven't expanded my fluency much, which I want to do. I'm also working on learning Toki Pona, a popular conlang that a friend introduced me to. It's a quicker language to learn, but also more dense because it has VERY few words. And I haven't really absorbed all the grammar of it, yet. But I love languages, and have always wanted to know and speak many. Sometime ago, I watched a youtube video about a couple women who know...I wanna say 5 languages apiece? And when talking about their language skills, they explained how they studied, and I was connecting their explanations of what they did to your descriptions of what a person SHOULD be doing to make deliberate practice work for them.