Living Deliberately

How One System of Practice Can Allow You to Live the Life You Always Wanted

Reframing Our Minds

People have always thought that talent was natural, that gifts were inherent. They believe that skills are genetically prescribed, that experts are a different breed.

But this is a myth.

“I get it. People want to believe that there is magic in life, that not everything has to abide by the staid, boring rules of the real world. And what could be more magical than being born with some incredible ability that doesn’t require hard work or discipline to develop?”

—Ericsson and Pool, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise¹

There is no such thing as “natural talent,” nor “inherent gifts.” There are no identifiable genes for skills. And despite what you’ve been told, experts are just as human as you and I.

Top-performers aren’t tapping into gamma radiation or mutated spider bites. No, what they are using—whether knowingly or not—is a system of practice that enables them to acquire, practice, and execute specific skills. And while these skills may vary from violin and chess playing to three-point shooting and mathematics, the gold-standard is surprisingly uniform.

Young Woman Playing a Violin, Gentileschi (oil on canvas, c. 1612). Image via Wikimedia. Reproduce here under fair use.

Types of Practice

There are three different kinds of practice: the usual approach, purposeful practice, and deliberate practice. But only the last consistently develops top-performers.

For our discussion, let’s use the specific example of learning pickleball.²

The Usual Approach: The Most Common Method of Practice

After watching some YouTube videos and purchasing the basic gear, you privately try hitting the ball. It’s good enough to visit a local court and join some pick-up games. You continue watching instructional videos and practicing. Gradually you learn the basics of stance, serving, and a successful volley. You even learn a few tricks to avoid whiffing on a serve. By now you’re more than able to navigate the court without falling into the net. You get comfortable with different kinds of moves and before long, you require less hand-holding. Other patrons start to recognize you. They invite you to join a local league, and you happily accept. As the season progresses you keep improving. Unlike the start of your journey, you’re not worried about falling flat on your face—instead, you’re now able to give some of the other players a competitive game. No longer a total beginner, you’ve become a pickleball player.

“We all follow pretty much the same pattern with any skill we learn, from baking a pie to writing a descriptive paragraph. We start off with a general idea of what we want to do, get some instruction from a teacher or a coach or a book or a website, practice until we reach an acceptable level, and then let it become automatic.”³

Purposeful Practice: How to Improve Even More

“Purposeful practice has several characteristics that set it apart from what we might call ‘naive practice,’ which is essentially just doing something repeatedly, and expecting that the repetition alone will improve one’s performance.”⁴

The usual approach allowed you to become a competent pickleball player. But there’s still holes in your game. Right now, cardio seems to be the biggest issue.

You start by devoting specific time to cardio-centered workouts like jumping rope, agility drills, and trail runs. They’re not easy, but you keep pushing. Eventually, these workouts get easier, and your play seemingly improves—you feel noticeably less tired after hard games. You get feedback from others and they confirm this. Congratulations, you’ve become an even better pickleball player.

But what actually happened here?

Let’s review: First, you noticed a problem. Second, you focused on specific ways to address this. Third, you went outside your comfort zone. And finally, you got feedback.

These basic principles distinguish purposeful practice from the usual approach:

1. Well-defined, specific goals.

2. Focus.

3. Getting out of one’s comfort zone.

4. Feedback.

Purposeful practice enabled you to get a leg up on the competition. But what about those other holes in your game? You may have gotten better, but you’ve seemingly hit another plateau.

“Although it is generally possible to improve to a certain degree with focused practice and staying out of your comfort zone, that’s not all there is to it. Trying hard isn’t enough. Pushing yourself to your limits isn’t enough. There are other, equally important aspects to practice and training that are often overlooked.”⁵

Deliberate Practice: The Gold Standard

A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery, Wright of Derby (oil on canvas, c. 1766). Image via Wikimedia. Reproduce here under fair use.

Purposeful practice can only take you so far.

Let’s turn to those recurring mistakes that you just can’t brute force your way through.

Backhand volleys. For whatever reason, you keep missing these shots and no amount of focus, effort, or feedback seems to help. After losing a league championship final off a failed backhand, you resolve to improve this technique and your entire repertoire of pickleball skills once and for all.

This requires deliberate practice.

Here are the criteria that make it the gold standard for improvement:

• Builds on established techniques.

• Full effort.

• Never vague—specific goals are required at all times.

• Utmost focus. Hence the title, “deliberate.”

• Feedback from coaches, teachers, training partners, etc.

• Modifications to practice in response to the aforementioned feedback.

• Mental representations.

• Always builds upon specific aspects of existing skills.

“With this definition we are drawing a clear distinction between purposeful practice—in which a person tries very hard to push himself or herself to improve—and practice that is both purposeful and informed. In particular, deliberate practice is informed and guided by the best performers’ accomplishments and by an understanding of what these expert performers do to excel.”⁶

The key aspect of deliberate practice is building upon established techniques and their specific aspects.

Chess provides a clear example: while repetition, specific goals, focus, effort, and feedback are important—these alone will never create a grandmaster. After a certain point—and this may surprise some—the most effective method of practice is actually studying the games of other grandmasters.

Why?

Simply because these experts are literally the best. Their performances provide precious data regarding proper and improper sequences of moves. Sure, a player could practice endlessly, but this is no different than the infinite monkey theorem which states that, given an infinite amount of time, a monkey will eventually type the complete works of William Shakespeare. Sure, it is possible for a prospective student to recreate the games of Magnus Carlsen, but this is hardly expertise.

If however a student studies Magnus’s games, they will soon observe those general principles—those common denominators—that Magnus used to become the world’s top player. In this way, the student is not relying on chance, but proven expertise.

Returning to pickleball, this would require you to not only watch some of the world’s top players, but also to enroll yourself with a coach that can inculcate the very techniques—including a backhand volley—that a top performer must master. This will demand “near-maximal effort, which is generally not enjoyable.”⁷ Moreover, it requires one’s utmost attention:

“It isn’t enough to simply follow a teacher’s or coach’s directions. The student must concentrate on the specific goal for his or her practice activity so that adjustments can be made to control practice.”⁸

Finally—and perhaps most importantly—the student must develop unique mental representations. These images allow one to remember a technique similar to how mnemonic devices allow one to remember something like a phone number or address.

“Mental representations make it possible to monitor how one is doing, both in practice and in actual performance. They show the right way to do something and allow one to notice when doing something wrong and to correct it.”⁹

The principles of deliberate practice will enable you to progressively refine your skills to the point where you are one of, if not the best, players in your league.

While you may never become the world’s best player, deliberate practice ensures that you will improve and see resulting developments in your expertise.

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Friedrich (oil on canvas, c. 1817). Image via Wikimedia. Reproduced here under fair use.

Living The Deliberate Life

Although it’s the gold standard, deliberate practice is for everyone. Sure it could be pickleball, but you could apply these principles to cooking, prayer, sales, physical fitness, reading, academics, or whatever other passion or discipline you can think of.

Everyone, including you and I, are capable of self-improvement—of leading a deliberate life. The balls in our court. Only one question remains:

Are we game enough to try?

“. . .the great mass of men, at that time, were utterly unconscious, that their conditions, or their minds were capable of improvement.”

—Abraham Lincoln

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1. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise (Boston: HarperCollins Publishers, 2016), 216.

2. Please note that this example could be applied to any other sport, subject, language, instrument, work-specific skill, or any other well-established field of interest that exists.

3. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, Peak, 12.

4. Ibid., 14.

5. Ibid., 25.

6. Ibid., 98.

7. Ibid., 99.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., 100.