Wednesday Wisdom: Practice
January 24, 2024's Wisdom
Welcome to Wednesday Wisdom, our 3x3 Newsletter where I attempt to distill and share worldly advice for better living by presenting three quotes, three observations, and three questions.
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Practice
🤨 Quote
“Hours and hours of practice are necessary for great performance, but not sufficient. How experts in any domain pay attention while practicing makes a crucial difference.”
Daniel Goleman
Source: Focus
Observation 🧐
In 2008, Malcolm Gladwell published his best-seller, Outliers: The Story of Success, which popularized the idea that it took 10,000 hours of practice in order to become proficient in a skill.
While it is a helpful guide and generalization to the art of practice, performing hours upon hours of practice will not in and of itself improve one’s skills.
There are far too many choices in life and mastering a skill requires tough choices that must be made daily.
Those choices come in the form of our attention.
“Attention,” writes Michael McCullough, “is a spotlight that illuminates a single feature of the world around us to the neglect of all the others.”
If we want to improve our skill, we have to continually be focused within our practice, understanding the reps we’re taking, gathering feedback around what is and is not working, and attempting to implement that feedback into our practice routine.
According to the psychologist Alison Gopnik, using our minds to focus and pay attention actually helps increase plasticity leading to greater flexibility and change.
🤔 Question
As I practice this week, am I blocking out enough distractions to focus and properly identify weaknesses?
Deliberate Practice
🤨 Quote
“If you can figure out how to integrate deliberate practice into your own life, you have the possibility of blowing past your peers in your value, as you'll likely be alone in your dedication to systematically getting better. That is, deliberate practice might provide the key to quickly becoming so good they can't ignore you.”
Cal Newport
Source: So Good They Can’t Ignore You
Observation 🧐
“Deliberate” practice, in its simplest terms, is the active and persistent pursuit of the perhaps mundane or less flashy, basic tasks that will ultimately lead to improvement and further skill development.
We’d all love to write like Ernest Hemingway but how many would diligently sit down, take one of his books, and copywork it, copying each word from the book to their own page, following the structure of the sentences and transcribing each word until the book’s end? That’s exactly what famed author Joan Didion did in order to learn how to write:
“When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked. I taught myself to type at the same time. A few years ago when I was teaching a course at Berkeley I reread A Farewell to Arms and fell right back into those sentences. I mean they’re perfect sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.”
In order to master a craft, one has to learn to set their ego aside and be willing to do the deliberate practice, the work that no one wants to do, the stuff that is dull, tedious, and tiresome, but that ultimately moves the needle in improving your skill.
“All real work,” David Brooks writes in The Second Mountain, “requires a dedication to engage in deliberate practice, the willingness to do the boring things over and over again, just to master a skill.”