research started by Anders Ericsson (Peak)
(...) purposeful practice in a nutshell: Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation.
some examples of practicing with clear goals in mind:
— How to Use Deliberate Practice to Reach the Top 1% of Your Field ↗
- Play this piece all the way through, at this speed, with no mistakes, three times in a row
- Program an email signup form without checking Stack Overflow
"getting outside your comfort zone" reminds me of ideas from Flow: flow is achieved by operating at the edge of competency, and Deliberate Practice is about moving that edge
Everyone from the very top students to the future music teachers agreed: improvement was hard, and they didn't enjoy the work they did to improve. In short, there were no students who just loved to practice and thus needed less motivation than the others. These students were motivated to practice intensely and with full concentration because they saw such practice as essential to improving their performance.
(...) the importance of staying just outside your comfort zone: you need to continually push to keep the body's compensatory changes coming, but if you push too far outside your comfort zone, you risk injuring yourself and actually setting yourself back.
feedback is necessary, there's a difference between just lifting weights vs recording my lifts and then critiquing my form
Purposeful practice involves feedback.
Generally speaking, no matter what you're trying to do, you need feedback to identify exactly where and how you are falling short. Without feedback - either from yourself or from outside observers - you cannot figure out what you need to improve on or how close you are to achieving your goals. (...) This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve. The amateur pianist who took half a dozen years of lessons when he was a teenager but who for the past thirty years has been playing the same set of songs in exactly the same way over and over again may have accumulated ten thousand hours of "practice" during that time, but he is no better at playing the piano than he was thirty years ago. Indeed, he's probably gotten worse. We have especially strong evidence of this phenomenon as it applies to physicians. Research on many specialties shows that doctors who have been in practice for twenty or thirty years do worse on certain objective measures of performance than those who are just two or three years out of medical school. It turns out that most of what doctors do in their day-to-day practice does nothing to improve or even maintain their abilities; little of it challenges them or pushes them out of their comfort zones. (...) Generally the solution is not "try harder" but rather "try differently."
I should focus on things that don't go well, and practice them; this is related to weight training and specific exercises to address "weak points":
the importance of grit - of students' focusing on material with which they struggle
importantly, if "measuring" the skill that you're after is impossible - for example if there's no agreed way what "good performance" even means, then it's impossible to create effective training methods - You Get What You Measure, and if there's nothing to measure, it's hard to get anything
related to:
We get interested in what we get good at. In general, it is difficult to sustain interest in an activity unless one achieves some degree of competence. Athletics is the activity par excellence where the young need no prodding to gain pleasure from an increase in skill, save where prematurely adult standards are imposed on little leagues formed too soon to ape the big ones. A custom introduced some years ago at the Gordonstoun School in Scotland has become legendary. In addition to conventionally competitive track and field events within the school, there was established a novel competition in which boys pitted themselves against their own best prior record in the events.
— Toward a Theory of Instruction - Jerome Bruner
766 words last tended to on 2023-12-27 — let me know what you think