Practice More Efficiently | Deliberate Practice & Skill Improvement

To get better at something, we practice, right? So what happens when we don't seem to be getting any better?

Fundamentally, there's two explanations: you are actually getting better (but it just doesn't feel like it) or you're practicing incorrectly. The first has to do with the typical trajectory of skill acquisition and our performance measures. The second has to do with deliberate practice.

00:00 Introduction
00:24 Linear change is not a good model
01:14 Performance plateaus
01:57 Sometimes it's hard to measure skills
03:00 Deliberate practice
03:07 Identify expert skills
04:23 Challenging practice
05:13 Self-evaluation
06:08 Feedback
07:25 Repeat the steps (especially steps 2-4)

If anyone wants some one-on-one laundry basketball action, I'm game.

References:

For a general guide to deliberate practice, check out my article, here:

The classic study is:

The idea of deliberate practice has been applied to a lot of different domains.

Chess:

de Bruin, A. B., Smits, N., Rikers, R. M., & Schmidt, H. G. (2008). Deliberate practice predicts performance over time in adolescent chess players and drop‐outs: A linear mixed models analysis. British Journal of Psychology, 99(4), 473-497.

Typing:

Ballet:

For some solid criticism of the concept, see:

Note that Hambrick and his colleagues still think that deliberate practice is critical for developing expertise. But they do differ with Ericsson over the relative importance of some other factors. There’s also some important points made by Ericsson on how they’re measuring deliberate practice, although I tend to think this is a problem endemic to the deliberate practice literature. Many researchers will just log practice hours (or “time spent working alone”) as deliberate practice when the concept is considerably more nuanced.

The piece below also digs into some of these inconsistencies in the definition of deliberate practice:

Macnamara, B. N., & Maitra, M. (2019). The role of deliberate practice in expert performance: revisiting Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer (1993). Royal Society open science, 6(8), 190327.

Chess image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay.

[michaelvarney.]

To improve as a teacher, the expert skill is picking good students.
QED.

[edwardroneill]

Wonderful video! So charming. I love the way you broke it up into small segments to vary the camera angles and backgrounds and avoid a long monologue.

You really take the viewer on a journey. And you visualize the concepts so well--the graphs really make the ideas clear.

You make learning about learning enjoyable!

[ReflectionOcean]

- Understand learning isn't linear; expect plateaus (Start: 0:23)

- Recognize the need to reorganize thinking during learning (Start: 1:23)

- Assess the accuracy of skill measurement in your field (Start: 2:01)

- Identify what constitutes expert skills in your domain (Start: 3:08)

- Focus practice on challenging, not easy, aspects (Start: 4:33)

- Regularly self-evaluate to identify areas for improvement (Start: 5:15)

- Obtain and utilize feedback from experts or peers (Start: 6:06)

- Engage in repeated cycles of practice, self-evaluation, and feedback (Start: 7:26)

- Prepare for the effort and fatigue that comes with deliberate practice (Start: 7:49)

[Siebentod]

Very interesting about plateaus in the beginning. I've searched information about memory in learning and scientific self-education theories for a year, and your channel is such a gift!

[nihsumi]

I have heard similar ideas from Principles by Dalio. A good video topic in the area of deliberate practice for learning "Why, when we observe an expert performing an action we are unable to duplicate it even after years of practice or more likely never." From the sheer number of coaches in the world, humans seem to lack the ability to mimic or grasp the experts actions even after numerous lessons or YT videos. Proprioception is something we are not wired for or seem to be able to learn.

[OfficialNattyOrNot]

Hoping this channel grows exponentially, both for you and others. As always, great content! Thanks for all your time and effort

[daeraticspecializt]

Don't know if you are going to read this, but thanks for all the content you put out Benjamin! As an electronic engineer student the methods and principles you share have been of great aid on studying better and more efficient in time!
Love your videos fam, the way you teach with examples, graphics and understandable language is very nice, also the mini skits like the intro of this video are a fun plus :)
Godspeed

[JCtheMusicMan_]

My Judo instructor always said, “Perfect practice makes perfect”

[Bvic]

I stagnate when I can't find what I do that isn't ideal.

In competitive PvP video games (that aren't just about faster and more accurate motions), I'm not able to see what better players do differently than what I do.

Knowing deep learning reinforcement learning helps me realise how I learn stuff. Thr exploration vs exploitation problem. Trying something suboptimal temporarily to try a new avenue for progress.

Overall, there is either that paradigm shift strategy where it's super hard to come with a new idea of something that could be better. Or there is the incremental machine learning style improvement that is limited by our ability to sense the mistake we make.

I find progressing at the piano far easier than progressing at advanced video game mastery. With the piano, I can feel when I make a wrong note. I can feel when I hesitate. I can hear when I don't like the intonation.

The problem is also how to impact the result. For example, learning the flute or oboe is far harder than the piano. There are dozens of muscles from the stomach and throat and lips that control the sound. I can't find what to do differently to get a cleaner sound. Meanwhile, it's far easier on the piano to feel what muscle change makes an improvement on intonation. And of course 90% of piano learning is about huge finger motions that are easy to evaluate.

[lvplvp]

What I struggle with is "when" to practice. When should I drop down my book and practice what I learned? how many times should I repeat this action? When I watch a course or read a book, I opt to finish them and "then" practice and apply what've learned.

[ericmojica]

6:38 I'm watching this at like 1or 2 I was shocked lol. It was funny

[MrGrokNRoll]

It would be cool to have videos about how to identify expert skill and how to set up self-evaluation and especially feedback. Especially especially if you don't have access to an expert. I know this all depends on the domains and skills but maybe there a some general(ish) strategies? Or just some real-world examples of skills, self-evaluation and feedback?

[fidonnamani]

How would you go about identifying the expert skills?

[englishwithanes]

Is it true that if you love sth you're passionate about sth you will learn it faster ?

[mtns]

Be careful of passion as it could lead to missing out on other things that could optimise improvement. Eg, sleeping as you have to practice more, cancelled pyhsio as you dont want to cancel practice, eating well as you dont have enough time between practices..i speak from a sporting stance and maybe the word to be more careful of is obsession.

[michaelanthony]

Thank you, sound wisdom. No pun intended. Yea, pun intended.

[madani-mesbah]

has there been any deliberate practice research on drawing

[hulkmahmut]

If that ball didn't go into that basket, I might die

[JarOfPrickles]

If you got feedback, what do you do with it? So if I do know what I'm bad at, do I practice in that main area I'm bad at? Sounds like an obvious question, but just wanted to make sure.