Deliberate Practice
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings. I've been thinking more and more about how to avoid writing these issues on a Sunday evening while freaking out if I'll make it on time!
Anyhow, I hope you had a great weekend and were able to rest!
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Have you ever met or heard about someone who "had one year of experience repeated over ten years"?
Or did you think that you've plateaued in specific skills? Sometimes, we do a task or practice a skill constantly, but it seems we cannot improve past a certain level.
This might be due to the lack of deliberate practice. But what is deliberate practice?
Deliberate practice is commonly mentioned in sports or other manual tasks. You've probably heard that "10,000 hours of practice is required to become an expert in a particular field".
There's some debate about whether deliberate practice is useful for knowledge work due to the nature of the tasks. Anyhow, I've felt that the principles behind deliberate practice have helped me improve certain skills I've wanted to level up, such as recognizing people at work.
Intentionally Designed
The first point around deliberate practice is that it is intentionally designed, meaning you're not just trying everything possible. Instead, you decide on an approach you will repeat each time.
Another aspect of the exercise is the access to feedback so that with each attempt, you're improving something. It resonated with me when Jimmy from MrBeast said:
Your first ten are not going to get views. So stop sitting there and thinking for months and months on end, and just get to work and start uploading. All you need to do, this applies to people who have not uploaded videos but have dreams of being a YouTuber, is make 100 videos and improve something every time.
If you want feedback, you need a good work partner, or work with your manager or mentor to get the feedback you need to improve!
Repetition
The other key aspect of deliberate practice is repetition; you'll see people who practice sports doing free kicks for hours on end, swinging the golf club, practicing batting, etc.
When I've done deliberate practice, if it's related to programming, I do something each day. When learning Golang, I gave myself mini-exercises each day, then thought if it felt idiomatic and asked developers that I knew to get feedback.
The more consistent you are with the repetition, the more value you can get from it.
Demanding
The last aspect of deliberate practice is that the exercises you repeat are demanding, either due to the number of repetitions you do daily or because the exercise is difficult.
With programming, it is easy to do a lot of programming to make it a demanding task.
In other areas, for example, recently, I wanted to improve the quality of the questions I asked. I read some books about inquiring and "framework thinking," but then, at each meeting, I set myself the goal of asking two questions.
I would later ask attendees I trusted if my questions clarified a topic, avoided a problem, etc. I kept going at it with each meeting.
Your turn!
Let me know if you know about deliberate practice or if it is new! Also, by replying to this email, let me know what you're practicing next!
Happy coding!
Things I discovered in the past week
This week was interesting! We had 2 things that I generally review or come across often on social networks.
- InfoQ Software Architecture and Design Trends Report - April 2024 - In general, I'm interested in edge compute and socio-technical architecture!
- thoughtworks Tech Radar Volume 30 - In general, I'm interested in CloudEvents, and edge functions.
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