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The Beginner's Guide To Deliberate Practice
The Beginner's Guide To Deliberate Practice
The Beginner's Guide To Deliberate Practice
The greatest challenge of deliberate practice is to remain focused. In the beginning, showing up and
putting in your reps is the most important thing. But after a while we begin to carelessly overlook small
errors and miss daily opportunities for improvement.
This is because the natural tendency of the human brain is to transform repeated behaviors into
automatic habits. For example, when you first learned to tie your shoes you had to think carefully about
each step of the process. Today, after many repetitions, your brain can perform this sequence
automatically. The more we repeat a task the more mindless it becomes.
Mindless activity is the enemy of deliberate practice. The danger of practicing the same thing again and
again is that progress becomes assumed. Too often, we assume we are getting better simply because we
are gaining experience. In reality, we are merely reinforcing our current habits—not improving them.
Claiming that improvement requires attention and effort sounds logical enough. But what does
deliberate practice actually look like in the real world? Let's talk about that now.