Deliberate Practice
I’m slowly reading 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know. Do Lots of Deliberate Practice really struck a nerve. Parts of it are great. Parts are unfortunately misguided.
I think the great parts are in identifying the nature and importance of deliberate practice. The difference between practice-orientation and task-orientation is so often lost, and is so clearly articulated here.
Additionally, the identification of parallels between deliberate practice and learning is so important, and I’m glad to see it mentioned here. I would extend further and mention that learning itself is a practice at which you can gain expertise.
I personally believe that practicing learning is the most important form of deliberate practice we can engage in. That is, not learning something because we need to know it, but learning something in order to practice learning something. As mentioned in Continuous Learning, it sure would be nice to have Neo’s ability to download information in the Matrix. In real life, how does one get closer to that amazing ability? Practice.
Two big disagreements from me:
First, the 10,000 hours of practice to achieve expertise is not important or realistic. Time required varies hugely by person and task.
The 10,000 hours thing has got to be one of the more damaging memes regarding learning. Clearly the idea was the impress on people that expertise requires a lot of work. 1,000 hours seems a little too achievable, and 100,000 hours is too depressing (you’d be dead before you’d be an expert), so Malcolm Gladwell landed on 10,000 hours because you can only effectively market nice round numbers.
Second, it’s absolutely best … errr … practice to practice something you are already an expert at. Have you ever met or observed someone who has deep expertise? Have you noticed how they still practice what they became expert in ages ago? They do.
True, usually this practice is disguised as something else. A job, perhaps. Or more often teaching the subject they have mastered. But even for people who constantly exercise their expertise through one of these activities, you will find that they set time aside for deliberate practice, focused on maintaining and honing their mastery.