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Many consider Kobe Bryant to be the greatest NBA player of all time.
I’m not going to get into whether I think that’s true or not. Let’s just agree that he was incredible. What I do want to talk about was his unrelenting dedication to deliberate practice.
When watching Kobe play, it was easy to assume that he was born with a supernatural talent to play basketball.
However, this was not the case.
In fact, when Kobe first started playing basketball at the age of 10, he wasn’t very good. In an interview with Lewis Howes, Kobe admitted that he didn’t score a single basket during his summer basketball camp.
It wasn’t until the summer of seventh grade that he decided to dedicate himself to the game and practice consistently every day. This was the genesis of his legendary work ethic.
Kobe worked out in his mind that he needed to take a long-term approach to practice. He wasn’t going to get better than his peers in a week or even a year.
He then estimated that his teammates practiced for around 1 to 2 hours per week and if he wanted to surpass them, he would need to practice for at least 2 to 3 hours per day.
Kobe had a very deliberate approach to practice. While his peers were relying on their athleticism to win, Kobe spent his time working on the fundamentals.
During practice he would work on taking open shots and releasing his shots quicker.
The next summer when Kobe returned to his basketball camp, he was a little better than the year before. The following summer he improved even more.
By the time he reached his freshman year in high school he was the best player in the state of Pennsylvania at age 14.
He maintained his dedication to deliberate practice, got drafted into the NBA, and went on to be one of the greatest players to play the game.
So, how did Kobe Bryant go from scoring zero points to basketball legend?
He attributes his success to his deliberate approach to practice.
If you’re wondering, “what is this deliberate practice thing and how do I get some?”
Don’t worry, I’m going to cover deliberate practice in depth and give you a step by step guide so you can start to implement deliberate practice into your life.
But first, let’s discuss what the three main types of practice are.
Table of Contents
The Three Main Types of Practice
According to Anders Ericsson, there are three kinds of practice, naïve, purposeful, and deliberate.
Here I’m going to discuss what the three types of practice are and their real-world applications.
First, let’s start with the least effective method of practice, naïve practice.
Naive Practice
Naïve practice is by far the most common form of practice. This kind of practice involves the continuous repetition of a task over an extended period of time.
Naïve practice doesn’t involve strategic planning, purposeful effort, or meaningful feedback. It’s basically going through the motions mindlessly.
For example, imagine that a golfer is on a putting green working on his putts. His practice routine involves him standing about 10 feet away from the hole, lining up his golf balls, and tapping them in, one after the other.
This would be impressive an impressive feat if it wasn’t for the fact that this is the only shot that he practices. He doesn’t change his distance or placement on the green.
As a result, he’s no longer challenging himself by raising the level of difficulty. He’s essentially stuck at his current level of mediocrity.
So, the problem with naïve practice is that it simply doesn’t work.
In his book Peak, Ericsson uses an example involving two doctors to better illustrate this point.
Ericsson poses the question: Who do you think generally has better patient outcomes? Doctors with 5 years of experience, or doctors with 20 years of experience?
One might assume that the doctor with 20 years of experience would have better patient outcomes, right?
Oddly enough, this isn’t the case.
Several studies show that older doctors with more experience often have worse patient outcomes than younger doctors with less experience.
How could less experienced doctors outperform the more experienced doctors?
Well, the reason lies in their method of practice. The more experienced doctor is stuck utilizing naïve practice.
That is, he stopped pushing himself, establishing clear goals, and getting meaningful feedback. In essence, he stopped implementing deliberate practice.
Sure, the more experienced doctor went to conferences and kept up the latest journals, but he stopped pushing himself outside of his comfort zones and setting measurable goals.
This is why naïve practice leads to stagnation and ultimately inhibits growth. If you only utilize naïve practice you won’t challenge yourself enough to take your skillset to the next level.
So, what do you do if you find if you find yourself stuck at your current skill level?
Well, there is another form of practice that can help you to elevate your game to the next level.
Next we’ll discuss the benefits of purposeful practice.
Purposeful Practice
Purposeful practice is vastly superior to naïve practice. While naïve practice doesn’t involve much more than simple repetition, purposeful practice incorporates goals, feedback, and strategic effort.
While purposeful practice is still not considered to be as efficacious as deliberate practice, it’s still an effective means of learning a skill.
Setting Goals with Purposeful Practice
One of the most important components of purposeful practice is setting goals. Goal setting can help you to get clear about what it is that you want and where you want to go.
Goals are tantamount to a rudder on a ship. They play an essential part in helping you to reach your desired destination.
Without goals we are floating aimlessly in a sea of distractions. The key to successful goal setting is to be as specific as possible.
Setting vague goals like “make more money”, isn’t going to help you to achieve that goal.
Fortunately, there is a goal setting method that can help you to achieve even your most ambitious goals, the SMART method.
The SMART method stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time Bound. This method will help you to gain clarity about your goals and establish clear actionable steps to moving towards your goal every day.
I discuss the SMART method in further detail in the deliberate practice section.
Getting Outside of Your Comfort zone with Purposeful Practice
Another important component of purposeful practice is pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone.
Most people are perfectly content staying inside of their own self-imposed comfort zone. They’re afraid to step outside of their safety bubble and try something new.
Unfortunately, this will only lead to stagnation and mediocrity. In order to grow we must push ourselves to the limits of our current abilities. This is the only way to improve at something.
For instance, I recently downloaded an app that is specifically designed to increased working memory. It’s called dual-n-back.
For those who have used this app, you know how difficult it is. The purpose of this app is to memorize a series of squares using visual and auditory queues.
What makes this game so challenging is that it gets progressively more difficult the better you get. In other words, it doesn’t give you a chance to get comfortable. The more you improve the harder it gets.
This is also why it’s so effective. It’s constantly pushing the player to the limit of their ability. Just when you think you’ve got it mastered; it raises the bar.
This is how you need to approach purposeful practice. Always push yourself to the edge of your current abilities. Just make sure you don’t push yourself too hard or you might get frustrated and give up.
Getting Feedback with Purposeful Practice
Furthermore, feedback also plays an important role in purposeful practice. Without feedback we have no way of knowing if we are improving or not.
This is why feedback is crucial for practicing effectively.
There are generally two forms of feedback, internal and external. The kind of feedback that we are going for is external.
While seeing yourself making a goal is still considered good feedback, having someone else provide specific and constructive feedback is even better.
This person could be a friend, colleague, teammate, or coach. Whoever it is, just make sure that they are qualified to be giving you feedback.
You could even use a video camera for external feedback. This wouldn’t be as effective as getting feedback from an actual person, but it would allow you to see your performance from a different perspective.
Finally, we move on to the most effective form of practice, deliberate practice.
Deliberate Practice
Deliberate practice is considered by many to be the Gold Standard of practice strategies.
Deliberate practice was first coined by Psychologist Anders Ericsson who was a professor of Psychology at Florida State University.
While conducting research on high achievers, Ericsson discovered that people who were the leading experts in their fields became great not merely by sheer effort and practice, but by conscientious and effortful practice, or deliberate practice.
In other words, he discovered that how you practice matters much more than how much you practice.
Most people consider practice to be the constant repetition of a task over an extended period of time.
For example, if you watch basketball players practicing before a game, many of them are simply shooting the ball over and over until the game starts.
While this might help to get them warmed up for the game, it’s not actually improving the skills.
This is due to the fact that they aren’t challenging themselves or pushing themselves outside of their comfort zone.
On the other hand, if you watch elite players practice, their practice is more methodical and intentional. Their practice is more deliberate.
They run drills, practice one-on-one, and have trainers that are constantly giving them relevant feedback.
Ericson uses a good example in his book, Peak, on the kind of specificity that is required for someone who wants to use deliberate practice to improve at golf:
“If you’re a weekend golfer and you want to decrease your handicap by five strokes, that’s fine for an overall purpose, but it is not a well-defined, specific goal that can be used effectively for your practice. Break it down and make a plan: What exactly do you need to do to slice five strokes off your handicap? One goal might be to increase the number of drives landing in the fairway. That’s a reasonably specific goal, but you need to break it down even more: What exactly will you do to increase the number of successful drives? You will need to figure out why so many of your drives are not landing in the fairway and address that by, for instance, working to reduce your tendency to hook the ball. How do you do that? An instructor can give you advice on how to change your swing motion in specific ways. And so on. The key thing is to take that general goal — get better — and turn it into something specific that you can work on with a realistic expectation of improvement.”
With deliberate practice, one must have a systematic approach to improving. This often involves identifying your weak points, breaking down the steps you need to improve, getting relevant feedback, and measuring your progress.
It’s not that people who are world class at what they do are genetically gifted or more intelligent that everyone else.
They just know how to break down their skills sets, expose their weak points, and improve on areas that need improving.
Ok, that may be a slight oversimplification, but I’ll go into more depth in the step-by-step guide. First let’s l
“The differences between expert performers and normal adults are not immutable, that is, due to genetically prescribed talent. Instead, these differences reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance.” – Anders Ericsson
Examples of Deliberate Practice
1. Stephen Curry – Basketball
Stephen Curry understood the power of practice at a young age. His father, Dell Curry, was a professional basketball player in the NBA from 1986-2002 and he instilled in Stephen the importance of work ethic and practice when he was a young boy. Stephen’s practice routine has become the stuff of legends. He was so committed to developing his shooting skills that he wouldn’t leave practice until he made five swish shots in a row. Not five shots in a row, five swish shots in a row, no rim involved. Now, for those who play basketball you know that this isn’t an easy task, but this was his practice routine. Curry’s five basket ritual is a prime example of deliberate practice. Let me explain:
- He would set a clear and specific goal for himself, five swish shots in a row.
- He would receive specific and constructive feedback from his coach and trainers.
- He would constantly push himself outside of his comfort zone. Making five swish shots in a row isn’t easy, not even for Steph Curry.
- He would maintain motivation until all of his shots were completed. He wouldn’t allow himself to give up if he was having a bad practice. He would stay until all five shots were made, in a row, with no rim.
This practice routine has clearly payed off Curry because he is now widely regarded as the best shooter in the NBA.
2. Wolfgang Mozart- Music
Wolfgang Mozart was exposed to music at a young age. His father Leopold was a music teacher and was always playing music in their home. Mozart and his older sister were taught by their father at a young age and were very competitive with one another. Mozart wanted to play better than his sister, so he was always pushing himself to play better. When Mozart would find a piece a music that he found challenging, he would play it over and over until he was able to play it flawlessly. He would even seek to improve on well-known pieces to make them better. After just two years of teaching young Mozart, his father took him on a tour of Europe so he could dazzle audiences from Vienne to Paris. Mozart started utilizing deliberate practice at a young age and went on to become the greatest composer in history.
Here’s how Wolfgang Mozart utilized deliberate practice:
- He immersed himself in music and was surrounded by music day and night.
- He set the clear and ambitious goal of playing better than his older sister who was often the center of their fathers’ attention.
- His sister had several years more experience, so Mozart was constantly pushing himself to play better, so he could catch up with his sister.
- Mozart would receive immediate and constructive feedback from his father and teacher, Leopold Mozart.
- Mozart started playing concerts at the age of 5, which pushed him outside of his comfort zone and motivated him to practice even more.
- Lastly, Mozart had the motivation to maintain his practice routine his entire life. This allowed him to continually improve his skills and go on to become one of the greatest composers in history.
3. Magnus Carlsen- Chess
There are many parallels between Mozart and Magnus Carlsen. Like Mozart, Magnus Carlsen’s father taught him to play chess at the age of 5. At first, he wasn’t motivated to learn but, like Mozart, Magnus was driven by a desire to beat his older sister at chess. By age 8 Magnus was playing in tournaments and by the age of 13 he became the youngest chess Grandmaster in history. At age 19, Magnus became the youngest player to be ranked #1 in the world. In 2014, he obtained the FIDE rank of 2882, which is the highest of any player, ever. How did he achieve all this at such a young age? Deliberate Practice. Let’s take a look at how Magnus Carlsen utilized deliberate practice.
- Magnus immersed himself in chess. When he wasn’t practicing, he was reading books on chess strategies and studying chess moves from historic games.
- Magnus constantly pushed himself to the edge of his abilities and was motivated to become better than his older sister.
- Magnus constantly received feedback from his expert coaches including legendary chess Grandmaster, Garry Kasparov.
- Finally, Magnus is able to sustain complete focus while he is practicing. He often practices for 7 to 8 hours a day before a tournament.
Utilizing deliberate practice allowed Magnus Carlsen to quickly rise through the competitive ranks of the chess world and become the youngest and most highly regarded Grandmaster in history.
The 6 Steps to Deliberate Practice
1. Identify Your Weaknesses
The first step to deliberate practice is to identify your weaknesses. This can be uncomfortable for some, but it’s an important step to improving your skillsets.
In order to find out what your strengths and weaknesses are, write them out on a piece of paper, strengths on one side and weaknesses on the other. It’s important to be honest with yourself during this exercise.
For instance, if you want to improve your writing, your list might look something like this:
Strengths Weaknesses
– Use of humor – Poor vocabulary
– Good storyteller – Run on sentences
– Strong researcher – Trouble focusing
– Good at formatting – Procrastination
Once you know where your strengths and weaknesses lie, then you can set out to improve on your weak areas.
This then brings us to the next step, setting specific goals.
2. Set Specific Goals
Once you’ve figured out what your strengths and weaknesses are, you need to establish specific goals to improve on your weaknesses.
Now, it’s important to set your goals just beyond your current capabilities. In other words, you should make it a stretch goal.
Stretch goals will force you to grow and adapt. Just make sure that you don’t push yourself too hard. There is an optimum level of difficulty that allows for maximum advancement.
Furthermore, you can use the SMART goals method to optimize your chances of reaching your goals.
The SMART method stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time Bound. This technique will help you to get crystal clear about what your goals are, how long it will take to achieve them, and the what steps you need to take to accomplish your goals.
An example of a SMART goal might look something like this:
Goal: read more books
- Specific: I want to read 3 new business books every month.
- Measurable: In order to read 3 books per month I will need to average 1 book every 10 days.
- Achievable: If I read 15 pages in the morning and then 15 pages before bed, I can easily achieve this goal.
- Relevant: Reading 3 business books per month will help me to take my business to the next level.
- Time-bound: In order to read 3 books per month, I will need to read 30 pages every day which will take me approximately 1 hour.
3. Get Out of Your Comfort Zone
Getting out of your comfort zone is a crucial step in deliberate practice. This will mean feeling uncomfortable, but there’s nothing easy or comfortable about deliberate practice.
Pushing yourself outside of you comfort zone is the only way to grow and get better. This is what makes deliberate practice so effective.
If you find yourself stuck at your current level of competence, it’s most likely because you’re not pushing yourself enough. This might sound harsh but it’s true.
How this might look is, say you want to increase your reading speed. You measure your current reading speed at 300 words per minute and you decide that you would like to increase it to 400 words per minute.
Start by using your pointer finger to guide your eye along every line of text. Once you feel like your reading at a comfortable speed, increase it a little.
Make sure you don’t push yourself too hard. You don’t want to get frustrated and give up. Push yourself just outside of your comfortable reading speed.
Over time your reading speed will gradually increase. Just make sure that you don’t slip back into your comfort zone or else you will stop progressing.
4. Seek Expert Feedback
If you research people who have achieved expert status in their profession or field, you will find that they almost always had a mentor or a coach that helped them to achieve their level of expertise.
Why is this?
Because success is dependent on quality feedback. Without feedback, you won’t know what or how to improve.
Imagine if you were training to become a professional tennis player and the only feedback you received was from a random guy telling you to “do better”.
Not very helpful, right?
However, if you receive specific feedback regarding the way you swing your racket, that kind of information can dramatically improve your results.
This is also why the feedback should come from an expert. You don’t want advice or feedback from someone who hasn’t achieved what you want.
Magnus Carlsen understood this when he was training to be a grand master. He didn’t hire any run of the mill chess expert, he hired the legendary grandmaster, Garry Kasparov to be his coach.
The feedback that Magnus received from Kasparov was truly priceless and it helped Magnus achieve the title of youngest grandmaster and #1 chess player in the world.
So, whether it’s a mentor, coach, or an instructor, make sure the feedback that you get is from someone who is an expert in their field.
And when you find an expert who is willing to work with you, take their advice and apply it. At first, it might seem counter intuitive, but it could be just what you need to take your skill to the next level.
5. Track Your Progress
Tracking your progress is an integral part of getting better at any skill. The reason why is simple, if you don’t track your progress you won’t know if your making any improvements.
My first experience with tracking my progress came from weightlifting. In the past, I wasn’t very diligent about tracking my weightlifting progress.
I would simply add more weight to my lift’s week after week. And for a while I had a modest amount of success with this technique.
However, once I started using a journal to track my reps, sets, and weights, my results skyrocketed.
Over the next month I saw an improvement in all my lifts across the board. It was so successful that it is now a part of my daily weightlifting routine. I track all of my major lifts and I continue to see positive results.
“Most of us make advances small and large every single day, but we fail to notice them because we lack a method for acknowledging our progress. This is a huge loss.” – Jocelyn K. Glei
Furthermore, tracking your progress will help to keep you motivated. Deliberate practice is difficult and sometimes you may get discouraged and feel like throwing in the towel.
However, if you are constantly tracking your progress and celebrating small wins, you will be less likely to feel discouraged and give up.
The journal that I use to track my progress is called the SELF Journal. It’s simple, clean, and it has templates that make progress tracking quick and easy.
If you don’t want to spend the money on a journal, you can always use a spiral notebook. This is what I used when I first started tracking my lifts in the gym.
The most important thing is to be diligent about tracking your progress. Don’t skip days, even if you have days when you don’t make any progress, still write it down.
Like anything important, you must develop this into a daily habit. After a short while, you will start to see the fruits of your labor.
6. Maintain Your Motivation
Deliberate practice is difficult, uncomfortable, and time consuming. Therefore, you must be able to maintain motivation over an extended period of time if want to see any significant results.
Now, I don’t want to scare you away from deliberate practice, I just want your expectations to be realistic.
Personally, I think the hard work and long hours are insignificant when compared to the joy and fulfillment I get from mastering a skill.
However, in order to achieve the level of mastery, one must be able to stay motivated over a sustained period of time.
How do we stay motivated?
According to Ericsson, “meaningful positive feedback is one of the crucial factors in maintaining motivation”.
This can be from internal feedback, such as the enjoyment you feel from seeing yourself improve at something.
Or this feedback can come from an external source, such as a coach or mentor. Either way, meaningful feedback is essential to maintaining the necessary effort to improve through deliberate practice.
Here are some more ways to maintain motivation:
- Celebrate your wins, even small ones.
- Make deliberate practice a daily habit. If you make deliberate practice a daily habit you will be less likely to skip days or feel unmotivated.
- Remove distractions from your environment. You want to eliminate anything that might pull your attention away from your work.
- Take frequent breaks to reenergize yourself and avoid burnout.
- Create a support group. Find people who want to see you succeed and keep them updated with your progress.
Deliberate practice requires hard work and dedication. And if you want to experience the benefits of deliberate practice you must be willing to put in the work, day in and day out.
This requires sustained motivation. It will be difficult at times but as long as you keep showing up, you will reap the rewards that deliberate practice has to offer.
The Best Books on Deliberate Practice
There have been several books written on deliberate practice and not everyone has the same perspective.
I’ve included a list of the books that I’ve read that go into depth about the ins and outs of deliberate practice.
Some of the most well-known books on the topic include Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book, Outliers.
I first read this book back in 2008 and it was the first book that exposed me to deliberate practice and the 10,000-hour rule.
Additionally, Angela Duckworth wrote a great book called Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, where she talks about the importance of deliberate practice and its influence on grit.
Personally, my favorite book on deliberate practice is from the originator himself, Anders Ericsson.
Ericsson wrote a book called Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise where he goes into depth about his research and findings about high achievers, peak performance, and the power of deliberate practice.
Here’s a list of books that I’ve read that discuss deliberate practice:
- Anders Ericsson – Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
- Malcolm Gladwell – Outliers: The Story of Success
- Angela Duckworth – Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
- Geoff Colvin – Talent is Overrated
- Daniel Coyle – The Talent Code
Again, my favorite book from this list is Anders Ericsson’s book, Peak. I found his research and examples to be the most thoughtful and compelling.
There is also a great TEDx talk by Eduardo Briceño which is titled, How to get better at the things you care about, in which Briceño talks about the performance zone and how it relates to deliberate practice. You can check it out here.
Furthermore, if you’re interested in listening to an interesting interview of Anders Ericsson, Larry King interviewed Ericsson on his show Larry King Now. You can listen to it here.
Final Thoughts
With enough practice we can master almost any skill. However, how you practice matters more than how long you practice.
The most effective form of practice that you can utilize is deliberate practice. That being said, deliberate practice is not a magic wand. It will not turn you into a world-class expert within a few weeks, or even months.
In order to experience the full benefits that deliberate practice has to offer, you must dedicate yourself to utilizing deliberate practice on a daily basis.
This will involve hard work and plenty of discomfort. However, if you commit yourself to deliberate practice and dedicate yourself to your craft, it can take your current skill level and elevate it to mastery.
My Favorite Quote on Deliberate Practice
“The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.”
-David Brooks
