A couple of days ago my attention was captured by an article published on the beloved and very much followed Freakonomics: "Deliberate Practice": How Education Fails to Produce Expertise". I am very grateful to the Freakonomics team, because despite not having approved my comment to one of their blog posts (yes they did) they always provide interesting insights on the strangest subjects, this time being deliberate practice.
It turns out that a man named K. Anders Ericsson wrote a very interesting piece of article quite some time ago (1993) with the title "The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance". As Freakonomics greacefully interpreted for me, deliberate pratice is an activity aimed at the enhancement of specific aspects of a performance, usually previously spotted as weakness areas. An example will make it clearer for you, a real life example.
I started playing piano when I was 9 and stopped at 12 and a half, I remember myself always eager to play but really not enjoying the technical exercise needed to perform well: those little boring exercises to improve finger dexterity and speed. I wasn't interested in practicing like this and my performance was poor. I didn't want to follow my teacher's suggestion and break down the difficult parts of the performance so to face them individually. At much of my parents despair I stopped playing piano and I started playing tennis: only they know how much hassle I gave them. I would bring a tennis ball everywhere with me, just to exercise with the most difficult gesture in tennis, the ball launch for the serve. I would exercise at school, in the living room, pretty much everywhere the ceiling height allowed. As a result I soon became one of the best servers in my course. Motivation and the application of the same method I previously refused to respect made me a very good server. That was definitely deliberate practice.
Discovering deliberate pratice and its importance really says that "A Star is Made" and not born, as Ericsson pointed out and the people from Freakonomics helped explain in their NYT article. I already applied this key concept to my foosball skills, but I cannot wait to expand this to many other areas.
It turns out that a man named K. Anders Ericsson wrote a very interesting piece of article quite some time ago (1993) with the title "The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance". As Freakonomics greacefully interpreted for me, deliberate pratice is an activity aimed at the enhancement of specific aspects of a performance, usually previously spotted as weakness areas. An example will make it clearer for you, a real life example.
Discovering deliberate pratice and its importance really says that "A Star is Made" and not born, as Ericsson pointed out and the people from Freakonomics helped explain in their NYT article. I already applied this key concept to my foosball skills, but I cannot wait to expand this to many other areas.
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