Deliberate Practice

As I start to write this post, I am hoping I will be done in 30 minutes.

I am going to try a new experiment. Try and post small articles written within 30 minutes, or in some case 1 hour. Agreed, this doesn’t always work, so for lengthier articles I could span it over multiple days or ditch this scheme. May be you are wondering why should I force myself to write so fast?

I have come to believe that when practicing something that you want to master, speed is of importance. I had this idea vaguely understood before, but the book ‘Moonwalking with Einstein’ cleared it for me. In it, the author gives an example of learning to type. Before learning to type, your speed may have been abysmal. And once you learn to type, your speed improves a lot, but even though you may continue to use your new typing skill for many years, your speed may not improve that much. I myself learnt typing many years back and so since I have been typing for so long, my wpm must hit the roof, but that is not the case. There is no improvement since there is no deliberate practice.

The author of the book Joshua Foer cites psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner from the 1960s, and explains us that there are three phases to learning:

During the first phase, known as the “cognitive stage,” you’re intellectualizing the task and discovering new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. During the second “associative stage,” you’re concentrating less, making fewer major errors, and generally becoming more efficient. Finally when you reach what Fitts called the “autonomous stage,” when you figure you are as good as you need to get at the task and you’re basically running on autopilot.

Most of the time, this autonomous stage is a good thing since you have one less thing to worry about, but it is not good for learning.

I believe that most of us, unfortunately, end up in the autonomous stage and never improve (or improve very slowly). Joshua calls this phase “OK Plateau” rightfully so. My typing skills is an example. My photography improved rapidly in the beginning and nowadays I don’t think I am improving these days.

Here is another from the book, which I found useful:

What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled “deliberate practice”.

(Ericsson here refers to Ander Ericsson, the psychologist behind the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice rule.)

This is why I am forcing myself to write fast. Hopefully if I keep doing this, I will keep getting better. Agreed, I need to carefully find out flaws in my writing and fix them. By the way, the time is up.

via MIND. IS BLOWN http://mindisblown.com/blog/2013/05/16/deliberate-practice/