021 Arete

summary:

"If you only read one book on mastering your craft, read this one.

The central message: The right sort of practice ("deliberate practice") carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement.

A common learning obstacle: If you reach a skill level that feels “satisfactory” to you, you stop improving, and even get worse with time.

Two types of practice:

Naive practice in a nutshell: I just played it. I just swung the bat and tried to hit the ball. I just listened to the numbers and tried to remember them. I just read the math problems and tried to solve them. This is how most people “practice” but it’s ineffective.
Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals. Without such a goal, there is no way to judge whether the practice session has been a success.

Components of purposeful practice:

Putting a bunch of baby steps together to hit a long term goal, having a plan
Feedback, you have to know whether you are doing something right and if not, what mistakes you’re making
Getting outside of your comfort zone, feeling uncomfortable. If you never push beyond your comfort zone you’ll never improve.
A way to monitor your progress
Maintaining motivation

Other rules of purposeful practice:

You won’t improve much without giving the task your full attention
Without feedback— either from yourself or from outside observers— you cannot figure out what you need to improve on or how close you are to achieving your goals.

Mental Representations: Your skill in anything is based on the number and quality of “mental representations” you have for the skill.

Deliberate practice is even better than purposeful practice:

The field must be well developed, the best performers must be clearly far superior to people just entering the field.
requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve his or her performance.
Near maximal effort, constantly being taken out of your comfort zone by a teacher or coach. Not “fun”
Well defined, specific goals, not aimed at “overall improvement.”
Full attention and conscious action, no autopilot.
Feedback and constant little improvements, modifying efforts in response to feedback
Building and modifying mental representations
Focusing on building and improving specific skills by focusing on aspects of those skills and improving them

Saturday, January 16, 2021