10,000 Hours Of Deliberate Practice Is Useless Without This

Deliberate practice is meant to be focused practice on what you want to achieve (this video helps explain deliberate practice focus) rather than unfocused errands and tasks you just fill your day up with and seemingly get nowhere. 

It’s the aim of keeping focused and mindful on something without letting it turn into an automated habit that sees us lose focus and lose the ability to think and adapt.

Of course, deliberate practice is useful, especially in today’s easily distracted world. Practice in any craft or skill will see your skill improve, but practice alone, even deliberately with focus, is never going to help you deal with other factors that are equally important.

The Limitations Of Deliberate Practice

‘Practice makes perfect’, or so they say, but actually it depend on the type of practice, principally the variety.

You don’t see sports teams only practicing. Training helps but the matches are what counts. The real pressure is where we see just how capable we are. We might be the greatest darts player but then crumble under the pressure of the spotlight.

It’s not just pressure in activities like sports either.

We can practice anything to our hearts content. We can learn to play an instrument but if we are simply just repeating notes and tabs to learn a song then we don’t engage our minds in something that goes beyond that comfort zone.

Of course, deliberate practice aims to focus our attention on playing mindfully, and not in a drone-like manner.

However, even though we might learn the song really well (we might be able to practice enough to master Bohemian Rhapsody), if we are asked to then play something else we might not know what to do at all. We go back to almost beginner-like status.

Thus, simply practicing is a foolhardy approach to learning. Even if we deliberately focus on a certain task to avoid distraction and focus on a particular skill set then it might only help us for one particular learning.

For example, it might help us in repeating a language phrase correctly but it won’t help us in figuring out how to create our own song.

And to think that repeating something enough times (say in 10,000 hours), even with focus, will then guarantee you to be really good at it is also highly subjective. People take different amounts of time, have different levels of ability, and different distractions and environments around them.

It’s far too simplistic to say that practicing enough will lead you to greatness. It might lead some, but not others.

A final issue is in how assuming deliberate practice of a certain amount of hours will be needed until mastery. It leads towards a more procrastinating mindset even when it isn’t meant. It allows the comfort of thinking we just need to invest lots of time, rather than leading us to be as resourceful as possible with limited time.

When we have less time to play with and lots of goals to accomplish we are forced to think smarter about what is necessary and what isn’t. Deliberate practice just leads us to assume that we just need to practice more and it will all be fine in the end. We could be more productive with less time if we were focused on knowing we had to ‘fine tune’ our art as much as possible.

So, What Do We Need Instead Of Deliberate Practice?

It’s more of a case of what we should do ALONGSIDE deliberate practice, and not to assume simply focusing on something deliberately will lead towards improvement.

Don’t get us wrong, we’ll say again, deliberate practice is useful (it is one of the 5 key techniques to becoming super adaptable). It’s the difference between mindless practice running on autopilot and mindful practice where you consistently analyze what you are doing right or wrong so you adjust and adapt. 

However, we won’t be able to deliberately practice well if we don’t consider how we also bring variation to the game.

Variation is key to keeping our brain from falling into autopilot.

Variation keeps us sharp, but not in a focused sense (which might be useful for learning logical tasks that just need repetition), but for varied tasks where you don’t know what is coming.

Think of it this way.

Let’s say you have a neighbor who is like clockwork. They get up each day and spend 3 sessions of one hour each practicing golf in their net outside in their garden.

Now excusing how annoying it might be for the neighbors, they would tend to be very focused and motivated to repeat the action each day in their quest to improve. Their consideration is for their craft, not for their neighbors.

Now, does this person improve? Of course, they do in some ways. Their ‘swing’ might improve, their connection with the ball, their ability to analyze what they are doing well, and so on. But do they improve in other rounded ways? Likely not.

The situation is still largely the same each time. It’s deliberate and focused practice. They will surely be thinking about how to adjust their swing and so forth, but it doesn’t help them deal with a windy day in a bunker or a blind shot from the edge of a lake where they can’t even see the flag.

So, let’s say they deliberately practice now through playing matches instead. They get a varied approach and different situations to deal with.

Will they now improve? Yes, of course. The more times they face a similar situation they will likely have the tools in the draw to deal with it.

Deliberate and repeated practice does help, but it’s the amount of variety that really counts towards our ability to adapt and adjust accordingly.

You see, maybe they’ve played on that course many times. Maybe they are comfortable with it. Maybe it’s just a friendly round and not a tournament with many people watching.

Even if their ball lands in different places and their shot each time is slightly different, there might be other familiar conditions that keep them in the same pattern of thinking, which doesn’t challenge them to adapt.

They will have to consider something that isn’t what they are used to at some point though. As conditions change we need to try and match those changing conditions with our practice.

This is why we need to adapt with varied repetition.

How Varied Repetition Helps Us Learn Better

It’s easy to say this for something like a sport, but how about for something different. How about reading a book.

We often read books to obtain new information, but how much do we really retain, and how often do we make sure we understand the context? Do we read the book again after, in a different way? Did we miss something from the first time?

There are a few people who can fly through books and understand the vast majority of what they take in (their retention percentages may be higher than average). Yet, even with these brights sparks, if they were to only read and not implement after then that infiltrated knowledge would at some point leave them.

The vast majority of us don’t actually have high retention rates at all, and it is something that needs to be deliberately practiced itself with focused, yet varied, attention.

For the vast majority of us, when we read something we tend to read in a passive mode simply because we are not actively thinking about how we digest the information. We do so because passive, autopilot reading is easier and more relaxing than deeply analyzing what we read or how it can relate to our life.

We could wake ourselves to a more focused deliberate practice and retain more, yet we would still be reading in the same linear way, only a bit more focused on what we take in.

To truly activate our minds to be challenged about what it is infiltrating we might find different ways of reading it, ensure we read a varied amount of sources on the subject, and join reading communities to discuss ideas.

When we vary the information we take in and ensure our minds are actively aware (when it is not the same expected outcome all the time), then we find we take more in, plus we have more stimulus to draw upon for allowing our imagination to come up with new ideas ourselves.

We Need To Varied Repetition To Open Up Our Creativity

Going back to learning a musical instrument. If you were to play the same song over and over then you might well master it, but can you adapt the song to your own? Can you play in different styles or is that way out of your comfort zone?

With reading a book, can we create our own ending or apply the techniques we learned immediately to our lives, or will we just drift off back into ‘learning but not really doing’ mode?

If we were asked to repeat what happened in a book we read 2 months ago would be able to recollect it? Or a song we learned years ago? Our memories are attached to our imagination in the sense that we think in images. When we build visual memory places in our minds we can remember facts from years ago that others can’t.

When we learn with varied repetition we force our minds to stay alert as we don’t know what is coming next, and we open up the same channels that support visual learning and memory.

If we just learned a song on the guitar through following tabs and not trying to create our own connections (or versions) of that song then we would likely find it hard to recollect or improvise. We might be able to repeat it if we started from the beginning, but would likely stumble to pick it up at a random place or continue on after making a mistake.

It’s not just remembering either. It’s utilizing that counts. We could practice something over and over again and not push ourselves to the next level simply because we didn’t really take the lessons in by implementing them.

Let’s say you watched a video on how to build a toaster from parts but you only followed one example. Then you suddenly had one problem that wasn’t suggested in the video (let’s say the video cut out a step ‘deliberately’). Now you need to think laterally and come up with a solution that isn’t there in front of you.

If you are used to trying new things, getting out of your comfort zone, having different challenges you have to adapt to then you would likely fill in the gaps, if all you did was practice by being focused and following steps then you wouldn’t.

We Need Active Practice That Is Quality, Not Just Quantity

Let’s go back to reading books again. Sure, some books are designed to just be passively read (fiction novels and such), but any book is really an opportunity for you to expand your mind and imagine your own scenario. That activates your mind to consider different options.

Books aimed around building knowledge and skills should be actively read too, where we stop and consider points and chapters and how to apply the principles to our life, try to do so, read over again in a varied pattern, and so on. 

Active reading takes a lot longer than passive reading but for the purpose of developing skills and knowledge from reading books, it really is the only way.

The irony in the 10,000 hours myth is that people talk about how much time it takes to really learn something. It leads people to believe all they have to do is practice over and over, cutting corners to ‘fill in’ the hours, rather than learn well.

For example, passive reading is quicker so people passively fly through it instead, but by doing so they may have read it quicker but also have just wasted that time as they haven’t really engaged with the content of a book (to really take it in and visualize how it can be applied to their life), so they will likely soon forget it anyway.

It just becomes a waste of time rather than hours that add to proficiency. This is why varied repetition is so important with deliberate practice.

You see, repetition helps at first, but it also leads to a point where the initial drive and motivation fades, and then to keep our motivation going we need a change (i.e. varied repetition).

If we don’t change our practice methods then we are only more likely to try and read for readings sake.

Passive reading may be quicker, but achievements should not be quantifiable when we are truly trying to become a master of something.

You might have people who brag about reading 100’s of books a year. but have learned no adaptable skills that will help them utilize the information towards their lives better. Or people who say they’ve been to 100’s of countries with flags to prove it, yet don’t know the first thing about each countries culture as they weren’t there long enough to really take it in.

It really doesn’t matter how much of something you have or haven’t, it’s always the quality of what you do, the variety, and the ability to think more abstractly through active learning that will help you get further than others.

The Takeaway

We live in a world today that seems obsessed with numbers, counts and followers, so it’s not surprising that such routine following suggestions are out there, and that people fall for them, but if you really want to deliberate practice effectively, then forget about the number of hours and just get lost in the flow of active learning instead.

You mind will thank you for it and you will be happier, more motivated, and more versatile in life as a result.