Tag / deliberate practice

by Nathan Coumbe

What skill have you developed in the last five years?

For most of us, I’d bet it’s something like this:

“In the last five years, I’ve gotten really good at reading and sending emails and instant messages. But also, I’m really good at going to meetings.”

Not exactly skills you can sell when you’re looking for your next gig, are they?

For those of us who don’t make or sell tangible products for a living, skills are all we have to trade for money. But the nature of knowledge work means more of us are developing fewer skills the longer we’re in our careers.

We’re spending more and more of our time talking about work rather than doing work. We’re building fewer things and completing fewer projects.

AI is only exacerbating the problem, as we outsource more of our making and thinking to AI chatbots (and getting worse outcomes as a result).

Without projects that we do ourselves—without making things that challenge us to learn—we’re deskilling ourselves. And as a result, we’re making ourselves less marketable in the workforce.

The best time to develop a new skill was five years ago. The next best time is today.

by Nathan Coumbe

Deliberate practice and writing

Deliberate practice is essential for developing thinking and writing skills.

But how do you do that when it seems like such a nebulous skill to develop?

You practice by extracting the gist of an idea and writing it down in your own words. Then do it again tomorrow.

Now you’re a writer.

by Nathan Coumbe

Make an exercise out of the hard parts

Something I learned to do as a musician was the idea of “deliberate practice.”

What this meant for me—like when I was learning a concert snare drum solo—was to take individual measures or a small group of measures, and turn them into exercises.

Examples:

  • A difficult passage that had a hard dynamic transition or sudden change
  • A complicated rhythm I needed to drill before I could play it

I would take these passages, slow them down, get them perfect, and work my way up to “normal” playing speed. Then I would add back in the music that surrounded these difficult sections.

This is how I was able to learn difficult music.

There’s a lesson to be learned here for every aspect of life.

Doing the things you can already do easily won’t make you any better at anything.

You’d got to practice the hard parts until you can get them right.

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