Note - The statements mentioned in such quoted blocks are from the book ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’ by Cal Newport. Rest of the points are based on my understanding from the book.
What is Deliberate Practice?
Deliberate Practice is an approach to work where you deliberately stretch your abilities beyond where you’re comfortable and then receive ruthless feedback on your performance.
Why do we need Deliberate Practice?
There’s a lot of buzz around encouraging people to find their passion and match their work with their passion to eventually find their way to great work. However, when studied closely that advice has not really worked. What has indeed worked is that people should put the career capital, gain skill(s) which are rare and valuable, polish those skill(s) and become so good that they can’t ignore you.
Steps for Deliberate Practice:
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Decide Your Capital Market
There are two kinds of career-capital markets: winner-take-all and auction.
In a winner-take-all market, there’s only one type of career capital available, and lots of different people competing for it.
An auction market, by contrast, is less structured. There are many different types of career capital, and each person might generate a unique collection.
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Identify The Type Of Your Career Capital
After identifying your career-capital market, the next step is to identify the specific type of capital to pursue.
If you’re in a winner-take-all market, there’s only one type of capital that matters.
For an auction market, there’s flexibility. A useful heuristic in this situation is to seek open gates - opportunities to build capital that are already open to you. An advantage of seeking the open gates is that you already have some skills to get started. Once you’ve identified these skills, you just need to keep growing them with deliberate practice to achieve your goals faster.
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Define “Good”
After identifying your career-capital market and specific skills to grow, next step is to set clear goals. Without setting clear goals, your efforts can get incoherent and not help you get the results you desire. Hence, it’s important to define how “good” your skills should get in order to direct your path.
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Stretch and Destroy
This is the most difficult and important step of deliberate practice. Skipping this step can lead to mediocrity and excellence.
Deliberate practice is opposite of enjoyable. It is above all an effort of focus and concentration.
Stretch refers to pushing yourself to go past what’s comfortable in growing your skills.
The other part is embracing honest feedback - even if it destroys what you thought was good.
This is indispensable in getting the harsh feedback back into the loop of stretching and accelerating your skill growth.
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Be Patient
The last step is to give practice this with diligence for a significant time in order to become ingrained and natural.
To get an idea, here’s a summary of the 10,000-Hour Rule mentioned by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 book, Outliers
The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers ave settled on what they believe is tha magic number for true expertise: ten thousant hours.
Translating this (considering 5 hours per day) we get 400 weeks, or 2800 working days.
Dedicating more hours of deliberate practice for developing your career-capital long enough will eventually make you so good that they can’t ignore you.