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Deliberate practice is a specific, highly effective, multi-step technique for training skills. The steps in deliberate practice are: identify one’s weaknesses, set firm stretch goals to improve them, practice with full effort and concentration, gather and digest feedback about one’s performance, and repeat.
Deliberate Practice Quotes in Grit
The Grit quotes below are all either spoken by Deliberate Practice or refer to Deliberate Practice. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 7: Practice
Quotes
Ericsson generally finds that deliberate practice is experienced as supremely effortful. As evidence that working at the far edge of our skills with complete concentration is exhausting, he points out that even world-class performers at the peak of their careers can only handle a maximum of one hour of deliberate practice before needing a break, and in total, can only do about three to five hours of deliberate practice per day.
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Gritty people do more deliberate practice and experience more flow. There’s no contradiction here, for two reasons. First, deliberate practice is a behavior, and flow is an experience. Anders Ericsson is talking about what experts do; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is talking about how experts feel. Second, you don’t have to be doing deliberate practice and experiencing flow at the same time. And, in fact, I think that for most experts, they rarely go together.
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Each of the basic requirements of deliberate practice is unremarkable:
• A clearly defined stretch goal
• Full concentration and effort
• Immediate and informative feedback
• Repetition with reflection and refinement
But how many hours of practice do most people accomplish that checks all four of these boxes? My guess is that many people are cruising through life doing precisely zero hours of daily deliberate practice.
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Deliberate Practice Term Timeline in Grit
The timeline below shows where the term Deliberate Practice appears in Grit. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 7: Practice
Ericsson argues that experts improve through “ deliberate practice .” They identify their weaknesses, then try to improve them by setting specific stretch goals—meaning...
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Anyone can use deliberate practice to improve. For instance, Benjamin Franklin became a better writer by repeatedly trying to recreate...
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Duckworth teamed up with Ericsson to try and understand whether deliberate practice was the key to success at the National Spelling Bee. Spellers practiced in many ways,...
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...of automatic, spontaneous, total concentration known as flow. Ericsson believes that flow is impossible during deliberate practice , which by definition involves planning and suffering. But Csikszentmihalyi disagrees with Ericsson: when people...
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...people are more likely to experience flow. Of course, they’re also more likely to do deliberate practice . But this makes sense—they practice in order to improve their skills, and they experience...
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Most of the world-class experts Duckworth has interviewed say that deliberate practice is extremely difficult. But many think it’s a positive experience anyway. According to Duckworth’s spelling...
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Duckworth identifies three key steps people must take to benefit from deliberate practice and achieve flow. First, people have to follow the science. They must define specific stretch...
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What’s more, people must make deliberate practice into a habit. If possible, they should do it at the same time and place...
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People should also try to change their experience of deliberate practice . The swimming coach Terry Laughlin pointed out that swimmers can make practice more pleasurable...
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