Deliberate Practice: What Are We Waiting For?

I’ve been reading Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin and came across an interesting point worth sharing. 

Chapter Five: What Deliberate Practice Is and Isn’t digs into the term “practice” and when talked about we often think of sports and music.  The habitual use of the term in entertainment industries may stop us from thinking of how deliberate practice can be applied to business or science in which Colvin states “we almost never think about practicing”. 

Colvin Explains:

“It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.”

Colvin stresses the point that we may design and practice a particular sport, instrument or business, but without the help of a teacher, mentor or coach very few of us can make a clear, honest assessment of our own performance.

Interesting Point:  

“….most of us, as adults, are just doing what we’ve done before and hoping to maintain the level of performance that we probably reached long ago.  Deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them.”

Application:

“Noel Tichy, a professor at the University of Michigan business school and former chief of General Electric’s famous Crontonville management development center, illustrates the point by drawing three concentric circles, he labels the inner circle “comfort zone”, the middle one “learning zone,” and the outer one “panic zone.”  Only by choosing activities in the learning zone can one make progress.  That’s the location of skills and abilities that are just out of reach.  We can never make progress in the comfort zone because those are the activities we can already do easily, while the panic-zone activities are so hard that we don't even know how to approach them.

Identifying the learning zone, which is not simple, and then forcing to stay continually in it as it changes, which is even harder — these are the first and most important characteristics of deliberate practice.”

My take away is the attempt to continually stay in the learning zone and be acceptant of feedback from someone who can provide clear, honest assessment of my own performance that allows me to get better at what I do.  It’s a good thing I have a willing and able board of directors, mentors and family to help.