i. The Idyllic Cycle of Deliberate Practice
*Ching!*
*Ching!*
*Ching!*
In a dark, cobblestone-laid room about the size of an attic, a shadow-cast blacksmith shone with layers of sweat covering him. He slammed his hammer down to a searing blade. Each strike formed the stubborn metal into the blacksmith’s vision.
You are the blacksmith, and your ideal skill is the blade.
I know this is a cliche analogy. You’ll have to give me some slack. I’m trying! However, it’s a cliche because it’s really accurate.
To get better at something, you must identify what that something is. You find your ideal skill. It doesn’t have to be your childhood passion, instead, you should find something that you find interesting enough to try. If it’s something you find meaningful, that’s even better. This is your blacksmith’s vision—it’s what you’re trying to craft.
Once you have an ideal skill in mind, practice. There’s no shortcut to improvement. You have to put time, effort, and thought into your blacksmith’s vision. As you practice and learn, you should increase the difficulty. Continually practice and find harder things to do.
This is the idyllic (happy) cycle of practice, and you need to take a break from practice.
But before I get to that, let me explain the cycle of practice more.
Summarized, it’s simple:
- Find your ideal skill.
- Practice.
- Increase difficulty.
- Repeat the second and third steps.
Many people get stuck at step 2 when they realize practicing their ideal skill is not easy and requires significant commitment. However, some push through. They start the cycle, and they have consistency.
Moreover, the cycle becomes enjoyable (this is why it’s idyllic). You want to practice, do harder things, and improve. This motivates you to achieve your goals and refine your ideal skill.
It’s fun.
You’re the blacksmith forming your vision, striking it over and over. What could possibly be bad about this?
I don’t think it’s burnout. (Though you should take a break to avoid this too.)
I don’t have a generic pep talk about “don’t feel bad about not being productive” either. (Though there’s merit to this too.)
Nor is there a shortcut to avoid hard work.
When you don’t take a break from practice, something very detrimental happens to your personal growth. To understand what it is and why it’s bad, we need to talk about the Law of Diminishing Returns.
ii. The Law of Diminishing Returns
In economics, the Law of Diminishing Returns states that as you put employ more labor to produce goods, there is a point where the added unit of labor produces less output than the previous unit of additional labor.
Basically, imagine owning a company. The first three employees you hire are critical for business. The first person makes $20,000 for the business, the second generates $30,000, and the third person generates $50,000.
You decide to hire three more people. This time all three make $50,000 for the business.
Still, you enjoy the extra revenue. Again, you hire three more people. However, this time, the first person brings in $40,000, the second person only generates $10,000, and the third person makes $1,000 for you.
This is the Law of Diminishing Returns at work. It looks like this:
Practice works the same way.
In strength training, this is called “newbie gains.” When you first start working out with weights, you have to familiarize yourself with new movements. Once your body learns the new movements, you are able to more easily complete them. This gives the illusion of sudden, large strength increases.
Or, it’s possible that you really do gain muscle more quickly as a beginner, but I’ll leave that to the scientists. In either case, newbies seem to gain much more strength than people who have trained for months or years.
When you first start practicing, you learn the basics of your ideal skill really fast. Furthermore, many things you learn will be core fundamentals. When you go from having no experience at all to knowing the basics, it can seem like a massive improvement even if you haven’t mastered your skill yet. [1]
Eventually, you enter the land of diminishing returns. You’re getting better but at a much slower rate than before.
This is why you need to increase the difficulty of your practice to continually improve. Having a challenge forces you to work harder and adapt, and your skills continue improving at a steady pace.
It would be the equivalent of the business owner optimizing by only recruiting the highest quality workers. He invests in the process to see better returns. [2]
Yet, even when you’re making it harder, there’s a point where your efforts still fail to cause any meaningful change. You make your practice more difficult, but it isn’t more difficult in the right ways. Working harder is good, but it doesn’t fix everything.
You need to learn to target your improvement.
iii. Lazy Brain, Lazy Habits
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman writes about two systems involved in human thinking.
Your first system (System 1) controls intuitive, subconscious thought. System 1 manages visual perception and identification, gives you “gut feelings” about suspicious people, and drives most quick and casual decision-making.
System 2 controls deliberate, conscious thought. It performs mathematical calculations, evaluates English papers, and makes logical deductions. Unfortunately, System 2 is lazy and prefers to leave most mental work to System 1.
The cycle of practice begins in System 2. Initially, you have to do significant work to learn your ideal skill. Think of a beginner pianist who can’t play without constantly monitoring where their fingers are.
As the pianist learns, the movements needed to play become intuitive to her; her muscles automatically know where the next key is.
System 1 takes over as the pianist improves her skills.
Now, this pianist is very consistent. She dedicates three hours per day to practice, and whenever she plays a piece well, she finds another piece that’s harder to play. She becomes a great pianist.
Then she plateaus.
Why? Isn’t she following the cycle of practice: identify, practice, increase difficulty, and repeat?
Look at it as if there are four levels of playing difficulty:
- Easy
- Intermediate
- Hard
- Insane
She went from easy to insane. She does the cycle of practice for so long that she can no longer find pieces that really challenge her. Now, she just picks insane-difficulty pieces and hopes that they are harder. She isn’t searching for other ways to improve.
Practice forms habits in your system 1 overtime, but eventually, these habits are not enough to improve your skills. System 1 is content continuing the same habits. To level up, you have to engage your lazy System 2 and build new, better practice habits.
This requires breaks. [3]
Breaks are necessary for accurate assessment of progress and reanalyzing what doesn’t work. You’re prone to repeat habits that don’t work if you don’t stop and ask, “Is this actually helping me improve?”
Taking a break from people improved my interpersonal skills.
As I write this, the world is still in the COVID-19 lockdown.
When I first heard about social distancing, I desperately wanted to fight it. (Fortunately, I didn’t. I’m safely at home and spreading no germs, so don’t worry.)
I had spent the past two years practicing my social skills every single day. I made friends, and I was confident and happy. For lack of better words, I felt like I had “made it.”
Suddenly, I couldn’t be around the people I loved the most.
This was the BEST thing that could’ve happened to me.
Though my two years of deliberate practice improved my social skills drastically, I had begun plateauing. I formed many great relationships and had friends, but I still felt awkward. I was still awkward with many people, though my conversational skills were great in theory.
To summarize the story, I had developed terrible people-pleasing habits along with my social skills. Conversing was second nature for me, and my conversations became meaningless. I focused on “playing the game” of having conversations that made people like me, and I tried to learn to do that.
As a result, I ignored important conversational skills like honesty, developing and talking about my interests, and forming genuine relationships.
Spending time with myself and reflecting on my old habits is most likely the only way I would’ve recognized this. Otherwise, I would’ve continued playing ridiculous games with people.
Take a break from practice and think about what you need to change in your practice habits. What’s working? What isn’t?
iv. So, Take a Break from Practice
When you do take a break from practice, make sure to use the time well. Rest time is attractive and good. It’s also an easy way to justify laziness. Avoid the trap of “taking a break” because you just don’t want to practice.
Here’s a few ideas about how to have an effective break:
- Spend time away from your ideal skill. Allow yourself to get away from whatever you’re practicing so you can come back to it with a fresh mind. When we’re deep in practice, it’s hard to see anything else. Time will let you come back to your practice habits and ask, “Why was I doing this?” instead of saying “I need to keep doing this.”
- Spend time writing or journaling habits you need to improve. The motive here is to intentionally assess effective and ineffective habits. Note down the things you need to get better at your ideal skill, and think about what practice habits will help you get those things.
- Determine the length of the break wisely. How long does your break need to be? I’m realizing that if I had willingly chose to take a break, it would not have been as long as this lockdown has been. Yet, I have needed every second of every day to really improve my people skills. However, for some ideal skills, a long break might not be necessary. Put consideration into this.
Now, one last step…
Ready?
Take a deep breath, and exhale.
Then, take a break from practice.
Today’s extra content is on some thoughts on self improvement authors that will probably influence how I write in the future. Great read. I have long thought that having no credentials nor training limits how much you can help others “improve.” This is one reason why I’m working towards a Masters in some field of psychology or behavioral science.
QOTD: Have you experienced burnout before? How did it happen?
Footnotes:
- Not everything fits this format. There are terminal skills. For example, if you wanted to learn how to do a handstand and you managed to do it, there’s no point in worrying about “diminishing returns.” You can do a handstand. Go celebrate.
- At this point, you can see the “law of diminishing returns” analogy breaking down a bit. Economics only applies to self improvement to a certain degree. I used this example to help you understand the concept of “take a break from practice” better, not because it’s a perfect analogy.
- You might ask here, “Can’t you just reassess while you continue practicing?” You can. However, if you want to do a good analysis of what practice habits you need to change, you’ll need to dedicate some time to the analysis. This means taking a break, even if it’s a short break.
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