Mastery or proficiency?
- Philip Brophy
- Mar 27
- 3 min read
Practice, observe and refine • 3 min read
Research cited by Harvard Business Review has shown that musicians over 60 years old who continue deliberate practice for about ten hours a week can match the speed and technical skills of 20-year-old expert musicians when tested on their ability to play a piece of unfamiliar music.
Introduction
We've looked at how being the “master” of a skill is not the be all and end all — that honing the skill is enough to allow us to hold our own in a competitive environment.
In this piece, we’ll look at some other approaches to refine our skills and talents in time-efficient ways.
Deliberate practice
Whether you’ve decided to go down the 20- or 10,000-hour route, if you’re not engaged in deliberate practice, then you’re most likely wasting your hours.
Deliberate practice is not work, and it’s not play. Work is where we exercise the skills we already have, and if you’re playing inside your comfort zone and spending your practice time engaging in routines you already know, then you’re most likely wasting your hours.
On the other hand, deliberate practice is a highly structured activity involving experimenting with new techniques and studying to develop new skills. It can also involve training activities, drills, and exercises.
You’ll likely remember this from when you first learned any set of skills, from picking up the guitar to public speaking to developing management skills. Odds are that you started out with more simple exercises, playing chords, or thinking through case studies.
Structure your approach
Let’s take a look at improving your presentation skills as an example. The next time you have one to deliver, you could use a three-step method to deliberately practice:
Deliver the entire presentation out loud over, and over, and over.
Identify friends or colleagues who will watch some of your rehearsals and offer honest feedback.
Incorporate their feedback to refine the presentation every time you rehearse it.
Try experimentation
When we experiment, we’re engaging in one of the most beneficial forms of deliberate practice. It means that we perform more of our work in the form of experiments. We do things in new ways on a small scale.
This allows us to advance our projects while banking hours for our 20- or 10,000-hour goal.
Data shows that experimentation-oriented companies are four times more likely to achieve 20% or more growth compared to other organisations.
The benefits
You get quick feedback, which allows you to learn, while making improvements. When we see the results of our action, we can adopt these new methods, discard them, or modify them and try again.
Key takeaways
When we’re at work, we engage in the skills we already have and routines we already know, which rarely allows us to move outside of our comfort zones.
By using deliberate practice, we encounter new techniques to experiment with, while developing new skills along the way. Deliberate practice is highly structured and ideally involves training activities and exercises.
We can incorporate deliberate practice into our workplace practices. This allows for workplace experimentation and innovation while facilitating instant feedback.
Think big, act small
Can you work towards mastering a chosen skill?
How about using deliberate practice?
By applying structured practice that pushes you outside of your comfort zone, you can gain real proficiency in a skill by practising consistently, observing by gaining feedback, and refining by incorporating the feedback.
Content sources
Harvard Business Review, Wilson, H.J., A Fast Track to 10,000 Hours of Practice’
Harvard Business Review, Anders Ericsson, K. et al. ‘The Making of an Expert’
Forbes, Dan Schawbel, ‘Josh Kaufman: It Takes 20 Hours Not 10,000 Hours To Learn A Skill’
Forbes, Carmine Gallo, ‘Steve Jobs, Ashton Kutcher, And The 10,000 Hour Rule’
Forbes, David Burkus, ‘Are You Wasting Your 10,000 Hours?’
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