In his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You author Cal Newport provides compelling evidence that “if you just show up and work hard, you will soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.” That’s a disheartening thought as well as one we all can relate to.
Consider the truth of this idea of “plateauing” when you evaluate your personal experience in sports, playing a musical instrument, video games, or your career. When you first get started, full of energy and the exuberance that comes with initial learning, you find yourself on a wild trajectory that fuels you as you learn and convert new knowledge to improve results. Over time, however, you find yourself grinding for inches of improvement. Most of us will settle and find contentment despite seeing very little further improvement in either efficiency or effectiveness. The attitude becomes apparent when you hear the often quoted “it is what it is”.
So how do we escape the plateau and move beyond? Newport talks about the idea of “deliberate practice” which comes from a study by Anders Ericsson of Florida State University to describe “actively designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance”. It turns out that people who are masters of a particular pursuit spend significant time studying and practicing their craft.
Malcolm Gladwell points to the “10,000 Hour Rule” in his book Outliers. Experts agree that accumulating 10,000 hours is the secret to developing true expertise. Newport discovered studies that point to the additional importance of how those hours are spent. Just spending 10,000 hours doing something will not necessarily take you to the top of your sport or profession.
Deliberate practice is the key. Using chess as an example, those who became grandmasters dedicated almost half of their hours to deliberate practice. Newport further defines this idea of deliberate practice as including the disciplines of “strain and feedback”. Incorporating these ideas into deliberate practice repetitively builds muscle memory which translates to improved performance.
So why not deliberately practice? Turns out playing is more fun and we would rather play than to be uncomfortable practicing with strain and feedback. Newport says, “deliberate practice is the opposite of enjoyable.”
If golf is your hobby, and you are playing at a level that is enjoyable, then you be the judge. If golf is intended to be an enjoyable outing and it is, disregard these ideas. But if we’re talking about your career, a part of your life where improved performance means much more, perhaps we should consider what deliberate practice means for us.
Going back to the definition of deliberate practice, we can’t help but notice the influence and necessity of a teacher or a coach. There is a reason all top athletes have coaches. The top chess players in the world have coaches. And yes, the top salespeople and business leaders also have coaches who can incorporate deliberate practice to help them escape the plateau.
Depending on what it is you do, deliberate practice could consist of role-playing, rehearsals, regular consumption of focused content, and regular coaching meetings with someone who has both expertise in the subject matter and the ability to coach others.
Studies confirm if you just show up and work hard, you will soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better. You must choose deliberate practice to escape the plateau.