Unconventional Approaches to Acquire Skills

Skill acquisition is frequently thought of as a difficult process that takes many hours of practice. This is true, but consists of one missing detail. Gaining skill involves a different type of practice. The type of practice required to master a skill effectively is known as deliberate practice. On his blog, Cal Newport profiled an accomplished piano player who described his unusual practice techniques. By using the strategies below he became more skilled than his peers with less practice time:

• Strategy #1: Avoid Flow. Do What Does Not Come Easy.
  “The mistake most weak pianists make is playing, not practicing. If you walk into a music hall at a local university, you’ll hear people ‘playing’ by running through their pieces. This is a huge mistake. Strong pianists drill the most difficult parts of their music, rarely, if ever playing through their pieces in entirety.”
• Strategy #2: To Master a Skill, Master Something Harder.
  “Strong pianists find clever ways to ‘complicate’ the difficult parts of their music. If we have problem playing something with clarity, we complicate by playing the passage with alternating accent patterns. If we have problems with speed, we confound the rhythms.”
• Strategy #3: Systematically Eliminate Weakness.
  “Strong pianists know our weaknesses and use them to create strength. I have sharp ears, but I am not as in touch with the physical component of piano playing. So, I practice on a mute keyboard.”
• Strategy #4: Create Beauty, Don’t Avoid Ugliness.
  “Weak pianists make music a reactive task, not a creative task. They start, and react to their performance, fixing problems as they go along. Strong pianists, on the other hand, have an image of what a perfect performance should be like that includes all of the relevant senses. Before we sit down, we know what the piece needs to feel, sound, and even look like in excruciating detail. In performance, weak pianists try to reactively move away from mistakes, while strong pianists move towards a perfect mental image.”

The strategies can be applied to any area that requires a deep level of understanding to master a complicated subject. In Cal’s profile, he focused on an astute piano player who used deliberate practice to gain a master-status level of skill at the piano. Business owners, students, and any person with the desire to learn a challenging skill can implement deliberate practice fundamentals. The goal of deliberate practice is to work hard, but not necessarily long. The best learners are able to accomplish a skill without sacrificing an inordinate amount of time. By challenging and disrupting flow, the learning rate is able to exponentially increase.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, he makes the claim that to master a skill one needs 10,000 hours of practice. Most of histories greatest legends have been known to practice excessive lengths, but the truly amazing practiced differently. Kobe Bryant, Tom Brady, and Albert Pujols have the ability to dominate the sports that they play by individually outworking their opponents. They do this by applying deliberate practice techniques to master their respective sports.

Albert Pujols doesn’t stand in a batting cage and aimlessly swing all day. He studies film of his mechanics, seeks advice from his coaches, and relentlessly challenges himself to improve his muscle memory. By challenging the assumptions of his muscle memory, he is able to practice more efficiently and learn more about his game. In result, he is known as the best player in Major League Baseball despite leaving my beloved St. Louis Cardinals.

The rules of skill acquisition are not easily interpreted. Any person with the desire and will to learn a skill is capable. The truly amazing are able to efficiently and effectively learn a skill in a short amount of time. They are able to harness the deliberate practice strategies utilized and outlined by the piano player to become so amazing that they cannot be ignored.