{"id":36,"date":"2026-04-18T16:31:18","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T16:31:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/feyro.blog\/home-2\/?p=36"},"modified":"2026-04-21T03:26:06","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T03:26:06","slug":"the-beginners-guide-to-deliberate-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/feyro.blog\/home-2\/the-beginners-guide-to-deliberate-practice\/","title":{"rendered":"The Beginner\u2019s Guide to Deliberate Practice"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Basketball: Let’s look at an example Aubrey Daniels once shared. One player, Player A, shoots 200 practice shots, while Player B takes only 50.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 Now, Player B fetches his own shots, might dribble a bit aimlessly, and takes a few breaks to chat with friends. Player A, though, has someone else there to retrieve the ball after each attempt. This colleague also keeps track of every shot made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 If a shot misses, they record exactly how it went wrong\u2014too short, too long, left, or right\u2014and Player A reviews these results every ten minutes during practice. So, to say their hour of practice was equal would hardly be right.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If this is how they typically practice, and they both started out with the same skill level, who would you predict would be the better shooter after just 100 hours on the court?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hogan, you know, he really picked apart the game of golf, trying to figure out how to ace every single bit of it. He was one of the first, for instance, to actually map out specific distances for each of his clubs. And when he played a course, he\u2019d really dig into it, using trees or those sand bunkers as clear markers to nail down the exact distance for every shot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He wrapped up his career with nine major championships<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

 putting him fourth on the all-time list. Back in his heyday, other golfers just put his incredible run down to “Hogan’s secret.” Nowadays, though, folks who study this kind of thing have a different name for his intense way of getting better: deliberate practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, what exactly is this “deliberate practice” we’re talking about?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s a particular way of practicing, one that\u2019s really intentional and well-thought-out. Unlike just going through the motions, which can happen with regular practice, deliberate practice demands your full attention. It’s always done with a very clear aim: to get better at something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 Think about Ben Hogan, meticulously rebuilding every tiny part of his golf swing\u2014that was deliberate practice in action. He wasn’t just hitting balls; he was fine-tuning his craft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, unlike just mindlessly repeating things, deliberate practice demands your sharpest focus and is always aimed at a clear goal: getting better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Staying focused, actually, is the trickiest part of deliberate practice. When you\u2019re first starting out, just getting yourself to show up and do the work is huge. But after a bit, it\u2019s easy to start missing those little mistakes and just let daily chances to improve slip by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s because our brains naturally turn things we do repeatedly into automatic habits. Take tying your shoes, for instance: when you first learned, you really had to concentrate on every single step. But now, after doing it countless times, your brain just runs through that whole sequence without you even thinking about it. The more we do something, the less we actually pay attention to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mindless activity? That’s really the opposite of deliberate practice.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

tricky thing about doing the same thing over and over again is that we start taking progress for granted. It\u2019s so easy to just assume we’re getting better just by racking up more experience. But what\u2019s really happening is we’re often just cementing our current habits, not actually making them better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saying that getting better takes focus and effort sounds pretty obvious, right? But what does this “deliberate practice” really look like when you put it into action? Let’s dive into some examples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, how about some actual examples of deliberate practice?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a great one I always think of, from Geoff Colvin\u2019s book, Talent is Overrated. In it, Colvin talks about how Benjamin Franklin really worked on honing his writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a teenager, young Ben Franklin actually got some flak from his dad about his writing skills not being up to snuff. Now, most teens might have just shrugged that off, but Ben, he took his father’s words to heart and decided he was going to get better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He started by tracking down some of the finest writing of his time<\/strong>, in various publications. Then, he’d go through each piece, sentence by sentence, and jot down what every line truly meant. After that, he\u2019d try to rewrite the whole article in his own style, only to then compare his version against the original. Each time, as he put it, “I discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.” It wasn’t long before Franklin figured out his vocabulary was a real bottleneck for his writing, so he really zeroed in on building that up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You’ll notice a common thread in deliberate practice, a kind of pattern: you start by dissecting the big picture into smaller pieces. Then you figure out where you’re struggling, try out different approaches for those specific parts, and finally, weave all that new learning back into the larger skill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let’s look at a few more examples.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cooking: There\u2019s Jiro Ono, the incredible chef from the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, who runs an award-winning sushi place in Tokyo. He’s spent his entire life perfecting sushi, and he demands the same devotion from his apprentices. They have to master one tiny element of making sushi at a time\u2014things like how to properly wring out a towel, how to handle a knife just so, or precisely how to slice the fish. One apprentice, for instance, spent a decade under Jiro\u2019s tutelage before he was even allowed to cook the eggs. Every single step, no matter how small, is taught with incredible precision and care.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Basketball: Let’s look at an example Aubrey Daniels once shared. One player, Player A, shoots 200 practice shots, while Player B takes only 50.  Now, Player B fetches his own shots, might dribble a bit aimlessly, and takes a few breaks to chat with friends. Player A, though, has someone else there to retrieve the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/feyro.blog\/home-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/feyro.blog\/home-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/feyro.blog\/home-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feyro.blog\/home-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feyro.blog\/home-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/feyro.blog\/home-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97,"href":"https:\/\/feyro.blog\/home-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions\/97"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/feyro.blog\/home-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feyro.blog\/home-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feyro.blog\/home-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}