Saturday morning, November 22nd. Watching someone meticulously work through guitar exercises they hate while their roommate who just plays songs for fun somehow sounds better after the same amount of time.

The Deliberate Practice Gospel

Since Anders Ericsson's research was popularized (and somewhat misrepresented) in books like Outliers, we've accepted a specific story about expertise: Real improvement requires deliberate practice. Work at the edge of your ability. Do the uncomfortable drills. Focus on weaknesses. Track metrics. The person casually dabbling is wasting time. The person doing systematic, focused practice is building expertise.

This framework has colonized how we think about skill development. Language learning apps force you through systematic drills. Coding bootcamps emphasize algorithmic problem sets over building things. Music teachers assign scales and exercises before letting you near actual songs. Fitness culture celebrates structured programming over just moving in ways you enjoy.

The message is clear: If you're having too much fun, you're not learning efficiently. Real growth happens in the uncomfortable zone between what you can do and what you can't. Deliberate practice is discipline, structure, and measurement. Casual practice is indulgence, unfocused, and ineffective.

This sounds scientific. Evidence-based. Sensible. And deliberate practice does work—for certain narrow contexts. But watch what actually happens to people who follow this advice religiously versus people who ignore it, and a strange pattern emerges.

Thesis: The deliberate practice framework, as commonly understood and applied, makes most people worse at skill development. It strips away the intrinsic motivation that drives volume and experimentation, replacing it with joyless grinding that leads to burnout and plateaus. The person doing deliberate practice drills often quits or stagnates while the person who just does high volume of the thing they enjoy mysteriously gets better. For most skills, most of the time, enjoyable volume beats structured suffering.

What Deliberate Practice Actually Promised

Let's be clear about what the research actually showed before it got weaponized into productivity advice:

Ericsson's Research Context

What Ericsson studied: Elite performers in highly structured domains—classical musicians at conservatories, chess grandmasters, expert typists. Domains with:

  • Clear, objective performance metrics
  • Established teaching methods refined over centuries
  • Expert coaches providing immediate feedback
  • Competitive environments requiring peak performance
  • Performers dedicating their entire lives to singular pursuits

What Ericsson found: In these specific contexts, the best performers engaged in a particular kind of practice—highly focused work on specific weaknesses with immediate expert feedback, at the edge of their current abilities. This was distinct from both performance (playing concerts) and mindless repetition.

What this research didn't claim:

  • That deliberate practice is the only path to expertise
  • That it works the same way across all domains
  • That intrinsic motivation doesn't matter
  • That you should do deliberate practice if your goal isn't elite performance
  • That deliberate practice is more important than total volume

The Popularized Distortion

What the pop productivity world did with this:

  • Took findings from elite performance in narrow domains
  • Generalized them to all skill development
  • Stripped out the importance of intrinsic motivation and total volume
  • Sold deliberate practice as a method anyone can apply to anything
  • Framed it as more efficient than high-volume practice
  • Made it sound like the systematic approach always beats the enjoyment-driven approach

The result: A generation of people trying to apply classical music conservatory training methods to learning programming, writing, languages, design, and every other skill. Treating every learning journey as if the goal is solo piano performance at Carnegie Hall.

What Goes Wrong With Deliberate Practice

When normal people apply deliberate practice frameworks to most skills, several things consistently break:

It Kills Intrinsic Motivation

Deliberate practice is, by definition, not fun. The whole point is working at the edge of ability where things are difficult, uncomfortable, and frustrating. You're focusing on weaknesses rather than strengths, drilling fundamentals rather than doing the enjoyable parts.

For elite performers in competitive domains, this works because:

  • External motivation is massive (prestige, career, competition)
  • They've already selected for people with exceptional intrinsic interest
  • The practice is time-limited and leads to performance opportunities
  • Expert coaches make the practice more effective and bearable
  • The payoff is clear and valuable

For normal people learning skills, this fails because:

  • External motivation is often weak (hobby, casual interest, vague career benefit)
  • They haven't selected for exceptional interest—they're just trying to learn something
  • The practice is indefinite with no clear endpoint
  • They lack expert coaches (watching YouTube videos isn't the same)
  • The payoff is distant and uncertain

What actually happens: The person starts with genuine interest. Deliberate practice drills make it unpleasant. Interest wanes. They push through for a while using discipline. Discipline eventually fails because humans can't maintain discipline indefinitely for things they don't enjoy. They quit.

The deliberate practice framework takes something they enjoyed and turns it into homework. Then it's surprised when they stop doing it.

It Trades Volume for "Efficiency"

The deliberate practice narrative emphasizes efficiency: Twenty minutes of focused, deliberate practice is better than two hours of casual dabbling. Quality over quantity. Work smarter, not harder.

This sounds appealing. Who wants to spend more time when you could spend less time and get better results?

But it misses something critical: Volume is how most people actually get good. Not because each repetition is optimally efficient, but because:

  • High volume means you encounter more edge cases and variations
  • High volume gives you time to internalize patterns unconsciously
  • High volume lets you experiment and discover what works
  • High volume builds automatic fluency that conscious practice can't

The person doing "inefficient" high-volume practice:

  • Spends way more total time with the skill
  • Encounters much more variation
  • Experiments more because they're not following a rigid program
  • Builds deeper pattern recognition through exposure
  • Actually enjoys it so they maintain consistency

The person doing "efficient" deliberate practice:

  • Spends less total time (because it's unpleasant, so they minimize it)
  • Practices in more structured but narrower ways
  • Follows the program rather than experimenting
  • Burns out faster because it's not enjoyable
  • Often quits before reaching the volume where breakthroughs happen

The supposed efficiency is false. The deliberate practice person does 30 minutes a day of focused drills for three months then quits. The casual dabbler does two hours a day of enjoyable practice for three years. Who actually gets better?

It Optimizes for Weaknesses Instead of Strengths

Deliberate practice emphasizes working on weaknesses. Find what you're bad at. Drill it systematically. Bring your weak areas up to competence.

This makes sense in certain contexts: Classical musicians need technical proficiency across all aspects of performance. You can't just skip the parts you're bad at.

But for most skills, the strength-based approach dominates:

  • Your strengths are often what make you distinctive
  • Building from strengths is more motivating
  • Many domains let you specialize around what you're good at
  • Weaknesses often don't matter as much as you think

Example: Programming

Deliberate practice approach: "I'm weak at algorithms. I'll grind LeetCode problems for an hour every day. It's not fun, but I need to fix this weakness."

Strength-based approach: "I'm good at building user interfaces and understanding user needs. I'll build lots of projects that play to these strengths. When I need an algorithm, I'll learn it in context or collaborate with someone who's better at it."

What typically happens: The deliberate practice person burns out on algorithm drills and quits. Or they get mediocre at algorithms but never builds the portfolio and practical experience that actually leads to opportunities. The strength-based person builds a bunch of things, develops a distinctive style, and gets work based on what they're actually good at.

The deliberate practice obsession with weaknesses makes you mediocre at everything instead of excellent at something.

It Mistakes Teaching Method for Learning Method

Much deliberate practice advice comes from teachers describing how they teach. Music teachers assign scales. Language teachers assign conjugation drills. Fitness trainers program structured progressions.

This creates a false inference: "Expert teachers use these methods, therefore these methods must be optimal for learning."

But teaching is different from learning:

  • Teachers need standardized methods that work across many students
  • Teachers have limited time, so they assign homework for practice they can't supervise
  • Teachers need legible progress metrics (can you play this scale?) even if they're not the most important metrics
  • Teachers operate in formal contexts (schools, lessons) where systematic approaches are expected

What this misses:

  • The most effective learning often happens through self-directed exploration
  • Different learners optimize differently
  • Some people need structure; others need freedom
  • The homework assignments might not be how the teacher actually learned

Many expert performers didn't learn via the methods they now teach. They learned through obsessive, high-volume engagement driven by intrinsic interest. Then they became teachers and adopted systematic methods because that's how you teach groups of students with varying motivation levels.

Taking a pedagogy designed for teaching unmotivated students and applying it to your own self-directed learning is backwards.

When Deliberate Practice Actually Works

Deliberate practice isn't always wrong. It works in specific situations:

Highly Structured Domains With Clear Feedback

Classical music, chess, competitive sports—domains where:

  • There's an established body of technique refined over centuries
  • Performance is objectively measurable
  • Expert coaching is available
  • The goal is elite competitive performance

In these contexts, deliberate practice can accelerate improvement over pure volume. But notice: these are exactly the contexts Ericsson studied. The research hasn't actually been validated for most domains.

When You're Already Intrinsically Motivated

If you already love something so much that you want to do high volume anyway, deliberate practice can help you get more from that volume.

The person who already plays guitar three hours a day because they love it might benefit from spending 20 minutes of that on specific technical drills. They're not replacing enjoyment with discipline—they're adding structure to existing volume.

This is very different from the person who thinks deliberate practice will make their 30 minutes of daily guitar drills sufficient to build expertise.

For Specific Performance Contexts

If you're preparing for a particular performance—a presentation, a sports competition, a musical recital—deliberate practice of specific elements makes sense. You know exactly what you need to perform and can drill it.

This is different from general skill development. Preparing for a specific test versus learning a domain. The first suits deliberate practice; the second often doesn't.

What Actually Works Better

If deliberate practice fails for most people in most contexts, what works instead?

High-Volume Practice You Actually Enjoy

The underrated path: Just do a lot of the thing you're trying to learn, in whatever way you find most engaging.

Why this works:

  • You'll actually maintain it because it's enjoyable
  • High volume means you encounter more situations and variations
  • Enjoyment keeps you in a state where you're open to learning rather than grinding through
  • You'll naturally experiment and try things because you're engaged
  • You build pattern recognition through sheer exposure

The person who learns programming by building weird projects they think are fun often ends up better than the person doing structured algorithm problems they hate.

The person who learns Spanish by reading trashy novels and watching telenovelas often ends up more fluent than the person doing grammar drills.

The person who gets good at writing by writing essays about whatever interests them often develops a stronger voice than the person doing systematic prose exercises.

Directionally Correct, High Repetition

You don't need perfect practice. You need practice that's directionally correct and high volume.

Directionally correct means: You're doing roughly the right thing, getting some feedback loop telling you whether you're on track, and iterating based on that. You don't need expert coaching or perfect technique.

High repetition means: You do it a lot. Not in short, optimized bursts, but in long, messy sessions where you actually get to experience the full context of the skill.

Example: Learning to write.

Deliberate practice approach: Study sentence structure. Do exercises on specific elements. Get expert feedback on every paragraph. Write very deliberately with high focus on craft.

Directionally correct, high-volume approach: Write a lot. Publish some of it. See what resonates. Read authors you admire. Write more. Pay attention to what works. Write more. Gradually internalize patterns through volume.

The second approach is messier, less systematic, and harder to sell as a course. It also produces most successful writers.

Playing in the Zone of What's Possible

Deliberate practice says: Work at the edge of your ability where it's uncomfortable.

High-volume learning says: Work in the zone where things are interesting—sometimes easy, sometimes challenging, following your curiosity rather than systematic skill progression.

Why the second works better for most people:

  • You can maintain much higher volume when it's not always uncomfortable
  • Easy repetitions still build fluency and automaticity
  • Following curiosity means you're exploring broadly, which helps pattern recognition
  • You occasionally challenge yourself naturally when you get interested in something harder
  • The variety keeps you engaged

The guitarist who just learns songs they like moves between easy songs (building fluency) and harder songs (stretching ability) based on interest rather than systematic progression. This unsystematic approach often works better than grinding through a structured program.

Focus on Volume Metrics, Not Quality Metrics

Deliberate practice emphasizes quality: Did you execute the drill correctly? Did you work at the edge of ability? Was the practice efficient?

Better approach for most people: Track volume and let quality emerge from volume.

Examples:

  • Don't worry about perfect Spanish grammar—track how many hours you spent immersed in Spanish
  • Don't agonize over every line of code—track how many programs you built
  • Don't perfect each drawing—track how many drawings you completed
  • Don't refine each essay paragraph—track how many essays you wrote

Quality metrics make you slow down and self-critique. Volume metrics keep you moving and accumulating experience. For most skills, the second approach builds expertise faster because volume is the actual driver.

The Saturday Truth

Here's what the deliberate practice gospel gets wrong:

The research on deliberate practice studied elite performers in narrow domains. It doesn't generalize to most people learning most skills for most purposes.

Deliberate practice kills intrinsic motivation for most people in most contexts. It transforms something potentially enjoyable into homework, which makes people quit.

The supposed efficiency is a trap. Twenty minutes of optimal practice that you maintain for two months is worse than two hours of "inefficient" practice that you maintain for two years because you actually enjoy it.

Volume is how most people actually get good. Not because each hour is perfectly optimized, but because high volume means more exposure, more experimentation, more pattern recognition, more unconscious learning.

The person getting mysteriously good while "just messing around" isn't lucky—they're doing high-volume practice in an enjoyable way. The person grinding through deliberate practice drills is often just building resentment toward the skill.

Here's what to actually do:

Choose enjoyable practice over optimal practice. If you enjoy it, you'll do more of it. Volume beats efficiency for most skills.

Track volume, not quality. Count hours, projects, repetitions. Let quality emerge from quantity rather than trying to perfect each iteration.

Follow curiosity rather than systematic progression. Learn what's interesting rather than what's "next" in the logical sequence. The motivation keeps you practicing.

Play to your strengths instead of grinding weaknesses. Build on what you're naturally good at. Specialization beats well-roundedness in most domains.

Only use deliberate practice if you're already doing high volume. Add structure to existing intrinsic motivation, don't replace enjoyment with structure.

Recognize that most people who got good at things did so through obsessive volume, not systematic drilling. The successful programmer built hundreds of things they thought were fun. The successful writer wrote millions of words, most of them bad. The successful musician played for hours every day because they couldn't put the instrument down.

Accept that getting good takes a long time and a lot of repetition. There's no shortcut. The deliberate practice framework promises efficiency but delivers burnout. High-volume enjoyable practice delivers expertise but requires accepting that it takes thousands of hours.

Most importantly: The person grinding through drills they hate will quit before they get good. The person doing high volume of practice they enjoy will persist long enough for expertise to emerge. Persistence beats optimization. Enjoyment enables persistence.

The uncomfortable truth: The deliberate practice narrative serves people selling courses and coaching. "Follow this structured program" is packageable and sellable. "Just do a lot of the thing you enjoy" is not. But the second approach works better for most people learning most skills.

Stop trying to optimize your practice. Start trying to increase your practice. The volume is what matters. The only practice method that works is the one you'll actually maintain. For most people, that means making it enjoyable rather than efficient.

The person who "wastes time" doing high volume of enjoyable practice will get better than the person who "optimizes" with brief sessions of uncomfortable deliberate practice. Because the first person is still practicing in three years while the second person quit after three months.

Deliberate practice works for people trying to be the world's best classical pianist. For everyone else, just doing a lot of the thing in ways you find enjoyable works better. Volume beats structure. Consistency beats intensity. Enjoyment enables both.

Stop drilling. Start doing. The expertise will emerge from sheer accumulated experience, not from optimal practice sessions.

The person who just enjoys doing the thing gets mysteriously better because volume is the actual secret. There's no mystery—just lots of practice disguised as fun.

The deliberate practice myth: We're sold idea that expertise comes from deliberate practice—focused, uncomfortable, systematic skill-building. But watch who actually gets good. Person grinding deliberate practice often plateaus while person who just enjoys doing the thing gets mysteriously better. Thesis: Deliberate practice framework makes most people worse at skill development. Strips away intrinsic motivation that drives volume and experimentation, replacing with joyless grinding leading to burnout and plateaus. Person doing deliberate practice drills often quits or stagnates while person doing high volume of what they enjoy mysteriously gets better. For most skills, most of the time, enjoyable volume beats structured suffering. Ericsson studied elite performers in highly structured domains with clear metrics, established methods, expert coaches. Found they engaged in highly focused work on specific weaknesses with immediate feedback. Research didn't claim it's only path, works across all domains, that motivation doesn't matter, or that you should do it if not pursuing elite performance. Pop productivity world took findings from elite performance in narrow domains, generalized to all skill development, stripped out importance of intrinsic motivation and volume, sold as efficient method anyone can apply to anything. What goes wrong: Kills intrinsic motivation (deliberate practice not fun by definition, makes skill into homework); Trades volume for "efficiency" (person doing "inefficient" high volume spends more time, encounters more variation, experiments more, enjoys it so maintains consistency vs efficient deliberate practice person spends less time, practices narrowly, burns out faster, quits before breakthroughs); Optimizes for weaknesses instead of strengths (for most skills strength-based approach dominates, strengths make you distinctive, building from strengths more motivating); Mistakes teaching method for learning method (teaching different from learning, teachers need standardized methods, expert performers often didn't learn via methods they teach). When deliberate practice works: highly structured domains with clear feedback, when already intrinsically motivated (adding structure to existing volume), for specific performance contexts. What works better: High volume practice you actually enjoy (maintain it, encounter more variations, stay open to learning, naturally experiment, build pattern recognition); Directionally correct high repetition (roughly right thing with feedback loop and high volume, not perfect practice); Playing in zone of what's possible (work where things interesting, following curiosity rather than systematic progression, can maintain higher volume, builds fluency and automaticity); Focus on volume metrics not quality metrics (track volume and let quality emerge from volume). Deliberate practice studied elite performers in narrow domains—doesn't generalize. Kills intrinsic motivation, transforms enjoyment into homework. Supposed efficiency is trap—optimal practice you quit beats "inefficient" practice you maintain. Volume is how most people actually get good. Choose enjoyable practice over optimal practice. Track volume not quality. Follow curiosity rather than systematic progression. Play to strengths instead of grinding weaknesses. Only use deliberate practice if already doing high volume. People who got good did so through obsessive volume not systematic drilling. Getting good takes long time and lots of repetition—no shortcut. Person grinding through hated drills quits before getting good. Person doing high volume enjoyable practice persists long enough for expertise to emerge. Persistence beats optimization. Enjoyment enables persistence. Stop trying to optimize practice, start trying to increase practice. Volume is what matters. Only practice method that works is one you'll maintain. Person "wasting time" doing high volume enjoyable practice gets better than person "optimizing" with brief uncomfortable deliberate practice. Volume beats structure. Consistency beats intensity. Enjoyment enables both. Expertise emerges from accumulated experience not optimal practice sessions. Person who enjoys doing the thing gets better because volume is actual secret—lots of practice disguised as fun.

Today's Sketch

Nov 22, 2025