“What do you do every day to improve that is similar to how a musician practices their scales?” interview question suggested by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross in their book Talent.
Most people do not practice things to get better at them. They just do what they are doing when it comes to it and improve a little bit each time until they hit a plateau. This works for many things in life and allows us to get good enough at most things to the level we need to get by.
But there are many types of activities that simply require more focus and effort than just doing something now and again. Playing a musical instrument, speaking a foreign language, touch typing, writing and reading are some examples of activities where focused practice is essential to even get started. But most people stop practicing even here after they get good enough and never improve beyond a certain point.
There are four approaches you can take to practice.
I ordered them here by how effective they are to help you overcome the limitations of working memory to increase fluency. But the biggest jump is in going from repetitive practice to reflective practice. In fact, reflective practice is something that you can do all the time, purposeful and deliberate practice may not always be an option.
Repetitive practice is when you just try to repeat something many times in sequence to get better at it. For example, when you repeat a word many times to try to remember it or when you study for an exam. This is better than nothing but it has severe limits.
Apart from being boring, simply repeating things over and over does not let you combine things into bigger chunks. It also relies on having some aptitude or prior knowledge. Which is why people often give up when they try to learn something by rote and say “I’m just not very good at it.” But in fact, their attitude should be:
<aside> 💡 It’s not that I can’t learn this, I just haven’t found a way to practice it to learn it.
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But sometimes we don’t even do that much and we just rely on getting better at something by doing it multiple times. We call that experience but we should be cautious about assuming pure experience is enough to continue improving. This can be best summarised by this quote from Stephen Covey (author of the famous book ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’):
<aside> 💬 “experience is overrated. Some people say they have twenty years, when in reality, they only have one year’s experience, repeated twenty times.” How Stephen Covey Changed The Life Of One Young Entrepreneur Through A Single Powerful Phrase (forbes.com)
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Adding reflection to repetition is what makes your practice reflective. That is when you focus on the task you’re trying to practice and try to identify what chunks you could create to reduce the demands on working memory and what are the most effective ways of practicing to develop those chunks.