Chapter 6 - Principles of Deliberate Practice in Everyday Life 

Studies

• After a singing lesson, the amateurs were happy but not the professionals because they viewed this session as a means of improving their singing, so they were focused
• The very best bee spellers had the superior ability to remain committed to studying despite the boredom and the pull of other more appealing activities

Key Terms

• Engage: consciously developing and refining your skills
• 3 Fs: focus, feedback, fix it
• Willpower: a very situation-specific attribute
• Social motivation: motivation linked with the approval and admiration of others and is one of the strongest forms of extrinsic motivation

General Information

• A good teacher should be accomplished in the field
• A good teacher should have some skill and experience in teaching that field
• It’s important to question a prospective teacher about practice exercises
• If you find yourself at a point where you are no longer improving quickly or at all, don’t be afraid to look for a new instructor
• Learning to engage is one of the most powerful ways to improve the effectiveness of your practice
• American swimmer Natalie Coughlin would pass her time swimming daydreaming but when she started to use the time spent swimming to improve her form, she started seeing improvement
• Long-distance runners amateurs tend to daydream while elites remain attuned to their bodies so they can find the optimal pace and make adjustments to maintain the best pace throughout the whole race
• Shorter training sessions with clearer goals are the best way to develop new skills faster
• You should make sure you get enough sleep so that you can train with maximum concentration
• By listening to the same dialogue over and over, people improve their ability to understand English more quickly
• We can only form effective mental representations when we try to reproduce what the expert performer can do, fail, figure out why we failed, try again, and repeat over and over again
• Successful mental representations are tied to actions
• Extended practice aimed at reproducing the original product will produce good mental representations
• The best way to move beyond a plateau is to challenge your brain or your body in a new way
• When you reach a plateau, it’s only one or two components of that skill, not all of them, that are holding you back
• You need to find a way to push yourself a little to figure out where your sticking points are
• There is no evidence for the existence of general willpower that can be applied to any situation
• There is no evidence for the existence of individual genes that determine willpower
• Anyone who hopes to improve their skill in a particular area should devote 1h or more each day to practice which can be done with full concentration
• To maintain your motivation, you can either strengthen the reasons to keep going or weaken the reasons to quit
• When pursuing a goal, you should keep general physical maintenance by getting enough sleep and keeping healthy
• You can’t maintain concentration for much longer than 1h
• Both your body and your mind habituate to practice
• While athletes get acclimated to the particular type of pain associated with their sport, they do not get acclimated to pain in general
• Once you have practiced for a while and can see the results, the skill itself can become part of your motivation
• You need to believe that you can succeed
• When future experts in different domains were young, their parents would use various strategies to keep them from quitting (lying about the time it took to run a 100m as if he had improved)
• To sustain social motivation, you should surround yourself with people who will encourage, support and challenge you in your endeavours
• You can put together a group of people all interested in the same thing and use the group’s shared goals as extra motivation
• You should break down long-term targets into a series of levels
• There is no reason not to follow your dream