Deliberate practice requires pushing beyond your comfort zone subjectively, and immediate feedback objectively. The subjective part depends on the individual’s own discipline, so there’s not much to say about it. But objectively speaking, if immediate feedback isn’t available, deliberate practice simply can’t happen.
So the skills that can usually be developed through deliberate practice are those with clear evaluation standards. Test-oriented education lends itself to deliberate practice because there are standard answers. Music performance and sports also place considerable emphasis on deliberate practice, because in these fields it’s fairly easy to provide feedback whether someone is at a low or a high level. During early-stage training, you can use objective measures—whether the notes are in tune, whether you’re running fast enough—as feedback. At a high level, sports can still rely on hard metrics, while high-level music performance may have entered the realm of aesthetics; even then, a highly accomplished coach can still provide immediate feedback based on experience and tacit knowledge.
But some fields and situations just aren’t so “lucky.” Take my current entrepreneurial venture, for example. I can’t use deliberate practice to improve my entrepreneurial ability because there’s no immediate feedback. After every decision I make and every step I take, I still can’t really tell whether I got it right or wrong. Many decisions can only be judged after a long time has passed and I look back and reflect (and even then, I may still not be able to judge them).
Writing is another example. I feel that objective constraints also make it impossible for me to improve my writing through deliberate practice. When I reread things I wrote a long time ago, I can tell that the writing is pretty awful, which tells me I’ve made progress—but that progress comes from extremely slow accumulation. I imagine that if, after every article I finished, an expert were standing right beside me to tell me immediately what to change and how, I’d improve much faster than I do now. Unfortunately, although I have friends whose writing is far better than mine, various practical considerations make it impossible to bother them constantly for immediate feedback to whip me into shape. So I have no choice but to keep my head down and train on my own.
p.s.:
From the perspective of deliberate practice, the comments everyone leaves here, along with many of the comments in my New Lessons in Psychology, are all precious immediate feedback. So thank you very much for helping me grow ^_^
Note
- This series of short popular-psychology essays and rambling reflections, New Lessons in Psychology, was written back then to accompany content related to Zhichao Wei: New Lessons in Psychology. It was published on the now-closed platform Fantuan, and the original link no longer exists.
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