Recently, I just finished reading the book "Deliberate Practice", I actually read this book for a long time from the beginning, and the reason in the process may be that many of the content is relatively simple on the surface, but when you actually imagine it from the depths, you will find that many case scenarios can be extended to many practical application scenarios around us.
Whether it is in the student stage or the social stage, practice will always be in our various life scenarios, because in order to continuously improve ourselves, we have to constantly challenge ourselves, and the premise of challenging ourselves is to have sufficient practice.
The book "Deliberate Practice" shows us how to improve one's skills and achieve excellence through purposeful, planned practice. For example:
Definition of deliberate practice
Long-term working memory
Purposeful exercises
The importance of feedback
Mental representations
Stay motivated
Professional guidance
Ongoing challenges
By understanding and applying these key points, we can practice deliberately more effectively, leading to significant progress and achievement in our respective fields.
I've compiled some key notes from the time of reading, and then I'll share with you the highlights of the key information points in the book (some of them):
Chapter 1: Purposeful Exercises
Keep practicing, pushing the limits: Any achievement is achieved through continuous practice, in the process find the right way, from simple to complex, continue to increase the difficulty, persevere, and after a period of time you will reach unexpected heights
Purposeful practice VS naïve practice: Purposeful practice is a clear purpose in the practice process, and it is necessary to constantly achieve this goal and constantly improve the goal and continue to practice.
Naïve practice is just to practice again and again for a certain thing, but you don't think about the purpose of doing it, and you lose your goal in the process.
In our life and work, we also need to set corresponding goals and then continue to practice a certain thing, even if we break through a small point every day, we still continue to work towards the ultimate goal
There are four characteristics of purposeful exercises:
1. Have a well-defined specific goal
2. Purposeful practice is focused
3. Purposeful practice requires feedback
4. Get out of your comfort zone and force yourself to do things you haven't done before
What to do if you encounter a bottleneck:
1. Try to do different things, think of solutions to problems from different perspectives, not to do more difficult things, and refer to how other experienced people solve the problem
2. Doing something requires a certain motivation to assist in forcing you to do it, reward, fame, growth, etc.
Purposeful practice is the need to step out of your comfort zone, set clear goals in a focused way, make a plan to reach them, and come up with ways to monitor progress while maintaining the motivation at all times.
Purposeful exercises are not enough: you need to build your own search structure in the exercises, and the challenges with structure and ideas can make breakthroughs.
Chapter 2: The Brain's Adaptability
The brain is like a muscle, the more you practice, the bigger it gets
As with our physical exercises, the more powerful your part will be if you continue to deepen your impression in one place
For example, if a taxi driver has the ability to navigate the map and continue to train the city road to deepen the impression of the route, the greater the hippocampus in the brain, as if the muscles are exercised, and the more the muscles are exercised, the bigger the muscles will be.
The importance of stepping out of your comfort zone
If you want to make your body and brain continue to evolve, then you have to constantly challenge yourself and persevere, just like running exercise, doing 10 more sets of push-ups every day, running an extra kilometer, is a manifestation of self-breakthrough.
Potentials can be constructed
Traditional Exercises: Not specifically designed to challenge homeostasis, they are based on your inner potential to develop a specific skill and ability, without stepping out of your comfort zone, you can develop it with continuous training
Deliberate practice: not only to discover potential, but also to build it, to challenge our own balance, to step out of our comfort zone, and to force our body and brain to adapt to build such a potential
Chapter 3: Mental Representations
Mental representation leads to outstanding performance
Outstanding Performance: Over time, outstanding individuals have built neural circuits in the brain and created specialized mental representations that allow them to develop a variety of advanced abilities and excel in their professional field.
Mental representations help us make plans
Mental representation can help us to mentally anticipate the implementation plan in advance when we do anything, such as when writing a book, when we see the title of a certain topic, the psychology already has the structure of the whole article when we start formal writing, and this kind of psychology can help us improve the implementation effect of a certain thing plan.
Mental representations help us learn
While using mental representations to enhance our learning, we are also sharpening our skills
Through mental representation, we plan the direction of our next step in advance, and continue to master the operation skills of a certain link in the process
At the same time, when we complete the current task, we also have to plan the next plan, and only after completing the front can we have the back, and it is this step by step that can help us better grasp and complete something
Chapter 4: The Gold Standard
The most outstanding people, the ones who have practiced the longest
Success is the result of countless hours and nights of practice, and in most cases, the more time we spend practicing a skill, the higher our attainments.
What is deliberate practice
The difference between deliberate practice and other types of purposeful practice: Deliberate practice is usually reflected in a field that has been reasonably developed, such as diving, dance, chess, etc., and a colleague has a tutor who can give you practice assignments.
Deliberate practice is also a purposeful practice that knows in what direction to develop and what goals to achieve
How to apply the principle of deliberate practice
If deliberate practice can be practiced in your industry and field, then you should practice deliberately, and if not, you should use the principle of deliberate practice as much as possible.
1. Find the best people: Find objective and reproducible metrics to judge and select the best people.
2. Look for the differences between the outstanding person and others: Look for ways to judge how he behaves differently from others, and from a practice point of view, these differences are the methods we need to learn.
3. Find a good mentor: The best way to do this is to find a good mentor at any given time, as he can help avoid unnecessary pitfalls and points that you can't find.
The 10,000-hour rule:
If you want to become an outstanding person in a certain field or industry, you must have passed a long period of practice and perseverance, usually 10,000 hours as a benchmark, of course, this is not definitely an average level for everyone in all fields.
Chapter 5: Applying the Principle of Deliberate Practice in Your Work
Ace Training Program:
By deliberately practicing the principles, you can find more outstanding people and masters in a certain field in a certain industry, and let them train those who want to improve, find benchmarks, and improve the ability of the entire organization.
Make practice part of your routine:
Three Wrong Thoughts:
1. Mentality is very important, don't easily say no to yourself, this will only make you lose at the starting line
2. If we practice in exactly the same way in a certain field, we will definitely only keep ourselves in the same place
3. If you want to improve, you must find the right way, if you don't improve, it's not that you don't have talent, but that you don't practice with the right way
Train the Medic with the Ace Training Method:
In the deliberate practice, a case library of various cases in a certain field is established in advance, so that the students can make on-site diagnoses and suggestions based on a certain case, and give feedback on the spot, which can effectively improve the students' subsequent breakthroughs in a certain field.
Committed to traditional methods of transferring knowledge
It is easier to impart knowledge than to train skills, and in the industry and the market, we should master practical skills rather than pure theoretical knowledge.
Work on new ways to improve your skills
1. Identify who the experts are: make judgments based on case results and data
2. The importance of timely feedback: Obtaining the latest results in time during the implementation process and making optimization suggestions can improve my real skills
3. Psychological representation of outstanding people: be able to preset unpredictable unexpected situations in the implementation process and make flexible adjustments before proceeding
Chapter 6: Applying the Practicable Principles in Your Life
Find a good mentor
How to find a good mentor: A mentor can only guide you to the heights of them or the outstanding students before them;
In the process, once you find that you can no longer upgrade and move forward, immediately change to a higher-level mentor.
Focus and commitment are crucial
If you're wandering or doing something relaxed, and it's just for fun, you're probably not going to improve.
Shorter connections, better concentrations: Setting clear goals and shortening the time spent in practice sessions is the best way to move up to new skill levels more quickly
What to do without a mentor
With the three F's, create an effective mental representation
Three Fs: Focus, Feedback, Correction
We can only create effective mental representations if we strive to replicate the achievements of outstanding people, stop when we fail and think about why we failed.
Crossing the stagnation phase
Address specific weaknesses: When you find that you can't go further in a certain thing or skill, you should review and find out where you are weak in the process, find the problem, and then improve it.
Find new ways to do it: When you find yourself stagnant, try to get back on it in a whole new way
Stay motivated
Weaken the reason for stopping: When we find it difficult to stick to a certain thing, try to change the time and stick to it. If it is too cold to run in the morning and it is difficult to persevere, choose a time period that is more acceptable to your body, such as the evening, and keep it persistent.
Enhance the reasons to move on:
1. Once we practice a certain skill and see results, this is a motivation in itself, such as praise from others, honorary titles, rewards brought by others, etc.
2. When you find it difficult to stick to a goal, you must not give up halfway, first reach an agreement with yourself, return to one of the best states of the process, and when that time comes, you may not give up.
3. Set goals carefully, when practicing a thing, we try to break it down into different small goals, so that it is easier to see the results.
Deliberate practice can create a variety of possibilities, don't think you can't complete, can't achieve this possibility, let yourself stagnate, only boldly to break through, to try to know whether you can succeed in the end!
Chapter 7: A Roadmap to Becoming a Prominent Person
Stage 1: Generate interest
Encouragement from family members, such as siblings who have a certain status in a certain field, can have a certain interest in the practitioner himself, because he or she expects to be praised by his parents or siblings.
Stage 2: Get serious
It can come from the encouragement of parents, and at the same time, it has been found that there is a certain prominence in a certain field, and it has begun to focus on cultivation
Stage 3: Full Engagement
Participate in special skill customization training, and participate in the training and improvement of similar high-end expert activities
The relationship between age and adaptability
As people get older, their skills deteriorate, and practicing a skill after a certain age is certainly not as successful as practicing it at the beginning.
But if it can be practiced and maintained, the human brain will then change the way to practice for the age at that stage, so that there is a certain level of achievement.
Stage 4: Pioneering and Innovative
Every innovator has been working in the industry for a long time and has reached a certain level of achievement and started to break new ground.
The progress of each and every outstanding person is only a major breakthrough in the eyes of an outsider, because the small progress that has not been seen has been seen and it is these small progress that add up to a major leap.
Chapter 8: How to Explain Innate Talent
There are no shortcuts to the current achievements of outstanding people who can be practiced year after year, step by step in the process.
Those who seem to be born with an advantage in a certain area have only had professional practice and natural advantages in one of them, such as high jump, which is relatively easy for players who have practiced bouncing before before practicing it, because they have some practice in bouncing before practicing professional high jump.
And in the natural advantage, people who are taller naturally look more advantageous than people who are shorter
If there is enough effort in the practice of a certain skill, the dimension that distinguishes between the two lies in the application of mental representations, not the relevant IQ
In the overall long run, those who are born with an advantage in one area may be more likely to show their strengths at the beginning of the short term, but in the long run, it will be those who are more diligent in practice who will go further and higher in the long run.
Practice is the only factor that determines someone's ultimate achievement in a particular field or industry, and if genes are at work in it, it will slowly disappear.
Self-fulfilling prophecy: The way we approach others affects their behavior and ultimately their evaluation of themselves. For example, at the beginning, indicating the weaknesses and shortcomings of a certain student in a certain aspect can easily cause the student to think that he is deficient in a certain aspect.
Chapter 9: Creating a Whole New World with Deliberate Practice
The so-called practitioner is a reflection of a person's ability to control his own destiny through practice in his life, so that his life is full of possibilities.
Deliberate practice, the road to excellence, begins under the feet, and becomes a matter of persistence.
This article was originally published on Everyone is a product manager, and it is forbidden to reprint without permission. The title image is from Unsplash and is licensed under CC0.