Pretend that you got out of bed one morning feeling disappointed, and you don&#39;t know why.
The first thing to do is facing that negative feeling and not suppressing it. While it may feel uncomfortable for a day, suppressing your emotions will take much longer to overcome.

Coping with  disappointment

Once you've sat with your negative feelings for long enough, doing some mental health hygiene can help to create a more positive mental outlook. <ul><li>Start the day by reading something inspiring or meaningful to help you escape doom-scrolling.</li><li>Find a positive statement and stick it where you can see it.</li><li>Also consider gratitude diaries, exercise, expressive writing, a good night's rest and music.</li><li>Consider what your disappointment will look like 50,000 years from now. </li><li>Imagine yourself from a third-person view.</li></ul>

Acts of mental health hygiene

Sorrow and disappointment are a big part of pandemic life – and England football fans are now feeling them keenly. But there are ways to deal with these distressing emotions

Stashed ideas

Sorrow and disappointment are a big part of pandemic life – and England football fans are now feeling them keenly. But there are ways to deal with these distressing emotions

H ow do you cope with crushing disappointment? Is it better or worse if everyone’s feeling it at the same time? Should you allow yourself those flights of fancy – where your mind disappears into a different outcome – even if you have to come crashing back to real life? These questions, by the way, are about the emotion of disappointment, not just about the football. Because, as <a data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr" href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/apr/24/fit-in-my-40s-after-lockdown-weakling-muscles-lost-for-ever">Arj Thiruchelvam </a>, a coach and lecturer in performance psychology, says, with a clear-eyed sense that few of us are feeling at the moment: “Put it in perspective. Flip the mentality. We’ve got back-to-back semi-final and final appearances in the last three tournaments, 2018, 2019 and last night.” In other words, life, or this green corner of it, at least, has never been more amazing.

So maybe this isn’t about football or any other sporting event, or indeed any particular event. Let’s just pretend you woke up feeling disappointed and you don’t even know why. What should you do?

First, it’s important not to suppress the feeling. Therapists often talk about “living in” or “sitting with” a negative emotion, and it sounds both sensible and obscure – an instruction of which you can see the benefit but have no idea how to enact. Annalisa Barbieri, the Guardian’s agony aunt, however, explains clearly why it can be so powerful not to always look on the bright side. “When I first became a mum and was finding it very overwhelming, I read something about what to do if you think you’re being followed. If there’s nothing you can do to get away from them, turn around and face your attacker. Then at least they lose the element of surprise. It struck me as so brave, and I’ve tried to do it with negative emotions. It can be really uncomfortable for 24 hours, but if you suppress the feelings, that will take a lot longer.”

Psychology with an accent on performance – sports psychology, mainly – tends to take a different tack, emphasising the need to banish negative thoughts and critical self-talk. Nonetheless, for Thiruchelvam, that still begins with “honest self-reflection”, without which you “give power to your weaknesses”.

Once you have sat with your negative feelings for what you have decided is long enough, there are small acts of mental health hygiene that will foster a more positive outlook, helpfully collated by <a data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr" href="https://www.myndup.com/about">Myndup </a>, an online platform of mental health practitioners. Start the day reading something inspiring or meaningful – it doesn’t have to be cheerful, you just need to escape the trammels of doom-scrolling or doom-listening-to-the-radio. Better to choose it the night before, otherwise your day will start with your being unable to find inspiration, and that will make matters worse.

Find a positive statement and stick it where you’ll repeatedly see it. Don’t just pull it off Instagram. I don’t get a lot from “Every morning is a revolution against the darkness”, even though I can see that is technically true, and I like a revolution as much as the next man. In fact, I cannot immediately think of a positive statement that is meaningful for me, but I’m sure you can figure this out. Gratitude diaries, exercise, expressive writing, getting excellent sleep and music are all good for mood enhancement, even – or perhaps especially – if your low mood is down to a particular event.

Feelings of solidarity never harmed anyone, but they almost need to be spoken aloud before you can experience them as togetherness. Otherwise it’s just a load of people walking around making sad eyes at each other. What you need, ideally, is a poet on the case. In fact, there are few situations where a poet is more of a key worker. Ian McMillan, Barnsley FC’s poet in residence: “I always think in geological terms, when something terrible happens; you’re disappointed in the moment, but as soon as you think, well, in 50,000 years … Think like a glacier.”

And if that doesn’t work: “Try and imagine it’s a piece of fiction, so you’re in a cartoon, or an opera. I was doing a poetry gig once, and this fella stood up and said: ‘I’m going to the toilet now, if you say something funny while I’m out, let me know.’ At the time, I was cut to the quick, but if I fictionalised it by putting myself in the third person … I could become a woman, or I could become detective inspector Ian McMillan. McMillan of the Yard is off to do his next case. He doesn’t care what that fella said.”

Without trying to minimise your feelings, you could consider whether or not your disappointment is so keen because you were loading too much on to the event. Let’s be honest, this is about the football: even people who were not that interested in football, people so indifferent that they had rarely watched a match all the way through, were nevertheless hugely invested in Sunday’s final because the event seemed to represent such an important moment in the wider culture. In so many ways, from the <a data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr" href="https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/jun/13/england-players-take-knee-wembley-euro-2020-boos-applause">whole team taking the knee </a>, to Marcus Rashford’s work on child poverty, to Raheem Sterling’s fight against racism, to Harry Kane’s Pride armband, to Gareth Southgate’s progressive patriotism, they were saying, as the campaigner Shaista Aziz - one of the #threehijabis behind this <a data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr" href="https://www.change.org/p/football-association-and-oliver-dowden-sec-of-state-dcms-pm-boris-johnson-ban-racists-for-life-from-all-football-matches-in-england">petition to ban racists for life from football matches </a>– puts it: “We are equals, we demand equality and we stand for equality.”

There was a symbiotic snowball effect between the team’s behaviour and the nation’s powerfully emotional response to it that made it feel as if change was coming. So, clearly, we wanted them to win, but I didn’t care so much whether they won against Italy; I wanted them to win so that good could triumph. And if they had won (against Italy, I mean) the racism surrounding them – from fans booing when they took the knee, to the despicable <a data-link-name="in body link" dir="ltr" href="https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/jul/12/gareth-southgate-racist-abuse-of-england-players-unforgiveable">abuse Sterling, Saka and Rashford received on social media after the match </a>– would have been “completely glossed over”, Aziz says. “At no point should anyone have ever thought that England winning was going to wipe out racism; we were at risk of the government trying to spin it into some narrative of their own glory.”

Instead, we have to confront the reality. Aziz continues: “There’s something very wrong in a country where two hours before kick-off, we’re being told to get behind our boys, and then the minute it ends, they’re suddenly no longer our boys.” This is an inflection point, “an opportunity to advance a conversation about tackling racism and hate”, Aziz concludes. They didn’t have to win to force that moment; it was enough for them to exist as the people they are. Indeed, it wouldn’t even have helped, though winning would have been wonderful for them.

McMillan, incidentally, has already written a poem about this week’s signal disappointment; he went to sleep with his ideas swirling, and woke up to find social media a cesspit of racist abuse, and “the poem in the end compares the fellas to Icarus. They fly too close to the sun, and then we catch them. I tried to make it into a collective act of transcendence.”

To return to the unadorned emotion of disappointment, another way to look at the way you have been feeling since Sunday night’s result, Barbieri explains, is that allowing yourself to feel your disappointment deeply is important because if you numb one of your emotions, you numb all of them. “It’s not like a fuse box, where you can switch off sadness, but still be happy.”

She makes an analogy with music: you can have a favourite bit of a song, but if you tried to replace the song with a medley of all your favourite bits of all songs, well, that would sound bad. Likewise, you cannot exist only in your most euphoric moments. You need feelings of disappointment, sadness, loss, thwartedness; that’s what anchors times of elation or contentedness into a story. Plus, if you “sit with disappointment and face it, you’ll dilute it eventually”.

But there is a paradox here. If you reconcile yourself to feeling sad, and allow yourself to feel it fully, because the texture of the emotional life, the vividness of its contrasts and undulations, make that worthwhile, it amounts to far more than putting a positive spin on things. The key difference between accepting pain and enforced, superficial positivity is that the one is rooted in where you are now; the other is about where you want to be, but can’t be there yet. However, you will be. Disappointment does end, honest.

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With no shareholders or billionaire owner, we can set our own agenda and provide trustworthy journalism that’s free from commercial and political influence, offering a counterweight to the spread of misinformation. When it’s never mattered more, we can investigate and challenge without fear or favour.

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Good grief: how to get over a bone-crushing disappointment

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”

Quote

Problem Solving

Reading is one of the best sources of continuous learning. It allows your mind to grow, change and make new connections. Highly successful learners read a lot: Elon Musk grew up reading two books a day, according to his brother. Bill Gates reads 50 books per year. Mark Zuckerberg reads at least one book every two weeks. Warren Buffett spends five to six hours per day reading five newspapers and 500 pages of corporate reports.

Reading and continuous learning

<div class="insight_content" data-text="What you learned...">Learning is a journey, not a destination. It's a process of self-discovery, fueled by curiosity.Learning is an investment that usually pays for itself in increased earnings. And in a fast-changing world, the learning skills quickly is becoming a necessity.</div>

Learning as a process 

<div class="insight_content" data-text="What you learned...">Adopting an adaptable mindset (or growth mindset) means cultivating&nbsp;the belief that you can improve intelligence and performance because they are not fixed features.</div>This will have a significant impact on your motivation and on the process of searching for new opportunities in life.

The adaptable mindset

&quot;We all have enough brainpower to master a new discipline — we use the right tools, approaches, or apply what we learn correctly. Almost anyone can learn anything — with the right technique. Better learning approaches can make the process enjoyable. &quot;

<div class="insight_content" data-text="What you learned...">Research shows that we retain approximately 90% of what we learn when we explain it to someone else or use the new information immediately.Sharing with others what you've learned is one of the most effective ways to learn, and it also tests your knowledge, by assessing your capacity to transfer it to another. This process is called the “retrieval practice”.</div>

Teaching what you know

<div class="insight_content" data-text="What you learned...">Our brains naturally decline if we do nothing to protect them. With the right diet, we&nbsp; can slow the decline process.</div>The health of our brain can significantly change how your record, process and retrieve information.

Keep your brain healthy

<div class="insight_content" data-text="What you learned...">“Everyone thinks you need to ‘practice, practice, practice’ when learning something new. Instead, we found that resting, early and often, maybe just as critical to learning as practice.”</div>

Becoming a super learner is one of the most important skills you need to succeed in the 21st century. In the age technological change, staying ahead depends on continual self-education - a lifelong mastery of new models, skills and ideas.

Becoming a super learner is one of the most important skills you need to succeed in the 21st century. In the age technological change, staying ahead depends on continual self-education - a lifelong mastery of new models, skills and ideas.

In a world that's changing fast, the ability to learn a new skill as fast as possible is quickly becoming a necessity. The good news is, you don't need a natural gift to be better at learning something new even when you have a full-time career.

Many polymaths (people who have excelled in diverse pursuits) - including Charles Darwin, Leonardo da Vinci and the Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman - claimed not to have exceptional natural intelligence.

We all have enough brainpower to master a new discipline - we use the right tools, approaches, or apply what we learn correctly. Almost anyone can learn anything - with the right technique.

Better learning approaches can make the process enjoyable. The key to rapid skill acquisition isn't complicated. If you aim to learn a new skill to improve your career this year, some of these habits can be useful for you.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to your body. It gives us the freedom to roam the expanse of space, time, history, and offer a deeper view of ideas, concepts, emotions, and body of knowledge.

Your brain on books is active - growing, changing and making new connections and different patterns, depending on the type of material you're reading. Highly successful learners read a lot.

In fact, many of the most successful people share this appreciation for reading - they don't see reading as a chore but as an opportunity to improve their lives, careers and businesses.

Elon Musk grew up reading two books a day, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-09-13/elon-musk-the-21st-century-industrialist">according</a> to his brother. Bill Gates <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/04/fashion/bill-gates-gates-notes-books.html">reads</a> 50 books per year. Mark Zuckerberg <a href="https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10101828640656261">reads</a> at least one book every two weeks. Warren Buffett <a href="https://fs.blog/2015/05/warren-buffett-information/">spends</a> five to six hours per day reading five newspapers and 500 pages of corporate reports.

In a world where information is the new currency, reading is the best source of continuous learning, knowledge and acquiring more of that currency.

<h2>2. Super learners view learning as a process</h2>

Learning is a journey, a discovery of new knowledge, not a destination.

It's an enjoyable lifelong process - a self-directed and self-paced journey of discovery. Understanding any topic, idea or new mindset requires not only keen observation but more fundamentally, the sustained curiosity.

"A learning journey is a curated collection of learning assets, both formal and informal, that can be used to acquire skills for a specific role and/or technology area," <a href="https://www.ibm.com/blogs/ibm-training/learning-is-about-the-journey-and-not-the-destination/">writes</a> Sonia Malik of IBM.

Learning is an investment that usually pays for itself in increased earnings. More than ever, learning is for life if you want to stay relevant, indispensable and thrive in the changing world of work.

Super learners value the process. They don't have an end goal, they seek consistent improvement. They keep mastering new principles, processes, worldviews, thinking models, etc. The "ongoing, voluntary, and self-motivated" pursuit of knowledge is important for their maturity.

You can't go wrong cultivating a growth mindset - a learning theory developed by Dr Carol Dweck that revolves around the belief that you can improve intelligence, ability and performance.

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn," argues Alvin Toffler, a writer, futurist, and businessman known for his works discussing modern technologies.

Cultivating a growth or adaptable mindset can help you focus more on your most desirable goals in life. It may influence your motivation and could make you more readily able to see opportunities to learn and grow your abilities.

The ability to keep an open-mind, acquire better knowledge and apply it when necessary can significantly improve your life and career.

<h2>4. Super learners teach others what they know</h2>

According to research, learners retain approximately 90% of what they learn when they explain/teach the concept to someone else, or use it immediately.

Teaching others what you know is one of the most effective ways to learn, remember and recall new information. Psychologists, call it the " retrieval practice ". It's one of the most reliable ways of building stronger memory traces.

Learn by teaching someone else a topic in simple terms so you can quickly pinpoint the holes in your knowledge. It's a mental model coined by the famous physicist Richard Feynman.

Known as the "Great Explainer," Feynman was revered for his ability to clearly illustrate dense topics like quantum physics for virtually anybody. The Feynman Technique is laid out clearly in James Gleick's biography, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman.

The ultimate test of your knowledge is your capacity to transfer it to another. A better way to learn, process, retain and remember information is to learn half the time and share half the time. Example, instead of completing a book, aim to read 50 percent and try recalling, sharing, or writing down the key ideas you have learned before proceeding.

<h2>5. Effective learners take care of their brains</h2>

Keeping your brain healthy keeps it sharp. What you do or don't do for your brain can significantly change how your record, process and retrieve information. Everyone wants to live an active life for as long as possible. And that goal depends on robust brain health.

That means eating lots of foods associated with slowing cognitive decline - blueberries, vegetables (leafy greens - kale, spinach, broccoli), whole grains, getting protein from fish and legumes and choosing healthy unsaturated fats (olive oil) over saturated fats (butter).

Fruit and vegetables combat age-related oxidative stress that causes wear and tear on brain cells," says Dr Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry and ageing.

Our brains naturally decline if we do nothing to protect them. However, if you intervene early, you can slow the decline process - it's easier to protect a healthy brain than to try to repair damage once it is extensive.

<h2>6. They take short breaks, early and often</h2>

Downtime is crucial to retaining anything you choose to learn. According to recent <a href="https://www.ninds.nih.gov/News-Events/News-and-Press-Releases/Press-Releases/Want-learn-new-skill-Take-some-short-breaks">research</a>, taking short breaks, early and often, can help you learn things better and even improve your retention rate.

"Everyone thinks you need to 'practice, practice, practice' when learning something new. Instead, we found that resting, early and often, maybe just as critical to learning as practice," said Leonardo G. Cohen, M.D., Ph.D., a senior investigator at NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Better breaks help the brain solidify, memories during the rest periods. Whatever you choose to learn over time, it's important to optimise the timing of rest intervals for better results.

Experts at the Louisiana State University's Center for Academic Success recommends 30-50 minutes sessions. "Anything less than 30 is just not enough, but anything more than 50 is too much information for your brain to take in at one time," <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/3063173/six-brain-hacks-to-learn-anything-faster">says</a> learning strategies graduate assistant Ellen Dunn.

Our brains' neural networks need to time process information, so spacing out your learning helps you memorise new information more efficiently - give your brain enough time to rest and recover.

Habits of Super Learners

The term &quot;deliberate practice&quot; is mostly attributed to Karl Anders Ericsson, an influential figure in the field of performance psychology. Deliberate practice turns amateurs into professionals. It creates top performers in any field.
Doing something regularly but mindlessly is not the same as practicing it. Deliberate practice means repeatedly performing a set of activities with the intention of improving the specific skill.

Defining deliberate practice

While engaging in deliberate practise, we are always looking for errors or areas of weakness. Once we identify it, we establish a plan for improving it. If one approach does not work, we keep trying new ones until it does.
In using deliberate practice, we can overcome many limitations we might see as fixed. We can go further than we ever thought possible.

Deliberate practice aims at constant progress

Deliberate practice is a universal technique employed in any area you&#39;re trying to be the best at or get a little bit better at. 
For example, competitive fields with clear measurements such as music, dance football, horse riding, swimming, or chess. But we can also improve performance in fields such as teaching, nursing, surgery, therapy, programming, trading, writing, decision-making, leadership, studying, and communication.

Fields where we can improve performance

Our nature is to choose the easiest thing. When we practice something a lot, we develop habits that make the task almost effortless. While it may be helpful, it can interfere with our improvement. 
Deliberate practice means finding the weak areas that impact your overall performance and then target those.
<ul>
<li>Break the skill you want to improve into the smallest possible parts.</li>
<li>Then work through them in a logical order, starting with the fundamentals.</li>
<li>Put your practice sessions on your calendar.</li>
</ul>

Deliberate practice is structured and methodical

Most often, deliberate practice is repeated frustration and failure. Similar to a baby learning to walk, we will often fall for every step we take. That is the point. Since deliberate practice targets our weakest areas, it means doing the stuff we&#39;re not good at. We will get frustrated. 
Set a short, ambitious goal once a month, not impossible, then challenge yourself to it.

Deliberate practice is challenging and uncomfortable

Deliberate practice is very challenging and impossible to do all day long. At the high end, top practitioners rarely spend more than three to five hours per day on deliberate practice. More hours often result in diminishing returns. One hour per day is enough for substantial improvements, especially when it&#39;s consistently done over a long period.
Enough rest and recovery are vital. During deliberate practice, we need to switch to relaxing activities to feel refreshed.

Deliberate practice requires rest and recovery time

Practicing something without knowing if you are getting better is pointless. 
<ul>
<li>Identify the most important metrics related to performance. Keep a record of them each time you practice.</li>
<li>Be careful of vanity metrics. For example, if you use deliberate practice to improve email marketing skills to get more customers for your business. An increase in email subscribers is a vanity metric; the number of paying customers is a useful metric.</li>
</ul>

Deliberate practice involves constant feedback and measurement

Deliberate practice is most effective when used with a coach some of the time to give feedback, point out problems, suggest techniques for improvement, and provide vital motivation.
A coach can see your performance from a different perspective. If you don&#39;t have access to a coach, built the skill of metacognition (knowledge about your own knowledge), where it becomes possible to coach yourself systematically.

Deliberate practice: Using a coach or teacher

&quot;…A critical part of self-evaluation is deciding what caused those errors. Average performers believe their errors were caused by factors outside their control: my opponent got lucky; the task was too hard; I just don’t have the natural ability for this. Top performers, by contrast, believe they are responsible for their errors.&quot;

Persisting with deliberate practice needs a lot of motivation. However, the motivation needs to come from within, not from external rewards or to avoid a negative consequence. We need to enjoy getting better for its own sake.
<ul>
<li>Make a list of reasons you want to work on a skill and the benefits you&#39;ve experienced.</li>
<li>Keep a &quot;motivation diary&quot; for one week, scoring your motivation level every fifteen minutes during each pratice session.</li>
<li>Find a cheerleader to help sustain motivation.</li>
</ul>

Deliberate practice requires intrinsic motivation

<ul>
<li>Deliberate practice tends to fast track progress, but truly mastering a skill is a lifelong process. </li>
<li>There are no examples of people labelled as prodigies that did not put in enormous amounts of deliberate practice.</li>
<li>Creative genius tends to come after ten years of studying relevant knowledge and developing skills, research found.</li>
<li>Those who eventually gain recognition produce an enormous quantity of less remarkable work.</li>
</ul>

Deliberate practice takes time

The deeper we focus during deliberate practice sessions, the more we get out of them.<ul><li>If you can pay your full attention for only five minutes in practice, then take a break every five minutes. Increase your focus time as you get better.</li><li>Figure out which practice activities have the biggest potential to increase your performance. Plan to do them first before considering activities that offer marginal gains.</li></ul>

Deliberate practice requires your full attention

The spacing effect refers to how we can better remember information if we learn them in multiple sessions with increasingly longer intervals between them. It is nearly impossible to practice something once and expect it to stick.
Every time you&#39;re learning a new part of a skill, make a schedule for when you&#39;ll review it. Typically, it involves going over information after an hour, then a day, then every other day, then weekly, then fortnightly, then monthly, then every six months, then yearly.

Deliberate practice leverages the spacing effect

Deliberate practice is more complex and nuanced than we like to believe.
<ul>
<li>Deliberate practice is necessary but insufficient. Once you reach a high level for any skill, everyone at that level is engaging in a lot of deliberate practice. Then more luck and randomness, innate talents or physical advantages matter.</li>
<li>Practitioners miss out on other parts of life as they devote most of their time to practice.</li>
<li>Sometimes, we can practice past the point where it serves us. We need to know when to pivot.</li>
</ul>

Limitations of deliberate practice

Deliberate practice is the key to expert performance in writing, teaching, sports, programming, music, medicine, therapy, chess, business, and more. But there’s more to it than 10,000 hours. Read to learn how to accelerate learning, overcome plateaus, turn experience into expertise, and enhance focus.

Everything You Need to Know to Improve Your Performance at Anything—For Beginners and Experts

Deliberate practice is the best technique for achieving expert performance in every field—including writing, teaching, sports, programming, music, medicine, therapy, chess, and business. But there’s much more to deliberate practice than 10,000 hours. Read this to learn how to accelerate your learning, overcome the “OK” plateau, turn experience into expertise, and enhance your focus.

“Engaged in the creative process we feel more alive than ever, because we are making something and not merely consuming, masters of the small reality we create. In doing this work, we are in fact creating ourselves. ” —Robert Greene, Mastery

Deliberate practice is what turns amateurs into professionals. Across every field, deliberate practice is what creates top performers and what they use to stay at the top of their game. It’s absolutely essential for expert performance.

As a general concept, “practice” means preparing. It’s the act of repeatedly performing certain activities with the intention of improving a specific associated skill. We rehearse what to do in low-pressure situations so we’ll be better when we use a skill in situations where something is actually at stake, such as in a competition or in the workplace. Although this definition may seem obvious, it’s crucial to distinguish between doing something and practicing it, because they’re not always synonymous.

The key distinction between doing and practicing is that we’re only practicing something when we do it in a way that makes us better at it—or at least with that intention.

Deliberate practice means practicing with a clear awareness of the specific components of a skill we’re aiming to improve and exactly how to improve them. Unlike regular practice, in which we work on a skill by repeating it again and again until it becomes almost mindless, deliberate practice is a laser-focused activity. It requires us to pay unwavering attention to what we’re doing at any given moment and whether it’s an improvement or not.

Geoff Colvin summarizes deliberate practice as such in <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591842948/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=farnamstreet-20&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=1591842948&amp;linkId=5513ddeb394f211a0ee9dd3ef89182d0" rel="nofollow">Talent Is Overrated </a>:

Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.

The extraordinary power of deliberate practice is that it aims at constant progress. Practitioners are not content with repeating a skill at the same level. They have metrics for measuring their performance. And they aspire to see those metrics get continuously better.

While engaging in deliberate practice, we are always looking for errors or areas of weakness. Once we identify one, we establish a plan for improving it. If one approach doesn’t work, we keep trying new ones until something does.

Using deliberate practice, we can overcome many limitations that we might view as fixed. We can go further than we might even think possible when we begin. Deliberate practice creates new physical and mental capabilities—it doesn’t just leverage existing ones.

The more we engage in deliberate practice, the greater our capabilities become. Our minds and bodies are far more malleable than we usually realize.

Deliberate practice is a universal technique, and you can employ it for whatever you’re trying to be the best (or just get a little bit better) at. It’s easiest to apply to competitive fields with clear measurements and standards, including music, dance, football/soccer, cricket, hockey, basketball, golf, horse riding, swimming, and chess.

But deliberate practice is also invaluable for improving performance in fields such as teaching, nursing, surgery, therapy, programming, trading, and investing. It can even accelerate your progress in widely applicable skills such as writing, decision-making, leadership, studying, and spoken communication.

The key in any area is to identify objective standards for performance, study top performers, and then design practice activities reflecting what they do. Recent decades have seen dramatic leaps in what people are capable of doing in many fields. The explanation for this is that we’re getting better at understanding and applying the principles of deliberate practice. As a field advances, people can learn from <a dir="ltr" href="https://fs.blog/2020/04/shoulders-of-giants/">the best of what those who came before them figured out </a>. The result is that now average high-schoolers achieve athletic feats and children advance to levels of musical prowess that would have seemed unthinkable a century earlier. And there’s little evidence to suggest we’ve reached the limits of our physical or mental abilities in any area whatsoever.

Many of us spend a lot of time each week practicing different skills in our lives and work. But we don’t automatically get better just because we repeat the same actions and behaviors, even if we spend hours per day doing it. Research suggests that in areas such as medicine, people with many years of experience are often no better than novices—and may even be worse.

If we want to improve a skill, we need to know what exactly has to change and what might get us there. Otherwise, we plateau.

Some people will tell you it’s only possible for anyone to improve at anything through deliberate practice, and any other sort of practice is a waste of time. This is an exaggeration. In reality, regular practice works for reinforcing and maintaining skills. It can also help us improve skills, particularly in the early stages of learning something. However, deliberate practice is the only way to:

<ol><li>Reach expert-level performance and enjoy competitive success </li><li>Overcome plateaus in our skill level </li><li>Improve at a skill much faster than through regular practice </li> </ol>

If you’re just doing something for fun and don’t care about constantly improving at it, you don’t need deliberate practice. For example, maybe you like to go for a walk around a local park in the afternoons to clear your head. Although you’re practicing that walk each time you go, you probably don’t care about increasing your walking speed day by day. It’s enough that the repetitions further ingrain the habit and help maintain a certain level of physical fitness. Not everything in life is a competition! But if you want to keep getting better at something as fast as possible or reach an expert level, deliberate practice is vital.

Another important point to note is that deliberate practice isn’t just a catchy name we came up with out of thin air. The term is largely attributed to Karl Anders Ericsson, one of the most influential figures of all time in the field of performance psychology. It’s something many scientists have studied for decades. Everything we say here is supported by substantial academic research, particularly Ericsson’s work.

We’ll also debunk the numerous myths swirling around deliberate practice as a concept and reveal some of its significant limitations. So if you’re looking for quick hacks for overnight success, you might want to look elsewhere. If you want a realistic roadmap for improving your performance, read on.

“Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well .” —Jack London

In this section, we’ll break down the fundamental elements of deliberate practice and exactly how to incorporate them into your practice sessions. As Ericsson wrote in Peak , “No matter what the field, the most effective approach to improving performance is to follow a single set of principles. ” We’ll explain why each component is crucial and how they apply to different fields, and we’ll cover multiple ways to implement them depending on your goals.

“Everyone has talent. What’s rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads .” —Erica Jong

As humans, we’re wired to want to do the easiest thing at all times in order to conserve energy. Put more simply, it’s in our nature to be lazy. When we practice something a lot, we develop habits that become almost effortless to enact. While that’s <a dir="ltr" href="https://fs.blog/2017/06/habits-vs-goals/">beneficial in many areas of our lives </a>(and helps us survive), it’s something we have to overcome in order to engage in deliberate practice. We can’t expect constant improvement if we keep repeating the elements of a skill we already know how to do with ease. That’s only enough if we’re just having fun or want to reinforce our habits.

Deliberate practice is structured to improve specific elements of a skill through defined techniques. Practitioners focus above all on what they can’t do. They seek out areas of weaknesses impacting their overall performance, then target those. At every stage, they set tailored, measurable goals in order to gauge whether their practice is effective at moving them forwards. Numbers are a deliberate practitioner’s best friend.

If you want to reach an expert level of performance, you need to begin practice sessions with a plan in mind. You need to know what you’re working on, why, and how you intend to improve it. You also need a way to tell if your improvement efforts aren’t working and if you need to try a new tactic. Once you reach your goal for that particular component of the skill, it’s time to identify a new area of weakness to work on next.

Having lots of little, realistic goals with a game plan for achieving them makes deliberate practice motivating. There’s a sense of ongoing movement, yet the next step is always a realistic stretch. Day by day, the gains from deliberate practice may feel modest. But when we look back over a longer period of time, small bits of progress compound into gigantic leaps.

How to implement this: Take the skill you’re aiming to improve and break it down into the smallest possible component parts. Make a plan for working through them in a logical order, beginning with the fundamentals, then building upon them. Decide which parts you’d like to master over the next month. Put your practice sessions in your calendar, then plan precisely which parts of the skill you’re going to work on during each session.

Don’t expect your plan to be perfect. You’ll likely need to keep modifying it as you discover new elements or unexpected weaknesses. The most important thing is to always go into practice with a plan for what you’re working on and how. Knowing what you’re doing next is the best way to stay on track and avoid aimless time-wasting. That means seeking to keep figuring out what separates you from the next level of performance so you can concentrate on that.

“One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts. ” —Albert Einstein (attributed)

Imagine the world from the perspective of a baby learning to walk for the first time. It’s not usually an easy process. They need to develop a lot of new skills and capabilities. They need to build enough muscular strength to stand upright without support. And they need to learn how to coordinate their limbs well enough to move around. Along the way, a baby needs to develop numerous sub-skills, such as how to grip supports to pull themselves up. It likely takes thousands of attempts to master walking—as well as numerous, falls, collisions, and other mishaps. We might not remember the process as adults, but a baby learning to walk needs to spend many hours challenging themselves and moving incrementally out of their comfort zone.

If we want to use deliberate practice, we could do with learning a thing or two from babies. Deliberate practice isn’t necessarily fun while we’re doing it. In fact, most of the time it’s a process of repeated frustration and failure. We have to fall down a dozen times for every step we take. That’s the whole point.

Seeing as deliberate practice requires us to keep targeting our weakest areas, it means spending time doing stuff we’re not good at. In the moment, that can feel pretty miserable. But the quickest route to improvement involves stepping outside of our comfort zones.

The reason why people who have spent decades doing something are not necessarily better than newbies is that they’re liable to get complacent and stop pushing themselves. We need to keep attempting to do things that feel out of reach at the moment.

In his studies of elite violinists, Ericsson asked them to rate different practice activities by how enjoyable they were and how much they contributed to improving performance. Invariably, there was an inverse correlation between the usefulness of an activity and its enjoyability. As Ericsson puts it in <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0544947223/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=farnamstreet-20&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0544947223&amp;linkId=0abf2e202e9c1fb6ddfecc5fd32a00f1" rel="nofollow">Peak </a>:

The reason that most people don’t possess these extraordinary physical capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather because they’re satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of “good enough.” The same thing is true for all the mental activities we engage in.

Elsewhere in the book, he writes “This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve .” The interesting part is the more time you spend deliberately practicing, the more comfortable you’ll become with being uncomfortable.

There is a place, right on the edge of your ability, where you learn best and fastest. It’s called the sweet spot.…The underlying pattern is the same: Seek out ways to stretch yourself. Play on the edges of your competence. As Albert Einstein said, “One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.”

The key word is ‘barely.’

A quick way to assess if you’re doing deliberate practice or just regular rote practice is to ask yourself if you ever feel bored or zone out during practice sessions. If the answer is yes, you’re probably not practicing deliberately.

Deliberate practice isn’t boring. Frustrating, yes. Maddening, yes. Annoying, even. But never boring. As soon as practicing a skill gets comfortable, it’s time to up the stakes. Challenging yourself is about more than trying to work harder—it means doing new things.

Pushing ourselves just beyond the limits of our abilities is uncomfortable, yet it’s how we do our best—and indeed, it can be the source of some of our greatest moments of satisfaction. According to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, we often experience happiness as a result of entering a<a dir="ltr" href="https://fs.blog/2013/07/what-makes-you-happy/">“flow” state </a> , which occurs when we intensely focus on an activity that is challenging yet achievable. During moments of flow, we become so immersed in the activity that we lose any sense of time or of ourselves.

Noel Tichy, professor at the University of Michigan business school and the former chief of General Electric’s famous management development center at Crotonville, puts the concept of practice into three zones: the comfort zone , the learning zone , and the panic zone .

Most of the time when we’re practicing, we’re really doing activities in our comfort zone. This doesn’t help us improve because we can already do these activities easily. On the other hand, operating in the panic zone leaves us paralyzed, as the activities are too difficult and we don’t know where to start. The only way to make progress is to operate in the learning zone, which are those activities that are just out of our reach.

Repetition inside the comfort zone does not equal deliberate practice. Deliberate practice requires that you operate in the learning zone and you repeat the activity a lot with feedback.

How to implement this: Each time you practice a component of a skill, aim to make it 10% harder than the level you find comfortable.

Once per month, have a practice session where you set yourself an incredibly ambitious stretch goal—not impossible, just well above your current level. Challenge yourself to see how close you can get to it. You might surprise yourself and find you perform far better than expected.

A common deliberate practice mistake is to plan a long practice session, then adjust the intensity of your practice to allow you to engage in a skill for the whole time. It’s far more effective to engage in “sprints.” Practice with the most intense focus you can manage for short periods of time, then take breaks. Seeing as you learn most when you stretch yourself beyond your current capabilities, shorter, more challenging practice periods are the way to go.

“There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep. ” —Homer, The Odyssey

Seeing as deliberate practice is so challenging, it’s impossible to do it all day long. Across fields, top practitioners rarely spend more than around three to five hours per day on deliberate practice, at the high end. They may work for more hours than that per day, but few can sustain the mental energy to engage in deliberate practice for eight hours a day. Additional hours often result in diminishing negative returns, meaning more practice makes performance worse because it results in burnout. Geoff Colvin writes:

The work is so great that it seems no one can sustain it for very long. A finding that is remarkably consistent across disciplines is that four or five hours a day seems to be the upper limit of deliberate practice, and this is frequently accomplished in sessions lasting no more than an hour to ninety minutes.

Ericsson’s studies of elite violinists found they often took afternoon naps and slept an average of eight hours per night, considerably more than the average person. They were highly aware of the importance of sleep.

Even fitting in a single hour per day of deliberate practice is ample time to make substantial improvements, especially when we’re consistent with committing to it over the long haul. <a dir="ltr" href="https://fs.blog/2018/10/long-game/">Continuous investments in success compound </a>. In the long run, commitment pays off.

Not only do most deliberate practitioners not spend all day at it, they also devote a lot of time to recuperation and recovery. They sleep as much as their bodies need. They nap if necessary. They take frequent, refreshing breaks. Most of us understand that rest is necessary after physical activity. But we can underestimate its importance after mental activity, too. Deliberate practice needs to be sustainable for the long term. How long a person keeps at a skill is often far more important than how many hours a day they spend on it.

When you’re practicing deliberately, truly practice. When you’re recuperating, truly relax. No one can spend every waking hour on deliberate practice.

Sleep is a vital part of deliberate practice. Being asleep doesn’t mean you’re not still improving your skill. We consolidate memories at night, moving them from short-term to <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3768102/" rel="nofollow">long-term memory </a>. And we can’t exactly benefit from deliberate practice sessions if we don’t remember what we learn each time. Not only that, but sleep deprivation also results in a plethora of negative cognitive effects that impact performance. If we skimp on sleep, we’re likely to forget far more of what we learn during deliberate practice sessions, rendering them less useful.

When you’re not engaging in deliberate practice, your brain is still at work. During deliberate practice, we’re in focused mode. When we let our minds wander freely while at rest, <a dir="ltr" href="https://fs.blog/2019/10/focused-diffuse-thinking/">we’re in diffuse mode </a>. Although that time feels less productive, it’s when we form connections and mull over problems. Both modes of thinking are equally valuable, but it’s the harmony between them that matters. We can’t maintain the effort of the focused mode for long. At some point, we need to relax and slip into the diffuse mode. Learning a complex skill—a language, a musical instrument, chess, a mental model—requires both modes to work together. We master the details in focused mode, then comprehend how everything fits together in diffuse mode. It’s about combining creativity with execution.

How to implement this: Make a list of activities you can engage in without too much conscious thought, letting yourself daydream while you do them. Common examples include going for a walk, washing the dishes, taking a shower, free-writing in a journal, playing with a toy like Lego, driving a familiar route, gardening, cooking, listening to music, or just gazing out the window. When you feel yourself getting tired or hitting a roadblock during deliberate practice, don’t keep pushing for too long. You want to be stretching yourself, not exhausting yourself. Instead, switch to one of those more relaxing activities for at least five minutes. You’ll likely come back to practice with new connections or at last feeling refreshed.

“Deliberate practice is hard. It hurts. But it works. More of it equals better performance and tons of it equals great performance. ” —Geoff Colvin, Talent Is Overrated

Practicing something without knowing whether you are getting better is pointless. Yet that is what most of us do every day without thinking.

As we saw before, deliberate practice involves continuously stretching yourself to improve on weak areas of a skill. For that to work, practitioners require constant feedback about their current level of performance so they can identify what works for making it better.

What gets measured gets managed. To engage in deliberate practice, you need a way of measuring the most instructive metrics related to your performance. Seeing how those metrics change is the sole way to know if practice is working or not. Top performers across fields tend to spend time examining their past performance with care to identify areas for improvement. For example, a tennis player might film themselves playing a match so they can go through the footage frame by frame afterward. This provides valuable feedback, because they can figure out what might have held them back during weaker moments.

In fields such as sports and chess, measuring performance tends to be straightforward. In other areas such as business, measurements are harder to take, and there may be no established markers of success. The influence of random factors may also be stronger, making it less clear whether technique changes are actually having an influence or not. When you engage in deliberate practice, it’s always important to be aware of how strongly correlated your practice and your performance are likely to be.

When measuring your performance, beware of vanity metrics. These are numbers that are easy to calculate and feel good to boost. But they don’t actually move the needle towards the real improvements in performance that help you reach your goals. For example, let’s say you’re using deliberate practice to improve the skill of email marketing, as part of the wider goal of getting more customers for your business. The number of email subscribers is a vanity metric; the number of paying customers is a useful metric. It’s completely possible to increase the former without a corresponding increase in the latter.

How to implement this: Identify the most significant metrics related to performance in your chosen skill and keep a record of them each time you practice. It’s easy to fool yourself without a clear record of how you’re doing. You might want to break the skill down into a few different parts to measure it, but make sure you’re not fixating on vanity metrics.

Deliberate practice is most effective with the help of a coach or some kind of teacher

“The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful. ” —H.L. Mencken (attributed)

Deliberate practice is most effective when conducted with some kind of coach who can give feedback, point out errors, suggest techniques for improvement, and provide vital motivation. Although mastering any skill requires a lot of time engaging in solitary practice, working with a coach at least some of the time is incredibly valuable. In some fields such as sports and music, it’s common for a coach to be present all of the time. But most top performers benefit from a combination of coaching and solitary practice.

When we look at the lives of people who achieved great things, we often find that those who did so at a young age or in a shorter time than expected benefited from having fantastic teachers. For example, physicist Werner Heisenberg had the epiphany that led to the formulation of matrix mechanics a mere five years after commencing serious study of physics. But he no doubt benefited from the mentorship of Niels Bohr and Max Born, two of the foremost physicists at the time.

Even people at the most elite levels of performance across fields can benefit from specialist coaching. Engaging in something and teaching that thing are separate skills in themselves. The best practitioners are not always the best teachers because teaching is a skill in itself.

Ericsson explained that “the best way to get past any barrier is to come at it from a different direction, which is one reason it is useful to work with a teacher or coach. ” We often make the same mistakes again and again because we simply don’t realize what we’re doing. Our performance falls into ruts and we can’t figure out why we’re running into the same problem yet again.

A coach can see your performance from the outside, without the influence of overconfidence and other biases. They can identify your blind spots. They can help you interpret key metrics and feedback.

Ericsson went on to say that “even the most motivated and intelligent student will advance more quickly under the tutelage of someone who knows the best order in which to learn things, who understands and can demonstrate the proper way to perform various skills, who can provide useful feedback, and who can devise practice activities designed to overcome particular weaknesses .” An experienced coach will have worked with many people on the same skill so they’ll be able to advise on the best ways to structure practice. They’ll know when you’re just repeating what you find easy, and they’ll be able to push you to the next level.

Teachers or coaches see what you miss and make you aware of where you’re falling short. Geoff Colvin writes:

In some fields, especially intellectual ones such as the arts, sciences, and business, people may eventually become skilled enough to design their own practice. But anyone who thinks they’ve outgrown the benefits of a teacher’s help should at least question that view. There’s a reason why the world’s best golfers still go to teachers.

But what if you don’t have access to a coach? What if you don’t have the means to hire one or one isn’t available for your particular skill? In that case, it’s still possible to apply the same principles that make a coach useful by yourself. Top performers across fields build the skill of metacognition , essentially making it possible for them to coach themselves. Colvin explains:

The best performers observe themselves closely. They are in effect able to step outside themselves, monitor what is happening in their own minds, and ask how it’s going. Researchers call this metacognition—knowledge about your own knowledge, thinking about your own thinking. Top performers do this much more systematically than others do; it’s an established part of their routine.

…A critical part of self-evaluation is deciding what caused those errors. Average performers believe their errors were caused by factors outside their control: my opponent got lucky; the task was too hard; I just don’t have the natural ability for this. Top performers, by contrast, believe they are responsible for their errors. Note that this is not just a difference of personality or attitude. Recall that the best performers have set highly specific, technique-based goals and strategies for themselves; they have thought through exactly how they intend to achieve what they want. So when something doesn’t work, they can relate the failure to specific elements of their performance that may have misfired.

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.css-d7z4j9{font-family:'Source Sans Pro',sans-serif;font-size:2rem;line-height:2.5rem;letter-spacing:-0.125%;font-weight:700;}Coping with disappointment

Good grief: how to get over a bone-crushing disappointment

ALVIN TOFFLER

Habits of Super Learners

Defining deliberate practice

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Bloom’s taxonomy of learning

5 thinking tools to add to your metacognitive toolbox

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