I maybe also want to note: The most interesting argument against “deliberate practice” as a frame I’ve read was from Common Cog, in his post Problems with Deliberate Practice.
This was the post that introduced me to the term “purposeful practice”, which is “deliberate practice when you don’t really know what you’re doing yet or how to train effectively.” I do think most of what I’m advocating for is in fact purposeful practice (but, I’m holding myself to the standard of pushing towards a deliberate practice curriculum)
He later has a post reviewing the book Accelerate Expertise, in which he advocates throwing out the “deliberate practice” paradigm, because it’s dependent on brittle skill trees of subskills that are hard to navigate if there isn’t an established literature, or if (in the case of the military in Accelerated Expertise), you find that circumstances change often enough that rebuilding the skill tree over and over isn’t practical.
But, the solution they end up with there is “throw people into simulations that are kind of intense and overwhelming, such that they are forced to figure out how to achieve a goal in a way that organically works for them.” This is actually not that different from my approach (i.e. finding confusing-challenges that are difficult enough you will need to learn to navigate confusion and creative strategy to solve, and then do reflections / “Think It Faster” exercises.
I see these two approaches as rounding out each other. While doing Toy exercises (interleaved with your day job), you can learn to notice subskills that are bottlenecking you, and focus directly on those. This is more of a guess than a claim, but I expect that trying to combine the two approaches will yield better results.
I maybe also want to note: The most interesting argument against “deliberate practice” as a frame I’ve read was from Common Cog, in his post Problems with Deliberate Practice.
This was the post that introduced me to the term “purposeful practice”, which is “deliberate practice when you don’t really know what you’re doing yet or how to train effectively.” I do think most of what I’m advocating for is in fact purposeful practice (but, I’m holding myself to the standard of pushing towards a deliberate practice curriculum)
He later has a post reviewing the book Accelerate Expertise, in which he advocates throwing out the “deliberate practice” paradigm, because it’s dependent on brittle skill trees of subskills that are hard to navigate if there isn’t an established literature, or if (in the case of the military in Accelerated Expertise), you find that circumstances change often enough that rebuilding the skill tree over and over isn’t practical.
But, the solution they end up with there is “throw people into simulations that are kind of intense and overwhelming, such that they are forced to figure out how to achieve a goal in a way that organically works for them.” This is actually not that different from my approach (i.e. finding confusing-challenges that are difficult enough you will need to learn to navigate confusion and creative strategy to solve, and then do reflections / “Think It Faster” exercises.
I see these two approaches as rounding out each other. While doing Toy exercises (interleaved with your day job), you can learn to notice subskills that are bottlenecking you, and focus directly on those. This is more of a guess than a claim, but I expect that trying to combine the two approaches will yield better results.