In June 2017, Alex Honnold did something which no man had done before. He climbed El Capitan in Yosemite without any ropes. This free solo ascent of the 3000 ft rock formation without any fallback mechanism ranks as one of the greatest athletic feats ever. Equally interesting is the way Alex Honnold trained. He did 60 practice climbs on El Capitan. First, he rehearsed these climbs using rope. He memorized complex portions of the climb. He specifically trained on the tricky portions of the segments by going up there and with gear and practicing over and over. In the final weeks before the climb, he practiced on a smooth stretch of rock, climbing with only his feet and not using his hands. Thus what looked like a miracle was the result of a well-planned training.

A similar story of well-planned training comes from one of the trainers of Kobe Bryant. Kobe woke the trainer up at 4:15 am and asked if he could help with some conditioning exercises. When the trainer, Robert, reached the practice floor just before 5 am, Kobe was drenched in sweat. They worked out for over an hour and Robert left. When he reached the practice center again at 11 am, Kobe was there shooting jumpers. On talking to him, Robert learned that Kobe never left.

“Kobe Bryant started his conditioning work around 4:30 am, continued to run and sprint until 6 am, lifted weights from 6 am to 7 am, and finally proceeded to make 800 jump shots between 7 am and 11 am.” This was not just showing up and practicing a lot, but practicing with a purpose. Kobe was focussed on the skill of making baskets and this is different from how we approach our work.

Recently one of my musician friends was explaining how they learn songs. While amateur singers listen to the entire song to memorize, these professional singers learn the song line by line, getting the diction and tone right. Like how Alex Honnold practices the climb on the tricky portions of El Capitan, these musicians repeat the complicated lines over and over, till they get it right. This is similar to how any music teacher would teach.

What Alex Honnold, Kobe, and these musicians did is a kind of practice that makes them experts. This has to be contrasted with mindless practice where you practice hours on end without self-correction. The book Peak argues that this is the most effective and powerful way of improving yourself. By following this methodology, you do not stay at the “good enough” level but become an “expert”.

The Right Way

Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers popularized the concept of working 10,000 hours to be an expert by citing the cases of Bill Gates, Beatles, and Mozart. If you read this book, you cannot be faulted for understanding that all you need is 10,000 hours of practice. But just repeating something and hoping that repetition alone will improve one’s performance is a naive thought.

Imagine a time when you learned driving. The first time was scary and you paid attention to everything on the road. It took some time to get comfortable. Now a days you drive from home to work effortlessly without paying conscious attention. Once we reach this level, improvement is hard to come by. A recent paper explored this and concluded, “they were better than when they started. That matched the EEG readouts, which showed an increase in their brains’ electrical activity during the first few days of training. But that spike faded as their performance on the task plateaued”

If you are not improving, it’s not because you lack innate talent; it’s because you’re not practicing the right way. Once you understand this, improvement becomes a matter of figuring out what the “right way” is. The “right way”, according to Peak is deliberate practice. In practice this often boils down to purposeful practice with a few extra steps: first, identify the expert performers, then figure out what they do that makes them so good, then come up with training techniques that allow you to do it.

Deliberate practice

• has well-defined, specific goals.
• is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal.
• is focused.
• involves feedback
• requires getting out of one’s comfort zone<

According to Peak, a music student would have a goal like, “Play the piece all the way through at the proper speed without a mistake three times in a row” or a runner would have a goal like have three runs during the week at a particular pace or like Kobe, get 800 jumper shots each day.

Becoming an expert does not happen overnight. It requires years of dedicated practice with no short cuts. Deliberate practice takes advantage of the natural adaptability of the human brain and body to create new abilities.  For example, we now know that playing chess or musical instruments or doing meditation can produce changes in the brain. Once we thought that our brains, if they were set in their ways, would not change; now neuro plasticity is an accepted fact. Deliberate practice can open the door to a world of possibilities.

Deliberate practice is not about vaguely improving your performance. It is specific and involves building or modifying previously acquired skills by focusing on particular aspects of those skills and working to improve them. Thus it is a step-by-step improvement over existing skills, by taking a person outside their comfort zone and by trying things that are beyond their current capabilities.

Unless you are in some field which is new, there are experts in your field who have effective training techniques. Rather than figuring out steps yourself, it is simpler to work with a coach or teacher who is familiar with these techniques. The coach can get you out of the plateau and  would be familiar with the obstacles which you can encounter and can suggest ways to overcome them. The coach and also help develop a plan and help with a series of small changes which will add up to the larger outcome.

During the initial stages, the feedback will come from the coach, but over time the students have to learn to quantify their work, spot mistakes and adjust. A simple example would be to use a running app to keep track of your runs, monitor the splits and self-correct.

Now, pick an area you want to improve. Look around to see someone who does it better than you. See if they can mentor you.