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Today I want to talk about building skills. In particular, the complex sorts of skills that often seem quite difficult to improve. We all know practice is important. But why does it seem like some people skip ahead and quickly master a skill, while others spend years stuck at the same level?

In this email, I’ll discuss a method that goes beyond just practice, in order to improve on complicated skills that often seem immune to the kinds of drills that work so well for music or athletics.

The elements of mastery have been outlined by K. Anders Ericsson in his research on deliberate practice. This research was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in the book Outliers, under his so-called 10,000 hour rule. The idea is that excellence tends to take around 10,000 hours of sustained practice.

What’s missing from the 10,000 hour rule, however, is that Ericsson’s own research doesn’t suggest that spending lots of time with a skill is sufficient to become good at it.

In fact, his research pulls up contrary cases, where people spend years working at a skill and see almost no improvement.

The difference between those who plateau and those who go on to mastery depends on the type of practice used. Deliberate practice involves immediate feedback, a focus on process and is driven towards the specific areas of weakness. Without these elements, improvement is slowed or stopped.

Immediate feedback is the difference between writing essays, putting them in a closet until you’re “ready” and publishing a blog to expose your flaws.

A focus on process means that you are spending time not trying to output work. This is the difference between basketball players practicing their skills through playing games and doing drills. The focus of a game is on winning; the focus of a drill is on process. It’s this latter focus which was found to be crucial in sustained improvement.

Finally practice is intense, uncomfortable and focused on areas of weakness. Don’t practice the things you’re good at. Identify exactly the trouble points you have in your process and drill them intensely until the problem is resolved.

This all sounds good–in theory. But in practice, it can be very hard to apply all three of these elements Ericsson outlined.

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The method to translate deliberate practice to your life

There’s a lot of specialized methods for implementing deliberate practice: project-based learning, peer coaching and immersion, all of which I teach in Learning on Steroids. Today, I’m just going to focus on one: skill dissection.

Skill dissection is important for complex skills because one of the major obstacles to improving these skills is that quality is subjective and each instance of practice rarely resembles the previous one.

Consider writing. What makes someone a good writer? What makes a piece of writing good? We can focus on details like headlines, grammar and vocabulary, but writing is a lot more than the sum of its parts. Some writing has all of the details correct, but still isn’t very good. Instead we can zoom out and ask questions like whether the idea is compelling, but this doesn’t simplify the problem much because there’s hardly a formula for compelling ideas.

Design, programming, sales and painting all suffer similar problems. The skill has thousands of smaller pieces and it can be difficult to improve holistically with each case changing drastically from the one before it.

The solution here is to dissect the skill into simple skills, evaluate yourself on those subskills, and practice those in isolation. Let’s consider each step:

Step One: Breakdown the skill

First, take out a piece of paper and write the skill you want to improve in a central bubble. Then make a branch to recognize subskills that are components of doing the broader skill well. Good writing might break down into research, storytelling, clarity, humor, etc.

Then take each branch and break it down further. Research might break down into domain expertise, properly managed citations, using reputable sources, etc. Storytelling might break down into vivid descriptions, clear plot structure, etc.

Keep doing this process until the leaves of your branches are themselves quite simple. Depending on the skill and your ability to articulate it, you may have anywhere from a dozen leaves to a hundred.

Step Two: Evaluate yourself on each subskill

Next, consider each leaf on the branch and mark its importance for your overall quality with either “Critical”, “Important” or “Minor Importance”.

You may want to do this process branching outwardly. A clear plot structure may be “Critical” to storytelling, even if storytelling is only “Important” to your overall writing quality.

With those leaves remaining, go through each and give yourself a rating of “Good”, “Okay” or “Poor” for each leaf.

If you’re not sure how to evaluate yourself, take a moment to look at some of your past work or performances and try to see it through that lens. Looking over your work again is probably a good idea, in any case, since normally you’re not viewing it through the critical eye necessary for this exercise.

Now look for those branches and leaves that have high importance but low proficiency. If a leaf is critical, but you’re poor in it, that represents the absolute best candidate for immediate improvement.

Step Three: Develop practice exercises (not work!) for improving one subskill

The final step is to create an exercise that will improve your ability in that one step. The goal here should be to practice, not to produce publishable work.

Continuing my writing example, if I decided that vivid descriptions was a critical, yet poorly realized, component of my writing ability, I might set aside time to write short paragraphs trying to describe pictures or ideas in vivid ways.

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Time for homework! I’m going to keep it really simple, as always, to encourage you to actually do a short exercise immediately and get the ball rolling for further practice.

For right now…

Pick a skill that matters to you for your work or learning, and break it down into the first layer of branches of subskills.

Example 1: Programming -> Understanding libraries, design patterns, documentation, algorithms.

Example 2: Chinese -> Pronunciation, listening, writing, grammar, vocabulary

Example 3: Public speaking -> Body language, storytelling, ideas, presentation aids

For next time you’re learning…

Continue the exercise fully until you can identify the top three subskills that require your most immediate attention. Then try to develop an exercise to practice one of them over the next month. Even an hour or two of drills can be powerful, if the skill itself was specified clearly enough.

Of course, setting aside practice time and executing on this is the hard part. Deliberate practice isn’t easy, which is why most people plateau at level far below their potential. It’s very hard to do concentrated, uncomfortable drills on top of the demands of work and studies. That’s why we’ll be talking tomorrow about habit creating (and why Learning on Steroids was developed in a format to encourage the development of long-term habits).