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On a cold April day in Portland, Oregon, in 2010, Dan McLaughlin putted for two hours. Dan, a commercial photographer, had never played 18 holes of golf in his life. Those two hours on a putting green were the start of an ambitious journey. Dan set out to test Dr. K. Anders Erickson’s 10,000-hour theory. He had 9,998 hours to go.
The 10,000-hour theory proposed by Erickson is this—it takes 10,000 hours of what Erickson called deliberate practice to excel at any skill. Erickson noted, “Elite performers engage in what we call ‘deliberate practice’–an effortful activity designed to improve individual target performance.” He found top practitioners—in any field— needed roughly 10,000 hours of ‘deliberate practice’ to become world-class.
Malcolm Gladwell, Geoff Colvin, and—can you believe it?—Justin Beiber have popularized the 10,000-hour theory.
At 5,100 hours, four years and halfway into the ‘Dan Plan,’ McLaughlin was a 3.3 handicap golfer. Then his back gave out.
You can get better at anything you do, any skill, with deliberate practice. Obviously, there are limits, as Dan found out. Outside factors: age, opportunities to train, your physicality, dexterity... Perhaps the largest limit is the muscle between your ears — do you have the passion and persistence to get better?
Dan did.
He went from a hacker to a three-handicap golfer in under four years.
If you want, with time and deliberate practice, you can improve at anything, whether it’s cooking or critical thinking, lacrosse or leadership, dancing, or data visualization.
Six practices will sweeten your deliberate practice:
#1. Enjoy the process.
#2. Break practice down.
#3. Make feedback work for you.
#4. Practice at the edge of your comfort zone.
#5. Use tools and play games.
#6. Keep going.
If you believe you can’t, you won’t.
If you don’t like it, despite all the willpower in the world, you won’t do it. To get better at anything, you must learn and practice. Enjoy the process; turn learning and rehearsal into a virtuous cycle. That cycle is a flywheel of positive feedback.
Begin with the belief that you can improve through practice.
Belief is your motivational fuel. Start your study with the parts you enjoy. Take any skill. You might enjoy research—hate public speaking—but, you want to improve.
To get started, start with what you like. In this case, it might be researching what “good looks like” in public speaking. You may move on to active listening, paying attention to what people say and how they say it.
That’s the first step on the flywheel.
You’re starting to enjoy the process. As you enjoy the process, you engage more deeply. Focus is easier. Learning improves. Note small improvements. You might reflect, doodle, or journal your journey.
The more you see improvement, the more you believe you can.
Mix fun elements into your routine. Perhaps you’re listening to your favorite music while you drill. You may choose to rehearse in inspiring or comfortable settings. Try habit stacking—incorporate your training into something you already habitually do and enjoy. If you enjoy walking the dog, try running through routines that are part of your practice while you do it.
Above all, celebrate the tiniest victories. They add fuel to keep you going.
Skills are made from smaller skills.
Good golfers can hole three-foot putts with metronomic reliability. They can bomb drives and shape shots. They’re confident chippers and great green readers.
All a host of small skills; never practiced all at once.
Effective communicators are clear thinkers. They’re active listeners who pay full attention to others. They speak clearly, often in threes or repetitive structures. They have picked up, by osmosis or study, rhetorical devices in their repertoire. They tell stories; they know when to pause; when to breathe. They know their own verbal fillers and tics and work on them.
To practice deliberately, break out sub-skills and work on them.
Chunk the sub-skills you are after into checklists to track progress and ensure thorough preparation. Two seemingly opposite, science-backed approaches work here—sequential tasking and interleaving skills.
Sequential tasking is best used early in learning.
Build the foundational skills you need—hitting a ball or creating a logical talk track. Sequential tasking suggests that you pursue the next logical step once you have the first small skill down. Once you have a clear talk track, you might want to figure out how to edit it for rhythm. Both are separate but related sub-skills.
Interleaving skills places you on the path to mastery.
Here, you alternate between related skills during training sessions. Take a critical presentation, and instead of working from beginning to end, tackle the middle. Later in the session, you might rehearse your opening. You might switch to transitions, then tackle answering tricky questions.
Interleaving skills is a fancy term for practicing chunks in random order. This method of switching deepens learning and retention; it’s a good proxy for real-world situations—prepping you for when, inevitably, things don’t go to plan.
Olympic athletes and Formula One drivers use feedback.
They study film, pore over data, and bring in coaches to give them guidance in real time. Feedback can work for you, too, but first, you have to learn to like it. In business, this is tough because most feedback is delivered poorly.
Establish feedback loops for yourself.
These feedback loops can be formal or informal. At fassforward, my co-CEO, Dave Frost, and I run a 360 on ourselves every year. It’s the same process we use with our coaching clients, but it has a double benefit for us. First—we get candid, thoughtful, and themed feedback on our performance and areas of opportunity. Second, we get to experience the process ourselves—eat our own dog food or drink our own champagne—and find ways to improve the process.
Digital feedback tools are helpful. Hemingway app, for example, is a tool that delivers real-time critique of your writing. You might use polling tools like Slido in your presentations to build interaction and see what’s landing.
Encourage constructive criticism on the team. Run “why it’s good” sessions. These sessions look at the work product of the team (or related work product). Setting aside the time and space for teams to think deeply about their work builds the lesser-used muscle of critique and creates a safe space where constructive feedback is valued. It allows you to regularly review each others’ work to provide insights.
The rise of AI gives you another powerful feedback tool. You can use it to find key opportunities. Prompt ChatGPT (or whatever tool you use) with the raw material you wish to improve—this could be captured feedback, the transcript of a Zoom call, or your work product, and prompt the AI for feedback. Use terms like “themes,” “polarities,” or “unusual ideas” in the prompt.
This will render a more palatable, easily digestible view.
Don’t practice from a couch.
This metaphorical advice is, perhaps, the most important element of your practice. Practice can’t be too easy. Stress teaches us. It rewires our grey matter.
Neuroscientist and author Friederike Fabritius argues that we all have a “sweet spot” of stress. Too little arousal and we get no benefit; too much, and our performance diminishes. Our brains want to conserve energy, so we won't reach our full potential unless challenged. Without some stress, we’re bored and unfocused.
In short, we need to get to the edge of our comfort zone.
Fabritius advises finding our optimal stress point, which "occurs when you are just slightly over-challenged. ... We need to experience fun to get into flow, and a little bit of fear is just the trick we need to get there.”
In flow, we are distraction-free, with complete concentration on the task at hand. Time slows. Things become easier. We’re at the tipping point between challenge and skill. It’s our state of peak performance and where we should aim to practice.
We can nudge ourselves there through controlled challenges, slowly increasing the difficulty of the task at hand and increasing stress. We can simulate high pressure. Use time constraints, peer pressure, or role-play complex situations, all ratcheting up stress and pushing us to the edge of our comfort zone.
Practice in a stressful place at a challenging pace.
Fun is part of flow.
Dopamine flows—we feel good. Our brains tickle with endorphins—the pain relievers that give us a “runner’s high.” A squirt of oxytocin—the cuddle hormone—kicks in. This is crucial to the process of forgetting old learned behavior, allowing us to learn the new.
This is why games work.
Gamification has been over-used in learning. It’s become a hodge-podge of points and scoring, badges, rewards, and leaderboards. Challenges and quests compete with levels and progression, storytelling, narrative, and visual design.
And in all that, we can’t forget the fun.
You don’t need badges. We made up games in the schoolyard; you can do it for yourself and your teams decades later. Just rid yourself of the professional embarrassment of childish things and embrace your inner child.
Build tools.
After all, that is the most basic human characteristic. We picked up stones to cut, chop, and scrape. We made fire. Bring that tool-making to your practice.
Use basic apps like MURAL or Miro to create frameworks, simulators, and collaboration spaces.
Like anything in life, you have to keep going.
The wonder drug that makes you an overnight expert hasn’t been invented yet. If the books are right, you might need to dedicate 10,000 hours. So you must keep going.
Put aside time. Set yourself a schedule. Set micro-quotas to bring you back to practice. Create rituals. Little routines that enhance your focus and readiness. Teach others. You get better by helping others get better. It deepens your understanding. Explaining, showing, and answering questions are all on the path to mastery.
Along the way, embrace errors. Every mistake is an opportunity to learn.
To quote Dan McGlaughlin, “The word ‘talent’ gets thrown around too much. What makes someone ‘talented’ is a single-mindedness to push through the lows and to allow themselves to change and grow.”¹
If that’s true, your skill at anything you do is dependent on your focus, the work you put in, and how you practice. Ask yourself first what skill you want to develop. Do you practice? And then, do you deliberately practice?
Talent isn’t genetic or ordained. It comes from work and will.
Gavin McMahon is a founder and Chief Content Officer for fassforward consulting group. He leads Learning Design and Product development across fassforward’s range of services. This crosses diverse topics, including Leadership, Culture, Decision-making, Information design, Storytelling, and Customer Experience. He is also a contributor to Forbes Business Council.
Eugene Yoon is a graphic designer and illustrator at fassforward. She is a crafter of Visual Logic. Eugene is multifaceted and works on various types of projects, including but not limited to product design, UX and web design, data visualization, print design, advertising, and presentation design.
