How Scholar Athletes Improve — Deliberate Practice and Deep Work
The Danger of "Practice Like You Play"
“Practice like you play” is one of the most repeated lines in athletics. But it isn’t good advice.
What people mean when they say this is that we should be taking practice seriously — not going through the motions or being lazy with the details. While that is certainly the case, a key mindset shift between practice and play must be communicated.
And so, we return to the topic of deliberate practice. The state of mind in which you are fully engaged, operating at the very edge of your capabilities, and receiving immediate feedback in order to adjust.
The best way I know to illustrate deliberate practice is the example of learning how to swing a baseball bat. I spent hours breaking down each movement in the swing, being mindful of everything from grip to toe placement. The most beneficial swings I ever took in practice happened in slow motion.
Is this “practice like you play?” Far from it. When a pitch comes in-game, the last thing you want is to be thinking of what your grip is doing or at what angle your shoulder is dropping. During play, you don’t have the luxury of breaking everything down in slow-mo. You’ve got to react and trust your training.
The “practice like you play” mindset leads to mindless repetition without deliberate intent. Sure, it may feel good and helpful to take a thousand swings or shoot a thousand shots. But this is not how real improvement is achieved.
What This Means for Scholars
Deep Work is the way into the intellectual arena’s version of deliberate practice. As mentioned in a previous post, Cal Newport believes these two concepts to be much aligned.
Deep work requires us to be free of distractions and completely engaged for long periods of time. It’s a philosophy of making room in our schedules for extreme focus in order to solve hard problems.
An example of deep work in intellectual life may be writing a research paper. Evaluating sources, putting arguments together, and proof-reading all take deliberate and focused effort. You are consistently seeking out feedback from yourself and peers on how the argument stacks up. And it’s a slow process — not something that can be done in between meetings on an afternoon.
If the process of paper writing is “practice,” then “play” might be presenting the paper at a conference. A conference presentation should be a smooth explanation of what the researcher has found — essentially the same idea as trusting your training and letting yourself perform without getting stuck in the minor details.
How might a research paper look if we wrote it in the same mindset as a conference presentation? It would lack depth and substance, and likely be full of errors. Once again, it’s clear that a different mindset is needed in our preparation compared to our performance.
How to Actually Get Better
Lots of advice on improving intellectual or athletic skill boils down to repetition, repetition, repetition. Yes, this is important. But what deep work and deliberate practice tell us is that repetition without clear focus and feedback is not as helpful as we might think.
True improvement, whether in your writing or your golf swing, require a mindset of effort and focus, and a willingness to operate on the edge of your capabilities. So treat practice deliberately and work deeply, and watch your play soar to new heights.