Practice

Recently I came across a fantastic blog by Dan Luu. It's one of those things where, once I found it I immediately spent several hours that night reading nearly every post. But the post I want to talk about has the wonderful title of 95%-ile isn't that good.  The key point is given right up front:

Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do [...] when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it's just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things.

[...] I'm also not referring to 95%-ile among people who practice regularly. The "one weird trick" is that, for a lot of activities, being something like 10%-ile among people who practice can make you something like 90%-ile or 99%-ile among people who participate.

I think this is really important, and I'm extremely interested in the concept overall. Over the past couple of year I've read books like Peak and Range and watched talks and courses about the topic of learning and practice. But my thoughts have never really coalesced into something like a structured practice.

To summarize my own takeaways from this series of posts, I think it's true that most people don't practice and that the ones that do stand out in their fields. I don't think that it's because people are lazy, I just think that some combination of education, general culture, and business culture combine to keep us stuck in "execution mode". I believe this TED Talk makes the point well. We sort of have this idea that we go to school where we learn the skills, and then we go to work and do the thing. Of course there's on the job training, but that's something to get out of the way early, and then we can go on to make widgets or whatever until we retire. That's over-simplified obviously, but training and practice is almost always an afterthought on the part of the business. A yearly allotment of time and money (or every other year at some places I've worked) is an indulgence or perk if it's offered at all.

This is tragic. If we work this way we're crippling ourselves, and it only benefits our employer (and not really even them). We basically stagnate until we are overpaid because we've been around awhile and are in senior positions, and our employer is incentivized to replace us with a cheaper and younger person who has a more recent set of skills. I've heard it said that: 1) you can't assume anyone will look out for your professional development (depending on how you look at it, it's not even really your manager's job) and 2) you should treat your own skill-set the way you would treat an investment portfolio. Regarding 2, your professional earning potential is like any other asset, and if you neglect it you're really hurting yourself.

A series of references from from Dan's blog eventually led me to this talk titled Solving the Right Problems for Engine Programmers by Mike Acton. I think it's fair to say that Mike is a legend in the programming field. He's responsible for some of the biggest game engines behind some of the biggest games. In a fairly provocative statement Mike says of developers in his field:

I find that a lot of people are essentially incompetent in three fundamental areas: one is practice, two is having reasonable defaults, and three is problem solving.

It's interesting to me both that he picked non-technical skills for his list, and that practice was right up front. He says "you should be practicing at your profession essentially every day." You should identify and aggressively attack your gaps in knowledge. He also distinguishes practice from research or a side project. Practice should be time-boxed and something that you throw away. This fits with how Anders Ericsson describes "deliberate practice" in Peak, something you iterate on, get quick feedback about, and then move on from.

I like how Dan points out that this is really a very empowering notion rather than elitist. It's so much better than the myth of the genius hacker that seems prevalent today. Practicing is a simple thing anyone can incorporate into their routine and it pushes back against the over-emphasis on executing. Okay, maybe it's not necessarily simple, but it's also not terribly hard, and the payoff is huge.

Range is a book that pushes back on some of ways in which Peak and deliberate practice has been popularized. Specifically, the notion that it takes 10,000 hours to "master" a subject. Unfortunately, people have taken what Peak teaches to mean that we need to basically be child prodigies to master anything–that the Tiger Woods approach is the only way to be great. But I really think that that whole discussion misses the point. It's why Peak and Range should be read together in my opinion, and it's why I really like how Dan and Mike have framed practice in their two pieces. The point for 99.9% of people isn't whether you've constructed the perfect deliberate practice regime, or practiced for 10,000 hours, it's whether you practice at all. Mike talks about 30 minutes per day as a reasonable start. Dan notes how hard it is to practice for real life messy things like speaking or managing (where there's no agreed-upon rules or ranking) or quick feedback (known as wicked vs. kind learning environments), but also points out that any practice at all is still very much worth it, and will put you ahead.

These are a lot of points and caveats for a simple concept, but I really enjoyed the post and, as I mentioned, it crystalized a lot of vague thoughts that I had about the concept. Initially, I may have read Peak and Range as sort of an either/or thing, but am now convinced that I was overthinking it. It probably shouldn't have taken multiple books and videos to land on "just make practicing your craft a regular thing." But that's where I think I am.