Tag: #deliberate-practice

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• Fourteen Things Table Tennis Taught Me: Skill Makes the Relationships, a Title Blocks the Growth

  Fourteen principles from years of playing table tennis, and how they carry over into work and life. The structure that turns skill into an entry ticket to relationships, why playing only for fun never makes you better, a

  2026-08-16 · 11 min read #mindset#growth#deliberate-practice#sports#career

• The Road to Becoming an Expert: Feedback First, Volume Second

  This post moves the evidence set out in the previous four posts into an executable form. Narrow the domain to where feedback arrives, build the feedback loop before you build the volume, practise under the conditions you

  2026-08-16 · 14 min read #mindset#learning#expertise#deliberate-practice#career

• The Structure of Being Good — Self-Assessment, Feedback, and a Narrow Scope

  The wish to be good at something runs strong, yet what being good is actually made of is a question people ask surprisingly rarely. This is a map post that lays out the structure of skill in three pillars: calibrated sel

  2026-08-16 · 10 min read #mindset#growth#deliberate-practice#self-improvement#2026-08

• What the Research Shows: Interpreter Training, Cognitive Ability, and the Deliberate Practice Debate

  A survey of the research on whether interpreter training actually changes working memory and executive function. Where a meta-analysis and a systematic review reached different conclusions, the difference between cross-s

  2026-08-16 · 16 min read #english#interpreting#research#evidence#deliberate-practice

• Learning How to Learn — Telling Fundamentals From Fashion, and Choosing One Thing to Go Deep On

  A learning strategy usually arrives as a list of things to learn, when what is actually needed is a criterion for what not to learn. This piece covers the single question that separates fundamentals from fashion, the rul

  2026-08-15 · 7 min read #career#skills#learning#fundamentals#deliberate-practice

• The Illusion of Talent — What the Practice Research Actually Says, and What Actually Compounds

  In late July 2026, "The Illusion of Talent" climbed to the top of GeekNews. The title makes it sound like a scientific dispute about talent and practice, but the original is a personal essay about a junior developer's ca

  2026-07-31 · 14 min read #career#deliberate-practice#expertise#psych-papers#mindset

• Why 10,000 Hours Alone Will Not Make You Better — The 4 Real Conditions of Deliberate Practice

  Why do some people have ten years of experience but the skills of a third-year? The 10,000-hour rule is a popular distortion that Anders Ericsson, the original researcher, himself called a misreading. This post restores,

  2026-07-20 · 7 min read #mindset#self-improvement#deliberate-practice#learning#growth

• The Original Paper Behind the 10,000-Hour Debate — Berlin Violinists and the 12% Truth

  Open the 1993 Ericsson paper where the 10,000-hour rule was born, and you find a picture quite different from the one the bestsellers told. This installment reads, in order, the actual design of the Berlin music academy

  2026-07-20 · 6 min read #psychology#paper-review#mindset#deliberate-practice#expertise

• The Elite Athlete Mindset, With the Poster Peeled Off — What the Research on Practice, Pressure, and Belief Actually Shows

  The elite athlete mindset is a staple of motivational posters, but the actual sports psychology is more careful, and more interesting, than the slogans. This post walks through Carol Dweck's growth mindset (and the false

  2026-07-11 · 5 min read #mindset#psychology#performance#sports#deliberate-practice

• Learn Fast by Failing — Stop Memorizing Answers and Start Colliding With Problems ♪ Listenable

  Words and answers you memorize fade quickly, but problems you solve and get wrong stick for a long time. Drawing on retrieval practice and the testing effect, plus growth mindset research, this essay separates fake succe

  2026-06-19 · 37 min read #self-development#learning#retrieval-practice#growth-mindset#failure

• Simulation — The Person Who Pictures It in Advance ♪ Listenable

  People who speak well, sing well, and play table tennis well share one thing. They picture the moment in advance and prepare. This essay argues that the secret of improvisation is actually preparation, drawing on real re

  2026-06-19 · 35 min read #self-development#preparation#mental-rehearsal#productivity#communication

• The Depth of Mastery: The Difference Between 2500 and 3000 ♪ Listenable

  Sometimes a difference that looks small on the surface actually marks an abyss in skill. Borrowing the analogy of table tennis ratings of 2500 and 3000, I explore what mastery really is, how its depth reveals itself, and

  2026-06-19 · 33 min read #mastery#deliberate-practice#skill#growth#self-improvement

• Learn From the Masters, Push Yourself — A Growth Method for the Animal That Adapts ♪ Listenable

  Human beings are animals that adapt. Play only against weaker opponents and your skill quietly plateaus. This essay is about learning from people better than you, stepping just outside your comfort zone, rewarding yourse

  2026-06-17 · 23 min read #growth#learning#mindset#deliberate-practice#mentorship

• How to Be Good at Programming — Principles, Habits, and Depth

  A builder essay that defines what being good at programming actually means, then works through fundamentals and debugging, abstraction and simplicity, readable code, testing, deliberate practice, reading code, and the sk

  2026-06-16 · 17 min read #programming#craft#deliberate-practice#debugging#code-quality

• Deliberate Practice — Experience Alone Will Not Make You Better ♪ Listenable

  Why ten years on the job can leave your skill stuck, and the principles of deliberate practice that break the plateau. Covers concrete methods for developers — reading code, reimplementing, code katas, postmortems — plus

  2026-06-16 · 19 min read #career#deliberate-practice#growth#learning#engineering-culture