The Problems with Deliberate Practice (2020)

There's also a correlation does not imply causation in this. People get worse at acquiring new skills compared to a younger person but there's lots of things that change with age outside of physical fitness. For instance, a kid delegates all worries outside of studying and games to the parents. Experts at fields might also underperform in some school subjects in favor of focusing in those they enjoy the most, so they can optimize their time even further.

And then we come to the society component. Anyone seeing a 12 year old shipping an app in the app store will omit the fact that the kid might be receiving training from an expert (maybe even a family member) since the age of 4. They won't judge it as "a person who learned programming for 4 years and shipped an app" but "a 12 year old that shipped an app". You might think the difference is semantic but if I were to told you that I was learning programming for 4 years and shipped an app you'd be like "what do you want now, a cookie? You're 30".

People who believe that over a certain age you're not gonna do anything good might consider suggesting software development as an activity to a 40 year old as a hobby, not as a profession. I cannot imagine them telling the same thing to a child. Don't get me wrong. I do believe that physical change exists and that my 15-year old self would run circles around me. But everyone gives advice on the grounds of seeking masters, not professionals. Translate that belief to the hiring process and it's easy to see where ageism starts. Someone might say that hiring a 40 year old who wants a junior developer position is "settling for less" in spite of the fact that your product can be shipped just as efficiently.

I'd like to share a view on this that I found for myself, I am curious if anyone finds it interesting. For years I thought of talent as an effort multiplier. "Intelligence is speed" etc.

I recently remapped it in my head slightly and migrated to a definition that talent is a degree of competence and productivity which you can achieve in a given field "effortlessly".

Let's say you are a top 5% software engineer off high school, because of your specific circumstances of nature and nurture. You will still need hard deliberate work, introspection and patience in overcoming plateaus if you want to climb the remaining 5% and become better or the best.

So, some people have a head start, some have a very big one, but true improvement in a field is only possible through deep work, and if you can organise yourself to do it, that's a meta-skill for 21st century.

This is for the common gym (and follows what was developed as class structure in the early days in Brazil), not for the more enlightened gyms that exist but they are not (or not likely) for the common person. Say, for 100 gym, 90 are set up the way I describe above.

The technique section is like going to a seminar whose topic you didn't choose and whose content you won't likely see again for a few months or years. Like, today we do partial differential equation, and we will do them again in 6 months from now (apart from some of you who like them and decide to practice with no support).

There is very little effort to present the common processes that make a technique work or not. For example, in ML you have broad categorization of approaches, such as supervised/unsupervised/reinforcement learning. Within supervised learning, you then have classification/regression. Then within those buckets, you have linear, non-linear. Within non-linear, you have bagged or boosted or neither. They share commonalities at different levels and they help the practitioner learn the techniques much faster and then apply those technique in a creative way.

Likewise, in mount and side control you have similar need for hip control, shoulders on the mat, diaphragm under pressure for the more pressure-oriented jiu-jitseiro. But more often than not, the side control technique of the day is presented as just the technique of the day with very little connection to other techniques or common processes that make the technique work. A waste of potential deeper learning.

More often than not, the instructors/coaches/professor love their voices and presentations way too much -- 5 minutes of explanation regarding some details of little relevance while students are getting cold and unfocused, then 5 minutes of drills that take 3 minutes to start because students have forgotten what the coach has shown (and you can imagine how long it will remain in the mind of the average practitioner after the class is over).

Then, we have sparring, which in JJ is for some reason way too high stakes. In judo, you see top people getting thrown or give points all the time in randori/sparring with no ego bruised (well, more in judo than US wrestling, while in Russia for example you see more learning-oriented sparring, in the US it is grind, grind, grind), but in JJ, especially after people get their blue belt, they absolutely do not want to get chocked, arm-barred or swept by equal or lower belts. This creates defensive games that make thee knuckles white, but give little back in terms of improving the game of the practitioner.

Positional sparring is pedagogically much better than free-sparring, since the same position or situation is presented or needs to be faced multiple times and that creates lower stakes, less defensive sparring and more "learning". That's the drilling that matters (and see Dave Alred's repair sessions https://leadersinsport.com/performance/dave-alred/) and what for example Roger Gracie, the best JJ sport practitioner of all time) does.

Many other points to discuss, but the main point is that coaches are not trained in coaching, they have no idea how to present ideas or concepts (clearly, there are exceptions and they are very often the most successful gyms, although there is selection bias at work), they are "just" good at JJ and they went into coaching.

Some might say: but some people are getting very good at JJ. I agree, but "sink or swim" is a selection approach, not a teaching one.

Yes, that's my approach when I am teaching. Positional sparring is way superior to free sparring for learning. Lower stakes, people are more relaxed, the same position is presented multiple times and that's where learning happens.

And I explain it to students beforehand. I say to students: there are interesting games going on in positional sparring and one is that who is trying to escape (say, from mount) is in a better mental, but not physical, position. You are already mounted, now if you "lose", that's ok, but if you "win" (that is escape the position or finish), it is a big win! And for the who's in mount, finishing is ok (already in mount), but letting the mounted escape is a big "loss". Winning when all, including yourself, know that anything else than winning is a bad loss, is being in the "ugly zone", like Dave Alred says, high pressure, low margin for error, when things are not pretty. But that's where one learns (it sounds like it is high stakes, but it not, because the activity/drill is repeated multiple times).

I do positional for takedowns, side control, mount, from flat half guard, favorite guard (and I say, this is your favorite guard, you should be hard to pass!).

Note he says "a minimum of ten years (or 10,000 hours)" That is it might be 20K, 30K or more hours of practice. So 10k hours is more like the starting line, not the finish line that Gladwell proclaims.