Mastery: How Deliberate Practice Builds Mastery

So far, we've covered what mastery looks like and why you might want to master something. Now, let's look at what the journey of mastery might look like.

Overview

In this post, we will look at the different stages of mastery and explore some elements of effective practice at the different stages of mastery.

The different stages of mastery

Although mastery is an endless journey, we can still say that the journey has different milestones.

The Dreyfus model attempts to describe this journey, identifiying a number of checkpoints from novice to mastery.

• Novice
• Advanced beginner
• Competent
• Proficient
• Expert
• Master

Credit: brainbok.com

Combining this with another framework (structure of learning outcomes), we get this:

• Novice: Has singular data points; Doesn't see how they connect yet.
• Advanced beginner: Has gathered more data points; Starts to see some connections.
• Competent: Understands how things fit together.
• Proficient: Sees patterns and has a knowledge of workflows and paths through the data points.
• Expert: Understands how all data points fit togehter; Can make abstractions and apply novel solutions;
• Master: Knowledge and applications are all auto-pilot; Lots of mental models and muscle memory;

For our purposes, let's split them into 3 categories:

• Novice & advanced beginner
• Competent & proficient
• Expert & Master

Before we explore how each stage approaches mastery, let's understand the common denominator: What makes practice effective?

What are the elements of good practice?

Anders Ericsson has coined the term "deliberate practice". Here is what deliberate practice looks like:

It has a number of elements. Alex is going to be our learner.

1. Focus: Alex must be completely focused on achieving their objective. He must be deliberate. He must tell himself he is doing X because it is important for him to achieve Y.
2. Expert: Alex must have access to someone who knows the domain to a high degree and can closely guide them throughout his development. This is usually a teacher, coach or mentor.
3. Difficult goals: Alex must embark on a difficult journey, putting himself under constant pressure - this is where growth happens quickest.
4. Performance-focused, well defined tasks: The teacher works with Alex to develop a tailored, specific set of tasks to achieve the difficult goal.
5. Feedback: Alex must receive constant feedback. Initially, this comes from the teacher. Over time, Alex develops the skills to self-adjust based on his own self-feedback.
6. Skill adjustment: Fundamentals come first. Over time, Alex builds off the fundamentals to get more advanced skills, refining individual skills as guided by his teacher (or himself later on).
7. Mental models: Alex discovers his own way of doing things over time, creating his own mental models. This is a strong sign of expertise.

This is a complex system, difficult for anyone to put into place. Each elements requires Alex to redesign specific elements of his life to achieve the complete system. However, if this is the gold standard for self-improvement, then it is the best blueprint we have to become great at something.

What makes good practice for each stage?

The novice has very different abilities compared to the expert. So while the principles of deliberate practice applies to everyone, each stage requires emphasis on a different element in the system.

Practice as a novice and advanced beginner

Having mentored many people and spent many 100's (maybe even 1000's) of hours teaching music to students, here is what the novice and advanced beginner needs in the beginning of their mastery journey. Let's bring back Alex and take a look at what he should focus on in the initial stages.

Focus - High importance

Alex must want to learn. There is nothing more painful than trying to teach something to someone who doesn't really want to learn. Or maybe they want to skip the hard work and reap the rewards at the end. Or maybe they just haven't developed the discipline yet. In children, it's generally up to the parents to enforce this discipline - no 10 year old wants to sit down at the piano for 20 minutes each day! But in adults, a lack of discipline, focus and willingness leads to no progress. For Alex, he has to want it.

Expert - High importance

When starting to learn a new subject or skill, the problem is we don't even know what we don't know. Where should I start? What should I focus on first? We could go through the slog of exploring the domain ourselves. But if we want to achieve a difficult goal, then the journey is already hard enough! We need to optimise the journey as much as possible to make progress as quickly as possible.

Alex must find an expert mentor or teacher. This will ensure that he sees progress early on which will, in turn, spur him to do more. There's nothing worse than working hard at something and not seeing yourself get any better!

The expert can help outline the journey and tasks that Alex needs to achieve in order to progress, giving him tailored advice and guidance, something which a book or forum cannot do.

Feedback

Feedback is really the thing that people pay for in a teacher. It's not just about the knowledge - we have books for that. It's the ability for the teacher to notice the small things Alex is doing and make adjustments.

Giving feedback is also the best part of being a teacher. The best lessons I've given have been where the student has come in with their exercises practiced and I have the joy of saying "Well done - I think we can do this a little differently". Contrast that to the worst (and often the most common) type of lesson where the student has not been disciplined through the week and we need to spend 30 minutes practicing instead of refining their skills.

Practice in the competent & proficient stages

As Alex moves into proficiency, the important elements of the novice stage remain. He still needs to focus, have access to some sort of expertise and work on well-defined tasks. However, since Alex has gathered the fundamentals, he has new challenges to contend with, the main one being complacency (Anders Ericsson calls this the "Plateau").

There are many people who graduate through different career milestones based on years of service alone rather than competence. We presume that people who have been around longer will naturally be better. But this is only sometimes true. We generally gather experience over time, but not at great speed. We may rely on our intelligence or our past success and think "Now I can relax".

This can be a good attitude sometimes. Breaks are required throughout anyone's career. Other prioritise arise - family being a big one, so not everyone can commit 100% effort all the time.

However, if we want mastery, then complacency is not an option. Your skill level will quickly max out around whatever day-to-day challenge you face. And if we face the same challenges each day (like most of us) then our progress quickly plateaus. We rise and plateau based on the standards of our environment.

Difficult goals

When Alex was a novice, his difficult goal was clear: Learn the fundamentals. But as he accomplishes the fundamentals, it becomes important to identify new and more difficult challenges. Again, he needs to stave off that complacent attitude of "I've worked hard for the fundamentals - now I can relax".

We want this: You could identify difficult goals in a few ways:

• Weaknesses: What tasks or skills do you struggle with? Maybe you're not clear on how that software framework really works. Or you struggle to keep up the pace for the final 1km.
• Strengths: What are your main strengths? How could you put them into practice? If you're a great musician, you could teach 1-2 students. Or if you're a good artist, set yourself the goal of hosting an exhibition in your local library.
• Collaborate: People love working with other people who have excellent skills. Join up with other musicians to create a band and meet once a month. Or contribute to an open source project.
• Make something you don't know how to make: There are few better ways to learn something challenging than by trying to do it in practice. Build a server. Convert your bedroom into a loft. Go to France for a month and only speak in French.

Feedback

As a novice, Alex required feedback to make sure he didn't develop bad habits. He needed a good teacher that understood the fundamentals.

For the proficient stage, Alex still needs feedback, but I have highlighted it in the picture because I think it is too often overlooked. We think feedback is only important for novices. We gain a certain level of pride as we accomplish the fundamentals. It's as if accomplishing the very basics of something means we are finished, or can teach ourselves the rest.

Now, we sometimes can teach ourselves the rest, but when it comes to fast improvement, we need to identify the big and small things we are doing incorrectly to progress. Having a person or system in place that can do this is necessary. This could be a mentor, coach or teacher. Or it could also be a software system (such as a test that tells us if our answer is correct or not).

Mental models

In the proficient stage, Alex gradually starts building up mental models. He starts to understand what works and what doesn't work. It is very difficult to teach mental models to a novice because mental models require data points to connect together to create patterns and context. But at the proficient stage, Alex now has enough information to reference, so he can work on processes and structures that help him get better.

As he builds up these mental models, he learns the patterns and the steps for things like:

• This is how I warm up properly.
• This is the brush stroke that gets me the best effect.
• This question is how I coach this person in their specific context.

Mental models are essentially patterns of thought and action that Alex knows works.

Practice as an expert and master

The expert and the master practice very differently to the novice. As an expert, Alex is no longer concerned with low level information - he has ingrained that knowledge to the point that it is reflexive. He has a large set of mental models to draw from. He has accomplished a large number of difficult goals and now understands the value of setting a high bar and completely focusing on it.

Alex can focus on his overall performance and learning systems. He understands how to identify areas of weaknesses, drill into them and improve them over time. He knows how to schedule practice routines and learn what he needs to learn to accomplish his goal.

Alex is focusing heavily on micro-adjustments to everything. Maybe he is drilling down into a maths technique he's not sure about. Or maybe he's found a muscle that needs more exercise.

Alex looks at the 'meta' level of his practice. Not just the tasks themselves, but whether or not the task is the best task to do at this moment.

• Master golfers take the time to tweak their swing.
• Master basketballer work on their jump shot under pressure.
• Master scientists adjust their data set based on the experiment.

Progressing through the stages

It's unfair to say there are different "stages" to mastery. Each journey is different, and as we said before, mastery is not a destination but an eternal journey.

However, just because each journey is different, it doesn't mean there aren't patterns to how a master achieves great things. Deliberate practice is clearly the fastest way to master something. Difficult goals with consistent and carefully measured practice with constant feedback ensures we improve as fast as possible.

Let's explore how a software developer might progress through the different stages.

Software Engineer: From Novice to Master

We can go back to our diagram of deliberate practice and fill in the blanks. Focus, expert, deliberate goals, practice feedback, adjust, mental models

Focus: This will be difficult and long

The learner must understand that the journey will be over the next couple of years. Maybe they have just started university or maybe they have floated along in their job for a few years. Either way, the learner must be honest with themselves - their expertise and mastery won't come for free.

The learner decides to be deliberate with their time. They think that 10 hours per week would be a good start, but know that they will struggle to keep to that. So they decide to carve out 1.5 hours per day in the morning before they go to work. And on Saturday, they decide to dedicate 2 hours in the morning to their learning.

Expert: Finding a mentor

The learner know the value of having an expert mentor could see them cutting the time it takes them to get to mastery by 2 or more. They attend a software development conference in their local city and get the names and numbers of 3 experienced engineers they spoke to. He explained to them he's looking for a mentor and was happy to pay them a fee for 1 hour a week.

Deliberate goals: Identifying the path forward

The mentor has over 20 years experience in the industry and knows the modern landscape quite well. She guides the learner to analyze the job market and pick the technology stack that is most likely to get him a job. They land on java and springboot for developing cloud applications.

The mentor shares some ideas for projects for the learner to build. Each project tackles a key part of the technology stack, allowing the learner to build up the foundations over time.

Practice: Getting the fundamentals right

She knows that the learner needs to get into the habit of building things without referencing online forums or ChatGPT. So they create some ground rules. The first project will look at practising the fundamentals of Java and springboot, only referencing the official documentation. The learner is not allowed to use AI or online forums to get the answer.

Feedback & adjust: Guiding even the little things

Each week, they get together to look at what the learner has built over the week. They discuss problems, and each week the mentor identifies areas the learner needs to improve on. For example, the first couple of weeks they choose to work on the tooling - which IDE to use, the shortcuts, setting up a proper desk for long coding sessions and so forth. The learner sees the benefit of a 1:1 mentor quickly, since he never even thought about learning the IDE shortcuts properly - he never saw it suggested in the online forums.

Mental models: Building up a picture

Over time, the mentor shares their thoughts on how the learner should approach a problem. In the beginning, she guides the learner on writing clean and readable code. As he progresses, the mentor teaches him about when to use different design patterns and why they are useful. She draws on examples of seeing good practices in her workplace, and examples of what bad practice can result in.

The learner gradually builds up his own understanding of the mentor's tips and tricks, creating his own mental models. As he ingrains things like for loops, springboot libraries and transfers his development flow into muscle memory, he starts to think more about how the overall system is designed. He spends more time drawing diagrams and data flows, trying to account for things like disaster recovery and fault tolerance.

Continuing the journey

After 18 months, the learner has developed at an exponential rate, understanding more than most senior engineers would across their career. They have absorbed all their mentor's examples and lessons and have even started giving ideas and solution to their mentor, consulting on a couple of their problems.

The learner understands their continuous need to keep learning, and they eventually go on to develop a network of mentors which he calls on for various consultations. He accelerates through positions at work, driven by his desire to want to work on more challenging problems. He continues his daily practice, getting up early each morning before work to hone his craft. Now, he has a good enough view of the landscape to drive his own goals. Every so often, he slows down, but a quick call to one of his mentors gets him back on track.

Closing comments on Mastery

Having high bars for ourselves is always a good practice. Yes, someone could argue that they don't want to put too much pressure on themsleves. But let's be honest - how many of us really put too much pressure on ourselves? Isn't it better to be uncomfortable trying to achieve something difficult (and growing because of it) than to not have any difficult goal at all?

Something I haven't covered here is the topic of discipline. Discipline is the bedrock upon which great things happen. We'll leave that to another blog.