The psychologist Anders Ericsson is famous for studying so-called “expert performers.” From decades of research into how these masters of games, craft, music, athletics and so on, Ericsson hypothesizes that the secret to their success is deliberate practice. I’ve written about deliberate practice obliquely before, as it has much in common with flow. The basic idea is that when learning a new skill, you can pick up the basics pretty quickly, but if you want to really see improvement, you need to be a bit more intentional and systematic about how you practice. For example, if you are taking piano lessons, you would do well to commit to a regimen of rehearsal. The results will be vastly different if your practice involves repeating an exercise or a tune for a set amount of time without regard to how well you do it—as compared to if your goal with practicing was to be able to play your piece at the correct speed, three times in a row without a mistake. Ericsson refers to the former method as naïve practice and the latter as deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice has the following characteristics and hallmarks:
Well-defined, specific goals
Reaching larger goals by stringing together baby-steps
Readily identifying specific actions you can take with a reasonable expectation of improvement
Getting feedback from yourself and others to find where you are falling short
Pushing beyond your comfort zone and trying to do things you couldn’t before
Don’t try harder, try a different technique
Work with a teacher, coach or mentor
This framework is attractive to me because it has shown me where I most often lapse back into naïve practice. I find that I am quite good at the first three items on the list, but I have often been unable to sustain deliberately practicing something because I find the last four items on the list more difficult. Failing to get feedback, push beyond my comfort zone, try alternative approaches, and finding a guide have usually been the culprits when I give up on something and move onto a new pursuit. I’m grateful for the clarity here, because I think it will help alleviate some of my anxieties around dilettantism that I wrote about last week.
At any rate, regardless of how long I stick with them, deliberate practice is something I want more of in all my creative pursuits, especially with ones I’m committed to more long-term, like writing. As I get back into my notes on creativity, a couple things stood out to me in relation to deliberate practice and my ultimate purpose here writing this blog.
First was an essay by Jami Attenberg—”How to Get Back to Work.” In it, she writes about returning to writing projects after some time away—and how to deal with the impediments that can come up along the way:
Refresh your memory of what project is and reflect on your motivations. Write out to yourself why you wanted to write it
Give whatever you last worked on a re-read
Read the introduction of something you love and pay attention to how it was crafted
Give yourself a little forgiveness for letting the project get away from you but commit to getting back to it
Prepare mentally and physically, create an auspicious space
Take some time off from the internet
Take the challenge of resuming as an opportunity for growth
I found these suggestions particularly inspiring both for blogging and my academic work. Here, I only took a few weeks off; there, I took several months off. My academic work is a bit of another beast, because I really had gotten to a place where I thought that career was over before I got a job offer, but that’s a story for another time. In any case, I found the first piece of advice to be the most powerful, though I will also say that catching yourself up on where you were before is essential as well.
So, in getting back to work on the blog, I was thinking about my project (writing about playing the Feelings Collector with flow and creativity) and why I wanted to do it (to really teach myself the material I was reading as a way to be more consistent about playing throughout the year). This alone was potent enough to motivate me again to commit fully to writing up all my notes and beginning to annotate what I have read but not written about.
But it also drew my attention to an interesting essay that I had annotated but forgotten about by Michel Foucault. From Corps écrit no 5 (1983), it’s called “Self Writing,” part of a series of short writings on the “arts of the self.” As he writes, no technique, professional skill, nor art of living can be learned without the training of the self by oneself—what we might consider a form of deliberate practice. Foucault characterizes self writing as a form of mediation—a mental exercise—that one can use to activate knowledge. The purpose of self writing is to bring to hand principles, rules, examples, and cases to reflect upon them directly, to digest them, and to use them to create new understandings.
As far as writing is exercise for our minds, it has two forms:
Writing -> Thought -> Writing
Writing -> Thought -> Action
Accordingly, writing as deliberate practice can be thought of as the fashioning of discourse into principles of action. Put another way, writing turns observations into truth and ultimately into ethos.
The basic building blocks of this kind of self writing are what Foucault calls hypomnemata—i.e., repertoires of things heard, read, or thought about offered up for subsequent re-reading and meditation. Hypomnemata are not just memory aids or references to consult, however. Instead, they are both the pieces and the rules of the game for mental exercises to be carried out frequently: reading, re-reading, meditating, conversing with oneself and with others.
Crucially, hypomnemata are not personal journals, accounts of spiritual experiences, or narratives of the self, nor are they confessionals. The point of accumulating hypomnemata is not to plumb the depths of the psyche to reveal the unmanifested, but rather, to gather the already-said, the already-heard, and the already-read to be used in the shaping of the self. Writing is the process of collecting and stitching together hypomnemata and at the same time producing one’s own thoughts about the material.
There is a danger in focusing too much on hypomnemata and not enough on writing, however. Foucault cautions that excessive reading without reflection is little more than distraction, and does little for the cultivation of the self. Focusing on hypomnemata without also writing can lead to a state of stultitia, a state of mental and emotional turbulence, in which opinions and desires can fluctuate rapidly, leading to a reduced capacity to skillfully face the world. Stultitia leads to fixation on the past and future, preventing the mind from anchoring itself such that it can find the truth of things.
The antidote is to write. Write about what you have read, seen, heard, and thought about. Generate new understandings and you will keep stultitia at bay.
I will have much more to say about the relationship between writing and the development of a personal ethics, but for now, I want to explicitly draw out the main lesson that I take from all of this. When I took my break from blogging weekly, I really needed it. It was the time away that helped me see that what was stopping me up was an imbalance between the amassing of hypomnemata and writing—way too much of the former and not enough of the latter. There was too much material to make sense of all at once! I got intimidated by the volume of notes I had generated but not yet processed. And the size of my books “inbox”—let’s be honest. And then I had a bit of a difficult time getting going again and got caught in stultitia.
So thanks to Jami, I’m going to take a bit of Anders and a bit of Michel and get to back to writing more deliberately.