Critique of Article: The Problems With Deliberate Practice
The article presents two claims of deliberate practice that it argues against -- but the first claim is a misattribution, and the second claim is not actually argued against.
A reader recently shared an article with me that argues against the idea of deliberate practice: The Problems with Deliberate Practice on Commoncog.com.
The article is structured as two main sections. The first section
- The first section argues against a claim "Talent is Overrated" that the author believes is part of the idea of deliberate practice.
- The second section addresses the claim "Deliberate Practice Trumps Normal Practice" and presents an argument about something else.
Here are my critiques on each of those sections.
Critique of the First Section
In this first section, the Commoncog article argues against a claim that “deliberate practice is all that matters.”
But the whole premise is incorrect: deliberate practice does NOT claim that anyone can do anything via deliberate practice.
While there is a mountain of research supporting the conclusion that the volume of accumulated deliberate practice is the single biggest factor responsible for individual differences in performance among elite performers across a wide variety of talent domains, the next biggest factor is genetics, and the relative contributions of deliberate practice vs genetics can vary significantly across talent domains.
I will say that Ericsson himself tends to downplay the importance of genetics, which I too disagree with, and I think most of today’s talent development researchers would also disagree with – but that is completely separate from the theory of deliberate practice.
It’s one of those unfortunate cases where an author introduces two ideas, one accurate and another inaccurate, that are completely independent of each other, but the two ideas get conflated because they had the same author (who may themself be conflating the ideas in their writing).
The same thing happened with the ideas of “spiral curriculum” and “discovery learning,” which are both widely attributed to psychologist Jerome Bruner in the 1960s.
Spiraling and discovery learning are sometimes conflated, even though they are two completely separate ideas – and while spiraling is supported by the cognitive science of learning, discovery learning is not (it is actually opposed by the cognitive science of learning).
One of Bruner’s ideas holds weight, while the other does not. It’s the same with Ericsson.
More explicitly, this part of the Commoncog critique is not about deliberate practice, but about Ericsson’s personal beliefs regarding the extent to which deliberate practice can make up for genetic disadvantage, (or, more generally, lack of genetic advantage).
Critique of the Second Section
The second claim that the Commoncog article says it’s going to argue against, “Claim Two: Deliberate Practice Trumps Normal Practice,” the article does not actually argue against.
Commoncog’s whole argument in that section is that it’s hard to do deliberate practice when you lack a proper structured/comprehensive curriculum with timely feedback.
And that’s completely true! In a situation like that, there is not a way to engage in deliberate practice in the strictest sense of its definition, and the best you can do is try to approximate it.
But this is not an argument against deliberate practice being the optimal form of practice.
The big picture is that deliberate practice is the Platonic ideal of practice.
It constitutes an optimal training regimen within an optimal practice environment (curriculum must be perfectly structured / scaffolded / comprehensive, feedback must be immediate / comprehensive, etc.).
When a field first emerges (or undergoes a rapid transformation), there are typically no well-developed practice environments because there has been no time to create them.
Over time, practice environments are constructed and improved.
That’s why Olympic records keep getting broken year after year.
That’s why so many of today’s high school students are able to learn something like calculus that, only a few centuries ago, used to be cutting-edge math.
Sure, there are fields in which training environments are not as developed as in other fields, but that’s totally unrelated to the superiority of deliberate practice as a general practice technique.