How to Know When You are Practicing at the Edge of Your Ability

Most people can tell when their practice is too easy, but what about when your tasks are too hard? That's often less obvious.

Anyone who knows about deliberate practice knows how important it is to spend your time practicing at the edge of your abilities.

But how do you really know when you’re at the edge?

Most people can tell when their practice is too easy – you’re able to complete tasks effortlessly while thinking about other things.

But what about when your tasks are too hard? That’s often less obvious. Practice is supposed to challenge you… but how hard is too hard?

Here’s my rule of thumb:

Focus less on feelings, and more on measurable progress.

When your practice is too difficult, you’re going to be running in place and not making much measurable progress.

Think about what happens if you try to work out with a weight that’s too heavy for you to lift.

Yes, you might be able to tell that it feels excessively strenuous, but what really gives it away is that despite trying your hardest, you’re not able to lift the weight.

And not only are you unable to lift the weight, but you’re not getting any closer to doing so.

The same thing happens if you work on a math problem or coding project that’s too hard.

Your brain goes into overdrive, and you work on it for a long time, but you just don’t really get anywhere with it.

You don’t solve the problem, you can’t point to any concrete skills you acquired during the process.

So, what’s the conclusion here?

If you want to practice effectively, these are some things you absolutely must do:

A. You need to have some concrete way of measuring your progress.

B. You need to make sure that whatever you’re doing is actually increasing that progress.

C. You need to make sure that the progress is increasing fast enough that you’ll reach your goal in a reasonable (but realistic) amount of time.

By the way, if your goal is really lofty, then a reasonable amount of time might still be a long time – so long that it’s hard to tell whether you’re progressing fast enough.

So if you have a lofty long-term goal, I would also recommend to decompose it into a series of shorter-term goals where it’s totally obvious whether you’re making fast enough progress to reach the next short-term goal in a timely manner.