Deliberate practice

Mr. Z. provided the following text:

".... At one point, not long after I started training, my memory stopped improving. No
matter how much I practiced, I couldn’t memorize playing cards any faster than 1 every
10 seconds. I was stuck in a rut, and I couldn’t figure out why. “My card times have
hit a plateau,” I lamented.

“I would recommend you check out the literature on speed typing,” he replied.

When people first learn to use a keyboard, they improve very quickly from sloppy
single-finger pecking to careful two-handed typing, until eventually the fingers move
effortlessly and the whole process becomes unconscious. At this point, most people’s
typing skills stop progressing. They reach a plateau. If you think about it, it’s
strange. We’ve always been told that practice makes perfect, and yet many people sit
behind a keyboard for hours a day. So why don’t they just keeping getting better and
better?

In the 1960s, the psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner tried to answer this
question by describing the three stages of acquiring a new skill. During the first
phase, known as the cognitive phase, we intellectualize the task and discover new
strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. During the second, the associative
phase, we concentrate less, making fewer major errors, and become more efficient.
Finally we reach what Fitts and Posner called the autonomous phase, when we’re as good
as we need to be at the task and we basically run on autopilot. Most of the time that’s
a good thing. The less we have to focus on the repetitive tasks of everyday life, the
more we can concentrate on the stuff that really matters. You can actually see this
phase shift take place in f.M.R.I.’s of subjects as they learn new tasks: the parts of
the brain involved in conscious reasoning become less active, and other parts of the
brain take over. You could call it the O.K. plateau.

Psychologists used to think that O.K. plateaus marked the upper bounds of innate
ability. In his 1869 book “Hereditary Genius,” Sir Francis Galton argued that a person
could improve at mental and physical activities until he hit a wall, which “he cannot
by any education or exertion overpass.” In other words, the best we can do is simply
the best we can do. But Ericsson and his colleagues have found over and over again
that with the right kind of effort, that’s rarely the case. They believe that Galton’s
wall often has much less to do with our innate limits than with what we consider an
acceptable level of performance. They’ve found that top achievers typically follow the
same general pattern. They develop strategies for keeping out of the autonomous stage
by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented and getting
immediate feedback on their performance. Amateur musicians, for example, tend to spend
their practice time playing music, whereas pros tend to work through tedious exercises
or focus on difficult parts of pieces. Similarly, the best ice skaters spend more of
their practice time trying jumps that they land less often, while lesser skaters work
more on jumps they’ve already mastered. In other words, regular practice simply isn’t
enough. For all of our griping over our failing memories — the misplaced keys, the
forgotten name, the factoid stuck on the tip of the tongue — our biggest failing may be
that we forget how rarely we forget. To improve, we have to be constantly pushing
ourselves beyond where we think our limits lie and then pay attention to how and why we
fail. That’s what I needed to do if I was going to improve my memory.

With typing, it’s relatively easy to get past the O.K. plateau. Psychologists have
discovered that the most efficient method is to force yourself to type 10 to 20 percent
faster than your comfort pace and to allow yourself to make mistakes. Only by watching
yourself mistype at that faster speed can you figure out the obstacles that are slowing
you down and overcome them. Ericsson suggested that I try the same thing with cards. He
told me to find a metronome and to try to memorize a card every time it clicked. Once I
figured out my limits, he instructed me to set the metronome 10 to 20 percent faster
and keep trying at the quicker pace until I stopped making mistakes. Whenever I came
across a card that was particularly troublesome, I was supposed to make a note of it
and see if I could figure out why it was giving me cognitive hiccups. The technique
worked, and within a couple days I was off the O.K. plateau, and my card times began
falling again at a steady clip. Before long, I was committing entire decks to memory in
just a few minutes...." 

I invite you to consider which of the following methods is more in the spirit of deliberate practice in the light of this text:

Doing easy tactics over and over again untill you have memorized them all. Focussing on assimilation of low level patterns in huge quantities.

Doing difficult problems and focus on where and why you go astray and trying to prevent the same mistakes in the future. Changing strategy when matters are executed on autopilot.