Deliberate Practice

Research psychologist Anders Ericsson identified the key to exceptional achievement is through Deliberate Practice. Only when you work in solitude, never in groups, can you engage Deliberate Practice, in other words, be in the zone.

Studies suggests that elite performers spend more time practicing alone than those in their peers. Chess grandmasters typically spend five thousand hours, almost five times as many as the average players, studying the game by themselves in their first ten years of learning to play. College students who studies alone learn more quickly than studying with their peers. Elite athletes and musicians who outperform their peers by a huge gap spends unusual amount of time in solitary practice.

Deliberate Practice requires intense concentration and deep motivation and having people around you can be distracting. Studies have found that the simple act of being interrupted is one of the biggest barriers to productivity. Also, when practicing deliberately, it is imperative that you work on something that is most challenging personally. “When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are not only less useful– they’re counter productive. They reinforce existing cognitive mechanisms instead of improving them”, wrote Susan Cain on Deliberate Practice.¹

In business setting, evidences show that #open-plan offices nullifies the efficacies of collaboration. It reduces productivity and makes people sick, literally. Another study found that people who take a quiet stroll through the woods learn far better than the people who walk down busy city streets. The minds who created revolutionary inventions such as Linux, Wikipedia, or Personal Computer spends more of their time not with their colleagues collaborating, but their time working alone.