This Week’s ABC…

• Advice of the Week - How I use deliberate practice to progress faster than others at mastering any skill.
• Breakthrough Recommendation - Explore the book that taught me deliberate practice, which is the ultimate guide to achieving excellence.
• Challenge - Start your journey of deliberate practice with one small, focused action.

Advice of the Week: Master Any Skill with Deliberate Practice

Life Lesson

I asked the coach if I could be the ball boy. Other people thought that would be embarrassing—and honestly I didn’t care.

Before school, I would wake up at 5 AM and practice for a couple hours.

After school, I would practice for another few hours.

I would run liners by myself like a crazy kid, to improve my endurance.

I watched videos of NBA players and how they practiced.

I tried replicating their moves—their shooting form, their crossovers.

I did this everyday for a year.

The next year in 10th grade, I not only made the team…

I started.

I became one of the best 3 point shooters on the team.

Years later, I realized why I got so much better so fast: deliberate practice.

I never made the NBA—I blame my asian parents for forcing me down the typical engineer/doctor path. (JK mom and dad)

But this experience taught me that I could be complete trash at a skill, and through intentionally working hard—I could succeed.

I never thought I was very smart, or good at anything.

But damned if my parents didn’t teach me how to work hard.

That was my only skill and I latched onto it for dear life.

I still do today, in everything I apply myself to.

For years, I thought talent was the secret to greatness.

Then, I discovered deliberate practice by accident through basketball, and my perspective changed completely.

Talent might give you a head start, but deliberate practice is what makes you unstoppable.

Putting in the hours is very important—and it’s also about how you use those hours to push your limits and improve intentionally.

That’s what this week’s breakthrough is about.

When I was in 8th grade, I started playing basketball. I loved it, and decided I would try to make the team in the 9th grade.

I didn’t make it… I was devastated.

But it made sense: I had no jumpshot, and my endurance was terrible.

I wanted to be around organized basketball and understand what practicing really meant.

Breakthrough Recommendation: “Peak” by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool

If you want to dive deep into the science of mastering any skill, “Peak” by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool is the book you need.

He reveals how experts in every field—from chess grandmasters to elite athletes—use specific, structured practice methods to reach the top.

Our brains are capable of forming new neural connections and pathways (skills and skill effectiveness) throughout life—given the right practice, deliberate practice!

3 Types of Practice

The book talks about 3 types of practice that people engage in.

1. Naive Practice: Simply repeating an activity with little improvement.
2. Purposeful Practice: More structured, with specific goals and feedback, but still limited.
3. Deliberate Practice: The most effective form, characterized by…
   • Specific, well-defined goals
   • Intense focus
   • Immediate feedback
   • Constant adjustment

Further, the book gives you a simple framework for deliberate practice.

The 3 F’s Framework To Improve At Anything

• Focus: Deliberate practice is about targeted effort. Identify specific areas of weakness and work on them with full concentration. You’re not just doing something over and over mindlessly; you’re refining your approach every time, intentionally.
• Feedback: Seek immediate feedback. Whether it’s from a coach, mentor, or even self-reflection, you need to know what you’re doing wrong to correct it. Don’t just rely on how it feels—get concrete insights into your progress.
• **Fix It: **Integrate your learnings from the feedback and try again intentionally. Use mental representations (the mental image of what a successful performance or execution looks like) to improve.

Mental Representations are EVERYTHING.

As your skills improve, your mental representations become more refined, helping you identify mistakes and provide better feedback.

Experts, whether chess players or athletes, rely on these advanced mental models for faster, more accurate decision-making in high-pressure situations.

Why?

If you excel at this, you can effectively identify your mistakes in performance and can zoom in on them to improve further.

Better mental representations lead to better feedback, and better training, which leads to better mental representations, and on and on.

Makes sense.

I think of it as visualization—the clearer the picture or video in the your head (higher fidelity), the better you are and faster you will improve at the skill.

It’s not about practicing more; it’s about practicing smarter. Ericsson’s research on deliberate practice is groundbreaking, and his book is empowering.

He shows that the human brain is highly adaptable.

In the book, the author describes a simple framework you can use IMMEDIATELY.

One of my biggest takeaways from this book is that developing effective mental representations is the key purpose of deliberate practice.