Deliberate practice

Have you ever lost yourself in playing, forgetting about time and self-consciousness? Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this state flow — an intrinsically enjoyable experience of total absorption in a challenging activity. It’s one of the reasons we play music, and it feels wonderful.

But there’s a catch. In flow, your attention is diffused — spread across the whole experience rather than focused on specific details. You keep playing through mistakes without stopping, because stopping would break the spell. The problem is that every time you play through an error without correcting it, you’re training your fingers to make that error again.

K. Anders Ericsson, the psychologist who spent decades studying how people become experts, put it directly: the absorbed, effortless state of flow is “almost antithetical to the focused attention required by deliberate practice to maximise feedback and information about corrective action.”

Deliberate practice is a specific type of practice designed to improve performance. It was defined by Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer in their landmark 1993 study, which examined how violinists at a Berlin music academy reached different levels of expertise.

Their key finding surprised many people: the difference between good and great performers wasn’t innate talent — it was the amount and quality of deliberate practice they had accumulated. The best violinists had done more hours of focused, goal-directed work on specific weaknesses, with immediate feedback, than their less accomplished peers.

Think about activities you’ve done for years without becoming an expert — typing, driving, cooking breakfast. You’ve put in thousands of hours, but you aren’t world-class. That’s because those hours weren’t spent deliberately targeting weaknesses, setting specific goals, and incorporating a tight loop of feedback and correction. You were just doing the activity, and “good enough” was good enough.

In How Learning Works (2010), researchers Susan Ambrose, Michael Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha Lovett, and Marie Norman synthesised decades of evidence on teaching and learning. Their chapter on practice and feedback identifies the ingredients that separate productive practice from wasted time:

1. Set explicit, specific goals. “Practice harder” is not a goal. “Eliminate the stumble at the second beat of this figure” is. The more precise the target, the faster you know when you’ve hit it.
2. Progressively refine those goals. Once you fix the stumble, shift focus — to tempo, dynamics, expression, or how the phrase connects to its neighbours. Improvement is a series of ever-finer adjustments.
3. Practice at the right difficulty. You want to play at a speed where mistakes are rare but not impossible. Too easy and you coast on autopilot. Too hard and errors flood in faster than you can correct them. Slow down, exaggerate articulation, or shrink the chunk to stay in that productive zone.
4. Break things down (scaffold). Don’t play the whole piece when you have a specific error to fix — by the time you reach the tricky bar, your focus has drifted. Isolate the problem. Work on it directly. Then put it back in context.
5. Evaluate frequently. Don’t play through the whole piece and then try to remember what went wrong. Work in short loops so that feedback is immediate. Each mistake is an opportunity to never make that mistake again.

A teacher provides the feedback loop that deliberate practice depends on. They hear what you can’t, stop you at the right moments, and direct your attention to the errors that matter. That’s why lessons accelerate improvement so dramatically.

When you practise alone, you have to supply that feedback yourself. This means listening actively (not just playing), working in short segments so you can hear problems immediately, and scoring your own performance honestly. Tools that break your practice into focused tasks, randomise the order, and ask you to evaluate each attempt can stand in for some of what a teacher does.