This is just so good, loved reading this. I too spent many thousands of hours of my childhood doing the same deliberate practice. I then didn’t with golf in my early 20’s and became a scratch golfer in about 2 years of daily practice (I golfed a lot growing up and was a 8-9 handicap prior).
hi matt, thanks for sharing your thoughts and fairly concur as the secret to being good at anything is practice, practice, an awful load of commitment and stickiness when things get difficult, and practice. it's a great coincidence that you're sharing your basketball experience because i've actually just started playing it too! i don't think i'll hit 44/50 shots with my current skill level though.
if there's anything i'd challenge/add to this though, it is to have a strong awareness as to not what but *why* you are choosing to practice something deliberately. it's important to define why it's important to you and be really certain that it's something you want to improve in (and not what others have told you is the right thing to do) and an awareness that prioritising this will put a few other passion projects on the sidelines (we can be anything we want!! just not at the same time). growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell - deliberate practice is great as long as it's on the things that we intend them to.
the other thing i'd add is that while deliberate practice may come with discomfort + suffering as much as I don't want to admit does build a firmer sense of character, there is also a ton of experience and value in play that is not interchangeable with practice. this is probably more relevant in creative fields, not that I'm in a creative field, in that one cannot force creativity - but one can actively place themselves in environments that cultivate it and make it natural. they train and call upon different skillsets, I feel, in that no amount of deliberate practice can make up for the out-of-the-box thinking that comes with playful freedom (likewise no amount of playful freedom i.e. just play basketball with no intention to get better at a specific skill will create a player with impeccable fundamentals) - you need both to make an all-star.
to round off this comment and a bit of a random comparison, but this post reminds me really loosely about a piece of advice somebody gave me regarding, I kid you not: playing super smash bros. his advice for improvement is that during zero-stakes practice games, you should go in with one "focus area" in mind that you'd like to improve on (e.g. spacing, neutral, patience, keeping opponents in the corner, noting how they act in defensive scenarios, mixing up the timing of your offense). through this, casual mashfests can transform into small bursts of deliberate, intentional practice and regardless of the results, you can walk away from the session feeling like and knowing that you have improved at least one section of your play.
Hi Matt, I very much enjoyed reading your article. I appreciate how you’ve outlined the practical steps needed for ‘deliberate practice’ within an essay that logically follows (or flows ! ) from one idea into the next. I also love the examples you’ve included to illustrate these ideas because they’re so much clearer in my mind as a result - btw the basketball dribbling goggles sound incredible. Keep up the good work and good luck with your business!
I love how practical and accurate this is. It puts words to things I’ve been ruminating on. I’m interested to see the vision you have for an outdoor brand.
In my mind, there are three great founding members of the study of expertise. The first is Ericssen with his focus on deliberate practice. The next is Dreyfus and his focus on skill acquisition. Then the last is Gary Klein with his focus on real real situations and the RPD model which describes how experts make decisions.
Klein is the founder of Naturalistic Decision-Making which I have an article on, but I would actually recommend checking out Gary's book "Sources of Power" which details the RPD model in a very accessible way (lots of stories). It seems to me like "feel" has more to do with the ability to adapt and know exactly how to handle a situation than the "flow" state of mind. But I may be biased (I work with Gary).
Thanks for sharing all of this. I just read the CLA article. Agree that bot the basketball training and the pitch training at the end of the article are CLA. Not mutually exclusive. Knowing it as a defined pathway within a broader Deliberate Practice approach seems really helpful — I'm going to dig in more on it.
Also planning on reading your piece and looking at Klein's/Dryfus' work. Appreciate you sharing this Jared!
Good essay! I don’t have all the answers, but I wonder how we can design deliberate practice in a way that it’s enjoyable, or at the least, most sustainable.
loved this piece! surprised it doesn't have 1k likes at least
🙏🏼 Thank you!
This is just so good, loved reading this. I too spent many thousands of hours of my childhood doing the same deliberate practice. I then didn’t with golf in my early 20’s and became a scratch golfer in about 2 years of daily practice (I golfed a lot growing up and was a 8-9 handicap prior).
Love this.
hi matt, thanks for sharing your thoughts and fairly concur as the secret to being good at anything is practice, practice, an awful load of commitment and stickiness when things get difficult, and practice. it's a great coincidence that you're sharing your basketball experience because i've actually just started playing it too! i don't think i'll hit 44/50 shots with my current skill level though.
if there's anything i'd challenge/add to this though, it is to have a strong awareness as to not what but *why* you are choosing to practice something deliberately. it's important to define why it's important to you and be really certain that it's something you want to improve in (and not what others have told you is the right thing to do) and an awareness that prioritising this will put a few other passion projects on the sidelines (we can be anything we want!! just not at the same time). growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell - deliberate practice is great as long as it's on the things that we intend them to.
the other thing i'd add is that while deliberate practice may come with discomfort + suffering as much as I don't want to admit does build a firmer sense of character, there is also a ton of experience and value in play that is not interchangeable with practice. this is probably more relevant in creative fields, not that I'm in a creative field, in that one cannot force creativity - but one can actively place themselves in environments that cultivate it and make it natural. they train and call upon different skillsets, I feel, in that no amount of deliberate practice can make up for the out-of-the-box thinking that comes with playful freedom (likewise no amount of playful freedom i.e. just play basketball with no intention to get better at a specific skill will create a player with impeccable fundamentals) - you need both to make an all-star.
to round off this comment and a bit of a random comparison, but this post reminds me really loosely about a piece of advice somebody gave me regarding, I kid you not: playing super smash bros. his advice for improvement is that during zero-stakes practice games, you should go in with one "focus area" in mind that you'd like to improve on (e.g. spacing, neutral, patience, keeping opponents in the corner, noting how they act in defensive scenarios, mixing up the timing of your offense). through this, casual mashfests can transform into small bursts of deliberate, intentional practice and regardless of the results, you can walk away from the session feeling like and knowing that you have improved at least one section of your play.
Absolute madman to a wild and inspiring degree. Laughed audibly when I read what the annoying podcast was
😂
Hi Matt, I very much enjoyed reading your article. I appreciate how you’ve outlined the practical steps needed for ‘deliberate practice’ within an essay that logically follows (or flows ! ) from one idea into the next. I also love the examples you’ve included to illustrate these ideas because they’re so much clearer in my mind as a result - btw the basketball dribbling goggles sound incredible. Keep up the good work and good luck with your business!
I love how practical and accurate this is. It puts words to things I’ve been ruminating on. I’m interested to see the vision you have for an outdoor brand.
Thanks Will! Stay tuned. I'll be sharing some interesting updates and behind the scenes stuff as I'm building it.
Your basketball practice actually sounds quite a bit like CLA. the NYT recently did an article on it
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6665943/2025/09/29/sports-training-cla-coaching-wembanyana-ohtani/
In my mind, there are three great founding members of the study of expertise. The first is Ericssen with his focus on deliberate practice. The next is Dreyfus and his focus on skill acquisition. Then the last is Gary Klein with his focus on real real situations and the RPD model which describes how experts make decisions.
Klein is the founder of Naturalistic Decision-Making which I have an article on, but I would actually recommend checking out Gary's book "Sources of Power" which details the RPD model in a very accessible way (lots of stories). It seems to me like "feel" has more to do with the ability to adapt and know exactly how to handle a situation than the "flow" state of mind. But I may be biased (I work with Gary).
Thanks for sharing all of this. I just read the CLA article. Agree that bot the basketball training and the pitch training at the end of the article are CLA. Not mutually exclusive. Knowing it as a defined pathway within a broader Deliberate Practice approach seems really helpful — I'm going to dig in more on it.
Also planning on reading your piece and looking at Klein's/Dryfus' work. Appreciate you sharing this Jared!
This is perhaps the exact opposite of the writing you excerpted from McPhee’s essay. You certainly don’t practice what you preach/admire, alas. 🤷♂️
Good essay! I don’t have all the answers, but I wonder how we can design deliberate practice in a way that it’s enjoyable, or at the least, most sustainable.