“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear that man who has practices one kick 10,000 times.”
Deliberate practice is the difference between you and the person you wish you could become.
Let me tell you something nobody wants to hear: you’re probably not special.
Neither am I. Neither was Mozart, Kobe Bryant, or any of those people we’ve convinced ourselves were touched by some magical genius fairy at birth. And here’s the thing that’s going to piss off half the people reading this—that’s actually good news.
Because if talent isn’t what separates the legends from the rest of us clueless folks mindlessly scrolling through Instagram at 2 AM, then maybe, just maybe, we’ve got a shot at something extraordinary after all.
I’ve spent years watching people—myself included—abandon dreams with the same excuse: “I’m just not naturally good at this.” It’s the perfect get-out-of-jail-free card. Can’t play piano? No musical talent. Can’t write? Not creative enough. Can’t start that business? Don’t have the entrepreneurial gene.
It’s a lie. Comforting, socially acceptable nonsense, but a lie nonetheless.
Here’s what actually happened: You tried something, it felt hard and uncomfortable, you didn’t see immediate results, and your brain—that beautiful, lazy bastard—convinced you that the problem was your DNA rather than your approach. Because admitting the truth is way more terrifying than blaming genetics.
The truth? You just never learned how to practice properly.
Brilliant.
Let’s talk about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, because we love using him as Exhibit A in the “talent is everything” argument. The dude was performing across Europe at age six! Child prodigy! Genetic lottery winner!
Except Karl Anders Ericsson, who spent over three decades studying elite performers, looked at Mozart’s story and said, “Hold on a second.”
Mozart wasn’t plucked from obscurity by the hand of God. He was born into a family of musicians. His father was a composer and music teacher who started training him at age four. By the time little Wolfgang hit six, he’d already logged thousands of hours of practice.
As Ericsson points out:
“The differences between expert performers and normal adults are not immutable, that is, due to genetically prescribed talent. Instead, these differences reflect a lifelong period of deliberate effort to improve performance.”
Think about that. While other six-year-olds were eating dirt and learning not to pee themselves, Mozart had already put in more focused music practice than most adults manage in a lifetime.
What a legend.
Was he talented? Sure. But that “talent” was built, brick by brick, through a process that would make most of us want to curl up and take a nap.
Even Mozart’s famous perfect pitch—the ability to identify any musical note just by hearing it—isn’t some mystical gift. Psychologist Ayako Sakakibara proved at the Ichionkai Music School in Tokyo that perfect pitch can be learned through structured training. Your brain isn’t fixed. It’s disgustingly, frustratingly, wonderfully adaptable.
Here’s where most of us screw up. We confuse doing something repeatedly with actually practicing.
You play guitar for an hour every day? Cool. Are you running through the same songs you already know, feeling pretty good about yourself? That’s not practice. That’s entertainment with a side of ego massage.
Real practice—the kind that transforms amateurs into experts—is called deliberate practice, and it’s nothing like the autopilot nonsense most people call “putting in the hours.”
Deliberate practice is systematic, focused, and structured with one purpose: to push you beyond your current level of performance. It’s not fun. It’s not relaxing. It’s the mental equivalent of doing squats until your legs give out, except you’re doing it with your brain.
According to Ericsson, the author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, deliberate practice has a specific anatomy. And if you’re missing any of these pieces, you’re just spinning your wheels and wondering why you’re not getting anywhere.
“I want to get better at writing” is not a goal. It’s a wish you make while blowing out birthday candles.
“I want to write 500 words of clear, engaging prose about complex topics every morning, focusing specifically on improving my opening hooks” is a goal. See the difference?
Deliberate practice demands that you break your grand ambitions into tiny, measurable chunks. As Ericsson explains:
“Purposeful practice is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal… The key thing is to take that general goal–get better–and turn it into something specific that you can work on with a realistic expectation of improvement.”
Small goals let you track progress. They let you pinpoint exactly where you’re struggling. They keep you from drowning in the overwhelming vastness of “mastery” and focus you on the next achievable step.
Which, let’s be honest, is much better than staring at your computer screen wondering why you’re not Shakespeare yet.
Intense focus is non-negotiable. Not “I’m sort of paying attention while Netflix plays in the background” focus. We’re talking about the kind of concentration that makes your brain sweat.
This is where magic happens. When you focus intensely, your brain starts rewiring itself. Neural pathways strengthen. Skills that once felt impossible begin to feel automatic.
Eleanor Maguire’s study of London cab drivers is a perfect example—these drivers can navigate 25,000 streets from memory not because they were born with GPS brains, but because they focused intensely on learning the city’s layout through rigorous training.
Your brain is plastic. It changes based on what you demand of it. But it only changes when you push it hard enough to trigger adaptation.
As Ericsson notes, elite performers:
“…develop their abilities through dedicated training that drives changes in the brain (and sometimes, depending on the ability, in the body) that make it possible for them to do things that they otherwise could not.”
Here’s the part nobody likes: you need someone to tell you you’re doing it wrong. Immediately. Specifically. Brutally.
Without feedback, you’re just reinforcing your mistakes over and over until they become permanent fixtures in your skillset. You need a coach, a mentor, or at minimum a system that shows you—in real time—where you’re screwing up and how to fix it.
Ericsson is blunt about this:
“Without feedback–either from yourself or from outside observers–you cannot figure out what you need to improve on or how close you are to achieving your goal.”
This is why practicing alone is often ineffective. You can’t see your own blind spots. You can’t measure what you can’t see. Get someone who knows more than you to watch you work and tell you the uncomfortable truth.
Let me be clear: deliberate practice feels terrible. It’s supposed to.
Geoff Colvin, author of Talent is Overrated, puts it perfectly:
“Deliberate practice is hard. It hurts. But it works. More of it equals better performance, and tons of it equals great performance.”
If your practice feels comfortable, you’re doing it wrong. You should be operating at the edge of your abilities, constantly pushing into territory where you might fail. As Ericsson says:
“If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.”
This is where the Stoics would nod approvingly. Comfort is the enemy of growth. Discomfort is the price of admission to excellence. The question isn’t whether you’ll feel pain—it’s whether you’re willing to feel it consistently enough to get where you want to go.
You’ve heard about the 10,000-hour rule, right? Practice for 10,000 hours and you’ll become an expert. Simple math. Just put in the time.
Wrong. Painfully, completely wrong.
Fantastic.
Ericsson mentioned that elite performers spend roughly 10,000 hours (about 10 years) reaching expertise, but everyone latched onto the number and ignored the qualifier: those hours have to be spent in deliberate practice, not just mindlessly doing the same thing over and over.
As Ericsson clarified in a Freakonomics podcast:
“I think there’s really nothing magical about 10,000 hours. Just the amount of experience performing may, in fact, have very limited chances to improve your performance. The key seems to be that deliberate practice, where you’re actually working on improving your own performance—that is the key process.”
You can drive a car for 20 years and still be a mediocre driver. You can bake pies every weekend for a decade and never improve beyond “acceptable.” Why? Because once you reach a comfortable level of competence, your brain shifts into autopilot. You stop learning. You stop pushing. You plateau.
Ericsson explains that “once a person reaches that level of ‘acceptable’ performance and automaticity, the additional years of ‘practice’ don’t lead to improvement.”
Ten thousand hours of autopilot practice gets you nowhere. Ten thousand hours of deliberate, focused, uncomfortable practice? That’s a different story entirely.
Want to see what this looks like in practice? Let’s talk about Kobe Bryant.
Five NBA championships. Two Olympic gold medals. Considered one of the greatest basketball players in history. And yes, before you say it, he had natural athletic ability. But so did thousands of other players who never made it past college ball.
Here’s what separated Kobe: he started conditioning work at 4:30 AM. Running and sprinting until 6 AM. Weight training until 7 AM. Then he’d shoot 800 made jump shots before 11 AM.
Do the math. If his shooting percentage was around 50%, that’s 1,600 shots attempted. Every. Single. Day.
That’s deliberate practice in its purest form:
Kobe’s mantra: “Rest at the end, not the middle.”
That’s not talent. That’s someone who understood the price of excellence and paid it every single morning while everyone else was still asleep.
So here we are. You’ve read this far. You know the secret now. Deliberate practice isn’t some mystical technique—it’s a systematic approach to pushing yourself beyond your current limits, with specific goals, intense focus, immediate feedback, and consistent discomfort.
The question isn’t whether it works. Ericsson spent 30 years proving it works. The question is, how far are you willing to go?
Because here’s the thing about pursuing mastery: it’s going to suck. You’re going to feel incompetent. You’re going to want to quit. You’re going to look at people who seem “naturally talented” and wonder why you’re putting yourself through this.
And that’s exactly when you need to remember that those “naturally talented” people felt the same way. They just kept going when you would have stopped.
James Clear, who wrote extensively about deliberate practice, suggests you “align your ambitions with your natural abilities.” Smart advice. But even your natural abilities need to be sharpened through the same brutal process. Nobody gets a free pass.
If you’re content with being decent at your hobby, ignore everything I just said. Enjoy your practice sessions. Have fun. There’s no shame in that.
But if you want to be exceptional—if you want to look back in five or ten years and barely recognize the person you used to be—then you need to get serious about how you practice.
Find a coach. Set specific goals. Focus like your life depends on it. Get feedback that stings. Push yourself past comfortable into the realm where growth actually happens.
Stop waiting for talent to magically appear. Stop using genetics as an excuse. Stop doing the same comfortable things over and over and expecting different results.
The path to mastery isn’t hidden. It’s not complicated. It’s just hard. Really, really hard.
The only question that matters is whether you’re willing to do hard things consistently enough to become someone who does extraordinary things.
Most people aren’t.
Are you?
DISCLOSURE: In my article, I’ve mentioned a few products and services, all in a valiant attempt to turbocharge your life. Some of them are affiliate links. This is basically my not-so-secret way of saying, “Hey, be a superhero and click on these links.” When you joyfully tap and spend, I’ll be showered with some shiny coins, and the best part? It won’t cost you an extra dime, not even a single chocolate chip. Your kind support through these affiliate escapades ensures I can keep publishing these useful (and did I mention free?) articles for you in the future.
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