Jerry Rice is the greatest wide receiver of all time and a well-known workout fanatic. That makes him a good subject for talking about deliberate practice. He’s also my favorite football player, so consider this my semi-topical homage in honor of his induction into the Football Hall of Fame.

The standard Jerry Rice story is that he wasn’t the fastest wide receiver in the league, but he was the hardest working and most disciplined. He finished his career with every major record by a wide margin. His career stats aren’t just a little bit better than the other all-time wide receivers, they’re better by a third. He caught 197 touchdowns, the next best receiver caught 148.

I have two favorite stories that I think demonstrate important ideas and outcomes from deliberate practice.

How do you spend your time?
I once saw a television special on the top ten Monday Night Football performances of all time. Jerry was on the list twice, naturally, including posting a MNF record 289 yards and three touchdowns on Minnesota in 1995. He also had a third, uncredited, performance on the list.

In 1989, his teammate, John Taylor, had 286 receiving yards (a record at the time), including two 90+ yard touch down catches. In every single John Taylor highlight, Jerry Rice would come out of nowhere to land key blocks. They’re amazing blocks, both for effort and technique. Watch these two highlights from the game and keep your eyes on #80. The John Taylor game would not have made the list without Jerry Rice.

One of the major themes from the people who study performance and deliberate practice is that how people spend their time is more important than how much time they spend or how hard they work. For example the swim study that I often reference found that different levels of swimmers were differentiated mainly by how they spent their practice time, not by how much time they spent practicing.

Jerry Rice had to be on the field doing something. He could have just thrown one block or taken the opportunity to catch his breath. Presumably, in pre-season all of the wide receivers had engaged in blocking practice. Every wide receiver in the league had similar opportunities. Jerry Rice maximized those opportunities. I think of that as a combination of time management and focus. (BTW, his teammate, John Taylor, was also known as an excellent blocker and that quid pro quo played a part in winning games and in boosting Jerry’s stats).

Think about your own work today. Did you use every minute productively? I sure didn’t. Since starting this post, I’ve checked TechCrunch and HackerNews several times and watched a YouTube video of some cheesy song about the town I live in. So rather than thinking about working sixty hours this week, try thinking about how to make each minute count.

Preparation mismatches are common
In 1997, Jerry Rice set the single season touchdown reception record with 22 touchdowns. Here’s the amazing thing, because of a player’s strike, he played only twelve games instead of sixteen. At the pace he was on, he would have scored 29 touchdowns over the course of a full season.

I’ve often debated the relative level of difficulty for this record. On the one hand, the season was significantly shorter–that obviously makes setting the record harder. On the other hand, the closest he ever came to this record in a full season was 17 touchdowns. So, there must have been another factor to put him on a touch down pace that was 70% higher than his next best season.

I think that factor was the strike. Most of the league went on a four week hiatus. Jerry came back ready to play at one level, the rest of the league came back at a much lower level. Even the highest level of professionals have very inconsistent levels of preparation.

I’ve seen many preparation mismatches happen at work. Many (frustrated) workers think it’s enough to be right. But ideas get more traction if they come packaged with preparation. The right idea with tight articulation, supporting evidence, and patient support will win out in most rational discussions. However, the right idea haphazardly presented will almost always lose out to a lesser idea presented well.

If a person goes into every meeting prepared to represent their point of view, then their point of view is going to win out more often (the number of times it would win on merit plus the number of times it was the only coherent option). I’ve been on the receiving end of many bad decisions that originated in this dynamic. The fix was just to go into every discussion with over the top preparation. Generally, it’s almost always possible to out-prepare someone.

If you make over the top preparation your standard, then you’re going to find many situations where you win by default.

Jerry Rice photo from Flickr Creative Commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/devstopfix/2689677355/

Roughly, deliberate practice is a means to improve yourself by intelligently breaking your target into components that can be practiced and upping the level of difficulty of each practice session to be just outside your comfort zone. Deliberate practice is often associated with the idea that even genius-level talents (Mozart, Tiger Woods) got there through practice, not talent. However, you can ignore the talent debate and just concentrate on the idea that if your talent level is X, deliberate practice is how you get to 10X.

There are two things that I think need more emphasis when people talk about deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice is more than 10,000 hours
Or maybe it’s less than 10,000 hours. Almost everyone I’ve used the phrase “deliberate practice” with has come back saying, “oh, that’s that 10,000 hour thing.” They’re referring to part of the research saying that after 10,000 hours of practice a person will have reached their improvement limit. This is the least useful thing to know about deliberate practice research. It’s the fine print warning that says if you keep a deliberate practice regime up for ten years it’s going to stop being effective. Big deal.

The ten thousand hour framing obscures two things, that deliberate practice can be applied to much smaller things (not just when your goal is to be world class) and when you want to make a smaller commitment. What happens after 1 hour of deliberate practice? Every hour spent practicing is time when you’re improving. There’s not 10,000 hours of work followed by a leap. It’s 10,000 hours followed by 10,000 gradations in improvement. The first research paper that I read on this topic is an study of competitive swimmers at all levels, The Mundanity of Excellence. Even at the youngest levels, they found that the fastest swimmers practiced better.

So, you’re an office worker who sends tons of email? Take one hour, read this article on writing effective emails, and then rewrite your last ten emails according to those guidelines. Forever after you’ll be a better emailer.

The key word is deliberate
A lot of people practice. They put in hours of work hoping to get better. Generally a high volume of practice does lead to improvement. But that’s not the key insight of deliberate practice. In the swimming example above they found that there were many similarities between the faster and slower swimmers, including how much time they spent swimming. The difference is that the slower swimmer would spend practice thinking about the hot tub and the faster swimmers would spend practice working on some minutiae, like how slight variations in the cupping of their hand effected the efficiency of their swimming stroke.

I generally find that it’s easier to work more than it is to work smarter. Why is that? It would obviously be much more efficient if my preference were reversed. For example, my number one productivity boost comes from keeping an obsessively updated todo list throughout the day. My natural inclination toward the todo list is to compete with myself to see how many items I can check off. The biggest problem with my todo list is that I’ll put everything on it and I don’t spend much time prioritizing. So at the end of the day my todo list reflects more activity than accomplishment.

In the language of deliberate practice, the “skill” I’m trying to improve is productivity. The naive approach is just to work harder. The deliberate approach is to break my productivity target down into smaller pieces and train up the areas where I am lacking. When it comes to productivity, I’m not afraid of hard work or long hours. Those are positives (I think). My weaknesses [1] are that I don’t like making plans (I distrust them), I often don’t follow my own plans, I procrastinate whenever the next step is not something I’m interested in (I almost lost an entire week to a screencast that still hasn’t happened). One of my old weaknesses was losing track of what I was working on and getting sidetracked. I solved that weakness by adopting a todo list. I bet if I spent more time “practicing” productivity I’d come up with an even more nuanced view of my strengths and weaknesses.

So, how would I train my own productivity? Each of those weaknesses needs a training plan. I’ve never seen anyone break down “productivity” in the way a coach would break down a training schedule. Should I say next Thursday I’ll re-prioritize three of my old todo lists, take a coffee break, then prioritize three more lists (written 2 x 3 x prioritize todo list; 2:00 rest)? That would be taking a small subset of my productivity goal and training it.

I generally like to try to include my deliberate practice as an organic part of the rest of my work. That means I like to practice while I’m working instead of creating artificial exercises like the todo list one above. I’m not advocating this as the most hardcore way to approach work, but it’s as hardcore as I’ve managed so far. The way I broke down training productivity was just to create a meta list that gives me points for things like: making a plan, working to a plan, and not surfing random websites. I’d be interested in a more disciplined approach though–does anyone have any training ideas?

[1] The book The Cyclists Training Bible has cyclists identify limiters, factors that are holding them back from achieving their goals. Then the cyclist puts together a training program that specifically addresses these limiters. The difference between weaknesses and limiters may seem subtle, but I think limiters are a much more functional way of looking at your weaknesses. I’m a terrible singer, but that hasn’t held me back from anything meaningful. I’m also terrible at visual design and that often slows down my work. Gee, which one should I work on? Thinking about limiters also lets you work on things that you’re good at but which happen to be extra important to your goals. For example, as a programmer I’m a reasonably good communicator but I’ve still managed to collect a huge list of regrettable programming outcomes that could have been solved by earlier, more articulate communication. So communication is always one of the skills that I’m working on.

Sarah and I just got back from a talk at Haas about “deliberate practice” as it relates to excellence. The idea is that how good (or expert) you become at a skill has a lot more to do with how you go about doing your work than it has to do with merely performing the skill a large number of times or over a long length of time. An expert will break down the skills that are required to be expert and focus on improving those skills either during practice (sports) or during the course of day-to-day activities (business).

Most people who perform a job over a number of years will become experienced non-experts, not experts.

It’s easy to look at this in terms of sports. During practice, Tiger Woods doesn’t merely spend time hitting balls on the range. He practices specific shots and fine tunes his mechanics with each swing. One of my running teammates used to spend most of her easy runs thinking about her running form. I spent my easy runs day dreaming. She won more medals (and ended up running for Cal).

This all reminds me of an old study of what differentiated classes of swimmers, The Mundanity of Excellence (it seems to be readable through Google book search). The researchers found that swimmers who moved up in class did it almost entirely by how they went about performing their practice. It was the quality of their work, not the quantity of their work that mattered. Moving up in class could be as simple as changing the way you cupped your hand during your swim stroke, as long as you were willing to practice that improved stroke during every lap of every practice.

This was a business school talk though, and we ended up wanting more examples of how you would apply the concepts of deliberate practice in a business setting. So I started thinking about ways that I would or should focus on the quality of my work rather than the quantity of my work. It’s hard.

Public speaking is an easy one. People are so afraid of it that there’s an entire community to help people practice (Toastmasters). But where do you go to practice email? You have to do it on the fly.

When I write an email I consciously try to apply the rule that the action item for the receiving party should appear in the first two sentences. My emails are more effective as a result. They didn’t get more effective merely because I’ve spent years writing them or because I’ve experienced the receipt of well written emails. They got better because I made a conscious decision to apply a better practice with each email.

Every time I write code I start a mini-todo list where I can shelve ideas or concerns that popup. The list also means that if I get interrupted I have context that helps me get back into the flow faster. This is the major practice that let me be a productive developer while dealing with the interruptions that come with being a manager or running a business.

Sales is a huge one. Let’s just say that if I promise you a response and you get it, that’s because I started using Highrise to manage all my contacts. I’m not working harder to keep up with my email, I’m just working smarter.

The nice thing about having better practices for the mundanity of work is that it frees me from a lot of mental baggage so I can actually reflect a bit about what’s going on in life/business. There’s no sense making the engine more efficient if I’m using it to drive off a cliff (or some such crazy metaphor).