020: Improve your Skills with Deliberate Practice

What you'll learn

  • Why coders should abandon the saying “practice makes perfect”
  • The value of consistency in learning and growing in coding
  • Understanding deliberate practice; regular practice with a specific goal of improvement
  • Why mastery is actually much rarer than we are led to believe
  • The importance of being highly structured in deliberate practice
  • Specific, informative feedback; the key guidance to learn and improve
  • How deliberate practice focuses on quality of practice instead of quantity
  • Using the Pomodoro Technique to regain focus in practice
  • Why it is always important to start practicing what you are least comfortable with
  • Integrating new challenges into your deliberate practice
  • Learning to bridge the feedback gap of self-teaching; asking for help

Tweetables

“Practice helps us improve and that's the best that we can hope for.” — @lavie_encode Click To Tweet “10,000 hours of unfocused work is meaningless.” — @lavie_encode Click To Tweet “Low-quality practice sessions are poorly structured and they lack clear goals or desired outcomes.” — @lavie_encode Click To Tweet “Learning deliberate practice by doing it every single day will change your life.” — @lavie_encode Click To Tweet

What is deliberate practice, and how does it differ from “regular” practice?

Nicole answers these questions and discusses how you can become a better web developer by integrating deliberate practice. You’ll finish the episode with a new perspective on what it really means to practice something for improvement, versus just going through motions aimlessly.

Today we are going to be talking about one of the biggest mistakes that I see new web developers. In fact, I have made these mistakes, too. That mistake looks something like this: A new web developer out there is learning to code and probably working through some kind of guided e-Learning platform like Treehouse, freeCodeCamp, Coursera, or Udemy courses.

You are cruising along, in the beginning, doing really basic stuff, getting great feedback that you are doing well. Let’s face it, there is usually only a couple of ways to approach what you learn early on. Now, this is where I personally start stressing a bit. Your application is clunky, at best, and it can be really frustrating to be at that point. It starts to get hard, it no longer feels so comfortable, and at that point you are officially not cruising anymore; you’ve hit traffic.

So, what do you do? Stay tuned as we discuss how to avoid associating those negative feelings with coding, the psychology of learning, the benefits of practicing the right way, and tips for introducing Deliberate Practice into your life.

Episode Links

Apps Mentioned

Be Focused Pro
This app is unfortunately Mac-only (womp womp), but I stumbled upon it while in search of a focusing solution.

If you’ve ever used the Pomodoro technique, this app applies a lot of the same principles. Set “work periods” of a few minutes to get yourself in the cadence of focusing, then gradually extend the period. Remember to take occasional breaks!

Episode Bonus

Download the “Is Your Practice Deliberate?” self-evaluation cheat sheet, a one-pager for ensuring you’re learning as effectively as possible.

I’d love to hear from you:

On Twitter as @lavie_encode

On the La Vie en Code Facebook page

Or, via my Contact page

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What you'll learn

  • Why coders should abandon the saying “practice makes perfect”
  • The value of consistency in learning and growing in coding
  • Understanding deliberate practice; regular practice with a specific goal of improvement
  • Why mastery is actually much rarer than we are led to believe
  • The importance of being highly structured in deliberate practice
  • Specific, informative feedback; the key guidance to learn and improve
  • How deliberate practice focuses on quality of practice instead of quantity
  • Using the Pomodoro Technique to regain focus in practice
  • Why it is always important to start practicing what you are least comfortable with
  • Integrating new challenges into your deliberate practice
  • Learning to bridge the feedback gap of self-teaching; asking for help

Tweetables

“Practice helps us improve and that's the best that we can hope for.” — @lavie_encode Click To Tweet “10,000 hours of unfocused work is meaningless.” — @lavie_encode Click To Tweet “Low-quality practice sessions are poorly structured and they lack clear goals or desired outcomes.” — @lavie_encode Click To Tweet “Learning deliberate practice by doing it every single day will change your life.” — @lavie_encode Click To Tweet

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