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Deep Questions with Cal Newport cover image

Ep. 304: Seinfeld on The Deep Life

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

NOTE

Practice Within the Actual Work Itself

Engaging in isolated abstract practice sessions, common in sports and music, is the exception rather than the norm. For most endeavors, especially cognitive tasks, the most effective way to build skills is by making the actual work your practice. Rather than hoping abstract skills will translate, incorporate skill-building directly into your work. This philosophy is applied in the online course 'Top Performer' based on Cal Newport's book 'So Good They Can't Ignore You.'

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Speaker 1
Those are really the exception, not the norm when it comes to how you build skills. This idea that you can have these abstract isolated practice sessions. Where I'm going to go, for example, to a baseball field and take grounders and work in the cage in this isolated abstract way so that later when I'm playing baseball, I'll be better. Or I'm going to go to the gym and I'm going to lift weights because it's going to make me faster when I'm on the football field. It's sort of isolated abstract practice separate from the actual endeavor in which you want to apply it. That is the exception, not the rule. So yes, we do that in sports, we do that in music, we do that for things like chess. But for most endeavors, especially complicated cognitive endeavors, like almost any skill you'd be improving in knowledge work, for most endeavors, you're better off having the actual work itself be your practice. Instead of saying, let me do something different and hope that the skills I pick up in this abstract practice carry over to my specific work. Let your work itself be the practice. We actually do this, and by we, I'm referring here to the online course that I have with Scott Young, called Top Performer, which we open up once or twice a year. This is a course in which it's based on my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You.

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