Varied Practice for Skill Development

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Varied practice, as discussed in Paul Berliner's book on jazz training, involves practicing similar but different things in alternation and a random sequence to develop a more abstract and flexible representation of a skill. This type of practice, termed as contextual interference or interleaving variable practice, helps in generating a deeper understanding of the skill and enables flexibility in applying it, especially crucial for tasks like improvisation. Additionally, the concept highlights that sometimes a temporary decline in performance may precede skill improvement.

Life revolves around learning—in school, at our jobs, even in the things we do for fun. But we often don’t progress in any of these areas at the rate we’d like. Consequently, and unfortunately, we often give up our pursuits prematurely or resign ourselves to always being mediocre in our classes, career, and hobbies.

Scott Young has some tips on how you can avoid this fate, level up in whatever you do, and enjoy the satisfaction of skill improvement. Scott is a writer, programmer, and entrepreneur, and the author of Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery. Today on the show, Scott shares the three key factors in helping us learn. He explains how copying others is an underrated technique in becoming a genius, why, contrary to the sentiments of motivational memes, we learn more from success than mistakes, why experts often aren’t good teachers and tactics for drawing out their best advice, why you may need to get worse before you get better, and more.