How to master any skill using deep practice

My Story

Back in my late 20s, I decided to learn the Chinese language. In hindsight, it wasn't the easiest language to learn. I probably should have chosen a less demanding language to pick up as a casual hobby. If you're familiar with Mandarin Chinese, it has over 50 basic sounds, four tones, and 10s of thousands of characters. According to babbel.com, it is one of the 6 most difficult languages to learn for an English speaker.

But that said, I did like the challenge, the culture and the people I met while learning the language, all of which inspired me to stick with it.

I started my Chinese studies by joining an evening Chinese class. Nearly all the students were working full-time, in their late 20s to 30s and struggling with the difficult language. Then, one day, a student learned to count from 0 to 10 in Chinese without making a single mistake. It sounds quite simple, but it's pretty challenging for someone new to the language, and I remember how surprised the whole class was. How did that person, who was busy as us, seem to struggle the previous week, suddenly leapfrog everyone and speak so clearly?

This gave me motivation. If that person did it, then perhaps I can do it also. So after classes, I immediately spent that afternoon practising my tones and pronunciations again and counting to 10. I would speak, listen to myself and check where I got the number, pronunciation or tone wrong, correct it and repeat it. I kept doing this until I could count to 10 without a mistake, and the flow was as natural as possible. And when I had mastered that, I tried counting to 100. Then I practised introducing myself in Chinese.

I showed up to class the following week, and when the teacher asked for a volunteer to count to 10, I shot up my hand, and I not only did it without mistakes but also said it clearly. The class was amazed at my skills which boosted my confidence and gave me even more motivation to improve.

From there, I spent the next two years studying the language for about 3 hrs a day. I brought Chinese language books, joined social clubs, practised with language exchange partners and found a teacher to help correct my tone and push me.

I got to a level where I felt comfortable speaking with native Chinese speakers. I eventually also passed the Chinese Language Proficient test (HSK 5) a few years later. Now, I'm not a linguistic genius. Many people are better and have reached that level faster. But it shows you can learn another language in your late 20s and become proficient.

I've since then also picked up some Japanese and applied the same techniques. And now, at 40 years old and working full-time as a software engineer, I am looking to start learning illustration and animation. Can I learn to draw and become good at it? Or, more broadly speaking, is it something you need to be born with to excel in, or can anyone learn to be good at it?

Myelin and Skill Development

Daniel Coyle, the author of The Talent Code, looked to answer this exact question. Where does talent come from, and is it nature or nurture? He travelled the world and researched how regular people achieved greatness in music, arts, education, and sports. Daniel found that talent isn't something you are born with and that anyone with the right approach can become great at anything. He uses neuroscience to explain all skills come down to one thing. A neutral fatty protein called myelin. The more myelin you have, the more skilled you are.

To understand the connection between myelin and skill, let's look at the composition of our brain and how skills are formed. As you learn a new skill or thought, you build new neurons, also known as nerve cells and axons, that connect the nerve cells in your brain. Then, whenever you do an action, your brain sends electrical and chemical signs through many nerve cells to perform that action or thought.

Myelin is a microscopic neural substance that wraps around your neural circuit. It increases the speed and strength of nerve impulses, translating to faster and more accurate actions or thoughts. If you think of Neurons as a skill, then myelin is how skilled you are at it. The thicker myelin is, the better you are at that action.

The interesting fact about myelin is that it isn't fixed at birth. Anyone can grow it. It forms the most during the early years and declines after 50. Myelin is indiscriminate about what skill is being created. To develop more, you need to perform that action more. But to encourage the fastest growth, you need to push yourself to learn at the edge by doing what Daniel Coyle calls "Deep practice".

Deep Practice

Deep practice involves practising just outside of your comfort zone, reflecting on any errors and adjusting, and then repeating the process.

According to Daniel Coyle, you need to fail and struggle to fire the right circuits to grow Myelin. Failing isn't optional, and it's neurologically required.

"..operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes — makes you smarter." - Daniel Coyle writes in The Talent Code.

For effective deep practice, Daniel Coyle breaks it down into three rules.

1. Chunk it - Break down what you're learning into smaller actions and focus on one individual part at a time. For example, if you're learning to play soccer, don't just practice complex combinations such as shooting, passing, and ball handling. Instead, focus on just shooting first and mastering that before moving on.
2. Repeat it - Repeating an action often triggers a set of neural activities, which encourages the growth of myelin. As we learned earlier, this translates to improved action, skill, or thought. Practice can be hitting a ball every day or writing a blog each week. The key to getting results is to practice consistently, as Myelin is dynamic, grows with more practice, and decreases with less practice.
3. Learn to feel it - To build myelin effectively, you need to practice at the edge of your ability—the point where it's just beyond your capability but not too far. Here you can best learn to feel when you are failing and know how to adjust to succeed by trial and error.

A great example of deep practice is watching a toddler learn to walk. First, the baby will get up, walk a step then fall. The baby tries again and again until one day, the baby can walk a few steps without falling. Eventually, the baby learns to walk staggeringly without falling. And before long, the baby can walk comfortably and might even start to try and run. The baby has used deep practice by targeting, failing, adjusting and repeating.

Reflecting on my language studies, I credit my Chinese improvement to my practice schedule, which I now know as deep practice. Every day, I would push myself to learn another word and more complicated sentence struct. I also challenged myself by joining a language exchange meetup to practice in front of people. I forced myself to fail and correct myself or be corrected by others. I had a mental image of what good looked like and worked towards that. And I kept it consistent and practised every day without a beat.

Greatness

Daniel showed that greatness isn't something you are born with but that anyone can grow to it. That said, some people are genetically born with some special trait that gives them an advantage or makes it easier for them to pick things up. For those gifted people, if combined with motivation, practice, and support, it can lead to world-class performers and Olympians. Think of Michale Phelps, who dominated swimming and won 28 medals across five Olympics. He had the right drive and support and was born with large hands, long arms and a long torso, which made him anatomically ideal for swimming. While even if you practised for 10 thousand hours with the right coach and had strong determination, you probably never beat Phelps. However, you can still outperform most of the population if you commit to practising swimming every day for a year.

Final Thoughts

Deep practice reminds us all that mastery comes from persistent practice at the edge of your ability and attention to correcting mistakes. This can apply to any discipline, such as basketball, swimming, art, music, writing, public speaking, science, engineering, software development, or learning a foreign language.