The Art Of Deliberate Practice (And How To Incorporate It Into Your Creative Work)

When you’re working consistently, and maybe even more importantly if you’re not, it can be hard to find time in your schedule for… practice. As novices, we’re frequently hustling to learn and acquire new skills. When I wanted to learn to edit, I took an 8-hour course on Adobe Premiere Pro twice. Once to learn, and again because my notebook was stolen and I refused to move ahead without a reference guide.

If you’ve played any kind of sport, learned an instrument, or any skill, really - you already know practice is essential to the process. If you miss a week at the gym, you absolutely feel it. As a freelancer, or business owner, it not only helps to hone your skills and techniques, but it also helps to build a strong portfolio and network of clients. The problem many of us face is that time for practicing isn’t a prescheduled appointment list taped to our refrigerators but on our own timetables. There are no corporate funds to cover expenses you may have in search of this knowledge, not to mention downtime. No one is going to remind or encourage you. As usual in the freelance world, you are your own motivation.

One of the most important benefits of practice is that it allows you to constantly improve your craft. Whether you're a copywriter, designer, or photographer, the more you work on your skills, the better you will become. This not only makes you more attractive to potential clients, but it also allows you to deliver higher quality work and command higher rates. One of the things I disliked as a staff employee was that this type of habitual practice and development was not equally distributed among the staff.

You may have creative types who go to conferences and meet clients and see other creative teams work, while project managers were given opportunities for software courses and a bevy of project post-mortems. In many ways, project managers can be the key to getting any of that higher-level creative execution going, but instead of being a true part of the creative process, their value was relegated to the administration of it all. And it’s unfortunate because a good team is collaborative, and you can’t be collaborative when you’re in different silos.

Borrowing from James Clear’s blog on the art of Learning vs. Practicing, he quotes:

“When we practice something, we are involved in the deliberate repetition of a process with the intention of reaching a specific goal. The words deliberate and intention are key here because they define the difference between actively practicing something and passively learning it.”

—Thomas Sterner, The Practicing Mind

Clear, a productivity expert and author of Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, also stresses the importance of consistent, deliberate practice in achieving goals. He suggests breaking down larger goals into smaller, manageable tasks and focusing on consistency rather than perfection. If you’re the type of person who sets goals, practice is an integral part of actually achieving them.

By now, you may be well familiar with Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours theory. First presented in his book Outliers, Gladwell popularized the idea that 10,000 hours of guided practice was “the magic number of greatness,” regardless of a person’s natural aptitude. When an action or behavior is reinforced, it’s more likely to be repeated in the future. Deliberate practice, which is characterized by setting specific goals, receiving feedback, and focusing on improvement, is an effective way to reinforce behavior and make it more likely to become a habit.

Of course, Gladwell’s theory is not without detractors. Including, for instance, the research he relied on as evidence, who have been open about Gladwell’s oversimplification of their research. No amount of practice - even 20,000 hours say – is likely to make me cut out for elite sports. And putting all of one’s energy into trying to hit 10,000 hours, can lead to a number of not-so-attractive conditions like burnout - but when we think about 10,000 hours of quality practice - where the emphasis is less on the amount of time you practice and more on how you practice, things start to look up again.

Practicing is about creating habits. It’s about applying the skills you’ve learned and building on them. It’s also about aligning with who you are and what you want to achieve.

So, what does practice look like? When I took track in middle school, practice looked a lot like gym clothes, circles around the oval and high-knees across the grass. It wasn’t always the same routine but focused on elements meant to build strength and consistency for the main thing I was there to do, run the 800-leg of a 4-person relay. Some days were purely for endurance - how long can I run? Other days were about strengthening muscles like calves, hamstrings, and arms — all of which were sore at the end of any practice, but would all ultimately help push me across the finish line.

As a writer and creative director now, however, practice isn’t as formulaic. I don’t always have time (or the wherewithal) to sit down and say, write a short story, or an essay - even though the act of doing so strengthens my skills in areas critical to my career.

Is the mere act of doing your work considered practice? Are you inherently getting better at doing your job by … doing your job? Clearly, I’m arguing this one to myself, but my gut says yes and no. Do you get better at doing your job by doing it? Sure. In Adam Grant’s Think Again, he argues the most valuable skill is not learning what to think, but rather how to think. On-the-job experience is critical to our understanding of how things work in real life.

You get faster, and you understand why, how, and when problems arise and what to do about them. As your capacity for those things levels out, you may add more to your plate. Will it always push you forward? This is where I think it gets a little wonky. At some point, something happens that makes us unhappy with work. I believe part of it is leveling out - when you’ve reached the point in your specific job where you do really have anywhere else to go or something to achieve. A lot of us get stuck there, and we’re not happy about it.

This is where practice comes back in full effect. How do you incorporate practice into your creative work?

If you don’t know what practice looks like in your field, it’s helpful to start with some of your fellow creative-types. Renowned graphic designer and artist Paula Scher, for example, is known for spending hours sketching and refining her designs. “You want to be in a position where you’re capable of making mistakes,” she says. “Sometimes it’s about accidentally making an extra mark while you’re sketching, and you look at it and feel like you’ve failed, but actually there’s something in it, and you use it. [Those] kinds of problems and constraints, that push you out of your comfort zone and make you do something else, those are the things that make you more inventive.” 

Malcolm Gladwell’s own practice routine involves writing every morning until noon. Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan is known for writing screenplays linearly, writing three or four pages, then spending the next several days editing. Legendary author Stephen King has a similar practice. “I don’t spend the day writing,” he says. “I’ll maybe write fresh copy for two hours, and then I’ll go back and revise some of it and print what I like and then turn it off.”

In At Work, Annie Leibovitz talks about the prep work she does for a shoot. “Everyone is so surprised to hear that I do so much research. On the Disney project, on Cinderella, I didn’t just look at animated Cinderella or the Disney stories; I went back and looked at Grimm and all the versions of the story. It’s probably the most translated fairy tale with so many different versions that feed into it.” She continues, “I think sessions should be short, only a few minutes. I believe that a session should be shorter and I do a lot of work upfront, so a subject can come in quickly and be done [. . .] The idea that you’re going to get the soul of the sitter in 15 minutes is garbage.”