This week, we’re talking about deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is the process of practicing something repetitively for the sake of improvement rather than enjoyment. That doesn’t mean that what you’re doing can’t be enjoyable; it just means that your goal has to be improvement. The first tenet of deliberate practice is that you need a clear, well-defined goal. And the reality is that it’s not just in deliberate practice that you need a goal, you just need goals in general. A life without goals is a life that you are going to regret living. Take that from someone who spent the first 30 years of his life drifting aimlessly. Goals are the first step in getting something valuable.
It would be nice if life would just drop valuable things in our lap, but that’s not how it works. If you want something valuable, you need to work for it, and the most efficient way to make sure that you’re not wasting your effort is to set a clear goal. Writing is exactly the same way. If you want to be a good writer, you need to set the goal of being a good writer, and then you need to take steps to move in that direction. It doesn’t matter how quickly you get to that goal, just that you have the goal and you are moving in that direction.
In deliberate practice setting a goal is your first step. First and foremost, you want your goal to be small. Why do you want a small goal? Because it’s much easier to improve something small than it is to improve something massive.
Imagine you’re facing a staircase of 10 steps and your goal is to get to the top step. What are you going to do? Well, you’re going to take one step at a time going up the staircase. If you have slightly longer legs, you might take two steps at a time, but nobody is going to try to take five steps all at once. Now imagine you’re climbing a staircase that is a hundred steps. Even if you could take the steps five at a time, you’re going to be exhausted before you’re even halfway up. On the other hand, if you simply take one small step at a time, you’re eventually going to reach the top. It’s practically guaranteed.
When I had just started writing, this is something that I fell into and the practice has served me really well throughout my career. I attribute a lot of my success to how I set goals. Now I’m not talking about my sort of big grandiose life goals. I’ve talked in other videos about how I think aggressive goals are the best goals to set when thinking about your life. The small goals that I’m talking about now are the goals that I use daily in my writing, the goals that fuel my deliberate practice.
I started off with a small goal of 500 words a day, figuring that with a bit of focus, practically anybody can write 500 words a day. Let’s examine that goal to break down why it’s so effective. I had one hour each day to dedicate to writing, so I picked a number that was stretching but achievable. If I had had half an hour to write, I would have lowered my goal to maybe 200. Now, when I started, I was not confident in being able to write 500 words in an hour. Most of you probably would blow past that no problem. But where I was in my writing, I wasn’t confident. It was a goal that stretched me a little bit while still being achievable.
The goal of writing 500 words in an hour is also exceedingly clear. It’s a binary. You either succeed or you don’t. There isn’t an excuse that you can give yourself that says, well, I kind of succeeded even though I didn’t meet my goal. No, you either write 500 words or you don’t write 500 words, and by the time the hour passes, you know which one it is. This is an eminently measurable goal because not only do I know if I’ve succeeded or not, but I know by how much I’ve succeeded. If I sit down and I write and I’m in the flow and in one hour I get 750 words, then I know that I’ve overshot my goal by 50%, which is fantastic. When I eventually worked up to writing a thousand words in that one hour period, the feeling was incredible. Last but not least, this was an interesting goal to me. I’ve always been particularly interested in productivity, so this was a goal that then fed into another of my interests on top of writing.
500 words in one hour was the goal that I set for myself when I was just starting, but I didn’t just leave it there. That’s not my goal anymore. Instead, as I’ve gotten better at writing, I have increased the goal to make sure that it’s still just enough of a challenge for me. Now my goal is to write a minimum of 10,000 words a day. It requires a lot more than an hour and it requires a lot of focus, but it still has those same hallmarks of being incredibly clear, of being measurable, and being both interesting and challenging.
As you embark on your journey of deliberate practice in your writing, make sure you’re setting goals. They don’t have to be word count goals, but I do think word count goals are probably the best kinds of goals you can get. Because we can always go back and edit, setting a word count goal to make sure you are maintaining output is, in my opinion, the best way to make sure that you are continuing to deliberately practice your craft.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/vGxryY6qx0Y
Thanks for reading and watching.
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