I’ve noticed this recently while playing guitar, and I think it generalizes well to anything that you want to have dramatic improvement in. A core tenet of Deliberate Practice is that if you want constant improvement, you have to be constantly pushing yourself past where you are know.
This means that as a…
- General Programmer: keep learning new languages, keep embarking on increasingly harder projects, keep learning new implementation tricks
- Competitive Programmer: keep doing harder and harder problems
- Guitarist: continuously speed up the metronome, keep using new picking styles, play unfamiliar songs
- Writer:
- Keep pushing yourself to learn more, learn better, learn faster, think better, think deeper, read better, read deeper, to write better, write faster, revise better, ask more people for feedback
This leads to some interesting observations: Schools are bad for learning