Writing Slowly

Have you heard of ‘deliberate practice’?

You might well have, because Swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson’s work on what makes an expert has been hugely influential over the years. His co-authored original paper from 1993 ¹ has been cited more than 3,000 times and it has spawned more than a few popular books, including Geoff Covin’s Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, Malcom Gadwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, and Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How.

Oh, those titles.

The key message of ‘deliberate practice’ is simple but not obvious. If you want to become an expert you have to do the right kind of practice. This was stated very clearly in Ericsson’s widely-read book, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (2016):

“If you are not improving, it’s not because you lack innate talent; it’s because you’re not practicing the right way. Once you understand this, improvement becomes a matter of figuring out what the ‘right way’ is.”

This is an attractive message because it’s very optimistic. It encourages people to overcome the fatalistic worry that somehow, maybe due to their genes or their upbringing, ’they’re just not cut out for it’.

Instead of being resigned to your fate, you can change it. And the key? Deliberate practice!

Unfortunately, the strong popular interest has warped some of Ericsson’s key ideas about how to gain expertise. Two concepts in particular have made it hard to move forward productively.

First, while Ericsson’s clear emphasis on ‘deliberate practice’ is very helpful, most commentators have gone into great detail on the practice side of the equation, while underplaying the deliberate part. Where exactly are you supposed to get the deliberate part from? How is a beginner supposed to know what is the right kind of practice to pursue?

This has led to the second unhelpful concept, that experts basically just needed ‘10,000 hours’ of practice to develop their skills. Here’s Malcolm Gladwell popularising precisely this (incorrect) point:

“researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.” – Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers.

But it was never about merely practicing a lot. It always mattered what you did with your practice. As a result, Ericsson has spent a lot of effort clarifying his position (2020), which itself has led to yet further misunderstandings (Hambrick et. al. 2020).

In fact, Ericsson and his collaborators have been quite clear on where you’re supposed to learn the right kinds of practice. In his book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise he says:

“Even the most motivated and intelligent student will advance more quickly under the tutelage of someone who knows the best order in which to learn things, who understands and can demonstrate the proper way to perform various skills, who can provide useful feedback, and who can devise practice activities designed to overcome particular weaknesses.” – Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise.

And who is this person, the one who knows the best order to learn, who can demonstrate how to do it, who can give feedback and devise practice exercises? Well, there’s no mystery and I’m sure you’ve already guessed: yes, it’s a teacher.

Here’s Ericsson again:

“[A good teacher] is particularly important . . . where the training is cumulative, with the successful performance of one skill often depending on having previously mastered other skills. A knowledgeable instructor can lead the student to develop a good foundation and then gradually build on that foundation to create the skills . . . no student, no matter how motivated, can expect to figure out such things on his or her own.” – Ericsson 2020, p.108

And for anyone who might have missed it, he said it yet again:

“Deliberate practice requires a teacher who is capable of individualizing instruction and practice and knowledgeable of practice methods with verified performance outcomes.” – Ericsson 2020, p.163

So the message is crystal clear: if you want to become an expert, you need to do the right kind of practice, which is the kind of practice you learn from a good teacher.

Unfortunately, this is not at all the message that has been taken from Ericsson’s work and regurgitated in a thousand think pieces, articles and books. Pick up almost any popular non-fiction book on learning and you’ll find in few if any references to teachers, let alone the idea that teachers might be important for learning.

Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book, Outliers, for example, was very popular in its day. It mentions teachers in a handful of places but these references are all just in passing. Nowhere did the author suggest a teacher might be useful in any way to help learners gain expertise, even though this is what the book is all about.

He’s not alone.

Try it yourself. I challenge you to find a popular book on learning that recognises the importance of teaching.

To give another example, I picked up Ultralearning by Scott H. Young (2019). Here, as with many self-help books, it’s as though learning is viewed through the lens of extreme individualism, where everything is up to the lone learner and no help is needed from anyone else, or even worth mentioning. Young does a little better in his 2024 book, Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery. In the introduction he mentions how he wrote his new book partly to explore “how teachers, coaches, parents, and those responsible for shaping learning within an organization can cultivate improvement.”

It’s a worthy aim. Unfortunately, this is the last we hear about it.

It’s as though the self-help genre has a dirty little secret: we’ll claim you can do anything yourself, but we’ll never mention you could also just get someone to help you.

An honourable mention, however, must go to Daniel Coyle’s 2009 book The Talent Code, which not only mentions teachers numerous times but also devotes a whole chapter to them. But this still seems to be the exception rather than the rule.²

To repeat: the uncanny silence regarding the need for teachers might suit the self-help formula, but it’s pretty much the opposite of what Ericsson and his co-authors have been saying for decades. The value of teachers to shape and guide deliberate practice is a theme that runs right through his work. Here he is way back in 1993, actually making teachers an integral part of the very definition of deliberate practice:

“The teacher designs practice activities that the individual can engage in between meetings with the teacher. We call these practice activities deliberate practice, and distinguish them from other activities. (1993:368)

One of the factors that made me decide to write my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning for Artists and Fighters, was a growing frustration with the way so many existing titles about learning completely ignored the essential role of the teacher-student relationship. It seemed to me that the traditional Japanese framework of Shu Ha Ri had something useful to say in this context. The process of learning is exactly that: a process. In fact, it’s a process of learning-and-teaching (if only there was a single word for this!) and I saw Shu Ha Ri as a clear, distinctive, and above all useful way of framing that process.

I was also frustrated because though a few western voices had mentioned the concept, no one had given it an accessible introduction. In fact, they still haven’t. Not long after my book came out, the writing team of Hector Garcia and Nobuo Suzuki published, in Spanish, Shuhari: The Three-Step Japanese Path to Lifelong Growth and Success. It appears in English in September 2026. But still, the references in this work are largely to non-Japanese sources, and there’s little exploration of the origins and context of the concept in Japanese culture.

In contrast to superficial treatments, Hermann Bayer’s Analysis of Shu Ha Ri in Karate-Do is one of the most extensive explanations of the context of Shu Ha Ri I’ve encountered, and I wrote an appreciative review. But Bayer’s central interest is in the history of Okinawan karate. He’s at pains in his very well-researched book to emphasise that Shu Ha Ri is a mainland Japanese concept, not an Okinawan one. Casual readers just looking for a general introduction to Shu Ha Ri might be overwhelmed by this passion for the authenticity and purity of Okinawan martial arts.

So anyway, I wrote the book on Shu Ha Ri, and as you can see, I’m still thinking about the learning process and the ways in which we can learn from traditional Japanese approaches, without idealising them.

Meanwhile, if you want to become an expert, it remains important to avoid the trap of naive practice, where you just rack up the hours (10,000!) in the hope that some of it will surely stick.

“This is naive practice in a nutshell: I just played it. I just swung the bat and tried to hit the ball. I just listened to the numbers and tried to remember them. I just read the math problems and tried to solve them.” – Ericsson and Pool, 2016:14.

Instead, you could do worse than heed the advice of an old Japanese saying which I quoted in my book:

“If it takes three years, find a good teacher”.

Oh, and now I’ve reached the end, I just realised ‘delibrate practice’ is a great example of the kind of two-word concept I’ve written about in ‘Improve your notes and your life with two-word phrases’.

References

Bayer, H. (2025). Analysis of Shu Ha Ri in Karate-Do: When a martial art becomes a fine art. YMAA Publication Center.
Coyle, D. (2009). The talent code: Greatness isn’t born. It’s grown. Here’s how. Bantam Books.
Ericsson, K. A. (2020). Towards a science of the acquisition of expert performance in sports: Clarifying the differences between deliberate practice and other types of practice. Journal of Sports Sciences, 38(2), 159–176. https://doi.org/10.1080/02640414.2019.1686942
Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363
Ericsson, K. A., & Pool, R. (2016). Peak: Secrets from the new science of expertise. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
García, H., & Suzuki, N. (2026). Shuhari: The three-step Japanese path to lifelong growth and success. Tuttle.
Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The story of success. Little, Brown and Company. Griffiths, R. (2025). Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters. Sydney, NSW: Detour Editions.
Hambrick, D. Z., Macnamara, B. N., & Oswald, F. L. (2020). Is the deliberate practice view defensible? A review of evidence and discussion of issues. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, Article 1134. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01134 Young, S. H. (2019). Ultralearning: Master hard skills, outsmart the competition, and accelerate your career. HarperCollins Publishers.
Young, S. H. (2024). Get better at anything: 12 maxims for mastery. HarperCollins Publishers.