Deliberate practice requires conscious effort and attention toward specific and challenging goals. Habits are your current self; deliberate practice is focused striving toward your desired Future Self. Reverting to habits or your comfort zone isn’t how you advance.

Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable. I like the term “stretch” for describing what deliberate practice feels like,

I like the term “stretch” for describing what deliberate practice feels like, as it matches my own experience with the activity. When I’m learning a new mathematical technique — a classic case of deliberate practice — the uncomfortable sensation in my head is best approximated as a physical strain, as if my neurons are physically re-forming into new configurations. As any mathematician will admit, this stretching feels much different than applying a technique you’ve already mastered, which can be quite enjoyable. But this stretching, as any mathematician will also admit, is the precondition to getting better.

Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands….

Deliberate living: Conscious attention to the basics of life, and a constant attention to your immediate environment and its concerns - A job, a task, a book; anything requiring efficient concentration (Circumstance has no value. It is how one relates to a situation that has value. All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you)

Deliberate living: Conscious attention to the basics of life, and a constant attention to your immediate environment and its concerns - A job, a task, a book; anything requiring efficient concentration (Circumstance has no value. It is how one relates to a situation that has value. All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you

Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.

Then there’s the issue of cognitive capacity. Deep work is exhausting because it pushes you toward the limit of your abilities. Performance psychologists have extensively studied how much such efforts can be sustained by an individual in a given day.* In their seminal paper on deliberate practice, Anders Ericsson and his collaborators survey these studies. They note that for someone new to such practice (citing, in particular, a child in the early stages of developing an expert-level skill), an hour a day is a reasonable limit. For those familiar with the rigors of such activities, the limit expands to something like four hours, but rarely more.

Pushing past what’s comfortable, however, is only one part of the deliberate-practice story; the other part is embracing honest feedback — even if it destroys what you thought was good. As Colvin explains in his Fortune article, “You may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was flawless, but your opinion isn’t what counts.” It’s so tempting to just assume what you’ve done is good enough and check it off your to-do list, but it’s in honest, sometimes harsh feedback that you learn where to retrain your focus in order to continue to make progress.

Mastery requires deliberate practice, and lots of it. But if you love it, you do it.

Pushing past what is comfortable, however is only one part of the deliberate-practice story; the other part is embracing honest feedback — even if it destroys what you thought was good.

Make dedicated time for practice.

To practice means to perform, in the face of all obstacles some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

In the case of a beginner the practice of Yoga is often deliberate and requires great determination. But those who are practicing sincerely for many years are intent on self-realization all the time, whether conscious of it or not. Unconscious sadhana is most effective, because it is spontaneous and steady.