More tips on deliberate practice in the real world

 The Missing Chapter Most Guides Never Give You

(Designed to perfectly complement your existing resource)

2. The Deliberate Practice One-Page Template 

3. Realistic Daily & Weekly Schedules That Actually Work

Elite performers (violinists at Berlin Academy, Olympic swimmers, top memory athletes) use one of these two patterns:

Pattern A – “Morning Monster” (best for most mortals) 06:30–08:00 Session 1 (90 min deliberate) 08:30–12:00 Normal work / study 13:30–15:00 Session 2 (90 min deliberate) 15:30–17:00 Session 3 (90 min deliberate) → total 4.5 h max Evening: light review, sleep 9+ hours

Pattern B – “Three Perfect Hours” (Cal Newport / Scott Young style) Three 60-minute blocks with 15–30 min rest between. Everything else in the day is treated as purposeful practice or recovery.

Anything beyond 4–5 hours of true deliberate practice per day dramatically increases burnout risk with almost no extra gains (Ericsson & Pool, Peak, 2016).

4. How to Combine Deliberate Practice with the Rest of Learning Science (the multiplier stack)

Technique	How it supercharges deliberate practice
Spaced repetition	Move yesterday’s drill to Anki so you never regress
Interleaving	Mix two related sub-skills in one session (e.g., Python list comprehensions + debugging) to build better mental models
Pre-commitment devices	Schedule sessions in public calendar, bet money on Beeminder, or tell an accountability partner the exact metric
Sleep + naps	Skill consolidation happens mostly during sleep; a 90-minute nap after a session can be worth an extra hour of practice
The 48-hour rule	Never go more than 48 hours without touching the skill or performance drops (Campitelli & Gobet, chess data)

5. Recommended Reading Order to Go Even Deeper

1. Ericson 1993 original paper
2. Peak - Anders Ericsson (2016) – Book Summary
3. The Talent Code - Daniel Coyle (2009) - Book summary – myelin + deep practice
4. Ultralearning - Scott H. Young (2019) - Book summary – nine real-world case studies using deliberate practice
5. "Do Deliberate Practice -Chapter in Deep Work - Cal Newport (summary)
6. Hambrick et al. (2014) & Macnamara (2014) + the 2019 Frontiers rebuttal you already have – shows the current scientific debate (practice explains ~14–21 % of variance in most fields, but it’s still the part you can control), Link to these papers

Final Thought

Deliberate practice is uncomfortable by design. If you ever finish a session thinking “that was pleasant,” you probably didn’t do it right.

But if you feel a little stupid, a little frustrated, and measurably better than yesterday, you’re doing it exactly right.