I’m continuing to read Cal Newport’s book on skills and passion.
He has some relevant remarks about “deliberate practice” in his Conclusion:
Here was my first lesson: This type of skill development is hard. When I got to the first tricky gap in the [paper he was studying] I faced immediate internal resistance. It was if my mind realized the effort I was about to ask it to expend and in response it unleashed a wave of neuronal protest…
To combat this resistance, I deployed two types of structure.
- …[T]ime structure: “I am going to work on this for one hour.”
- …[I]nformation structure: a way of capturing the results of my hard focus in a useful form
I’ve done similar things when reading a text that’s challenging: 1) split the reading up into “Pomodoros” (cf. the Pomodoro method I’ve spoken about previously) and 2) challenge the text by writing notes that actively dispute, wrestle with, work with the concepts in the text in order to make them mine.
It’s not easy; it still takes lot of chutzpah to hold yourself steady against the psychic pain. But it’s worth it.