97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

Chapter 22. Do Lots of Deliberate Practice

Jon Jagger

DELIBERATE PRACTICE IS NOT SIMPLY PERFORMING A TASK. If you ask yourself, “Why am I performing this task?” and your answer is, “To complete the task,” then you’re not doing deliberate practice.

You do deliberate practice to improve your ability to perform a task. It’s about skill and technique. Deliberate practice means repetition. It means performing the task with the aim of increasing your mastery of one or more aspects of the task. It means repeating the repetition. Slowly, over and over again, until you achieve your desired level of mastery. You do deliberate practice to master the task, not to complete the task.

The principal aim of paid development is to finish a product, whereas the principal aim of deliberate practice is to improve your performance. They are not the same. Ask yourself, how much of your time do you spend developing someone else’s product? How much developing yourself?

How much deliberate practice does it take to acquire expertise?

• Peter Norvig writes^[4] that “it may be that 10,000 hours…is the magic number.”

• In Leading Lean Software Development (Addison-Wesley Professional), Mary Poppendieck notes that “it takes elite performers a minimum of 10,000 hours of deliberate focused practice to become experts.”

The expertise arrives gradually over time—not all at once in the 10,000th hour! ...