On practice

I am getting to the end of listening to listening to Talent is Overrated in the car. The author -- Geoffrey Colvin -- narrates the book, which usually enhances the experience of listening to a book because it avoids the problem of having to listen to one of those droning generic Ronco pitchmen for hour upon hour. Unfortunately, Colvin's voice is uncomfortably similar to one of those guys.

Nonetheless, it's a good book and it's premise is that the "10,000 hours of practice" thesis that everyone seems to have swallowed whole from Gladwell's Outliers is wrong. Instead, great performers distinguish themselves by n thousand hours of focused practice, attending in a structured way to specific and critical minutiae of their craft.

I had an interesting if complex illustration of that on the tennis court this weekend. David stepped out there, having not played since he was last in NC maybe 18-24 months ago, and stroked his backhand very nicely, at least relative to mine. He kept hitting it deep to my backhand forcing me to chip it back.

How does this illustrate the thesis about focused practice? It's not so much about David making progress -- he just hasn't drilled in bad habits through many hours of half-assed, unfocused reps like I have. What it really illustrates is that Adam and I, because we warm up for about 5-10 minutes and then start playing, have made it hard for ourselves to get better because we spend so little time focusing on technique in a manner conducive to improvement.

Then again, we have a lot of fun, blow off a lot of steam and burn off many a calorie. We all have to decide what we are looking for an any given activity. I could probably stand to practice more and benefit from it. I just don't do it. Oh well.