Deliberate practice doesn’t have to be unenjoyable

One of Ericsson’s classic attributes of Deliberate practice is that it’s not inherently enjoyable, and in fact is generally less enjoyable than other relevant activities. When he writes this, he’s usually making a descriptive claim—describing properties of expert practice of this kin in the world—rather than a normative claim. But he suggests that the non-enjoyability is a natural consequence of deliberate practice being a) necessarily difficult/effortful; and b) primarily for improving performance.

I think his claim is wrong both descriptively and normatively.

In Ericsson (1993), the evidence he presents for this claim comes from a diary study of violinists. Solo practice gets 7.2 for pleasure. That's lower than playing for fun (8.3) but similar to solo performance (7.3), and higher than music theory (6.1) or the grand mean (6.5).

Hyllegard and Yamamoto (2005) do a review and find that: “only 4% of DP activities received low ratings for inherent enjoyment or pleasure in practice”. (They suggest that this might be because of methodological problems in all those studies, but I don't find their conjectures very compelling)

For an athlete, DP might amount to physical pain; maybe that's aversive. But for a musician? Is the problem that the DP tasks are repetitive, unmusical exercises? For a given practice aim, isn't it possible, in principle, to construct a musically interesting task that's targeted and effortful?

I practice sight reading every day by reading new music that’s roughly at the edge of my ability. It’s quite enjoyable—I’m playing music!—and it’s not repetitive at all. Can all DP activities be like this? For instance, if I’m trying to work on arpeggios of diminished chords, you could give me a sequence of different pieces which involve that move. You could even order them so that I’m first playing moody largo passages, and ultimately ending up with rapid scherzo snippets. Roughly: Fine-grained task progressions as cognitive scaffolding. Notice that this contradicts Typical work and performance environments don’t constitute deliberate practice

I think part of why DP often seems unenjoyable is that it doesn’t feel like legitimate participation in the practice, to use the language of Situated learning. It feels like a detached, decontextualized preparation for legitimate participation. But I think DP can often (usually? always?) be reframed authentically. My sight reading practice checks that box. Playing scales doesn’t. But playing scales in the context of a piece does.

References

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363

Hyllegard, R., & Yamamoto, M. (2005). Testing Assumptions of Deliberate Practice Theory, Relevance, Effort, and Inherent Enjoyment of Practice on a Novel Task. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 101(1), 283–294. https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.101.1.283-294

My Twitter thread: https://x.com/andy_matuschak/status/1778542381551530128