Deliberate Practice and the Art of Living
Note: This is another blog post that has been adapted from a post in the “Students” section of the site. Given that the theme fits the theme of my blog, I am sharing it here with some modifications.
As a high school student, I was totally into water polo, a sport of significant standing in my home country Croatia. In fact, Serbia and Croatia—both ex-Yugoslavia countries—have a stronghold on the sport's world championship and Olympic gold medals for some time now.
I still remember the brutal training sessions we had to endure. As is the case in all sports, we spent most of the time not playing the game or even shooting the ball. We swam, had leg drills, submersion drills, then swam some more, and so on. It was all about fine-tuning our bodies, fine-tuning the underlying skills needed to thrive, or even just survive, in a competitive setting. (The sport is notoriously demanding.)
One day we were slacking during a training session and so the coach punished us the next time around to have our practice session in t-shirts on. Not to be too graphic, but swimming a couple of miles with a soaked cloth dragging along will punish your body in all kinds of interesting ways. Let me just say that the guys who had the foresight to put badges over their nipples saved themselves a lot of misery.
That sadistic episode aside, the idea of repetitive practice will be nothing unusual to anyone who has been around sports (or music and arts for that matter). The basketball player who drills his free-throws, the soccer player who works on her tactics, the golf player who fine-tunes his swing—these and countless examples can be marshaled to illustrate the importance of deliberate practice (pace Anders Ericsson) for the mastery of any skill.
And so it is with life as well. There too the method of indirection implied in deliberate practice is essential for a purposeful existence. Sufficient sleep, proper nutrition, times for mindfulness and meditative stillness, regular morning journaling, empowering dialogues, and the sacrifice of service are but just some of the indirect means by which we grow in the art living. And bandages might not even be necessary!