The Best Way to Learn a New Skill? Go Deep

Source: niekverlaan/pixabay

So, you want to learn a new skill—playing tennis, speaking Chinese, or playing the violin. You’ve probably heard about the importance of developing muscle memory, or that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to reach some state of mastery.

But according to science and in Daniel Coyle’s research for his book, The Talent Code¹, the key to most effectively and efficiently learning new skills isn’t really about muscles and simple repetitive practice but about neurons, myelin, and what he calls deep practice. Here’s how all three work together:

Neurons. Every movement, thought, and feeling we have is an electrical signal traveling through a chain of neurons. These create nerve circuits in the brain.

Myelin. Myelin is a current hot topic in brain research; think of it like the insulation on an electrical wire wrapping around bundles of neurons. It helps coordinate the different areas of the brain, and studies, for example, have shown that abused children, or teens who smoke nicotine, have less or slower-growing myelin, affecting their brain development and impacting their adult mental health². But when it comes to developing skills, myelin helps nerve circuits fire more rapidly, strongly, and efficiently, creating superhighways in the brain³.

Practice. While doing a hundred tennis backhands or endless scales on the violin creates muscles, muscle memory, and keeps those neural pathways open, not all practice, it turns out, is created equally. The difference between deep practice and mere repetition is that deep practice actually makes more and stronger myelin, which in turn, concentrates and accelerates the learning process. Coyle gives numerous examples where six minutes or three weeks of deep practice equals a month or a year of simple repetition.

So, how do you do deep practice? Here are the guidelines:

1. Break learning down into small chunks.

Playing a hole of golf involves making dozens of different strokes, but those strokes can be broken down further into different grips, stances, arm movements. Learning to draw a mouth is about creating curving lines on paper, but also knowing how much pressure to put when drawing those lines. Don't try to eat the entire elephant in one bite; don't try to play the hole or create the picture. Instead, play one measure of music, not an entire bar. Speak one sentence or one word of the new language, not a paragraph or sentence. Do one drive, one line.

2. Go slow.

Slowness is obviously a byproduct of breaking things down into small chunks. But going slow also involves taking action slowly. Coyle quotes a music teacher at an elite music camp who uses deep practice, saying that if someone were to walk by, listen to what is being played, and recognize the melody, the students are playing the piece too fast.

What small chunks and going slow do is concentrate focus and movement, allowing the teacher and student to catch and not blow past or glide through errors.

3. Back up after mistakes and correct yourself.

Mistakes are essential to the learning process, and probably most important. When mistakes happen, stop, isolate the mistake, and correct it. Perhaps repeat the process several times. This is how identification and solidification of a specific skill occur. But it is this process—the concentration, the struggle, the wrestling with the challenge embedded within the mistake—that also triggers myelination, and what makes deep practice different from simple repetition. Show mistakes no mercy.

4. Practice consistently.

Deep practice sessions needn’t be long and aren't necessary. Because the practice is so concentrated and requires so much focus and energy, three to five hours a day is the max you need to do, but shorter sessions are often enough, based on your goals and skills.

Consistent practice is necessary: Stop practicing for a month, and your myelin, because it is living tissue, may begin to break down, and with it, your skill.

There you have it. Deep practice is a powerful combination of discipline and mindfulness that can accelerate your learning. If you’re intrigued, you can find YouTube videos applying this to drawing, golf, trumpet, etc. But the starting point is challenging yourself to try this method, and maybe replacing it for the rush-through, get-it-done, good-enough attitude you may have fallen into in the past.

Ready to give it a try?