- This video is sponsored by Skillshare.
I have a whole bunch of different things
I wanna get good at.
I wanna play the guitar better,
I wanna edit my videos better,
I wanna become a better rock climber.
And of course I wanna stop getting crushed
in Fortnite so much.
Dammit, New Master.
But like you I only have so much time
during the day to practice.
And I've noticed that when I sit down to practice
sometimes I'll make great strides
but other times I feel like I make no progress at all.
What causes this discrepancy?
Well, as it turns out improvement isn't only determined
by how many hours you practice,
but by the quality of your practice as well.
Amongst athletes, artists, gamers
and practitioners of every other discipline,
the people at the top of their game are
almost always the ones who understand
the skill of deliberate practice.
Like active learning, self-discipline and even empathy,
deliberate practice is really a meta-skill.
A higher order skill that can be applied
across nearly everything you do.
So what's the first step to practicing more deliberately?
- Intent is I think the biggest thing,
I mean you ask the question
of like what separates a practice session
from just kind of like playing.
And I think the answer is intent
like you really want to say,
I would like to leave with something
that I didn't have before I sat down.
- [Thomas] That's my friend, Charles Cornell,
who as you can tell is
a pretty phenomenal jazz piano player.
In 2019, his online following exploded
after he started posting these piano memes,
I've not even seen this one.
♪ Swisher Sweets Uggs ♪
♪ What's poppin' ♪
And through years spent in a music conservatory
as well as in countless hours of intense practice alone.
Charles has learnt that the best practice sessions are
the ones that start out with a goal in mind.
- Where you're going to pick up a lot of ground
and make a lot of headway is
when you define what you are going to do
in the practice room.
- [Thomas] Right.
- What can happen a lot is
that you go into the practice room
and you wind up just playing things that you already know
because it's pleasing to the ears.
It's something that we can do that we can enjoy.
It's much harder to say I'm going to do
some of the things that I don't enjoy as much
but I know why I'm doing them.
- So that's really the first step to deliberate practice.
Know what you wanna have accomplished
at the end of the practice session.
To give you just one example,
right now I'm working on shooting a music video
for a new song that I just released
and all the guitar parts in the song are improvised
but I need to know how to play them again for the video.
So lately all my practice sessions have had
the explicit goal of learning
and perfecting the segment of the song.
(soft upbeat music)
But it's not enough just have a goal
like Charles said, you also need to be disciplined enough
to do the things that are gonna get you to that goal.
And to be honest, it's only the looming need to shoot
this music video that has me sitting down
slowly, painfully transcribing my own solo.
And I know that's the kind of practice
that I should be doing most of the time,
but I still find myself doing exactly what Charles said.
Sitting down and just noodling,
playing things that I already know.
I find my biggest problem with learning songs
that other people have written is it's so slow
and I can play pretty well improv.
So whenever I sit down with a guitar
within five minutes I find myself
just noodling around improving.
A lot of people, find themselves falling
into this pattern with their own skills.
Doing the easy natural things,
instead of the hard stuff
they know they're supposed to be doing.
And personally, I'll take all the help I can get
in overcoming this discipline problems
whether we're talking about learning songs and the guitar
or drilling build patterns in Fortnite,
instead of just lazily, jumping into quick play every time.
And one thing Charles told me that was really helpful is
that because he's studied the fundamentals
that slow painful process
of learning a song is now almost effortless for him.
- So that goes into a whole other level too
which furthers the point of like pushing
through the things that are maybe are not as fun
or that seem more difficult, right?
Because what you said is like,
when you learn a song that somebody else has written
that's already decided it's so long.
Well, my solution for you for that is
okay, well you need to learn more music theory
because if you equip yourself with the knowledge
of being able to hear something
and understand exactly what's going on,
now that process is not slow anymore.
I can hear a song once and I'll understand like,
Oh, okay I get how this is structured.
And I could probably play along
and within two or three times, I'll have it down.
It's instant just about, but the only reason it's instant is
because I've equipped myself with that knowledge base
that like, okay, I understand music theory.
And I understand how that's applied
to something that sounds like this
and I can recognize those sounds.
- So clearly learning these fundamentals
or maybe we should call them not-so-fundamentals is
a key component to deliberate practice.
But how do you figure out
what those fundamentals are for your particular skill?
Well, one great method is
to seek out structured educational materials.
The author, Josh Kaufman stresses this in his book
"The First 20 Hours,"
his book on rapid skill development.
In the book he argues that to learn a skill quickly,
you should first identify the sub-skills
that matter most to you.
For me, that might be music theory like Charles said.
And once you picked out a few of those sub-skills
the next step in Kaufman's process is to go out
and learn enough about each one to start practicing,
and this is all great advice.
Tutorials, courses and coaches could all offer guidance
and sequencing that can help you make sure
you're working on all the right things.
They can also help you avoid hitting dead ends
or developing bad habits that you'll have to unlearn later.
But there's another perhaps even more important method
that Charles mentioned.
- My jazz teacher growing up would always say
that she learned more from listening
than she ever did from all of the hours of practicing,
the number of gigs she played like all of that combined,
she learned more listening.
And if we think about language as a spoken word,
it's like, well how does a child learn a language?
- They listened, yeah.
- They just listened
and over a long period of time.
It takes years for a child to develop
that ability to now start to repeat things
that they're hearing.
And even more years for them to be able
to string together functional sentences
and then even more years for them to be able
to form that vocabulary and those phrases
and sentences into their own genuine authentic ideas.
- Right.
- That they can then put out to the world
and the world goes, I understand what you're saying, right?
That is a lifelong process.
- Let's call it this idea, observation as practice.
We are natural observers as Charles said,
it's how we pick our native language as children.
And when we apply critical observation to skill development
we learn our skills much faster.
So if you're learning how to skate, watch great skaters
if you're trying to get better at a game,
study great gameplay from that game
if you're an aspiring author, read other great authors
and if you wanna get better at editing videos well.
I follow some really talented video editors on Twitter
and they are constantly watching movies
and breaking down shots of movies.
Like there's one guy, I forget his name
but he's always posting these just galleries of shots
from a scene in a movie to show like here's the cohesion
and the color grading, or here is...
Look at the dynamics
between the different shots and different cameras.
And like, what that tells me is
he's not spending all of his time editing.
He's spending a lot of his time watching
other people's movies and observing that.
So I do that a lot too with my editing,
I'll watch movies more often now with a critical eye
because I'm trying to see, okay, what are you doing?
- And why are you looking at that?
You're pulling things that you wanna try,
you're pulling bits and pieces of that.
Maybe it's certain angles
or a certain color grading approach
that you specifically want to apply to your own work.
- Yeah.
- Because you feel like,
Oh, I wanna understand how to use this.
That is listening to music,
we hear things that strike a chord with us literally.
And we go, I wanna sound like that,
I wanna play that sound.
Anywhere where you're attempting to kind of develop
a higher proficiency with something,
looking at the proficient examples
and saying, I want to try this part
and I wanna take that part.
Like that is the best way that you can learn anything.
- In other words, observe,
but also copy, take what you see and try it out sometimes.
The jazz legend Clark Terry had a system
for learning improvisation
that he called imitate, assimilate, innovate.
At first imitate what you see, transcribe
and then take what you learned
from the people you look up to
and innovate with what you've added to your repertoire.
Going back to the editing example
I've watched Edgar Wright movies
like "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,"
which is my favorite movie of all time
and tried to essentially imitate
what I've seen in the movies.
Both to pay homage to my director
but also to learn what he was doing,
what he was thinking, what techniques he was employing.
And here's one more beautiful thing about copying.
You get a built-in instant and guaranteed feedback mechanism
and feedback is crucial for skill development.
I do wanna take a second to give a quick shout out
to my friend, Matt D'Avella.
As the video that you're watching right now is
an attempt for me to get a little bit better
at blending interviews and narration,
which is a style that Matt employs so well on his channel.
Now some skills come
with it built in chess is a great example.
You make a move,
somebody makes a move against you instant feedback.
For other skills, you can always get a coach
but that costs money or submit your work for critique.
But of course that requires a willing audience
and if you have neither copying still gives you
a way to get feedback.
You can always compare to the original
to see how you did.
Now naturally, some people are gonna have worries
about copying, but it's important to recognize
that there is a big difference between passing off
somebody else's work as your own and copying their work
as a form of practice.
The latter isn't just okay, it's often crucial.
- In music specifically, we transcribe.
So in jazz, when we talk about transcribing
we are literally going and listening to an improvised solo
and we are going to replicate that identically.
I mean, there are still things that are ingrained
in my mind that I know that I transcribed,
like here's, this is a little bit of a Barry Harris thing.
(piano music)
Now, why do we do that?
Am I gonna get on stage and play his solo?
No, of course not,
it's interesting there are no jazz covers
in the way that take John Coltrane's "Giant Steps," solo.
Nobody is out there performing John Coltrane's solo.
If they did, they'd be laughed off stage, right?
Why is that?
And at the same time,
why is it that every saxophone player
ever can play that solo?
Why do we do that?
Well, the reason that I would transcribe Barry Harris
like that is I want to know what are the devices
that he used to create the sound that we heard?
Because when I heard that sound,
I went, I like that I want to have that in my vocabulary.
- [Thomas] Right.
- What is it?
But we're not gonna go
and simply perform the transcription.
That would be pointless
because Barry Harris already said it,
John Coltrane already said it,
we don't need to say it again.
we wanna say our own things.
But how can we speak in that language
we don't know what people have said.
- Right.
So when you sit down to practice spend some time
deeply observing the people
who are at the level you wanna get to
and also spend some time copying their work.
So you can learn the language
that they're speaking in terms of your skill.
If you can do that while also not ignoring the fundamentals
and setting strong intentions when you practice
you'll find yourself making a lot more progress
than you used to.
So throughout this video,
we've talked about several specific techniques
that you can use to improve the quality
of your practice time.
But there's one final point to keep in mind,
no matter the skill building mastery,
true mastery takes a lot of time.
It takes self discipline
and above all it takes strong long-term practice habits.
Fortunately, habits are one thing that I've learned a lot
about through all my research
and experimentation into productivity
over the last few years.
And if you'd like to improve your own practicing habits
then you might wanna take
my habit building class on Skillshare.
This class will help you break down your goals
into actionable daily habits that have obvious action items
and then stick to those by tailoring your environment
and by building systems
and tools that can help to bolster your self-discipline.
And in addition to that,
Charles actually just launched his own class called
Intro to improvisation.
And if you're a musician
you'll definitely wanna check it out.
- What would it be like to sit down at your instrument
and be able to play anything you want.
(instrumental music)
- At the end of the class you're even gonna find
a 57 minute bonus lesson where Charles teaches me
some techniques that improve my own playing.
- Here's a trick, ready?
Can we do it in the next key instead of D can we start on E.
- Absolutely.
(soft music)
Another thing you're gonna find
on Skillshare is live sessions.
In fact just recently I did an exclusive Q and A session
for my Skillshare students which just went up
as a live replay on my profile.
So in addition to my classes
you're gonna be able to watch that as well.
Of course, you'll also find thousands of other classes
on Skillshare from tons of talented teachers
that can help you boost your skills
in areas like video editing, photography,
UI and UX design, music production, and tons more.
It is a huge resource
and it's also a very affordable one
with your annual plans starting
at less than 10 bucks a month.
And you can even get a free trial
if you're one of the first 1000 people
to sign up using the link in the description down below.
So use that link, sign up,
go take one of my classes or go take Charles' class
and start boosting your skills today.
Thanks as always for watching this video.
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Also, if you want to learn a little bit more about Notion
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At least for now, we might branch into other stuff
in the future, but check it out right there,
it's called Thomas Frank Explains.
If you're looking for more videos from yours truly
that is where you're going to find them
in addition to this channel right here.
I'll have a couple of other videos on screen,
so you can smash your nose
on your phone screen to watch those
for an extra style points or just click on them like normal.
And beyond that, go do whatever you want,
go spend the rest of your life savings
on a First Edition Holographic Charizard card on eBay,
'cause it's always, I'm not your dad.
(piano music)
- That was literally (beep) worst thing I've ever played.