Some places, the “deliberate practice” idea breaks down, choosing and decision making is one of them. There is no way to “practice” them except by actually making chooses and decisions; separating practice from normal execution is not possible.
I agree that the only way to practice decisions is to make them, but I think there is more to it than that. The deliberate part of deliberate practice is that you are actively trying to get better. The deliberate performance paper I linked to touches on this a bit, in that deliberate practice is challenging for professionals and that something else might work better (they advocate the first 5 methods in that paper).
Beyond making decisions, you need to have an expectation of what will happen, otherwise hindsight bias is that much harder to overcome. It’s the scientific method: hypothesis->test->new hypothesis. Without defining what you expect ahead of time, it is much easier to just say “Oh yeah, this makes sense” and normalize without actually improving understanding.
I don’t disagree with anything in this comment, I was just pointing out that “deliberate practice” has several requirements, including practice being separate from execution, that makes it less usable, or even totally unusable, for some areas, such as decision making and choosing. The other main requirements are that it has a specific goal, should not be enjoyable and, as you pointed out, that is is challenging. Another thing, that is not part of the original requirements but is encompassed by them, is that you are not practicing when you are in “flow”.
Some places, the “deliberate practice” idea breaks down, choosing and decision making is one of them. There is no way to “practice” them except by actually making chooses and decisions; separating practice from normal execution is not possible.
I agree that the only way to practice decisions is to make them, but I think there is more to it than that. The deliberate part of deliberate practice is that you are actively trying to get better. The deliberate performance paper I linked to touches on this a bit, in that deliberate practice is challenging for professionals and that something else might work better (they advocate the first 5 methods in that paper).
Beyond making decisions, you need to have an expectation of what will happen, otherwise hindsight bias is that much harder to overcome. It’s the scientific method: hypothesis->test->new hypothesis. Without defining what you expect ahead of time, it is much easier to just say “Oh yeah, this makes sense” and normalize without actually improving understanding.
I don’t disagree with anything in this comment, I was just pointing out that “deliberate practice” has several requirements, including practice being separate from execution, that makes it less usable, or even totally unusable, for some areas, such as decision making and choosing. The other main requirements are that it has a specific goal, should not be enjoyable and, as you pointed out, that is is challenging. Another thing, that is not part of the original requirements but is encompassed by them, is that you are not practicing when you are in “flow”.