- 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. If you found this video helpful, definitely hit that like button to show the YouTube algorithm what's up and get subscribed right there if you haven't done so already, so you don't miss out on future
videos here on this channel. Also, if you want to learn a
little bit more about Notion I just launched a new channel,
all about Notion tutorials. 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.
Really Useful Information go watch it now