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When you're young and relatively inexperienced, every day you have to figure something out you don't yet know how to solve. I believe this does the same thing a

When you're young and relatively inexperienced, every day you have to figure something out you don't yet know how to solve. I believe this does the same thing as the deliberate practice of a musician. Five years of 40 hrs a week or ten years of 20 hrs a week comes down to about 10,000 hours. Now that I'm a veteran, I find that at work I spend most of my time at work solving problems I already know how to solve. I spend some of my spare time on pet projects doing things that are new to me, but unless they find a cure for the need to sleep, I'll never have 20 hours a week to spare for this again.

scarecrowbob 11y ago
As a programmer and a musician, I feel that deliberate practice is much different than the day to day practice of working. Sitting down and playing scales / etudes / method books every day is very hard, but it's the only way to get better at a quick pace. You can't really pay attention at that level for more than 4 hours (or, rather, I and most other humans can't). Similarly, I've made concerted efforts to refactor procedural code into functional code, and while that is very difficult conceptually (for me, maybe not you) it felt very much the same way as doing scales. Deliberate practice is not the same as just doing work, and just doing work doesn't make you better as quickly or in the same ways as deliberately practicing.