Hi, this is Ray.

Quick experiment. Think about something you've been "practicing" for a long time. A skill, a hobby, a professional capability. Now ask yourself: when you practice it, what are you actually doing? If you're honest, the answer is probably some version of: "the parts I'm already pretty good at." Maybe with slight variations. Maybe with new material. But mostly, you spend your practice time in the zones where you already feel competent, because those zones feel good, and the alternative (deliberately dwelling in the parts where you feel incompetent) feels bad.

I noticed this pattern in myself with embarrassing clarity a few years ago. I had been playing guitar for a long time. Decades, if you count the periods where I "played" by which I mean "owned a guitar." And yet I had plateaued at roughly the same level for years. I could play the songs I could already play. I could noodle in the keys I already knew. I could not, however, play in keys with lots of sharps or flats, could not read sheet music with any speed, and could not play any of the techniques that I had quietly decided long ago were "not really my style." Translation: I had identified the things I was bad at, and then spent years studiously avoiding them.

My practice was, in the technical sense, useless. Hours of it. Year after year. Producing no meaningful improvement. Not because I wasn't putting in time. Because I was putting in time in exactly the wrong places. I was practicing what I already knew, which is the cognitive equivalent of going to the gym and lifting empty bars. It feels productive. It produces nothing.

When I finally (painfully, ego in tatters) forced myself to start practicing the things I was bad at, my playing improved more in six months than it had in the previous six years. The practice content was different. The hours were similar. The difference was where I directed the work. Today's newsletter is about this principle, which turns out to be one of the most well-documented findings in expertise research, and how to actually apply it to your own learning… even when it's uncomfortable, especially when it's uncomfortable, because that's exactly the point.

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Let me give you the science before we get into the practical stuff, because it matters. The principle I'm describing has a name in cognitive psychology: deliberate practice, developed primarily by K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues starting in the early 1990s. Their research overturned a lot of assumptions about expertise and how it develops.

The core insight, as one analysis put it, is that opportunities for improvement occur when deliberate and focused practice is applied to overcome identified areas of weaknesses, and at its foundation, the deliberate practice model asserts that expertise develops neither automatically nor through extensive years of practice. Read that again. Years of practice, by themselves, don't produce expertise. What produces expertise is a specific KIND of practice, deliberately structured around your weaknesses. Most people who think they've been practicing for years have actually been doing what Ericsson called "naive practice"… repetition without the structure that produces growth. The hours look the same. The outcomes are wildly different.

Ericsson's research found something genuinely surprising when he studied expert performers across many domains. According to a research summary, in expert performers like musicians, athletes, and chess players, there is no correlation between level of expertise and hours spent practicing. However, the number of hours spent in deliberate practice was positively correlated to level of expertise. Total practice hours: no correlation with expertise. Deliberate practice hours: strong correlation. The variable that matters isn't time. It's structure. And the structure that matters most is whether you're actively engaging with your weaknesses or just running laps in your strengths.

A clean way the research frames this: deliberate practice involves breaking down skills into smaller parts, practicing them repeatedly, seeking feedback to identify weaknesses, and adapting methods to address deficiencies based on the feedback. Note the centrality of weakness-identification. It's not the cherry on top. It's the engine. Without it, the rest of the system doesn't work. As one analysis bluntly put it, deliberate practice requires sustained concentration, embraces difficulty rather than avoiding it, seeks out weaknesses rather than strengths, and demands honest, sometimes uncomfortable feedback. It's often mentally exhausting and seldom inherently enjoyable. That last part is important. Deliberate practice doesn't feel good. If your practice feels good, it might not be doing much.

Here's the part the research doesn't always emphasize but I think matters most for actually applying any of this. Your brain has a strong, evolutionarily-installed tendency to avoid information about your own incompetence. This isn't a moral failing. It's a feature of how human self-perception works, and it's the primary reason most people plateau even when they have the time and resources to keep improving.

Several distinct biases stack on top of each other to keep you in the dark about your weaknesses. Confirmation bias makes you remember the times you did well and forget the times you did poorly. Self-serving attribution makes you take credit for success and blame circumstance for failure. Fluency illusions make familiar material feel like mastered material. And the basic emotional sting of recognizing incompetence makes you flinch away from situations that might surface it.

The result: most learners genuinely don't know what they're bad at. They have a vague sense, but the specifics (the exact subskills, the exact knowledge gaps, the exact patterns of error) are protected from their awareness by these biases. And what you don't know about, you can't practice. You spend years working on the wrong things because your brain has carefully hidden the right things from you. Smeagol-coded behavior. The Ring keeps showing you only what flatters you.

This is why genuine improvement so often requires external input. Coaches see what you can't see. Teachers spot patterns you've stopped noticing. Honest peers catch errors that have become invisible to you through repetition. The classical deliberate practice setup almost always involves a knowledgeable other person, because the learner can't reliably identify their own weaknesses alone. As one summary noted, the concept of deliberate practice relies on the assumption that learners are able to identify weaknesses in their own performance and knowledge and take measures to address these, but this is itself a learned skill. Most adults haven't been explicitly taught how to do this. We have to develop it deliberately.

Okay, practical part. How do you actually identify your weaknesses with enough specificity to practice them? Here are the methods I've found genuinely work, ranked roughly from easiest to most effective.

After any meaningful performance (a presentation, a chess game, a piece of writing, a coding session, a music practice), do a short structured review. Write down what went well, what went poorly, and what specifically caused the poor parts. Be ruthless about the third part. Not "the project was bad" but "the section explaining the data was unclear because I jumped between three different metrics without establishing why each mattered."

This sounds obvious. Almost nobody does it consistently. The honest performance audit is one of the highest-leverage habits you can build, because it converts vague self-evaluation into specific, actionable data. Over time, patterns emerge. The same kinds of errors keep showing up. Those repeated patterns are your real weaknesses, the ones worth targeting.

For anything you can record (a presentation, a music performance, a teaching session, a conversation in a foreign language) record yourself and watch it back. Without exception, the first time you do this, you will notice things that are mortifying. Verbal tics. Bad posture. Unclear phrasing. Pacing problems. Technical errors you didn't realize you were making.

The mortification is the asset. You're seeing yourself the way others see you, instead of how your brain has been editing the experience for you. As one breakdown of deliberate practice put it, a benefit of getting constant feedback is that it shows you what moves the needle towards improved performance and what is just running in place. Certain practice activities can feel good without having any impact. The recording is the feedback that breaks the illusion of progress. Most people refuse to do this exactly because they suspect what they'll find. Do it anyway. The information is too valuable to skip.

Find one person in your life who is BOTH knowledgeable enough about your domain to evaluate you AND willing to tell you the truth. These are two separate requirements. Many smart people will lie to spare your feelings. Many honest people don't have the expertise to spot specific problems. The person who has both is gold. Treat them like gold.

Ask them, with genuine sincerity, what you're not doing well. Not "what should I improve" (too vague, easy to deflect). Specifically: "What's the one or two things I'm doing that you think are holding me back?" Then SHUT UP and listen. The temptation to defend or explain will be immediate and intense. Resist it. Their answer is data, not an attack. Write it down. Sit with it. Even if you disagree with parts, the parts you agree with are worth their weight in gold.

This is the same principle scaled up. A qualified coach or teacher's primary job, properly understood, is to identify your weaknesses and design practice that targets them. They can see things you can't see, both because of their training and because of the outside perspective. As the medical education research noted, progress depends on sustained efforts to purposefully enhance particular aspects of performance… first-year students benefit from any practice effort, but a lack of focus on identified weaknesses hampers learning after Year 1. Past the early novice phase, structured guidance becomes increasingly important. The instructor sees the weakness. The student practices the weakness. Improvement follows.

Paying for instruction at strategic moments in your learning is one of the highest-ROI uses of money for serious learners. Even a few sessions with a qualified teacher who can identify your specific weaknesses will save months of mis-directed practice. The investment pays back many times over in time saved. I've covered this in the "find someone to learn from" newsletter, but it applies even more sharply here. A good coach is essentially an expert weakness-finder. Use them as that.

Take an actual test of your current ability that's calibrated to surface your weaknesses. For language learners: try to have a 10-minute conversation with a fluent speaker, recorded. For coders: attempt a problem at the edge of your current skill, with no help. For writers: write a piece in a style you've never written in. For musicians: try to play a piece that's slightly beyond what you can confidently handle.

Then analyze where you fell apart. Not where you succeeded… where you fell apart. The collapse points are your weaknesses. Specific, named, demonstrated. You can now practice them, because you know what they are. As the deliberate practice research has consistently found, genuine improvement comes from actively identifying and addressing specific areas for growth, not from drilling harder on what you already know. The test is what surfaces the specifics.

Once you've identified your weaknesses (with some specificity, not just "I'm bad at math") the practice changes. Here's the structure:

Practice the weakness directly. This sounds obvious and almost nobody does it. If your guitar weakness is reading sheet music quickly, practice has to include reading sheet music quickly, not just playing songs from memory. If your writing weakness is the messy middle of essays, practice the messy middle of essays, not introductions. The specific weakness has to get specific attention.

Make it slightly above your current level. Practicing your weakness at material way beyond your level produces frustration without learning. Practicing it at material at your current level produces no growth. The sweet spot is material slightly harder than you can currently handle. As one summary noted, tasks should be targeted, challenging, and just outside a learner's comfort zone, rather than relying on rote repetition. Find the edge of your ability and practice exactly there.

Repeat with feedback. The repetition matters, but only with feedback. Practicing your weakness with no information about whether you're getting better is just suffering. Practicing with feedback (from a recording, a metric, a coach, a friend, a self-graded test) is where the actual learning happens. As the deliberate practice researchers consistently emphasize, the feedback loop is the engine. Without it, even targeted practice produces less growth than it should.

Re-audit periodically. Weaknesses change as you improve. The thing that was your biggest weakness six months ago has likely been replaced by a new one as you fixed the original. Every quarter or so, do a fresh audit. What are you bad at NOW? Often it's different from what you were bad at when you started this cycle. That's not failure… that's progress. The new weakness is at a higher level than the old one. You've moved up the staircase. Find the next step.

Let me be honest about something. Practicing your weaknesses is not fun. It's the opposite of fun, in many cases. You will feel incompetent every single session. You will produce work or performances that are visibly worse than what you could produce in your comfort zone. Other people will see you doing badly, which is a feature of growth that nobody talks about enough.

This is, in fact, why so few people do this. The cultural emphasis on "play to your strengths" makes intuitive sense… you'll feel better, you'll get visible wins faster, you'll have more confidence. But playing to your strengths produces a ceiling you can't get past. Past a certain point, your strengths can only carry you so far. The path to actually getting better goes directly through the parts of yourself you'd rather not look at.

The good news: this gets easier with practice. Not the practicing-the-weakness part. The being-okay-with-feeling-bad-at-things part. Once you've gone through the cycle a few times (identify weakness, practice weakness, see actual improvement), you start to develop trust in the process. The discomfort becomes evidence that the work is happening, not evidence that something is wrong. As Ericsson and his collaborators put it, deliberate practice isn't much fun, but the extraordinary power of deliberate practice is that it aims at constant progress. You trade the comfort of practicing your strengths for the reality of actually getting better. Many people don't want to make this trade. The ones who do, pull ahead steadily over the years.

Here's what I want you to take from all this. The myth of "practice makes perfect" is wrong in a specific and important way. Practice makes permanent. If you practice the wrong things, you get really good at the wrong things. If you practice your strengths, you get marginally better at your strengths while your weaknesses stay frozen in place. The thing that produces actual growth (the thing that separates the people who keep improving from the people who plateau) is the willingness to find out what you're bad at and then work on it deliberately, even when it feels terrible.

Most people don't do this. Their ego protection systems are too strong, their feedback loops are too weak, and the path of practicing strengths feels too good to leave. They stay where they are for years or decades, telling themselves they're getting better while staying essentially the same. You can be different. The methods exist. The science is solid. The cost is some discomfort and some ego damage. The reward is actually becoming what you're capable of becoming.

If you've been practicing something for a while without much sense of improvement, I'd gently suggest that the problem isn't your time investment. The problem is that you're probably practicing the wrong things… specifically, the things you already know. Audit. Identify the weakness. Practice the weakness. Watch what changes.

You don't get good by hiding from what you're bad at. You get good by walking straight toward it. Frodo didn't get to Mordor by going through the Shire over and over. He went somewhere uncomfortable. So can you.

Keep learning (and keep finding what you suck at),

Ray