Trent, can you possibly share some of the writing exercises you do? I found one site (oneword.com) that is fantastic and making you focus for 60 seconds on writing about one word. And I know this will definitely become part of my deliberate practice schedule for writing!

Now I just need to work on some other area’s I need to deliberately practice on!

If anyone wants to read more about this Cal Newport has done a few posts on it @ calnewport.com/blog

For me, it didn’t work out so well. Having the software/hardware skills, fastest typing speed, furthering my business admin education, etc. did not get me the promotions I was hoping to get – in fact – more than once when I’ve tried to go from “pink” collar to “white” collar, I’ve been told that the promotions won’t come because I can’t be replaced in the job I was already doing. Subsequently, the promotions went to the less educated and skilled folks. The last time I was laid off, in 2003, I was told that the decision to lay-off was between me and another woman in the office. It came down to “who would be most able to find other employment”, and since they felt that was me, the less skilled person remained employed and I was laid off. Well, I still haven’t found a job – and have ended up starting two small home-based businesses. My income doesn’t come near to what I used to make ($32K a year), but I do the best I can.

I guess my point is to not become TOO good at what you do, you may never be able to advance because of it.

I took a lot of Spanish classes, so I can manage with that, but I would rather learn something like Chinese, French or Russian. As the world gets smaller, I think knowing languages like these will be very helpful in getting a higher income, whether you’re a freelancer, own your own business or work for someone else.

I just finished reading “The Talent Code”, which discusses in depth the idea of deep practice, which can be applied to virtually anything. It basically picks up where Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” left off with the 10,000 hours idea. A fascinating read, and highly recommended.

But, as a note–this is actually exactly what I did: ..you go home at night and put in an hour of deliberate practice to improve your typing speed and eventually you inch up to ninety words per minute. You’re now the most productive typist in the pool.

And consequently I was given many data entry projects, and developed a serious RSI which now prevents me from typing…at all. YMMV.

However, I think the presentation example is a bad one, for two reasons:

1) I an academic environment, you are rarely chosen to give a talk. You only present your own work. And even then, if you have co-authors, it’s not sure that the best presenter will give the talk. In my field the unwritten rule is that the youngest co-author will present the paper.

2) Presentation skills are nothing you can learn or substantially improve in a vacuum. If it were so, I would not have suffered through so many bad talks at so many conferences… To become a good presenter, first you have to give a lot of presentations and second you have to apply the feedback you get. And somehow I can’t believe that the busy people in any lab would be willing to give you feedback every day for two hours…

However, I doubt that typing skills will put one admin asst. ahead of another. People skills, program skills, professional discretion, and meeting deadlines are everything there. And appearance, depending on the industry. Typing 90 vs 70 words/min is almost inconsequential.

I absolutely get your point, and agree with it, but I would check out my analogies with people in the professions I choose to use as examples, or come off as out of touch. Friendly suggestion- get a journalism intern to work as a fact/reference-checker for you, Good for them, good for you!

I agree with Amanda and EngineerMom that it would be a waste of time for a postdoc to spend an hour a day (let alone two) working on presentation skills, and that the situation Trent describes (in which the postdoc with the best presentation skills gets to go to more conferences) is particularly far-fetched. Both my PhD advisor and my postdoc advisor made sure that *all* the members of their groups had plenty of opportunities to go to conferences, because they know that when their students and postdocs make connections and move on to bigger and better things, that makes the advisors look good too. It’s definitely worth it to spend some time thinking about what makes a good presentation good and a bad presentation bad (don’t overload your slides with equations, people!) and, specifically, about how to talk about your own research to people at all different levels (the random friend of a friend who wandered by your poster at the poster session versus the big-shot professor who invented the technique you’re using), but an hour or two a day just working on general presentation skills is silly. There are so many ways to make better use of that time.

As for music practice: I’m also learning a new musical instrument (the English concertina). A lot of the skills people have mentioned developing with scales and exercises (familiarizing myself with chords, intervals, and the notes in a key, getting an even tone, control over volume, developing the connection between myself and the instrument), I’m working on by playing simple tunes whose notes I already know well. I’m still improving just as much (at least, I think I am), and it’s a lot more fun.

One of the best pieces of musical advice I ever got was that you have to bring your own enthusiasm to the music. You can’t count on the music itself to convey its own enthusiasm, and you can’t count on the other people you’re playing with to bring the enthusiasm for you. You can’t just show up and play the right notes in the right order and expect it to sound good – your heart has to be in it. It sounds corny, but I’m finding that it really holds true for me.

So, if you can bore yourself out of your mind with scales and exercises and still have emotion and enthusiasm to bring to the songs when you play them, then more power to you. But if playing lots of scales and exercises is killing the joy of the instrument for you, you may be shooting yourself in the foot.

I do, however, agree with Amanda. The content of the presentation is one’s own work, so even if you have great presence in front of an audience, if your work is crap, you aren’t going anywhere.

DH developed very good lab technique for some rather specific tasks, and was called upon during his grad student days to advise some industry types who were struggling with getting consistent results. Developing those bench skills was far more useful in making contacts than presentation skills.

I would agree that there are certain skills that can make you stand out in a crowd of others doing the same work. When working as an engineer, I always noticed when my drafter was either very organized and methodical, or chaotic and paid no attention to detail. I was in the position at one point to be a reference for two drafters I worked with. One was very organized, and I highly recommended him to the prospective employer. The other was rather disorganized and tended to make the same types of mistakes over and over, and I was honest about that, too.

That said, practicing scales *can* be a waste of time. It depends on what you’re focusing on when practicing the scales. I focused on two things.

1. Learning the notes of the scales on the keyboard.

2. Much more important, learning the role that the weight of your hand and arm play in playing the piano. The monotonous repetition of practicing scales is where I learned not to push the keys down, but to play them with arm weight instead. This lesson allows you to vary the loudness/softness of the notes at will, effortlessly and consistently.

Do not practice scales with the purpose of “playing” scales better. A totally useless occupation. Virtually no music incorporates straight scales as a component. (“Joy to the World” notwithstanding.)

Hanon, Czerny, etc. are likewise useless IMO. Much better, if you have a great teacher, is to practice technique using actual music pieces that incorporate the technique that is desired to be mastered.

Not everyone appreciates deliberate practice, so you have to be leery. When I was an accounts receivable secretary in high school, I was bored out of my mind and spent extra time making improved pricing spreadsheets in Excel. The other secretary was livid I was doing more with the job (making her look bad) and did everything she could to get me fired. Thankfully, it was just a summer job, but was one of the worst experiences of my life.