Improve the Part, Not Just the Whole

Lately, I have been thinking about this through running.

I do the whole run, but I rarely improve every part of it at once.

The same applies to writing, trading, and how I work with ideas. Sometimes, I repeat the full activity. That feels productive because I am doing more reps.

The problem is that weak parts can stay hidden inside the whole thing.

This reminds me of K. Anders Ericsson’s work on deliberate practice, which points to a better question:

Which small part is holding the whole thing back?

With that in mind, here’s what I do:

Pick one recent piece of work and break it down.

1. Find the weak part. I look for one recurring mistake. It might be a weak opening in my writing, an early trade entry, or poor pacing late in a run.
2. Pull it out. Instead of practising the whole activity again, I work on that weak part by itself.
3. Repeat with feedback. For writing, I rewrite five openings. For trading, I review ten similar trade setups.
4. Put it back. I return to the full activity and see if that part holds up better.

The goal is to stop spending time practising what already works. Instead, I give my attention to the bottleneck.

I revisited my reading notes on K. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool’s Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (2016) over the weekend.

One note on deliberate practice stood out: improving a specific part of a skill can be more useful than simply repeating the whole performance.

That sparked the idea for this approach.

Until next time,
Gav