We like fun as much as the next workplace performance blog, but the truth is sometimes you’ve got to work hard to learn, excel, and become a master at something.

We touched on this recently in our blog post on desirable difficulties, a term used for a group of counter-intuitive learning strategies that make learning a little harder and slower at first but that increase long-term retention and application on the job in the long term. And we’re going to be discussing desirable difficulties and more thoughts related to how hard or fun learning should be in an upcoming interview with learning research professional Patti Shank that you’ll see here soon.

And in this article, we’re going to continue that focus on the hard work involved in learning, and in particular in evidence-based research into how exactly experts in a field become experts. Hint: if you guessed it involved hard work, you’re right.

In particular, we’re going to focus on a concept called deliberate practice, which research shows is a difficult but reliable way to attain mastery in a field. If you’re involved in learning and development at your workplace, this is important information for you to know because you can use deliberate practice to help employees at your organization more rapidly improve their performance on the path to expertise.

This article is based on the book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool.

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Many people are looking for the simple, fast way to improve learning programs at work (and therefore improve the performance of employees, managers, and organizations as a whole). That’s understandable, but the problem is that we don’t necessarily know how to reach these goals.

When we consider the best way to improve learning programs and increase workplace performance, a whole range of considerations come to mind. In this article, we’ll only discuss two, although those two will present plenty of insights.

The first is that much of what we think we know about learning isn’t true, much of what we do isn’t conducive to long-term learning, application on the job, and performance improvement, and we’re not good judges of our own learning.

The second is that there are some proven learning techniques that we know work (because there’s evidence proving they work) and in some cases, these proven techniques are a little bit counter-intuitive. Collectively, these counter-intuitively effective learning techniques are sometimes called desirable difficulties (a term first coined by learning and memory expert Robert Bjork and made increasingly popular in the book Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger III, and Mark McDaniel).

In this article, we’ll spend a little time reviewing some of our mistaken ideas about learning and then we’ll introduce to you some of those desirable difficulties.

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