We found that this process also forced us to…

We found that this process also forced us to think carefully how we conceptualized deliberate practice ourselves. We started off with what seemed to be a clear idea of deliberate practice and how to explain is but as we tried to describe it briefly in a nontechnical way. sometimes we found that it it wasn't working as well as we would have liked that would lead us to rethink the best way to explain a concept or to make a point For example, when we presented our initial proposal to our agent, Elyse Cheney, she and her colleagues had trouble understanding de lherme practice clearly. In particular, they didn't get what separates deliberate practice from other forms of practice, other than that it is more effective. This was not their fault, but an indication that we hadn't made out explanation as readily intelligible as we'd thought. That forced us to rethink how we were presenting deliberate practice in essence, to come up with a new and better mental representation of how we thought about it and how we wanted others to think about it. It soon occurred to us that the role of mental representations held the key to how we wanted to present deliberate practice. Initiaily, we had seen mental representations as being just one aspect of deliberate practice among many that we would present to the trader, but now we began to see them as a central feature perhaps the central feature of the book. The main purpose of deliberate practice is to develop effective mental representations, and, as we will ducus shortly, mental representations in turn play a key role in deliberate practice. The key change that occurs in our adaptable brains in response to deliberate practice is the development of better mental representations, which in turn open up new possibilities for improved performance. In short, we came to see our explanation of mental representations as the keystone of the book, without which the rest of the book could not stand. There was a steady interplay between the writing of the book and our conceptualization of the topic, and as we looked for ways to make our messages clearer to the reader, we would come up with new ways to think about deliberate practice ourselves. Researchers refer to this sort of writing as "knowledge transforming," as opposed to "knowledge telling," because the process of writing changes and adds to the knowledge that the writer had when starting out.

— from The Flight Plan (Purpose/Wisdom/Risk)

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