Dr. Cal Newport

I mean, I studied a professional guitar player at one point.

You were a professional guitar player?

No, I studied one.

Oh.

So for a book, everything's from some book.

I've written a lot of books.

So I wrote a book 10 years ago where I was trying to figure out as part of it, how do people get better at things?

And so I spent time with a professional guitar player that said, I just wanted to see how he practiced.

Like, what does this actually look like?

And what I learned from them is like what they do is, yeah, they have the music in front of them, but for them, it's all speed.

So they take a piece, he was working on licks for, he was a new acoustic style player, and he had these kind of blue grassy type licks.

And he probably had it memorized.

And he knew how fast he could comfortably play it.

For them, it's all about adding 20% to what they're comfortably doing.

And then that push passed where they're comfortable.

And the thing I remember writing about him was he was concentrating so hard to try to hit this lick 20% faster than he was used to it, he'd forget to breathe.

So he'd be like going, going, going, and then just gasp, you know, because his body would force him to breathe.

So yeah, there it seemed to be all about deliberate practice.

So like how do you – they don't waste any time.

Professional musicians waste no time doing things they're comfortable doing.