FREE MASTERCLASS: Watch the Free Masterclass · Watch it free →
From the Science of Accelerated Evolution
Career & Business · deliberate practice
Deliberate Practice and the Internal State That Determines Every Outcome
Anders Ericsson's research on deliberate practice established that focused, feedback-driven repetition builds expertise faster than volume alone. What the research did not measure is the internal state from which practice happens, and that state determines how deeply any skill installs. Antano Solar John and Harini Ramachandran work with this missing dimension directly, showing that rest days are not gaps in a practice schedule but the state-preparation phase that makes the next session count.
Antano & HariniPersonal Evolution Scientists · Watch + read
Short on time? The video shows the change happen live. The article below walks it step by step.
The things to take from this
001Deliberate practice is defined by focused intention and imme
Deliberate practice is defined by focused intention and immediate feedback, not by hours logged, which is why quality of attention during practice outweighs quantity of repetitions.
002The internal state before and during a practice session dete
The internal state before and during a practice session determines installation depth, meaning two people doing identical drills for identical durations get different results based on the state they practice from.
003Rest days are a functional phase of deliberate practice, not
Rest days are a functional phase of deliberate practice, not an absence of it. Olympic athletes skip the day before an event because arriving in the right state matters more than one additional session.
004Judging an unproductive-feeling day as wasted creates a low
Judging an unproductive-feeling day as wasted creates a low state that degrades the next day's performance. Recognising preparation days as purposeful keeps the state high going into high-output work.
Part 01
What Deliberate Practice Actually Means
Anders Ericsson spent decades studying how experts become experts. His finding, which he documented across musicians, chess players, surgeons, and athletes, was that the number of hours a person practises matters far less than how those hours are structured. He called the effective version deliberate practice.
The definition is precise: deliberate practice involves a specific goal, full concentration on that goal, immediate feedback on errors, and repeated adjustment based on that feedback. It is the opposite of showing up and going through familiar motions. A pianist who runs the same piece from start to finish each day is accumulating time.
A pianist who isolates the four bars she keeps getting wrong, slows them down, receives feedback from a teacher, and drills the correction until it runs clean is doing something categorically different.
The research showed that 10,000 hours of the first kind does not produce the results that significantly fewer hours of the second kind produces. This is why two colleagues with the same number of years in a field can be separated by a wide gap in capability. Years in a role is a proxy for hours.
Hours are a proxy for practice volume. Neither one is deliberate practice. What separates experts from experienced non-experts is not how long they have been at it.
It is whether their practice sessions are structured around a gap, a feedback loop, and a correction. That distinction from Ericsson's work is useful and correct. And it is incomplete.
Part 02
The Dimension Ericsson Did Not Measure
Ericsson measured what happened during practice. He measured the structure of the session, the presence of a teacher, the specificity of the goal. What he did not measure was the internal state of the practitioner going into the session and sustaining through it.
That state is not a soft variable. It is the variable that determines how deeply a skill installs from any given session.
Antano Solar John and Harini Ramachandran, who work with capability installation across athletes, executives, and professionals across 50 industries, have seen this pattern clearly. Two people run the same deliberate practice protocol. One arrives fresh, the session flows, the adjustment lands and stays.
The other arrives carrying unresolved tension from the previous day, grinds through the same session, and wakes up the next day with the skill no further along. The hours were identical. The structure was identical. The state was not.
This is why the question of how to practise deliberately cannot be answered with structure alone. The answer includes what state you practise from. A person who wakes up carrying an unsatisfied expectation from yesterday enters their practice in a deficit.
The feedback loop Ericsson designed for skill acquisition is now operating in a low-resource state. The installation is shallow. The skill does not hold the same way.
The state before the session is not a warm-up variable. It is a determinant of the session's return on investment.
The pattern, as a circuit. One trigger, and it runs the full loop on its own. A pattern runs from one source. That is why it returns no matter how much effort goes in at the surface.
Part 03
What This Changes About How to Practise
The distinction
Olympic athletes do not practise the day before the event. This is not an anomaly in their training schedule. It is one of the deliberate decisions in the whole preparation cycle.
The day before the event is a state-calibration day. Arriving at the event in the right state matters more than one additional session in a suboptimal state.
That principle does not belong only to Olympic preparation. It applies to any high-stakes performance context. A sales leader preparing for a critical board presentation, an executive preparing for a difficult negotiation, a surgeon with a complex procedure the next morning: one more hour of preparation in a depleted state competes against a good night of rest that produces a sharper state.
Harini Ramachandran noticed this in her own schedule. Days that looked like rest days, days with no visible output, preceded her best high-output days. Antano pointed to what was actually happening. Every action on a so-called rest day was in fact preparing her system to operate differently when the demanding work arrived. The problem people create is cognitive: they evaluate a rest day against a production day metric and find it lacking. That evaluation produces exactly the low state that degrades the next day's performance. Recognising that some days are preparation days and some days are output days, and treating each according to its actual function, keeps the state calibrated across the week. Deliberate practice, at the level that produces sustained high performance, includes designing the state that practice and performance happen from. That design is not separate from the practice schedule. That design is where the highest-leverage work sits. Take the Free Team Dependency Audit to see where state-calibration gaps appear in your team's performance.
Free video series
Watch Antano work with this pattern live
The video series shows the session dynamic in full, including exactly where the intervention lands and what changes in the person in the room.
Surface work bounces. Advice, effort and willpower operate at the level of conscious thought, so they bounce off. The pattern runs one level below. Change it there, and the old loop has nothing left to run on.A × T = C™. Antano and Harini's formula: Adjustment times Time equals Consequences. Effort on the wrong adjustment barely moves the needle in decades. The right adjustment, made once at the source, compounds for years.
Free masterclass
Watch the change happen in one real person
One free masterclass with Antano Solar John. The shift that changes this exact pattern at its source.
Deliberate practiceA structured form of practice defined by Ericsson as involving a specific performance gap as the target, full concentration, immediate feedback on errors, and repeated correction. Distinguished from routine repetition by its intentional focus on the edge of current capability.
State calibrationThe process of preparing the internal condition from which practice or performance will happen. In the context of skill development, state calibration treats the practitioner's readiness as a design variable rather than an incidental factor.
Installation depthThe degree to which a practised skill becomes a stable, accessible capability rather than a fragile, context-dependent behaviour. Installation depth is influenced by both the structure of practice and the internal state from which practice runs.
Preparation dayA day whose primary function is to calibrate the state for subsequent high-output performance rather than to produce visible output itself. Recognising a preparation day as purposeful, rather than judging it as unproductive, preserves the state that makes the next high-output day possible.
Questions people ask
What is the deliberate practice definition from Ericsson's research?
Anders Ericsson defined deliberate practice as a form of training that targets a specific performance gap, requires full concentration, provides immediate feedback on errors, and involves repeated correction based on that feedback. It is distinct from routine repetition, which accumulates hours without directing attention at the edge of current capability. The definition emphasises quality of focus over quantity of time.
What are some deliberate practice examples in professional contexts?
A surgeon who reviews video of her own procedures to isolate a technical error and then drills a correction in a simulation environment is using deliberate practice. A sales professional who records client calls, identifies the specific moment where objections lose momentum, and rehearses a different response with feedback from a manager is using deliberate practice. The common thread across examples is a specific gap, focused attention, feedback, and correction, not general effort or time in role.
How to practise deliberately when the structure is clear but results plateau?
A plateau during deliberate practice often signals that the structure of the session is correct but the state going into it is not. The feedback loop Ericsson described works effectively when the practitioner enters the session with full attentional capacity and without unresolved cognitive load from previous days. Two adjustments address this: first, evaluate whether rest days before high-demand practice sessions are being treated as preparation or judged as wasted time. Second, ensure the end of each day includes a recognition of what that day accomplished on its own terms, so the brain is not running an unresolved loop through the night.
Why do Olympic athletes not practise the day before competition?
The decision to stop practice before the day of an event is a state-management decision, not a scheduling preference. Adding one more session in a depleted state does not improve performance and frequently degrades it by reducing the quality of the state the athlete enters the event from. The final preparation phase shifts from skill acquisition to state calibration. Arriving at the event in the right internal condition produces better performance than arriving with more recent practice hours in a worse condition.
What did Ericsson's deliberate practice research miss?
Ericsson's research documented the structural conditions of effective practice with precision. What it did not measure was the internal state of the practitioner going into and sustaining through each session. Two people can run an identical deliberate practice protocol and get different installation results because the state from which each person practises differs. State determines how deeply a skill installs from any given session, which means that improving the state going into practice produces a different return from the same number of hours.
The full session, in text
Read the full transcriptFor readers and search engines
Sometimes just doing nothing is the best preparation you can give for the accomplishments that's going to come the next day. There's also this one thing that I know everybody has always told me that you need to sleep at a specific time and wake up at a specific time, but that's somehow never been possible for me. Mm-hmm. Like whenever I've had great sleep, like maybe say an eight or nine hour sleep, which is like I'm amazing that day. But then for the next 24 hours, I just don't get sleep. So then my schedule is all wonky the next day. So then how I mean and everybody's like you gotta sleep at that specific time and I'm like I've never been able to do that. So is that how it should work? Oh, no, so I think what is going on is are you satisfied with what you achieved that day? When you don't sleep. Never really bothered to notice that. Yeah, so sometimes the pattern that goes on for some people is you know, you have an expectation from a day. This is how much you want to have achieved and at the end of the day if that that criterion isn't met, then your brain is still working on what else can I do? So you could easily fix that. I mean, I think the list of the procedures on your list will take care of it. Yeah, it's about looking back and recognizing some days their sole purpose is a preparation for the next day. And some days their purpose is to be fulfilling. It took me a while to recognize that. I mean I used to think you know, because if there was a day when I would just be doing like nothing and I'm just at home and I'm sleeping and at you know, I go back. He means playing with my dog. I'd wake up the next day and I'm like, you know, I'm like, okay, I had a good time. I was resting, but I would somehow not be able to sleep until one day, Antono told me that whatever you do each day is a significant contribution to everything, to the business, to the family, to you know, whatever it is that you do in that day. And then when I look back is when I recognize that it's those days when I do what I do. You know, prepares me differently to be ready for the great when I have to. Yeah, there's a reason why people when they go to Olympics, they don't practice the previous day. Sometimes just doing nothing is the best preparation you can give for the accomplishments that's going to come the next day. But what happens is most people come in their own way of success. So they're preparing for a great day the next day and then a part of their mind goes Abhi kya kiya kuch nahi. And then their preparation from that state of readiness, they go down there and then the next day is also gone. So that's what happens.
Before You Go
The article names the pattern. The masterclass changes it.
