So the issue of motivation inevitably comes up: Why do some people engage in this sort of practice? What keeps them going?

Deliberate practice develops skills that other people have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have been established.

The motivation must, of course, be a desire to be better at whatever it is you are practicing. If you don’t have that desire, why are you practicing?

Generally speaking, in almost any area of education the most useful learning objectives will be those that help students develop effective mental representations.

The main purpose of deliberate practice is to develop effective mental representations, and, as we will discuss shortly, mental representations in turn play a key role in deliberate practice.

Sometimes you may find it relatively easy to accomplish that new thing, and then you keep pushing on.

Our schools should give all students such an experience in some domain.

More generally, look for anything that might interfere with your training and find ways to minimize its influence.

subjects. Students who develop mental representations can go on to generate their own scientific experiments or to write their own books—and research has shown that many successful scientists and authors started their careers at a young age in just this way.