Anders Ericsson's Peak argues that expertise requires deliberate practice, not just years of work. You need to isolate one specific sub-skill, design a measurable exercise for it, and repeat it intensively. Golfers and chess players improve by breaking their game into tiny components and drilling those pieces, not by playing whole rounds.
I've been reading this book called Peak: The New Science of Expertise. The entire point of the book is that volume in and of itself doesn't necessarily mean skill acquisition. If you look at people who have been in the same career for 30, 40, 50 years, a surgeon or a lawyer who has 50 years of experience isn't necessarily better than someone who has 10 years of experience. Because normally what happens is as you get comfortable with a certain level of proficiency, you stop naturally improving or pushing yourself. And so instead, if you're not actively growing, some of your skills deteriorate and they deteriorate in where you default to what's most comfortable. What they stress in the book is that if you want to improve a certain skill, you have to first isolate the skill, and then you have to come up with an exercise or some tangible objective way of measuring the improvement of that skill, and then you have to deploy a lot of volume within that exercise to improve that particular skill. Two examples that I come back to often is golf and chess. If you want to become a better golfer, what a beginner would do is think, oh, I just need to keep playing 18 holes over and over and over again. But intermediate and advanced and expert level golf players or chess masters, that's not what they do. What they do is they isolate parts of their game, breaking it apart into pieces, smaller and smaller pieces, and then they are practicing just that individual piece. And so you should think of skill acquisition as a whole, as you isolating different pieces, and then as you isolate and practice individual pieces, then the entire skill improves over time.
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