Deliberate practice

After reading the book ‘So good they can’t ignore you’ by Cal Newport I found that I personally have plateaued in my photography practice. I’m too comfortable, I find my composition natural and it comes to me like second nature when framing an image inside the viewfinder. After reading Newport’s book I found that I was no longer practising in the sense of training, or stretching my creative mussels. Cal Newport coined the phrase ‘deliberate practice’, which is exactly what I need to do.

When you think of school or high school, you think grades, assignments or tests. If you don’t complete them to a high standard you fail. This is a great drive to push and drive learning into an area of discomfort and struggle. according to Newport’s research, this is how we achieve deliberate practice. We need to push ourselves beyond what were comfortable doing.

I also stumbled across a lecture online about becoming a more effective artist. And the traits and daily routines are obvious, but at the same time not easy. If something is not easy, it’s a sign you are pushing yourself beyond what your comfortable doing. This is exactly what we should be striving for when learning our craft. So here are the traits.

Daily work.
Volume, not perfection.
Steal/learn from other great artists.
Deliberate practice.
Rest.
Feedback.

You will notice that love and passion aren’t a part of becoming great because this is a false drive. But I’ll touch on this in a later post. So, photographers, we need to try things that are hard, challenging and do it on a consistent basis. Make deliberate practice part of your goal to better yourself and your photography.