Skill and Mastery
From first attempts to automatic skill: how practice builds mastery.
12 steps · roughly 36 minutes to read · Reviewed by Shariq Refai, MD, MBA
Skill Acquisition
Excellence develops gradually.
Deliberate Practice
Purposeful practice creates expertise.
Deliberate Play
Fun, exploratory practice that builds skill and keeps motivation alive.
Motor Program
A rehearsed movement packaged so it runs without step-by-step control.
Automaticity
Mastery reduces mental effort.
Feedforward Control
Launching an action from prediction rather than reacting to feedback.
Knowledge of Results
Outcome feedback that drives learning, best faded over time.
Fitts's Law
Movement time grows as targets get smaller and farther away.
Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff
Speed and precision trade against each other in most tasks.
Skill Plateau
Effort continues but improvement stalls, usually needing a new approach.
Bilateral Transfer
Training one side of the body transfers some skill to the other.
Expertise
Expertise is reliable high-level performance.