Why Does Deliberate Play Beat Deliberate Practice?

Steven Kotler says the change that raises learning and peak performance is to be more playful. Defense Department research found that people learn 230 percent faster than normal in flow. The familiar 10,000-hour figure is a fantasy number. The number he gives instead is 10,000 iterations, and even that depends on the domain. He knew Anders Ericsson. Deliberate practice, Ericsson's method, is repetition with incremental improvement. Deliberate play is repetition with improvisation.

In tightly bounded fields such as mathematics and the violin, the disciplines Ericsson studied, deliberate practice works. Outside bounded fields, which is almost everything else, deliberate play wins by a wide margin. Play releases more neurochemicals than repeating the same motion with a small improvement. The chemicals tag an experience as important and worth saving, so it moves from short-term holding into long-term memory.