Remember from the last post, deliberate practice can loosely be defined using the following:  Spending more time practicing and working on the most difficult tasks to gain the most improvement in the shortest amount of time for a given skill.  Okay, so the goal here is to come up with some seriously difficult but reproducible content to practice.  So how do we do that?  Well there’s a few things we can focus on doing to make this possible.

Set up a lab environment.  This is the main staple for working on your skills, and I believe without some sort of a lab environment one will not be able to completely and correctly apply the concepts that deliberate practice offers.  Hands on practice is where most of your time should be spent when learning, as well as time spent working on active recall. It is very important to build up some sort of environment for practicing different ideas, skills, content, etc. and it is an essential prerequisite for improvement.  The lab environment is not the only piece of the puzzle though.

I haven’t covered this much, but Active recall is an important concept to familiarize yourself with. It is a component of efficient learning and is a staple that is used to help develop long term memory.   Another main piece includes learning materials, whether it be audio, video or written format.  We need some type of reference material as well as a set of concepts and ideas to use as a guide for learning new subject matter.  A good example of this is Cisco and their CCIE certification.  They publish a list of topics and objectives covered by the exam, as well as a number of texts to use as study material.  So something like this would be useful for a network engineer that was looking to improve some aspects of their skill set.  They could use this topic list as a guide for what to study and the listed texts as reference material.

Once the objective has been defined, and the material has been clearly established for learning a particular skill or concept, the next step is to go out and attack it!  Remember, repetition (and especially spaced repetition) is an important element of practice, so when you are building these skills you will often find yourself going over things that you may have already covered.  Just remember that by repeating previously learned skills you are strengthening and improving your overall understanding, even if it can seem pointless and boring, it will help you.

Here are some techniques for quickly learning a new topic that I have found to be most useful for my own understanding and ability to grok ideas and concepts of a particular I am trying to learn more thoroughly.  This technique can be applied to practically anything, but I have found it especially efficient for my own purposes as a system administrator when I need to learn new subject material.

• Read a chapter about the new topic or idea, taking notes as you go.
  
• Watch related videos to further strengthen the concepts you are interested in learning about.
• Set up and work through labs specific to the topic.  You may need to ask for help in getting some  ideas here but there are many great communities out there.   Remember that hands on practice is where most of your time should be spent!
• Revisit the book/topic and notes, update anything that needs to be clarified, etc.
• Revisit  the previous steps, focusing on weaker areas until you are comfortable with idea or topic.
• Do it all over again with another topic.

Find yourself a mentor or a teacher in your journey to help with this process. I need to speak about this briefly, because I don’t think it can be understated.  If you get stuck or need ideas for labs, having somebody there to help and bounce ideas off of is incredibly important.  While you can learn all of this stuff on your own, having a mentor or teacher will increase the learning process by an order of magnitude.  So go out there and find some help, as I’ve mentioned before there are some great communities.  /r/sysadmin is one of my favorites, the people there are really smart and friendly and they love helping out others.

The final peace to this puzzle, in my opinion, is motivation.  It takes a certain level of grit to take the steps to become better at something through deliberate practice.  It all looks easy enough until you actually start putting these ideas into practice, and begin realizing what it means, and how much hard work and effort it takes to become an expert by grasping the amount of time and effort it takes to achieve.  The commitment to improvement means a full focus to improving your skills all of the time, not just every now and then and it becomes very difficult, unless of course you have a supreme level of motivation.

In the next part I will examine the work ethic and some specific examples of individuals in other disciplines that perform at an expert level so you can get a more complete understanding of just how much work it takes, and what it really means to become an expert at something, so stay tuned!

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I’m going to take a step back from the usual topics and go down a slightly different path than I usually do today and take some time to discuss something that has recently fascinated me.  I often wonder what it takes to excel and become great (ie expert) in particular areas, activities, et.  For example, how do athletes get to be so good at what they do?  I want to be able to generalize this concept and apply this type of thinking to my own profession to help answer the question of “what characterizes a great sysadmin?  What makes a great one stand out from an average, or even a good sysadmin?”  This is the sort of thing I have been researching and I’d like to share what I’ve come up with so far.

I stumbled across some interesting works recently on the 10,000 hour rule as well as a method known as Deliberate Practice.  Essentially deliberate practice can be broadly defined as spending more time practicing and working on the most difficult tasks to gain the most improvement in the shortest amount of time.  Look up Anders Ericcson for some more in depth examples, there is lots out there and they are great reads. These ideas have helped to shape my understanding and relationship of what is known as expert level knowledge.  I am still struggling to put all the pieces together for what this all means for my own career (namely, system administration) and how these ideas and practices can be applied generally to system administration but I’d like to carve out some general ideas and ways that deliberate practice can be utilized and put to use in system administration.

The problem most of you are surely familiar with is that system administration is such a broad field and applying such specific techniques of deliberate practice can be very difficult to generalize.  What I’m proposing are a number of generalized techniques for improving your performance as a system administrator by applying the techniques I have read about in a controlled and focused way to improve overall performance and skill as a system administrator.  My hope is that this type of generalization can be used in other areas as well.

To begin with, there are a number of maxims that can useful as a guideline or general rule of thumb for how to think about using deliberate practice in your own life and apply it to the way you practice and think about how to get better.

• Deliberate practice should never extend to more than 4-5 hours per day.  It requires a high level of focus and anything beyond this point (studies have shown) begins to hurt performance.
• There are two disticint times of day where indivduals have been show to be more productive and are the most focused.  Late morning and mid afternoon, these are optimal times to use for deliberate practice.
• Also of note, are managing energy levels.  Practicing at a high level with such concentration can lead to burnout if not manager properly.  A good way to manage this is to take short breaks between semi long periods of deliberate practice.  90 minutes practice, 15 minutes break, and repeat.
• Devote the most time practicing the most difficult tasks.  These activities are designed for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance, therefore are the most beneficial but the most difficult.
• Meticulous focus on the improvement of weak areas.  Spend large amounts of time analyzing and studying ones self, constantly looking for things to improve.

In my next post I will come back and revisit this idea and share some more specific examples of how to apply deliberate practice to specific topics and areas of interest in system administration.  In this post I will explore various ideas and techniques for ways to specifically apply deliberate practice to tasks in system administration.  As always, I’d love to hear any feedback you may have, especially on this and upcoming posts about becoming a better sysdamin.

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The previous post I wrote about becoming a better sysadmin, covering general points and tips for self improvement turned out to be more popular than I thought it would be (okay not really, but for me it was at least!).  So I decided to write a little bit of a follow up post in regards to general improvement and subsequently have decided to focus more of my time and effort on including more posts related to that type of content.  I find the topic of self improvement to be interesting and would love to write more about my findings, so I will be experimenting a little bit with these less technical pieces a little bit more I think. I would also like to hear what others have to say about these posts and the topic of self improvement so let me know.

While this post is primarily focused on self improvement this can easily be adopted to anybody in the IT industry that is just looking for a way to improve themselves and get better.  So while the hard skills (certifications, books, blogs, anything that specifically relates to a specific area) are incredibly important, why not throw in these general and well known strategies to help with your improvement?  I think the positive benefits will heavily outweigh the negatives in this scenario.

General Tips for improvement

These simple tips can go a really long way.  I read threads all the time about how to get better and how to improve mental capacity, blah blah blah and the following suggestions always seem to pop up.  What I have found to be true is that there is no magical instant way to improve yourself, I am learning that the hard way.  To me, the best way to see results and really work on yourself starts by changing your habits, working hard and being consistent.  That might not be what you are looking for, but trust me, these small tips can go a long way in becoming better at what you do.

Exercise – Time and again I hear and read about the massive benefits of proper exercise.  I did not take this advice seriously until just recently and can say that it has made a huge difference in the way I think and the way I feel.  I used to always feel beat down and terrible after work until I started exercising so those times of the day where you feel a lot slower are lessened.  I wouldn’t recommend starting out by completely changing the way you live your life.  Something simple to start with.  This summer I started running again, I made a routine out of going out for a run after work, and just kept at it until I started seeing changes.  I gradually increased the period of time and distance of my runs, then I added in weight lifting and other types of exercises gradually. By no means am I a hardcore athlete now but I do believe in the importance and benefits of exercising and working your body regularly to improve your mind.

Sleep – This is probably the most important thing to remember when you are trying to work on hacking your mind and improving yourself.  8 hours of sleep seems to be the general rule of thumb, and it should not be overlooked when you are evaluating yourself and your goals for getting to where you want to be.  If you want to wake up early, you need to go to sleep early, it really is as simple as that.  It is also important to be consistent on your sleep schedule so your body can get used to when it should slow down and when it should speed up (even on weekends!).  For example, getting in a routine of winding down at a certain time, say 9 pm  every night by reading a book for an hour to train your body that it is time to sleep.  Read until say 10 pm every night if you want to wake up at 6 am to get the sleep consistency your body needs, also giving your body enough time to repair and heal itself to get up and going.

Diet – Also important.  I realize that everybody is different and I don’t want to speak as if an authority on the subject so please take this advice at face value.  The point I want to make though is that diet isvery important in improvement.  Again, I do not want to encourage anybody to go all out and completely change every eating habit they have at once.  You will crash and burn like many others, it make work for some but generally you will be safer and more likely to make an impact if you take things slowly.  Work on one thing at a time and gradually make the changes to improve your diet and health.  As an example, start by cutting out something small, like cutting out a particular type of food that isn’t exactly healthy.  For me it was soda, and once I had that under control I was able to cut out (for the most part) fast food, etc.  Not entirely, I wouldn’t advocate that but cutting back is a good first step.  Basically doing something is better than doing nothing.

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