Writing Slowly

Jul 12, 2026 ∞

Learning to tell a bright cow from a dull one

You might be wondering how anyone can grow from being an advanced learner to becoming an expert. It might seem like an impossible step to climb.

According to the traditional Japanese approach of Shu Ha Ri, a vital step in the learning process is to so absorb the rules that the student transcends them. The rules and conventions become second nature. But what does that look like in practice?

Here’s a great example from the world of veterinary medicine, where veterinary students were trained to identify whether an animal is bright (i.e healthy) or dull (i.e. sickening):

“Eventually, the students get good enough at evaluating bright vs. dull. What’s interesting is that, by then, they’ve lost the rules. What was once effortful and algorithmic is now perceptual and automatic. They can see things you and I do not.” – Oddly-Influenced

Two Highland cows are grazing on a lush green field near a Scottish loch with trees and hills in the background.

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.

And if you found this article interesting you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest. You’ll receive all the week’s posts in a handy email format which you might prefer. But this site does of course have an RSS feed.

Jul 12, 2026 ∞

News just in from 2009:

“It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter.” – Techcrunch.

Well that didn’t exactly age well. And now there’s an RSS resurgence in the air – from Dave Winer, of course, who made RSS immortal by giving it an audio payload and thereby inventing podcasting.

Jul 12, 2026 ∞

We’ve been having our regular family disagreement about thinning our bookshelves, which made this article timely: How and why to cull your book collection [via Kottke.org].

On reflection, our bookshelves are very much a working library, more about flow than about stock. Most books pass through.

Jul 7, 2026 ∞

Odysseus: A name that spells trouble

Since we’re currently lost somewhere in the middle of wars that seemingly have no end-point, and arguably no point, I wonder just what film director Christopher Nolan will make of The Odyssey, his blockbuster movie of which comes out mid-2026.

After I watched another recent movie version of the story, The Return, I found out about the work of psychologist Jonathan Shay with Vietnem veterans. He wrote two books linking the works of Homer – The Iliad and The Odyssey – with the modern experience of warfare and with the travails of homecoming.

Two quotes from Jonathan Shay’s work stood out particularly. First, this one about war-induced PTSD:

The heart of the craft: an encounter with the spirit of Shokunin

“There’s something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there’s always something you can learn.” – Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973.

I read this quote in the epilogue to Matt Alt’s book, Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World. (London: Constable, 2021).

It could be a summary of shokunin kishitsu (職人気質), the spirit of traditional Japanese artesanal culture.

In fact, Jiro Ono the consummate master of sushi, featured in the acclaimed documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and who was still going strong at the age of 100, says something very similar in the movie:

How to learn deliberate practice

Have you heard of ‘deliberate practice’?

You might well have, because Swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson’s work on what makes an expert has been hugely influential over the years. His co-authored original paper from 1993 has been cited more than 3,000 times and it has spawned more than a few popular books, including Geoff Covin’s Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, Malcom Gadwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, and Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How.

Oh, those titles.

The key message of ‘deliberate practice’ is simple but not obvious. If you want to become an expert you have to do the right kind of practice. This was stated very clearly in Ericsson’s widely-read book, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (2016):

“If you are not improving, it’s not because you lack innate talent; it’s because you’re not practicing the right way. Once you understand this, improvement becomes a matter of figuring out what the ‘right way’ is.”

This is an attractive message because it’s very optimistic. It encourages people to overcome the fatalistic worry that somehow, maybe due to their genes or their upbringing, ’they’re just not cut out for it’.

Instead of being resigned to your fate, you can change it. And the key? Deliberate practice!

Unfortunately, the strong popular interest has warped some of Ericsson’s key ideas about how to gain expertise. Two concepts in particular have made it hard to move forward productively.