There’s a line from “Art of Practice” that I underlined three times and then wrote in the margin of my notebook: “It’s the other twenty percent that’s counterintuitive, and the counterintuitive stuff is always there in the very critical moments, usually completely unrecognized. One little shift. One simple change. Often that’s all it takes.”
I’d read plenty of books about practice and performance by this point. Most of them told me things that sounded right. Logical things. Intuitive things. Master the basics. Build gradually. Repetition is the mother of skill. Practice until you get it right.
“Art of Practice” was the first book that told me the opposite — and then showed me why the opposite actually works.
The Problem with Intuition
Here’s something I learned in consulting that transferred directly to my magic practice: intuition is a terrible guide for system design.
When you ask a struggling company to design their own recovery strategy, they almost always propose doing more of what they’re already doing, just harder. Sell more aggressively. Cut costs deeper. Work longer hours. The intuitive response to “this isn’t working” is “do it harder.” And it almost never works, because the problem isn’t intensity. The problem is direction.
The same trap exists in practice. When my card skills weren’t improving, my intuitive response was to practice more. Longer sessions. More repetitions. Greater intensity. And for a while, that felt productive — I was certainly putting in the effort, and effort feels like progress even when it isn’t.
But effort without the right structure is like driving faster on the wrong road. You’re covering more ground, but you’re getting further from your destination.
The counterintuitive twenty percent isn’t about effort. It’s about structure. About when to start hard instead of easy. About when to stop instead of pushing through. About when to move forward instead of perfecting what’s behind you. These decisions feel wrong in the moment. Every instinct says you’re making a mistake. And that’s precisely the signal that you’re on the right track.
Counterintuitive Move One: Start with What You Can’t Do
The most fundamental counterintuitive behavior I observed in naturals — and the one confirmed most emphatically in “Art of Practice” — was starting every practice session with the hardest, newest, most challenging material.
This goes against everything that feels right. You want to warm up. You want to ease into it. You want the psychological comfort of succeeding at something before you tackle the thing that’s going to make you fail. Starting with failure feels demoralizing. Starting with success feels motivating.
But here’s the thing: motivation is not the same as progress. Feeling good about your practice session and actually improving during your practice session are two completely different outcomes, and they’re often inversely correlated.
When you start with easy material, you’re burning your best cognitive resources — your freshest attention, your sharpest focus, your strongest willpower — on things that don’t need them. By the time you get to the hard stuff, you’re running on fumes. You’re practicing the most demanding material with the least capable version of yourself.
Naturals flip this. Hard stuff first, when the brain is fresh. Easy stuff later, when it doesn’t matter that you’re tired. The sequence feels backwards. But the results are dramatically better.
I tried this in my hotel room practice. For the first two weeks, it was genuinely uncomfortable. Starting each session with the technique I was worst at felt like jumping into cold water. There was no warm-up, no gentle on-ramp, no reassuring success to build momentum. Just immediate confrontation with my own inadequacy.
But by the third week, I noticed something: the techniques I was struggling with were improving faster than anything had improved in the previous six months. Not because I was practicing more. Because I was giving those techniques my best energy instead of my leftover energy.
Counterintuitive Move Two: Stop Before You’re Done
The second counterintuitive behavior was knowing when to stop.
My consulting-trained work ethic told me that quitting early was weakness. If you allocated two hours for practice, you practiced for two hours. Period. Stopping after forty-five minutes because you “didn’t feel focused” was laziness wearing a disguise.
“Art of Practice” reframed this completely. The book described what it called the energy model — dividing each practice session into three phases. The first third is high-value energy: peak focus, maximum willpower, highest quality attention. The middle third is good-value energy: still productive, but declining. The final third is low-value energy: passive, unfocused, running on habit rather than intention.
The counterintuitive insight: some of the best practitioners I’d read about stopped practicing entirely when they hit the low-value phase. They didn’t push through. They didn’t grind. They stopped. Because low-quality repetitions aren’t just unproductive — they can actually be counterproductive, reinforcing sloppy habits rather than building precise skills.
This was heresy to my work-harder mentality. But when I tried it — when I gave myself permission to stop after forty focused minutes instead of grinding through two unfocused hours — two things happened. First, my practice sessions became dramatically more productive per minute. Second, I started looking forward to practice instead of dreading it, because each session was intense but short rather than long and grinding.
Counterintuitive Move Three: Move On Before You’ve Mastered It
This was the hardest one to accept.
Everything in my learning history — school, university, consulting — was built on the principle of mastery before advancement. You don’t move to calculus until you’ve mastered algebra. You don’t tackle complex client engagements until you’ve proven yourself on simple ones. You don’t advance until you’re ready.
“Art of Practice” described a different model. In the book’s framework, you work on a skill until you reach roughly ninety percent consistency — and then you move to something harder. Not one hundred percent. Ninety percent. You deliberately leave the last ten percent unfinished and jump to the next level.
The reason is rooted in how adaptation works. Progress happens because the brain adapts to stress. When you’re at ninety percent mastery of a skill, the stress has largely dissipated — the skill is almost comfortable, almost automatic. The adaptation signal is weak. Grinding that last ten percent can take two to three times longer than the first ninety percent, because you’re trying to force adaptation in an environment that’s no longer stressful enough to trigger it.
But when you move to a harder skill — one that’s roughly ten percent beyond your current level — the stress ramps back up. The adaptation signal fires again. Progress resumes. And here’s the magical part: when you come back to the original skill after working on the harder one, that last ten percent often resolves almost by itself. Because adapting to the harder level elevated all the skills below it.
The book used a weight-lifting analogy that made it click for me. If you can lift thirty kilograms and you practice at forty, you’re not going to lose your ability to lift thirty. You’re strengthening everything that thirty requires, plus more. The higher level protects and enhances the lower level.
In my card practice, this meant moving to more challenging techniques before I felt “ready.” It felt reckless. It felt like building on a shaky foundation. But the foundation wasn’t shaky — it was at ninety percent. And the remaining ten percent solidified on its own once I challenged myself beyond it.
Why This Feels Wrong
I want to acknowledge something that “Art of Practice” addressed directly and that I experienced viscerally: all of this feels wrong.
Starting with hard material feels demoralizing. Stopping early feels lazy. Moving on before mastery feels irresponsible. Every one of these counterintuitive behaviors triggers a psychological resistance that’s completely natural and completely misleading.
The book explained why: humans are roughly twice as motivated to avoid loss as to pursue gain. Once you’ve accumulated skills, your instinct is to protect them — to spend your practice time maintaining what you have rather than risking it by pushing into new territory. This loss-avoidance bias is one of the primary reasons non-naturals get stuck. They’re so focused on not losing what they’ve gained that they stop doing the things that would help them gain more.
In consulting, I’d seen this exact bias in companies. Established firms become so focused on protecting their existing market share that they stop investing in the innovation that would create new growth. They optimize defensively. They play not to lose rather than playing to win. And they slowly get overtaken by hungrier competitors who have nothing to protect and everything to gain.
The counterintuitive twenty percent in practice is essentially the same thing: choosing to play offense when every instinct is screaming for defense.
The Consulting Client Parallel
I remember recommending a counterintuitive strategy to a client once — a mid-sized manufacturer who was losing market share. The intuitive response was to double down on their core product, cut costs, and try to out-execute the competition. My recommendation was the opposite: invest in a new product line that would cannibalize part of their existing business but position them for a market that was growing.
The client’s face when I presented this was exactly the face I saw in the mirror the first time I tried starting my practice sessions with the hardest material.
“That doesn’t make sense,” they said. “Why would we undermine our own product?”
“Because if you don’t, someone else will. And they won’t care about protecting your existing revenue.”
They did it. It worked. Not because the strategy was comfortable, but because it was correct.
Practice methodology works the same way. The counterintuitive twenty percent doesn’t feel right. But it is right. And the evidence — from “Art of Practice,” from my own observations, from decades of research across multiple disciplines — is overwhelming.
The question is never whether the counterintuitive approach works. The question is whether you can override your instincts long enough to let it work.
That, it turned out, was the real challenge. And it’s what I’ll explore in the posts ahead.